Primo Levi
1919 to 1987
Italian Jewish chemist; survivor and writer.
Primo Levi was born on 31 July 1919 in Turin and was arrested as a member of an anti-Fascist partisan group, then deported in February 1944 to Auschwitz, where he was tattooed with the number 174517. His training as a chemist won him a place in a laboratory at Auschwitz III-Monowitz, the labor camp serving I.G. Farben's synthetic-rubber works, which helped him survive roughly eleven months until the Red Army reached the camp in January 1945. He became one of the most influential of all survivors to write about Auschwitz, his year in the camp the subject of work read around the world. He died in Turin on 11 April 1987.
Witold Pilecki
1901 to 1948
Polish resistance officer.
Witold Pilecki was born on 13 May 1901 and was a Polish cavalry officer and resistance member who in 1940 deliberately allowed himself to be captured in a Warsaw roundup in order to be sent to Auschwitz and gather intelligence from within. Held as prisoner number 4859, he built an underground network among the inmates and compiled some of the earliest reports on conditions in the camp, smuggled out to the Polish Home Army and the Western Allies. He escaped from Auschwitz in April 1943 and later fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, afterward expanding his findings into the document known as Witold's Report. Arrested by Poland's communist authorities in 1947, he was convicted on fabricated charges and executed in Warsaw on 25 May 1948.
Rudolf Vrba
1924 to 2006
Auschwitz prisoner who escaped and warned the world.
Rudolf Vrba was born Walter Rosenberg on 11 September 1924 in Topoľčany, Slovakia, and was deported as a teenager to Auschwitz in 1942, where he was held at Auschwitz I and Birkenau and forced to work on the arrival ramp. On 7 April 1944, with the fellow prisoner Alfréd Wetzler, he hid in the camp and escaped two days later, reaching Slovakia. The two compiled the detailed Vrba-Wetzler Report, with maps and figures describing the killing at Birkenau, which reached the Allies and is credited with helping halt the deportation of Hungary's Jews in the summer of 1944. After the war he became a biochemist, working in Britain and Canada, and continued to testify about the camp until his death in 2006.
Rudolf Höss
1900 to 1947
SS commandant of Auschwitz.
Rudolf Höss was born on 25 November 1900 and served as the first and longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, from May 1940 until November 1943, returning briefly in 1944 to oversee the deportation of Hungarian Jews. Under his administration the camp at Birkenau was built and expanded into the deadliest site of the 'Final Solution.' Captured by British forces in 1946, he gave detailed testimony at the Nuremberg trials and wrote an extensive account in Polish custody. He was tried by the Polish Supreme National Tribunal, sentenced to death, and hanged on a gallows erected beside the former crematorium at Auschwitz I on 16 April 1947.
Maximilian Kolbe
1894 to 1941
Polish Franciscan friar; martyr who died for another prisoner.
Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan friar and missionary arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Auschwitz I in May 1941. At the end of July, after a prisoner escaped, the camp condemned ten men to die in reprisal; Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take the place of Franciszek Gajowniczek, a married man with children, and the substitution was allowed. He died in the starvation bunker of Block 11 on 14 August 1941. He was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982, with Gajowniczek present at the ceremony.
Edith Stein (Teresa Benedicta of the Cross)
1891 to 1942
Jewish-born philosopher and Carmelite nun; martyr.
Edith Stein was born in Breslau in 1891 into a Jewish family and became an accomplished philosopher before converting to Catholicism and entering the Carmelite order, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Arrested by the Gestapo in the occupied Netherlands on 2 August 1942 in reprisal for a Dutch bishops' protest against the deportations, she was sent through the Westerbork transit camp and deported to Auschwitz, where she was killed at Birkenau on 9 August 1942. She was canonized in 1998, the first Jewish-born woman declared a Catholic saint, and named a co-patron of Europe.
Otto Frank
1889 to 1980
Auschwitz survivor; Anne Frank's father and the family's sole survivor.
Otto Frank was born in Frankfurt in 1889 and was the father of the diarist Anne Frank. After the family's hiding place in Amsterdam was discovered in 1944, they were deported and reached Auschwitz-Birkenau on the last transport from Westerbork on 3 September 1944. Of the eight people who had hidden in the annex, Otto alone survived, liberated at Auschwitz by Soviet forces on 27 January 1945. He spent the rest of his life preserving his daughter's diary and establishing the Anne Frank House.
Filip Müller
1922 to 2013
Sonderkommando survivor and eyewitness.
Filip Müller was born in 1922 in Sered, in present-day Slovakia, and was deported to Auschwitz in April 1942, where he was forced to work in the Sonderkommando, the prisoner unit made to labor at the killing installations. He survived nearly three years in that assignment and was still alive when the killing ended in late 1944; sent on a death march, he reached Mauthausen and its Gunskirchen subcamp, where he was liberated in May 1945. He became one of the most important eyewitnesses to Birkenau, testifying at trials and in Claude Lanzmann's 1985 film, and died in 2013.
Eva Mozes Kor
1934 to 2019
Survivor of the twin experiments; later educator.
Eva Mozes Kor was born in 1934 in Romania and was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 at the age of ten with her twin sister Miriam, where the two were among the children subjected to Josef Mengele's experiments on twins. Both survived and were liberated when Soviet forces reached the camp on 27 January 1945. She emigrated to the United States, settled in Terre Haute, Indiana, and founded a Holocaust education museum there, lecturing widely and returning often to Auschwitz with students. Her public stance on forgiveness drew both admiration and debate before her death in 2019, during one of her annual visits to Poland.
Josef Mengele
1911 to 1979
SS physician at Auschwitz.
Josef Mengele was an SS physician at Auschwitz, notorious as one of the officers who decided the fate of arriving deportees on the selection ramp. He carried out cruel and often fatal experiments, focusing on twins and on people with physical differences, in cooperation with a Berlin research institute. Many of his subjects, Jewish and Roma, died as a result. After the war he escaped to South America, evaded capture for decades, and died in Brazil in 1979.
Irène Némirovsky
1903 to 1942
Ukrainian-born French novelist.
Irène Némirovsky was a celebrated French novelist, born in Kyiv in 1903 to a Jewish family that fled the Russian Revolution and settled in Paris. Despite her literary success she was denied French citizenship, and after the German occupation she was arrested as a Jew in July 1942 and deported from the Pithiviers transit camp to Auschwitz. She died in the camp the following month. Decades later the rediscovery of an unfinished manuscript she had written in hiding brought her renewed recognition around the world.
Charlotte Salomon
1917 to 1943
German-Jewish painter.
Charlotte Salomon was a German-Jewish painter born in Berlin in 1917 who fled to the south of France, where in hiding she created an extraordinary cycle of hundreds of autobiographical gouaches combining painting, text, and music. Pregnant and newly married, she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she was killed on arrival in October 1943 at the age of twenty-six. The body of work she entrusted to a friend before her deportation survived and is now recognized as a singular achievement of twentieth-century art.
