According to Kárný, Lederer's role in the latter group, which during 1944 focused on sabotaging the Roderstein capacitor factory and a local Wehrmacht installation is unclear. In 1944, Walter Rosenberg (later known as Rudolf Vrba) and Alfréd Wetzler became the first Jewish prisoners to escape from Auschwitz.

The majority of pages are undamaged with some creasing or tearing, and pencil underlining of text, but this is minimal. Even while still in Auschwitz, Vrba had heard rumours that the camp was being expanded to cope with the arrival of about a million Hungarian Jews, the last surviving major European community. And yet too few heeded the warning that Vrba—then just nineteen years old—had risked everything to deliver. Neumann and Pestek were caught, handcuffed together, and carried away; both were interrogated and tortured at Block 11.Previously, an SS man named Dobrovolný—an ethnic German from Slovakia—had met a Jewish childhood friend at Auschwitz. And though his life was a series of escapes – from his name, country and marriage, as well as from Auschwitz – he stayed true to who he was, and to his mission to make the world face the truth about the Holocaust. And on top of that, he clings to the "bomb, bomb, bomb" solution that the Allies didn't implement as what should absolutely been done, without bothering to at the very least lay out the logistical and technical difficulties and the effectiveness or lack thereof of bombing the concentration camp and the railways leading up to it. Lederer said in 1967 that he had the opportunity to escape to Switzerland but decided not to because his family had already been killed by the Germans and he felt obliged to continue to fight.

In a market full of WWII testimonials this is unusual since it is written by a Russian from the perspective of a Soviet.On 6 November 1942 70 captured Red Army soldiers staged an extraordinary mass escape from Auschwitz. SS men would sometimes reassure them or even joke with them right up to the doors of the gas chambers. Otherwise it was easier to deny what was right in front of you than to confront the reality of your own imminent destruction. Occasionally, the prose feels like we’re reading in the 20th century’s golden age of crime writing, where subtlety didn’t play, which makes it even more fun. Dobrovolný offered to help him escape but then turned him in, resulting in his brutal execution and a bonus for the SS man.

Pestek 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. Die Flucht des Auschwitzer Häftlings Vítězslav Lederer und der tschechische Widerstand [ The Escape of Auschwitz Prisoner Vítězslav Lederer and the Czech Resistance] (in German). This caused a huge scandal in Israel when Rudolf Kasztner, the leader of the Hungarian Jews at the time, was embroiled in a judicial case for defamation the State of Israel undertook on his behalf against another Hungarian Jew who accused him of collaborationism.

But lest you believe, as they did, that merely getting the detailed information of what was happening out would change things, there is this: At every juncture, their copious written report (created by resistance forces who grilled them individually for days, fact-checking their reports against each other) met lethargy, procrastination, convenient incredulity allowing inaction, or ineffective action from everyone from Winston Churchill to Franklin Roosevelt to the pope.