The Auschwitz Protocols

Ceslav Mordowicz and the Race to Save Hungary's Jews

By: Fred R. Bleakley

Narrated by: David de Vries

As Adolf Eichmann sent hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz gas chambers, the Jews of Budapest needed the eyewitness testimony of Auschwitz escapees Ceslav Mordowicz and Arnost Rosinto save them.

The clock was ticking on the Nazi plan to annihilate the last group of the Hungarian Jewry. But after nearly suffocating in an underground bunker, Auschwitz prisoners Ceslav Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin escaped and told Jewish leaders what they had seen. Their testimony in early June, 1944, corroborated earlier hard-to-believe reports of mass killing in Auschwitz by lethal gas and provided eyewitness accounts of record daily arrivals of Hungarian Jews meeting the same fate. It was the spark needed to stir a call for action to pressure Hungary's premier to defy Hitler—just hours before more than 200,000 Budapest Jews were to be deported.

©2022 Fred R. Bleakley (P)2022 Tantor

Still much to learn about the Holocaust

Fred Bleakley's lively story belies the decades of research that informed his writing. The Auschwitz Protocols often reads like a thriller, but readers will learn again and again how much they didn't know about Hitler's war and the Allied response to it. They also will be reminded anew of the power of human denial and collaboration, even in the face of extraordinary evil.