On the 24th of April 1944, two Jewish men named Rudi Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler arrived in Bratislava, Slovakia with an incredible story. They claimed to have just escaped from a German concentration camp known as Birkenau located in Poland. The escapees met secretly with Jewish leaders and over the next two days they wrote highly detailed reports regarding the operations in Birkenau and provided detailed drawings of the gas chambers and crematoria there. By this time, Slovakia, an ally of Germany, had already sent 60,000 of the country's 87,000 Jews to their deaths. The publication of the report in Swiss newspapers later that year was too little too late and by the end of the war it is estimated that only 300 Slovakian Jews had survived out of the original 87,000 children, women and men
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