Escaping Auschwitz : a culture of forgetting /

Linn (education, Haifa Univ.) reawakens the most painful issue that has agitated the Jewish community since the Holocaust: did Jewish organizations (Judenrat) abet the Nazis in killing their own people? The case at issue is the extermination of Hungary's Jewry in 1944. Before the community of half a million was transported to Auschwitz, two Jewish escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, informed the leaders of the Jewish community of Slovakia about the killings in Auschwitz in a three-day deposition. Yet the Jewish leadership chose to quash the report, thus helping the Nazis transport the Hungarian Jews. Furthermore, the author argues, to this day, the Vrba/Wetzler report has not been fully evaluated and the proper judgment made about the leaders and organization that suppressed the document. Among the culprits, Linn picks out historians, especially Jehuda Bauer, who defended organizations that squelched the report rather than celebrating the heroism of Vrba and Wetzler. The book is well documented and argued. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Suited for public and academic libraries. A. Ezergailis Ithaca College