page_title: Siegfried Lederer's escape from Auschwitz
section_title: Breaking into Theresienstadt
hierarchical_section_title: Siegfried Lederer's escape from Auschwitz / Aftermath / Breaking into Theresienstadt
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Theresienstadt; Infanterieposten vor dem Munitionsmagazin in Ravelin XX. This postcard is from publisher Brück &amp; Sohn in Meißen (www.brueck-und-sohn.de).This postcard has a unique number 11052 and is available in a higher resolution at the publisher. This images was uploaded in a cooperation project between Wikipedians and the publisher.
context_page_description: On the night of 5 April 1944, Siegfried Lederer, a Czech Jew, escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp wearing an SS uniform provided by SS-Rottenführer Viktor Pestek. Because of his Catholic faith and infatuation with Renée Neumann, a Jewish prisoner, Pestek opposed the Holocaust. He accompanied Lederer out of the camp, and the two men traveled together to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to obtain false documents for Neumann and her mother.
  Lederer, a former Czechoslovak Army officer and member of the Czech resistance, tried unsuccessfully to warn the Jews at Theresienstadt Ghetto about the mass murders at Auschwitz. He and Pestek returned to Auschwitz in an attempt to rescue Neumann and her mother. Pestek was arrested under disputed circumstances and later executed. Lederer returned to occupied Czechoslovakia, where he rejoined the resistance movement and attempted to smuggle a report on Auschwitz to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Switzerland. After the war he remained in Czechoslovakia. The story of the escape was retold by Lederer and writers including historian Erich Kulka.
context_section_description: On 20 April, Lederer made the first of four or five visits to the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Unbeknownst to him, Lederer was not the first Auschwitz escapee to bring news of mass executions by gassing. Rabbi Leo Baeck, one of the leaders of the Jewish self-administration, had been informed by an anonymous escapee in August 1943. Lederer went to the nearby village of Travčice, where he met with Václav Veselý, a barber who regularly went into the ghetto to shave the Czech guards; he knew Lederer and had helped the Jews in the past. Veselý told Lederer how to avoid the sentries, taking advantage of a security vulnerability around a hospital located outside the ghetto's perimeter. Lederer crossed the open ground outside the ghetto while the sentry was looking the other way and passed through a fence.
  Lederer told Leo Holzer about what he had witnessed at Auschwitz, and according to his later testimony also informed Jirka Petschauer, the captain of the Jewish police inside the ghetto, and Otto Schliesser, a member of the Council of Elders. Holzer notified Baeck and Paul Eppstein, head of the self-administration. Eppstein, Baeck, and Holzer agreed the truth about Auschwitz must be kept strictly secret, lest a "catastrophe" befall the 35,000 prisoners at Theresienstadt at the time. Although rumors about the fate awaiting them at Auschwitz had already spread around the ghetto, many people refused to believe them. Almost all the Jews who were deported to the family camp in May 1944 were unaware of Lederer's previous visit to Theresienstadt, and the few who had access to Lederer's reports made no effort to avoid deportation. Even the resistance members in the fire brigade opposed armed resistance, trusting the June 1944 Red Cross visit to ensure the survival of Theresienstadt's Jews.
  Explaining the reaction to the possibility of imminent death, Israeli historian and survivor Jakov Tsur stated that no one was capable of understanding Auschwitz until he or she had arrived and was undergoing selection. Miroslav Kárný said that he and his friends knew before their deportation on 28 September 1944 that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz, but that "no human being could accept these facts as truth". Lederer made two or three trips into the ghetto in May, smuggling weapons and parts of a radio transmitter that he received from Josef Pokorný.
caption: Fortifications of Theresienstadt (1910)
exif: {"Image XResolution": "600", "Image YResolution": "600", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Artist": "Brueck & Sohn, Kunstverlag, Meissen", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image Copyright": "Brueck & Sohn, Kunstverlag, Meissen", "Image ExifOffset": "198", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[2, 3, 0, 0]", "GPS GPSLatitudeRef": "N", "GPS GPSLatitude": "[50, 30, 99998359/2499959]", "GPS GPSLongitude": "[14, 9, 1249999/624999]", "GPS GPSMapDatum": "WGS-84", "Image GPSInfo": "284", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0230", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "1910:01:01 00:00:00", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated"}