Fred R. Bleakley - The Auschwitz Protocols: Ceslav Mordowicz and the Race to Save Hungarys Jews

Advance Praise for

A compelling account of life at Auschwitz, combined with a suspenseful story of a rare escape from that monstrous monument to evil, The Auschwitz Protocols offers precious insight into the unspeakable tragedy that was the Holocaust.

David I. Kertzer, Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University, and 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe

Fred Bleakley sought to chronicle what had been entrusted to him a couple decades ago by Ceslav Mordowicz, an escapee from the Auschwitz death camp. The author has fulfilled his witness mission: to present to us the truth about this story that has caused much controversy to this day. A very skilled and accomplished journalist, he sheds light on interesting hitherto unknown details and contexts, while basing his views on important document sources. We owe him thanks for his determination, perseverance, and commitment. His book is an outstandingly interesting read.

Zoltn Tibori-Szab, Habilitated Doctor, Professor at the Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj, Romania, and Director of the Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies of the same university

The Auschwitz Protocols follows the life of Ceslav Mordowicz who, together with Aronst Rosin, escaped from Auschwitz in May, 1944, and brought details of the Hungarian deportations to the outside world. The incredible escape of the two prisoners from Auschwitz is vividly described. This is an invaluable book, especially to a generation of young people who dont recognize the word Auschwitz.

John H. Merey, survivor from wartime Budapest who, with his Jewish family, was on the Kasztner Train that transported them and other Jews to safety in June, 1944. He is now a medical doctor in Florida.

The Auschwitz Protocols is an excellent book. I wonder how many years it took to write on this difficult subject in such an accurate way. It is a very richly documented and extremely well-written page turner.

Avi Pazner, son of Dr. Chaim Pozner, a Jewish leader in Switzerland who helped put pressure on Regent Horthy to stop deportations from Budapest. He currently lives in Israel and was Israeli Ambassador to France and Italy.

A WICKED SON BOOK

An Imprint of Post Hill Press

The Auschwitz Protocols:

Ceslav Mordowicz and the Race to Save Hungarys Jews

2022 by Fred R. Bleakley

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-63758-262-6

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-63758-263-3

Cover design by Tiffani Shea

Interior design and composition by Greg Johnson, Textbook Perfect

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

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To Jane and our son Will.

The best that ever happened to me.

On June 6, 1944, while the Allies were storming Normandy, thousands of Jewish men, women, and children from Hungary stumbled from cramped cattle car trains arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. At the same time, two escapees from Auschwitz, Czeslaw (Ceslav) Mordowicz, a twenty-four-year-old Polish Jew, and Arnost Rosin, a twenty-nine-year-old Slovakian Jew, were telling the local branch of the Bratislava Jewish Central Council (JCC) about the concentration camp. Beginning on May 15, they had seen, firsthand, the camps daily arrival of up to 12,000 Hungarian Jews. The arriving deportees had endured days of stifling heat, a lack of water, and, in each car, one overflowing bucket of human waste. They lined up as they got off the trains, with German shepherd dogs howling at them, where a uniformed SS physician flipped his thumb right or left. The lucky few moved to the right, fit for labor. The others would soon be lying dead inside the camps gas chambers. As one historian put it, the Hungarian Holocaust was the most concentrated and methodical deportation and massacre program of the war, a slaughter machine that functioned, perfectly oiled, for forty-six days on end.

The mass deportations of Hungarys remaining Jews ended on July 6 on the order of Hungarys leader Mikls Horthy. Just hours later they would have been rounded up from the center of Budapest for deportation to Auschwitz. Ceslav Mordowicz played a catalytic role in making that happen. This is Mordowiczs story: from the start of the war, his life in the ghetto, and his year and a half in Auschwitz, to his harrowing escape and cunning ways of avoiding recapture until he was finally caught, only to be deported in a nightmarish return to Auschwitz. This is also the story of Mordowiczs determination to tell of the horrors of Auschwitz. By doing so, his and his partners testimony corroborated the gruesome reports of two prior Auschwitz successful escapes, that of Walter Rosenberg (Rudolf Vrba) and Alfred Fredo Wetzler on April 7, 1944, and that of Jerzy Tabeau, known as the Polish Major, six months earlier. Those previous escapees had not been taken seriously until then by the officials who could make a difference. Together, the accounts of those three escapees have become the now famous Auschwitz Protocols, released by the US War Refugee Board to widespread press coverage in late 1944 and used by the prosecution in the postwar Nuremberg war trials of Nazi leaders.

In the decades following the war, historians and documentary filmmakers have focused largely on the Vrba/Wetzler report for the international pressure on Horthy to protect Hungarys remaining Jews. The importance of the Vrba/Wetzler report, as well as that of the Polish Major Tabeau, is irrefutable. However, the significance of the Mordowicz/Rosin Auschwitz report in corroborating and drawing further attention to those two reports has not been sufficiently recognized. A major reason stems from misstatements in the introduction of the Auschwitz Protocols. The misstatements by the War Refugee Board (WRB) are detailed in the coda of this book. In contrast, my research shows that the Mordowicz/Rosin report gave religious and Allied officials more reason to see the truth of Auschwitz and put pressure on Horthy to save his countrys remaining Jews.

I first heard of Ceslav in 1995, after Union College history professor Stephen Berk gave a lecture at a synagogue in Toronto. He cited Ceslav as an unsung hero of the war, adding that it wasnt known whether he was still alive. Hearing this, a woman in the audience rose and pointed to the man sitting beside her, saying, Ceslav is right here! A few months later, he received an honorary degree at Union Colleges graduation ceremony. As a writer at the Wall Street Journal, I attended the ceremony on a Sunday in June of that year to hear Unions president, Roger H. Hull, announce that Mordowicz was one of four brave Jews. The news you and your fellow escapees brought helped alert the world to the horrors of the Nazi death camps. My short article on Mordowicz, published in the Journal the following week, led to the US Holocaust Museum interviewing Mordowicz for its archive of oral histories. That article also put me on the road to writing this book. The sheer drama of the race to save the last Jews of Hungary captured my interest. Ceslavs story could not be told without the background of Hungarys on-again, off-again embrace of its Jewish population. I knew I needed to give the story sweep and scope, as one of my former editors, John Lee of the New York Times, once stressed. But my day job and family came first. So I stored away all my interviews with Ceslav from 1995 to 1997 and waited until retirement several years ago to pursue the broader context of Ceslavs story.