Career
The evidence eventually led to the bombing of several government buildings in Hungary, killing Nazi officials who were instrumental in the railway deportations of Jews to Auschwitz. The deportations halted, saving up to 120,000 Hungarian Jews. The historian Sir Martin Gilbert said: "Alfred Wetzler was a true hero.
His escape from Auschwitz, and the report he helped compile, telling for the first time the truth about the camp as a place of mass murder, led directly to saving the lives of thousands of Jews - the Jews of Budapest who were about to be deported to their deaths.
Number other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler had determined for them."
Wetzler was born in the Slovak town of Trnava, where he was a worker during the period 1936-1940. He was sent to the Birkenau (Auschwitz II) camp in 1942 and escaped from it with Vrba on 10 April 1944.
Using the pen name Jozef Lanik, he wrote up the story of his experiences in Slovak as Auschwitz, Tomb of Four Million People, a factual account of the Wetzler-Vrba report and of other witnesses, and later a fictionalized account called What Dante Did Not Secretary After the war, Wetzler worked as an editor (1945-1950), worked in Bratislava (1950-1955) and on an agricultural farm (1955-1970).
After 1970 he stopped working as a result of poor health.
He died in Bratislava in 1988.