He was mibilized in June 1941 and fought as a platoon commander of regimental artillary, but he was recaptured in September. He arranged for Neumann to get a job as a block clerk and offered to help her escape by disguising her as an SS woman. She also told them of Faltys, a Jew in hiding in Prague who could arrange the rest of the papers, including SS officer identification for Pestek and Lederer that would give them the authority to arrest Renée Neumann and her mother. Lederer, a former Czechoslovak Army officer and member of the Czech resistance, tried unsuccessfully to warn the Jews at Theresienstadt Ghetto about the mass murders at Auschwitz. The perverse theater of death included a military van marked with a red cross, in which an SS “medic” ferried canisters of Zyklon B.

Photograph: Keystone Press/Alamy View image in fullscreen Rudolf Vrba, centre, prepares to testify against former Auschwitz guards in Frankfurt, 1964. Pestek gave the correct passwords, telling the other guards Lederer was on special duty, and both men bicycled out of the front gate. And what they were witnessing, Rosenberg came to understand, was privileged information about the camp’s operation.

He met the widow of Werner, Pestek's SS colleague who was killed in action in Belarus, and gave her some of Werner's personal possessions that had ended up in Pestek's hands. In early June, Lederer attempted to smuggle a report on Auschwitz to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in neutral Switzerland. The print has some photos of Vrba and some of Auschwitz and some added material about the author, a real bonus over the audio.

In November 1939 and again in November 1940, Lederer was arrested by the Gestapo for alleged resistance activity. AUTHOR: Andrey Pogozhev was brn in 1912 at Dontsk in the Ukraine, and before the war he worked as a miner and mining engineer. Decades later, he would notice a waiter in a New York restaurant with a number tattooed on his arm and instantly tells him he must be a Jew from Będzin in Poland who had been sent to Auschwitz in the summer of 1943. After Werner died of his injuries, Pestek was discovered by partisans who spared his life despite the SS killings in the village. According to psychologist Ruth Linn, Pestek may have helped Lederer in an attempt to distance himself from Nazi crimes because his home in Bukovina had been recently occupied by the advancing Red Army.

And this death was not certain for all—there was selection for slave labor; perhaps not all transports went to Auschwitz. According to Lederer, he was then driven to Constance, alternately dressed as a civilian and an SS officer.

They had lain immobile for three days amid a pile of planks in a lumber yard, after scattering cheap Russian tobacco soaked in petrol all around to put off the tracker dogs. Kárný concludes that the conflicting accounts make it impossible to know what happened, and he is convinced Lederer's account is not accurate. Neumann and Pestek were caught, handcuffed together, and carried away; both were interrogated and tortured at Block 11. Siegfried Lederer [ cs] or Vítězslav Lederer ( ( 1904-03-06)6 March 1904 – ( 1972-04-05)5 April 1972) was born to a Jewish family in Písařova Vesce [ cs; de] in the Sudetenland, the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia. No, I don't believe Freedland was purposefully disrespectful nor that there was ill intentions either.For example, Kulka's account of the trip to Switzerland was denied by all witnesses, and not supported by the documentary evidence. These two books couldn’t be more opposite in purpose, but they both drive addictive page-turning with immersive narratives. Bonafide, who have a development and distribution deal with BBC Studios, recently produced Nicôle Lecky’s BAFTA-winning “Mood.

Pleased with getting the book, and didn't mind it being second hand, but wasn't made aware that it was written in on the inside cover - this might have put me off and I would have tried to get a different second hand one with no writing in it. Both Vrba’s wives were still alive and willing to be interviewed about his rich but somewhat tormented postwar life in Czechoslovakia, England and Canada. When non-Jewish leadership react exactly the same way, Freedland is quick to speculate on their motives, disingenuously and underhandedly mocking a prelate for passing out when he learns his clergy are being murdered at the camp too. This was truly an absolutely heartbreaking and completely incomprehensible (in the horrific detail of what occured), memoir.This is a relatively detailed retelling of his time there, from a journal he kept secretly in the camp. What saddened and incensed me, as it did Rudi in his later life, was that if took weeks into months for anyone in power to act on the Vrba-Wetzler report. It should be Abel Ebezner’s son Macaire; however Abel, before his death, changed the tradition of handing the presidency to the son to an appointment by the board of directors. The Vrba-Wetzler report was shocking (even though the British and American government officials were already aware of some of the details). Evading the thousands of SS men hunting them, Vrba and Wetzler made the perilous journey on foot across Nazi-occupied Poland.