Vitezslav Lederer was born on 6 March 1904 in Albersdorf, today Pisarova Vesce near Tachov. In Pilsen, he made a living in a textile shop, he was part of a wider circle of the Communist Party activists. After occupation and the creation of the Protectorate, he helped hide communists living illegally, distributed leaflets. He was arrested by the Gestapo in November 1939 but they failed to prove anything to him. He was assigned to work in a kaolin factory in Horni Briza, later he worked in agriculture for acquaintances who involved him in further resistance activities. He was arrested a second time in November 1940. He was released again after repeated torture and imprisonment. Finally, as a Jew, he was deported from Pilsen to the ghetto in Terezin by the R-transport dispatched on 18 January 1942. In Terezin, at the request of the commander of the fire brigade, Ing. Leo Holzer, who learned of his previous imprisonment, Lederer was assigned to the Terezin fire brigade. This protected him from further deportation for a time.
He was finally deported to the death camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau on 19 December 1943. He became one of the prisoners of the so-called Terezin family camp in Birkenau. The prisoners of the family camp, who had arrived in the previous September transport, were killed exactly six months later, on the night of 8 to 9 March 1944. The deportees from the December transport, including Lederer, thus knew how much time they had left.
That is why Lederer decided to flee and took advantage of the offer of the SS man, Victor Pestek, who repeatedly offered members of the Jewish resistance in the camp an opportunity to escape. Pestek was a 20-year-old Romanian German. He hated serving with the SS, and, in addition, he fell in love with Renée Neumannova, a prisoner from the Terezin family camp. Pestek wanted to find a safe haven for her and her mother in the Protectorate and needed a prisoner to help him find it. He then wanted to return to Auschwitz-Birkenau for both women.
Pestek and Lederer managed to escape from the camp on the night of 5 to 6 April 1944, the immediately announced search for them was unsuccessful. When he tried to return and pick up Renée Neumannova a few months later, Pestek was captured while Lederer managed to escape again.
In the meantime, Lederer was hiding with his friends, mostly members of the communist underground. Four or five times he undertook a risky trip to the ghetto in Terezin, unfortunately, according to the testimony of Ing. Holzer, his information about the mass slaughter was considered scaremongering or something that must be suppressed in order to keep the ghetto calm. Lederer also tried to deliver a message about the mass murder in Auschwitz-Birkenau to Switzerland, namely to the International Red Cross. From the resistance movement, he had false documents in the name of a worker assigned to work at Lake Constance. On the Swiss border, in Constance, he was to pass his message on to a sailor. Unfortunately, he decided not to cross the border and not to testify personally about the slaughter of Jews. Lederer was convinced that fleeing to Switzerland would be a desertion of the Czechoslovak nation's struggle for liberation, a betrayal of his friends from the resistance movement.
He returned to the Protectorate where he again joined the resistance, participated in sabotage, helped Soviet guerrillas, tried to cross the border to Slovakia.
In the mid-1960s, Lederer's story became the subject of Erich Kulka's book Escape from Auschwitz. This was followed by publicity, within which Lederer modified his own story, exaggerated his significance for the Czech, communist, pro-Soviet resistance movement, perhaps so that he would not be suspected of Zionism by the state authorities, i.e. of an effort to speak of the Jewish fate during World War II as something that concerned Jews. Communist Czechoslovakia prohibited such views. As the historian Miroslav Karny wrote, Lederer unfortunately let people delude him and tell him things that were obviously not true. He believed these things and later told them himself.
Vitezslav Lederer died on 5 April 1972.