The Virtual Historian

John Freund and his family arrived in the second group to inhabit the Czech Family Camp, arriving in Auschwitz on December 16, 1943. Six months later, on July 2, 1944, with approximately 10,000 Jews in the Czech Family Camp, 3,080 were chosen—2,000 women, 1,000 men, all of whom were sent to concentration camps in Germany, and eighty younger boys sent for vocational training. In this selection, John was among the younger boys, and his brother and father among the men. Erna Freund was among the 3,000 women and children taken to the gas chambers on July 10.

A Slovak Jewish prisoner, Rudolf Vrba, who had been a registrar in Birkenau, was able to move freely between the Czech Family Camp and other areas of Birkenau. In March 1944, he passed on messages from the resistance movement in Auschwitz to the effect that the Sonderkommando, those whose job it was to remove the bodies from the gas chambers, were prepared to resist on March 7 if the Czech Jews would begin the resistance. Rudolf Vrba asked Freddy Hirsch, whom John Freund knew well, to signal the resistance. Freddy Hirsch had been working with the young children of the Czech Family Camp and could not bear the thought of what would happen. He committed suicide on March 6. The resistance at the gas chambers did not bring about the planned effect, although there was some individual fighting. The Czech Jews entered the gas chambers singing the Czech national anthem and “Hatikvah” (Hope), now the national anthem of Israel.

Rudolf Vrba and the Resistance knew that those who had arrived in December would be killed in six months, as those who had come in September had been murdered in March. He and his fellow Slovak Jew, Alfred Weztler, escaped from Auschwitz on April 7 with the intention of alerting the world that the so-called “unknown destination in the East” was a killing centre, and that those in the Czech Family Camp were imminently going to be killed. Their report, which reached the West, became known as the Auschwitz Report.