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It is with some trepidation that I am about to re-read this new edition. The stories of tragedy and horror told by Rudolf Vrba left me deeply shaken. I read this book 30 years ago in the form of a tattered used paperback entitled "I Cannot Forgive". I know that it means I will be re-entering the violent and twisted world of Auschwitz, where so many innocent lives were so senselessly destroyed. I recall having to stop reading many times because my vision was obscured by tears. This book has never left my mind. It means I will have to re-witness so many acts of cruelty and barbarity through the eyes of the author as a teen-ager trapped in a death camp. I guess it is just a small way of trying to keep alive the memory of the vanished millions.
The book itself is a page turner, i could hardly put it down. This man at 17 years old made an effort to inform the world of what he witnessed in Auschwitz. His courage is overwhelming. The events it describes are still inconceivable; his actions, beyond impressive.There is an excellent PBS special on this event. Go to www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/escape-from-auschwitz/vrbas-and-wetzlers-escapeThe events are inconceivable.
Laughs in misery, death, despair, but never despair. The exceptional strength of character, combined with a sense of humour extraordinary luck, fidelity in friendship, will enable it to survive until his escape from Auschwitz in April 1944. Extreme poverty and weakness of humanity, Dr. The quality of work is exceptional. Rudolf Vrba manages to show the stupidity of executioners, their stupidity mechanical, projects a beam of light on the banality of evil and makes us laugh in many pages. It is necessary to recall that ever the official version and therefore mediated in the peoples occupied by the Nazis for deportation meant extermination. The disbelief was the first rendezvous of his report, his contacts, both the secret of Auschwitz was meticulously kept, as the Great Lie operating at full.
Poland is understood faster than other countries. We know why and how history took place (including the Warsaw ghetto). Rudolf Vrba (pronounced Verba), Slovak Jewish 17 years, is deported in 1942 to Maïdanek then, quickly, Auschwitz and Birkenau. 400,000 were deported. The remarkable intervention of the apostolic nuncio (= pope's ambassador in Slovakia) who believed the truth of the report Vrba after having heard at length, Pope Pius XII (we are well aware of the controversy about it) and the Apostolic Nuncio in Hungary permit to stop the deportation of 800,000 other Jews. The gift of humor is sublime. Tribute is their record. In the extermination camps, vermin encountered the nobility of soul, common law prisoners were killers, some kapos were real men, there was even a SS who was disgusted escape 2 Jews, is a long list of a tragic hero and low humanity who perished, often to defend it.
The motivation for his escape (one of the very few who have succeeded) was to save Hungarian Jews from the terrible mass deportation ahead. Laugh as knows so well do so in a Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago about Soviet concentration camps. Rudolf Kastner, head of the Jewish Rescue Committee in Hungary, preferred to communicate Vrba's report on the atrocities of the extermination camps (and very precise quantification of 1,765,000 killed, Eichmann rather than alerting the Jewish community so that it will revolt. In exchange, Kastner - the book teaches us - got saved his life, his family and all, that of 1,684 Jews. Never lose faith in humanity: Rudolf Vrba never ceases to surprise us. Thank you Mr Rudolf Vrba for this extraordinary testimony.
It is written from the perspective of an adolescent man. The book sounded like it came from an optimist on life or a person so proud of his accomplishment of saving so many that nothing could mar his implacability. This book is a page turner from the moment you start reading. Plus, he had a good deal of luck, which he does not discuss but comes through. Indeed the original title of this work was I can not forgive. Youth and inexperience is likely what helped Mr. Also, I was shocked at the overall readability of the prose on matters so morbid.
Vrba's attack on the Zionists. It is not as complex as the book written by Alfred Wexler that was recently translated into English. The one note of negativism was Mr. Vrba survive and deal with the atrocities that surrounded him: young people simply believe that they will live and maintain hope far longer than those with experience about the human condition. I often found myself wondering how he could remember such detail and quotes, but by the end of the book I realized that while some of the details may be somewhat imprecise, the impression and the overall truth of the testimony was both powerful and unchallengeable. Here he was clearly enraged at the Hungarian Jewish leadership (See Zionist organization Arcvhives). Did he mean forgive both the Germans and their Jewish collaborators or just the former.
Because of his and Fred Weltzer's escapse, the world was informed of the gruesome atrocities committed at Auschwitz and other concentration camps. An important account of Rudi Vrba's fateful escape from the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Details his life right before his capture, time at Auschwitz and after his escape. It is a gripping and emotional read. Highly recommended.
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