April 7, 1944 -- Alarm sirens announce the escape of two Slovak prisoners from a heavily-guarded camp in Nazi Germany. The escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, succeed and flee more than one hundred miles to give the first graphic and exact descriptions of the operations at Auschwitz, which up to that point had only been heard about as unverifiable rumours. Their report, first punished in Swiss and then in the western press, made the reality of Nazi annihilation camps explicit and unequivocal to Pope Pius XII, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.