   #copyright

Rudolf Vrba

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Historical figures

   Dr. Rudolf Vrba in 1997.
   Dr. Rudolf Vrba in 1997.

   Rudolf 'Rudi' Vrba, born Walter Rosenberg ( September 11, 1924 – March
   27, 2006), was a professor of pharmacology and therapeutics,
   specializing in neurology, who became known internationally for more
   than 50 research papers on the chemistry of the brain and for his work
   on diabetes and cancer. He is chiefly known, however, for being the
   second of only five Jews to both escape successfully from the Auschwitz
   concentration camp and pass information to the Allies about the mass
   murder that was taking place there during the Holocaust. The 32 pages
   of information that he and fellow escapee Alfréd Wetzler dictated to
   horrified Jewish officials in Slovakia in April 1944 became known as
   the Vrba-Wetzler report. It is regarded as one of the most important
   documents of the 20th century because it was the first detailed
   information about the camp to reach the Allies that they accepted as
   credible.

   Although the report's release to the public was controversially delayed
   until after the mass transport of 437,000 Jews from Hungary to
   Auschwitz had begun on May 15, 1944, it is nevertheless credited with
   having saved many lives. Information from the report was published on
   June 15, 1944 by the British Broadcasting Corporation and on June 20 by
   The New York Times. Pope Pius XII, U.S. President Franklin D.
   Roosevelt, and King Gustaf of Sweden subsequently appealed to Hungarian
   leader Admiral Miklós Horthy to halt the mass deportations, which
   stopped on July 9, 1944, thereby saving up to 200,000 Jews.

   The timing of the report's distribution remains a source of significant
   controversy. It was made available to officials in Hungary and
   elsewhere before the deportations to Auschwitz had begun, but was not
   further disseminated until weeks later. Vrba believed that more lives
   could have been saved if it had been publicized sooner, reasoning that,
   had Hungary's Jews known they were to be killed and not resettled, they
   might have chosen to run or fight rather than board the trains to
   Auschwitz. He alleged that the report was deliberately withheld by the
   Jewish-Hungarian Aid and Rescue Committee in order not to jeopardize
   complex, but ultimately futile, negotiations between the committee and
   Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of the deportations, to
   exchange Jewish lives for money, trucks, and other goods — the
   so-called "blood for trucks" proposal.

   There is no consensus among historians as to the validity of Vrba's
   allegations, which have revealed a fissure in Holocaust historiography
   between "survivor discourse" and "expert discourse." Yehuda Bauer,
   Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
   has called Vrba "one of the Heroes of the Holocaust," but also a
   "bitter Auschwitz survivor," writing that "[t]he trauma of the
   Holocaust had a severe effect on the internal intra-Jewish discourse,
   in the form of baseless accusations whose origin lay in the despair and
   anger over the loss of so many ... It is almost pointless to try to
   quarrel with this anger, since facts and logical arguments cannot
   assuage it."

Early life and arrest

   Rudolf Vrba in his Gymnasium photograph, 1935-36, fourth from the left
   on the bottom row. He was excluded from the school at the age of 15
   because he was a Jew.
   Enlarge
   Rudolf Vrba in his Gymnasium photograph, 1935-36, fourth from the left
   on the bottom row. He was excluded from the school at the age of 15
   because he was a Jew.

   Vrba was born Walter Rosenberg in Topoľčany, Slovakia, to Elias and
   Helena (née Grunfeldova) Rosenberg, who owned a steam sawmill in
   Jaklovce, near Margecany. Because he was a Jew, he was excluded at the
   age of 15 from the Gymnasium (high school) of Bratislava under the
   Slovakian version of the Nazi's Nuremberg Laws, which placed heavy
   restrictions on Jews' civil rights, and went on to work as a labourer
   in Trnava. He continued his studies at home, learning English and
   studying Russian. According to The Daily Telegraph, his mother found
   his interest in English eccentric, but his interest in Russian so
   alarming that she took him to a doctor.

   In March 1942, at the age of 17 and wanting to rebel against his
   country's anti-Semitism, Vrba decided to flee to England to join the
   Czechoslovak Army in Britain. He tore off the yellow Star of David that
   he was forced to wear as a Jew, and took a taxi from Topoľčany to
   Hungary with the equivalent of £10, all his mother could afford to give
   him. Though he managed to reach Hungary, as a Slovak Jew with no legal
   status he found the country too hostile and concluded that it would be
   dangerous to continue on to Britain.

   He decided to return to Slovakia, but was caught by Hungarian border
   guards while crossing back over the Hungary-Slovakia border. They
   turned him over to the Slovakian authorities, who sent him to the
   Nováky transition camp in Slovakia. He escaped from Nováky along with
   prisoner Josef Knapp, but was caught several days later by a Slovakian
   policeman on bicycle, who became suspicious when he noticed Vrba
   wearing two pairs of socks. He was sent back to the camp, where he was
   savagely beaten by the guards in retribution for his escape.

   On June 14, 1942, Vrba was deported to the Majdanek concentration camp
   in Poland, where he briefly found one of his brothers — Vrba saw him
   just once. Vrba volunteered for "farm work", and on June 30, he was
   sent to Auschwitz I, the main camp of the Auschwitz complex and the
   administrative centre for the satellite camps.

   Rather than the promised "farm work", Vrba's initial duties in
   Auschwitz involved digging up the bodies of over 100,000 Jews who had
   already been killed or died, so they could be incinerated. He
   eventually befriended a Viennese prisoner who was trusted by the SS,
   and who arranged for him to work in the Aufräumungskommando, also
   called the "Canada" kommando in camp slang. This was a work detail of
   up to 2,000 male and female prisoners who worked on the Judenrampe
   ("Jewish ramp") situated between Auschwitz I and II that the new
   arrivals were unloaded onto from the freight trains, and who sorted out
   the possessions confiscated from them, and disposed of the dead bodies
   among them. The Germans ensured that any valuables among the prisoners'
   possessions, including gold, were repackaged and sent to Germany, and
   the gold melted into ingots for the Reichsbank.

   The kommando and its storage facilities, which occupied several dozen
   barracks in the BIIg sector of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, were nicknamed
   "Canada I" and "Canada II" — officially, Effektenlager I and II —
   because the facilities contained clothing, shoes, medicines, blankets,
   and other provisions; it was therefore regarded as paradise by the
   Polish prisoners, who chose the nickname because they saw Canada as the
   land of plenty. Because he had access to the food, soap, and warm
   clothes stored in "Canada", Vrba was able to stay healthy and free of
   disease. He eventually became part of the pilfering hierarchy of the
   camp guards, though at one point he was beaten severely for smuggling
   goods to friends.

   On January 15, 1943, he was transferred again, along with the rest of
   the Aufräumungskommando, to Birkenau, the death camp, 2½ miles (4 km.)
   away from the main camp, where he continued to work as part of the
   "Canada" kommando.

Auschwitz-Birkenau

   On arrival at Birkenau, Vrba was "selected" to go to the right rather
   than the left, which meant he had been chosen to work rather than be
   sent to the gas chambers. He was tattooed as prisoner no. 44070.

   Vrba was later described by those who knew him as possessing a
   photographic memory, and during his time at Auschwitz I and II, he
   attempted to commit to memory the numbers of Jews arriving and the
   place of origin of each transport. Because his job involved being
   present when most of the Jewish deportees arrived, and sorting out the
   belongings of the ones who were gassed, he was able to make rough
   calculations of how many had been sent to Auschwitz, and how many of
   them were killed.

   He later wrote that he was able to judge how much the prisoners knew
   about why they were being sent to Auschwitz, and he concluded that they
   were ignorant of their fate when they arrived. While sorting through
   luggage, he noticed that many of them had packed as though for the long
   term. He saw clothes for different seasons and utensils for a variety
   of uses, which convinced him that the Jews believed the Nazis' stories
   about resettlement in the East. This strengthened his conviction that
   he had to escape. For two years he had thought about it, but now, he
   wrote, "It was no longer a question of reporting a crime, but of
   preventing one; of warning the Hungarians, of rousing them, of raising
   an army one million strong, an army that would fight rather than die."

   In the summer of 1943, he was given the job of registrar
   (Blockschreiber) in the quarantine section for men, Birkenau sector
   BIIa. From his barracks, he was able to watch the lorries driving
   towards the gas chambers, carrying the Jews who had been sent to the
   left. This allowed him to estimate the number of Jews arriving daily,
   and the percentage that were gassed. His estimate was that only around
   10 percent of each transport was selected to go to the right to be used
   as slave labor, and the rest were killed. By April 1944, he calculated
   that 1,750,000 Jews had already been killed in the camps, a figure
   significantly higher than those now accepted by mainstream historians,
   but which even decades later he insisted was more accurate.

"Hungarian salami"

   At the beginning of 1944, Vrba noticed that preparations were underway
   for the building of a new railway line, which would allow inmates to be
   transported directly from their places of origin to the gas chambers,
   and wrote that this was confirmed to him on January 15, 1944 by a
   German kapo who was one of the builders. Vrba also reported having
   overheard SS guards discuss how they would soon have "Hungarian salami
   ... by the ton," allegedly a reference to the refugees' habit of
   packing provisions for the long journey, and how the food invariably
   found its way into the SS officers' mess. Vrba wrote: "When a series of
   transports of Jews from the Netherlands arrived, cheeses enriched the
   war-time rations. It was sardines when series of transports of French
   Jews arrived, Chalva and olives when transports of Jews from Greece
   reached the camp, and now the SS were talking of 'Hungarian salami,' a
   well-known Hungarian provision suitable for taking along on a long
   journey." A new area of the camp, called "Mexico," was allegedly being
   constructed to accommodate the new inmates.

   Although Vrba is clear in his autobiography, and in subsequent versions
   of his story told to historians, that he did overhear the "Hungarian
   salami" conversation, there is no mention of the imminent mass arrival
   of Hungarian Jews in the Vrba-Wetzler report. This has led Czech
   historian Miroslav Kárný to dispute that Vrba heard anyone discussing
   "Hungarian salami," and whether Vrba's accounts over the decades after
   his escape may have suffered from some exaggeration. (See What Vrba
   knew below)

Escape

   When he arrived in Birkenau, Vrba discovered that Alfréd Wetzler, an
   older man he had known from his home town, was already there,
   registered as prisoner no. 29162. Wetzler worked in the Birkenau
   mortuary, where his job was to record the number of prisoners who died
   other than by gassing, and the amount of gold extracted from their
   teeth.

   The men came to trust each other implicitly and decided to try to
   escape together. With the help of the camp underground, at 2 p.m. on
   Friday, April 7, 1944 — the eve of Passover — the two men climbed
   inside a hollowed-out hiding place in a wood pile that was being stored
   to build the "Mexico" section for the new arrivals. It was outside
   Birkenau's barbed-wire inner perimeter, but inside an external
   perimeter the Nazi guards kept erected during the day. The other
   prisoners placed boards around the hollowed-out area to hide the men,
   then sprinkled the surrounding area with pungent Russian tobacco soaked
   in gasoline to fool the guards' dogs, a trick they had learned from
   Russian POWs, particularly Dmitry Volkov, who had escaped Auschwitz and
   then been recaptured. Volkov also advised them to travel lightly, with
   no money, and only at night, and trust no-one with their plans. At
   20:33 that evening, the commander of Auschwitz II, SS-Sturmbanführer
   Fritz Hartjenstein, was informed by teleprinter that two Jews had
   escaped.

   The men knew from previous escape attempts by other prisoners that,
   once their absence was noticed during the evening appell, or roll call,
   the guards would continue to search for them for three days. They
   therefore remained in hiding until the fourth night, almost getting
   caught at one point. On April 10, wearing Dutch suits, overcoats, and
   boots they had taken from "Canada", they made their way south, walking
   parallel to the Soła river, heading for the Polish border with Slovakia
   80 miles (133 km.) away, guiding themselves using a page from a child's
   atlas that Vrba remembered looking at while working in "Canada."

   "At the moment of our escape, all connections with whatever friends and
   social contacts we had in Auschwitz were severed, and we had absolutely
   no connection waiting for us outside the death camp ... We were de
   facto written off by the world from the moment we were loaded into a
   deportation train in the spring of 1942 ... The only administrative
   evidence of our existence was an international warrant about us, issued
   telegraphically and distributed to all stations of the Gestapo." The
   warrant was also telegraphed to the Kripo (criminal police), the
   Sicherheitsdienst (security police) and the Grenzpolizei (border
   guards).

   Although Vrba has told the story of his escape as one of himself and
   Wetzler alone in the world, Ruth Linn writes that Polish historiography
   argues that the escape was only possible because of the Polish
   underground operating inside the camp, and because of help from local
   people outside.

The Vrba-Wetzler report

   Eleven days after escaping, Vrba and Wetzler crossed the
   Polish-Slovakian border. They met a farmer who put them in touch with a
   Jewish doctor, Dr. Pollack, who had a contact, Adre Steiner, in the
   Slovak Judenrat (Jewish Council) in Žilina, which now called itself the
   Working Group, and regarded itself as an underground movement. Vrba
   left Dr. Pollack's office with a bandage on his foot to counter any
   suspicion, leaving behind an emotionally wounded physician, who until
   then had hoped his family was still alive in the new "resettlement"
   area they had been sent to.

   Vrba and Wetzler spent the night in Čadca in the home of Mrs Beck, a
   relative of the well-known rabbi Leo Baeck, and met the Working Group
   the next day, April 24, 1944. The head of the Working Group, Dr. Oskar
   Neumann, a German-speaking lawyer, placed the men in different rooms in
   a former Jewish old people's home (used by the Judenrat since the old
   people had been "resettled"), and interviewed them separately over
   three days.
   One of the maps from the Vrba-Wetzler Report
   Enlarge
   One of the maps from the Vrba-Wetzler Report

   Vrba writes that he began by drawing the inner layout of Auschwitz I
   and II, and the position of the ramp in relation to the two camps. He
   described the internal organization of the camps; how Jews were being
   used as slave labor for Krupp, Siemens, I.G. Farben, and D.A.W.; and of
   the mass murder in gas chambers of those who had been chosen for
   Sonderbehandlung or "special treatment".

   The report was written and re-written several times. Wetzler wrote the
   first part, Vrba the third, and the two wrote the second part together.
   They then worked on the report together, and ended up re-writing it six
   times. As they were writing it, Dr. Neumann's aide, Oscar Krasniansky,
   an engineer and good stenographer, who later took the name Oskar Isaiah
   Karmiel, translated it from Slovak into German with the help of Gisela
   Steiner, producing a 32-page report in German, which was completed by
   Thursday, April 27, 1944. Vrba wrote that the report was also hastily
   translated into Hungarian.

   The original Slovak version of the report was not preserved, according
   to Czech historian Miroslav Kárný. The German version contained a
   precise description of the geography of the camps, their construction,
   the organization of the management and security, how the prisoners were
   numbered and categorized, their diet, the selections, gassings,
   shootings, injections, and deaths from the living conditions
   themselves. The report also contained sketches and information about
   the interior layouts and operations of (and surrounding) the gas
   chambers, based on information Vrba and Wetzler had received from the
   Sonderkommando who worked there, which led to some inaccuracies.

   Jean-Claude Pressac, a French specialist on the mechanics of the mass
   murder, examined the report and concluded that, while "somewhat
   unreliable and even quite wrong on some points, [it] has the merit of
   describing exactly the gassing process in type II/III Krematorien as
   from mid-March 1943. It made the mistake of generalizing internal and
   external descriptions and the operating method to Krematorien IV and V.
   Far from invalidating it, the discrepancies confirm its authenticity,
   as the descriptions are clearly based on what the witnesses could
   actually have seen and heard." Auschwitz scholar Robert Jan van Pelt
   concurs: "The description of the crematoria in the War Refugee Board
   report contains errors, but given the conditions under which
   information was obtained, the lack of architectural training of Vrba
   and Wetzlar, and the situation in which the report was compiled, one
   would become suspicious if it did not contain errors." Kárný writes
   that the report is an invaluable historical document because it
   provides details that were known only to prisoners, most of whom died —
   including, for example, that discharge forms were filled out for
   prisoners who were gassed, indicating that death rates in the camp were
   actively falsified.

How the report was distributed

   According to Miroslav Kárný, the report was written and translated by
   April 28, 1944 at the latest, although Vrba says it was completed by
   April 27. Oscar Krasniansky had heard that Rudolf Kastner, a Jewish
   lawyer and journalist, and de facto head of the Zionist Aid and Rescue
   Committee (Va'adat Ezrah Vehatzalah) in Budapest, was about to visit
   Bratislava, as he did regularly. According to one of Krasniansky's
   postwar statements, he personally handed a copy of the report to
   Kastner at the end of April. According to British writer Laurence Rees,
   Kastner received a copy during his visit to Bratislava on April 28.

   The dates on which the report was handed over to Kastner and others are
   important, because Vrba and other Holocaust survivors and writers have
   alleged that the report was not distributed quickly enough. Kastner
   chose not to publicize its contents, and although the reasons for that
   decision are complex and unclear, Vrba believed until the end of his
   life that Kastner withheld it in order not to jeopardize ongoing
   negotiations between the Aid and Rescue Committee and Adolf Eichmann,
   the SS officer in charge of the transport of Jews out of Hungary, to
   secure the release of a number of Jews in exchange for money, 10,000
   trucks, and other goods. (See the controversy section below, Joel
   Brand, and Kastner train.)

   Although Kastner did not make the report public, he did pass it on.
   Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer writes that Kastner gave a copy to Geza
   Soos, a Hungarian Foreign Ministry official who ran a resistance group,
   almost as soon as he received it on or around April 28. Soos gave it to
   Joszef Elias, head of the Good Shepherd Mission, a Protestant
   missionary organization, and his secretary, Maria Szekely, translated
   it into Hungarian and prepared six copies (though Vrba said it had
   already been tranlsated into Hungarian by Krasniansky). These copies
   made their way to various Hungarian officials. On June 20, Vrba met
   Vatican legate Monsignor Mario Martilotti at the Svaty Jur monastery,
   and either gave him a copy of the report or told him about its
   contents, and a few days later, was taken to meet Rabbi Chaim Michael
   Dov Weissmandl, who was regarded as the leader of the Orthodox
   community in Slovakia, at his Yeshiva in Bratislava. Vrba wrote that it
   was clear during the meeting that Weissmandl was already familiar with
   the contents of the report.

Deportations to Auschwitz continue

   Bratislava, June-July 1944. Vrba on the right, and on the left, Arnost
   Rosin, who escaped from Auschwitz on May 24, 1944. The man in the
   middle is Josef Weiss, who worked for the Bratislava Ministry of
   Health. He secretly made copies of the Vrba-Wetzler report, which the
   escapees kept hidden behind a picture of the Virgin Mary in an
   apartment they were renting.
   Enlarge
   Bratislava, June-July 1944. Vrba on the right, and on the left, Arnost
   Rosin, who escaped from Auschwitz on May 24, 1944. The man in the
   middle is Josef Weiss, who worked for the Bratislava Ministry of
   Health. He secretly made copies of the Vrba-Wetzler report, which the
   escapees kept hidden behind a picture of the Virgin Mary in an
   apartment they were renting.

   On June 6, 1944, the day of the Normandy landing or D-Day, Arnost Rosin
   (prisoner no. 29858) and Czesław Mordowicz (prisoner no. 84216) arrived
   in Slovakia, having escaped from Auschwitz on May 27. Hearing about the
   Battle of Normandy, and believing the war was over, they got drunk to
   celebrate, using dollars they'd smuggled out of Auschwitz. They were
   promptly arrested for violating the currency laws, and spent eight days
   in prison, before the Jewish Council paid their fines.

   Rosin and Mordowicz already knew Vrba and Wetzler. Vrba wrote in his
   memoir that any inmate who managed to survive more than a year in
   Auschwitz was regarded as a senior member of what he called the "old
   hands Mafia," and all were known to each other. On June 15, the men
   were interviewed by Oscar Krasniansky, the engineer who had translated
   the Vrba-Wetzler report into German. They told Krasniansky that,
   between May 15 and May 27, 100,000 Hungarian Jews had arrived at
   Birkenau, and that most of them were killed on arrival, apparently with
   no knowledge of what was about to happen to them. The men reported that
   Jews were being killed at an unprecedented rate, with human fat being
   used to accelerate the burning.

   John Conway, professor emeritus of history at the University of British
   Columbia, and a friend of Vrba, has written that, because Rosin and
   Mordowicz were saying Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz still had no
   idea what awaited them, Vrba and Wetzler concluded that their
   information had been suppressed. According to Conway, Vrba remained
   convinced until the end of his life that "if the intended victims had
   been warned, they would have resisted or hid or fled." In his memoir,
   Vrba wrote: "I only learned after the war that more than 400,000
   Hungarian Jews were brought to Auschwitz after our escape and died a
   terrible death there up to mid-July, 1944 without ever having been
   warned by the Hungarian Jewish Council about the true nature of
   "resettlement."

Broadcast of the report and the end of deportations

   Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy stopped the deportations on July 9,
   1944.
   Enlarge
   Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy stopped the deportations on July 9,
   1944.

   The Vrba-Wetzler Report is known to have reached the British and U.S.
   governments by mid-June 1944. Elizabeth Wiskemann of the British
   Legation in Bern sent it to Allen Dulles, the head of U.S.
   intelligence, who sent it to the U.S. Department of State in
   Washington, D.C. on June 16. Details from it were broadcast by the BBC
   on June 15, and on June 20, The New York Times published the first of
   three stories about the existence of "gas chambers in the notorious
   German concentration camps at Birkenau and Oświęcim [Auschwitz]."

   Several world leaders, including Pope Pius XII, President Franklin D.
   Roosevelt, and the King of Sweden, appealed to Admiral Miklós Horthy to
   stop the deportations. On June 26, Richard Lichtheim, a member of the
   Jewish Agency in Geneva, sent a telegram to England calling on the
   Allies to hold members of the Hungarian government personally
   responsible for the killings. The cable was intercepted by Hungary and
   shown to Prime Minister Döme Sztójay, who passed it to Horthy. On July
   7, he ordered that the deportations end, which they did two days later.
   Historian T.L. Sakmyster has written that fear of being tried for war
   crimes was not the only reason Horthy halted the deportations; rather,
   before he read the Vrba-Wetzler report, Horthy had allegedly dismissed
   the rumors about Auschwitz as "Jewish exaggeration."

   Jews continued to be deported, although in smaller numbers, after the
   overthrow of Horthy's government and its replacement on October 15,
   1944 by the pro-German fascist Arrow Cross Party. In November, Eichmann
   arranged for tens of thousands of Budapest Jews to walk the 120 miles
   (200 km.) from Budapest to Vienna, marching without food in the rain
   and snow. Eventually, protests from neutral countries, and reportedly
   from other SS officers, forced Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, to
   instruct Eichmann to halt the marches.

Resistance activities

   After handing his information over to the Slovakian Jewish Council,
   Vrba was assured by Krasniansky that the report was "in the right
   hands," and so Vrba felt his job was over. He and Wetzler spent the
   next six weeks in Liptovský Mikuláš, and continued to make and
   distribute copies of their report whenever they could. The Slovak
   Judenrat gave Vrba papers in the name of Rudolf Vrba, showing that he
   was a "pure Aryan" going back three generations, and supported him
   financially to the tune of 200 Slovak crowns per week, equivalent to an
   average worker's salary, and as Vrba wrote, "sufficient to sustain me
   in an illegal life in Bratislava."

   On August 29, 1944, the Slovak Army revolted against the Nazis, and the
   reestablishment of Czechoslovakia was announced. Vrba joined the
   Czechoslovak partisan units in September 1944, taking Rudolf Vrba as
   his nom de guerre, and April 7, the day of his escape, as his birthday.
   He fought as a machine-gunner in a unit commanded by Milan Uher, and
   received the Czechoslovak Medal for Bravery, the Order of Slovak
   National Insurrection, and the Order of Meritorious Fighter. He
   legalized his new name after the liberation of Czechoslovakia.

After the war

   Vrba moved to Prague in 1945, attending and working at the Prague
   Technical University, where he received his doctorate in chemistry and
   biochemistry (Dr. Tech. Sc.) in 1951 for a thesis entitled "On the
   metabolism of butyric acid." This was followed by post-doctoral
   research at the Czechoslovak Academy of Science, where he received his
   C. Sc. in 1956. According to friends, Vrba was initially a staunch
   supporter of the Communist Party, which had helped him and Wetzler
   escape from Auschwitz, and for whom he had fought with the Czech
   partisans. However, " anti-semitic purges in Stalinist Czechoslovakia,
   culminating in the 1952 trial of Rudolph Slansky, the Czechoslovak
   Communist party secretary" drove him to want to emigrate.
   Vrba in 1960.
   Enlarge
   Vrba in 1960.

   In the summer of 1944 he had re-acquainted himself with a childhood
   friend Gerta, another Slovak Jew, who survived the war by moving from
   Slovakia to Hungary and back under assumed names, eventually escaping
   the Gestapo, and living as a refugee in Russian controlled Budapest.
   After the war she too moved to Prague and became a medical doctor; they
   married (she took the surname Vrbová, the female version of Vrba), and
   they had two daughters, one in 1952, and one in 1954. Soon after that
   the marriage failed; Vrbová escaped with her daughters to Copenhagen
   via Poland in 1958, reaching England in 1959.

   In 1958, Vrba received an invitation to present at an international
   conference in Israel, and while there, he also defected, working for
   the next two years at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. He
   found he could not continue to live in Israel, because the same men who
   had, in his view, betrayed the Jewish community in Hungary were now in
   positions of power there, so he decided to move to England in 1960,
   becoming a British citizen in 1966. In England, he worked for two years
   in the Neuropsychiatric Research Unit in Carshalton, Surrey, and seven
   years for the British Medical Research Council.

   On May 11, 1960, Adolf Eichmann was captured by the Mossad in Buenos
   Aires and taken to Jerusalem to stand trial. Vrba wrote in his memoir
   that the British newspapers were suddenly full of stories about
   Auschwitz. He contacted Alan Bestic, a journalist with the British
   newspaper, the Daily Herald, to ask whether the newspaper would be
   interested in his story. They were, and it was published in five
   installments of 1,000 words each over one week in March 1961, on the
   eve of Eichmann's trial. Vrba also submitted a statement in evidence
   against Eichmann. With Bestic's help, he wrote up the rest of his story
   in August 1963 for his memoir, Escape from Auschwitz: I cannot forgive,
   which was published in English (1963), German (1964), French (1988),
   Dutch (1996), Czech (1998), and Hebrew (1998).

   He appeared as a witness at one of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in
   1964, and later testified at the seven-week trial for Holocaust denial
   of Ernst Zündel in Canada in 1985.
   Rudolf and Robin Vrba at their wedding in 1975.
   Enlarge
   Rudolf and Robin Vrba at their wedding in 1975.

   Vrba moved to Canada in 1967, serving on the Medical Research Council
   of Canada from 1967 to 1973, and becoming a Canadian citizen in 1972.
   He spent 1973 to 1975 on sabbatical as a research fellow at Harvard
   Medical School; there he met his second wife Robin. They returned to
   Vancouver, British Columbia, where she became a successful real estate
   dealer, and he became an associate professor of pharmacology at the
   University of British Columbia from 1976 until the early 1990s,
   specializing in neurology. He became known internationally for more
   than 50 research papers on the chemistry of the brain, and for his work
   on diabetes and cancer. According to colleague Professor Michael Walker
   "As a scientist he started out very well, and was well respected for
   his work in proteins and chemistry."

   Towards the end of his career Vrba had trouble getting grant money;
   according to Walker, he was not "treated appropriately by the Canadian
   scientific community. He was prescient in his understanding of his
   area, which is proteins, and how their function may be changed if they
   have glucose attached to them". Rather than complaining, he instead
   focused on teaching, and was loved by his students.

   Impressed with Vrba's heroism, in 1992 British historian Sir Martin
   Gilbert supported a campaign to have him awarded the Order of Canada,
   and solicited letters from well-known Canadians on his behalf. One of
   them was law professor (and later Minister of Justice and Attorney
   General) Irwin Cotler, who, in a handwritten letter to Gilbert said "I
   fully concur with you that Vrba is a 'real hero'. Indeed, there are few
   more deserving of the Order of Canada than Vrba, and few, anywhere, who
   have exhibited his moral courage. Canada will honour itself — and
   redeem itself somewhat — by awarding him the order of Canada." However,
   Gilbert's efforts were unsuccessful.

   In 1998, at the instigation of Ruth Linn, he received the title of
   Doctor of Philosophy Honoris Causa from the University of Haifa "in
   recognition of his heroism and daring in exposing, during the war
   itself, the horrors of Auschwitz, which action led to the saving of
   Jewish lives; and in profound appreciation of his educational
   contribution and devotion to spreading knowledge about the Holocaust."

   Vrba died of cancer on March 27, 2006 in Vancouver; he was survived by
   his first wife Gerta, second wife Robin, younger daughter Zuza Vrbová
   Jackson, granddaughter Hannah, and grandson Jan. He was pre-deceased by
   his older daughter Dr. Helená Vrbová, who died doing malaria research
   in Papua-New Guinea in 1982. His fellow escapee, Alfréd Wetzler, died
   in Slovakia in 1988.

Awards and documentaries

   The Czech "One World festival", in its "Right to Know" category,
   annually awards the "Rudolf Vrba Award" to original documentaries which
   "draw attention to an unknown or silenced theme concerning human
   rights." The award was established in 2001 by Mary Robinson, then
   United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Václav Havel,
   then President of the Czech Republic.

   Several documentaries have told Vrba's story: Genocide, part of ITV's
   World at War series in 1973; Auschwitz and the Allies, directed by Rex
   Bloomstein and Martin Gilbert for the BBC in 1982; Shoah by Claude
   Lanzmann in 1985; and Witness to Auschwitz by Robin Taylor for CBC's
   Man Alive series in 1990.

Controversy

Vrba's allegations

   "Blood for goods"
   proposal
       Background
   Auschwitz
   The Holocaust
   Hungary: WWII
   Jews in Hungary
    People and events
   Kurt Becher
   Joel Brand
   Adolf Eichmann
   Heinrich Himmler
   Rudolf Kastner
   Kastner train
   Vaada
   Chaim D. Weissmandl
         Others
   Malchiel Gruenwald
   Joel Teitelbaum
   Rudolf Vrba
   Vrba-Wetzler report
   Alfréd Wetzler
         Sources
   Yehuda Bauer
   John Conway
   Ben Hecht
   Raul Hilberg
   Miroslav Karny
   Ruth Linn
   Rudolf Vrba in 1946
   Enlarge
   Rudolf Vrba in 1946

   Vrba believed that many of the 437,000 Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz
   between May 15 and July 7, 1944 — when 12,000 Jews were being
   dispatched by train every day — would have resisted or hidden had they
   known they were to be killed and not resettled. He wrote: "From the
   testimony of survivors such as Elie Wiesel, it seems clear that the
   Jewish masses assumed that if something truly horrible was in store for
   them, these respectable leaders would know about it and would share
   their knowledge ... It is my contention that a small group of informed
   people, by their silence, deprived others of the possibility or
   privilege of making their own decisions in the face of mortal danger."

   Vrba wrote in his memoirs that, as the Germans were preparing the mass
   deportations to Auschwitz, the Jewish communities in Slovakia and
   Hungary placed their trust either in the Zionist leadership (people
   such as Rudolf Kastner, the de facto head of the Aid and Rescue
   Committee), or in Orthodox Jewish leaders, such as Rabbi Weissmandl and
   Philip von Freudiger. The Nazis were aware of this, which is why they
   lured precisely those members of the community into various
   negotiations, supposedly designed to lead to the release of some, or
   even most, of the Jews, but probably regarded by the Nazis as a way of
   placating the Jewish leadership into not spreading panic, in order to
   avoid an uprising. Vrba wrote: "That the negotiators and their families
   were in fact pathetic, albeit voluntary, hostages in the hands of Nazi
   power was an important part of these 'deals'."

   At the time Vrba arrived in Slovakia from Auschwitz, Kastner was
   involved with other members of the Aid and Rescue Committee,
   particularly Joel Brand, in a series of complex negotiations with SS
   Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of the
   deportation of Jews to Auschwitz, and who was offering to trade as many
   as one million Jews — who were supposedly to be allowed to settle
   anywhere but Palestine — in exchange for 10,000 trucks and other goods
   from the Western Allies.

   Kastner's first meeting with Eichmann took place on April 25, 1944, and
   three days later, on April 28 — the same day the first trainload of
   Hungarian Jews left for Auschwitz, although not as part of the mass
   transports — Kastner is believed to have received a copy of the
   Vrba-Wetzler Report, though possibly in German and not yet translated.
   Vrba alleged that Kastner failed to distribute it in order not to
   jeopardize the negotiations with Eichmann, but instead acted on it
   privately by arranging for a trainload of 1,684 Hungarian Jews to
   escape to Switzerland. According to historian John Conway of UBC, the
   escaping party consisted of "themselves, their relatives, a coterie of
   Zionists, some distinguished Jewish intellectuals, and a number of
   wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs."

   Historian Yehuda Bauer argues against this interpretation of Kastner's
   motives, writing that Kastner put his own family on the train only in
   order to prove to the other passengers that it was safe. Vrba, in
   response, alleged that Bauer is one of the Israeli historians who have
   downplayed Vrba's role in Holocaust historiography, and who seeks to
   defend the Israeli and Zionist establishment. Vrba argued that
   Kastner's negotiations with the Nazis were far-fetched and foolish, and
   that they amounted to collaboration, an accusation Israeli historians
   such as Bauer reject.

   The allegations against Kastner were heard by the Supreme Court of
   Israel in 1957, after Malchiel Gruenwald, an Israeli amateur writer and
   stamp collector, accused Kastner in a self-published pamphlet of being
   a Nazi collaborator. Because Kastner was by then a senior Israeli civil
   servant, the Israeli government sued the writer for libel, and although
   Kastner was eventually exonerated, as a result of the controversy he
   was shot by an assassin on March 3, 1957, and died of his wounds nine
   days later.

   Most Holocaust historians disagree with Vrba's interpretation of the
   Slovakian Jewish leadership's actions. British historian Martin Gilbert
   argues that "Kastner and his colleagues in the Zionist leadership in
   Hungary were already committed to their negotiations with Eichmann ...
   Not urgent warnings to their fellow Jews to resist deportation, but
   secret negotiations with the SS aimed at averting deportation
   altogether, had become the avenue of hope chosen by the Hungarian
   Zionist leaders."

   Yehuda Bauer writes that, by the time the report was prepared, it was
   already too late for anything to alter the Nazis' deportation plans.
   Bauer cautions about the need to distinguish between the receipt of
   information and its "internalization," where it's regarded as correct
   and worthy of action, arguing that this is a complicated process:
   "During the Holocaust, countless individuals received information and
   rejected it, suppressed it, or rationalized about it, were thrown into
   despair without any possibility of acting on it, or seemingly
   internalized it and then behaved as though it had never reached them."
   Bauer has written that Vrba's "wild attacks on Kastner and on the
   Slovak underground are a-historical and simply wrong from the start
   ..."

What Vrba knew

   Vrba was criticized in 2001 in a series of articles — Leadership under
   Duress: The Working Group in Slovakia, 1942-1944 — edited by a group of
   leading Israeli historians with ties to the Slovak community, including
   Yehuda Bauer, Hanna Yablonka, Gila Fatran, and Livia Rothkirchen. The
   introduction by Giora Amir refers to those who argue that the Slovakian
   Jewish Council may have collaborated with the Nazis, as "a bunch of
   mockers and pseudo-historians ..." Amir writes that the "baseless"
   accusation was lent credence when Haifa University awarded an honorary
   doctorate to the "head of these mockers, Peter [sic] Vrba." Amir
   continues: "The heroism of this person, who together with the late
   Alfred Wetzler, was among the first to escape from Auschwitz, is beyond
   doubt. But the fact that, just because he was an Auschwitz prisoner
   endowed with personal heroism, he has crowned himself as knowledgeable
   to judge all those involved in the noble work of rescue, and accuse
   them falsely, deeply disturbs us, the Czech community.

   The tension between what Ruth Linn calls the "survivor discourse" and
   the "expert discourse" lies at the heart of this criticism of Vrba.
   Bauer has called Vrba's memoir "not a memoir in the usual sense,"
   alleging that it "contains excerpts of conversations of which there is
   no chance that they are accurate and it has elements of a second-hand
   story that does not necessarily correspond with reality." When writing
   about himself and his personal experiences, Vrba's account is an
   important one, argues Bauer. "Everything he tells about himself and
   about his actions ... is not only the truth, but also [forms] a
   document of significant historical value." But he continues: "I admired
   Vrba, with true admiration — though mixed with resistance to his
   thoughts in historical matters in which he thinks he is an expert,
   though I am not sure he is justified in thinking so." For his part Vrba
   often dismissed the opinion of Holocaust historians; for example,
   regarding the number of people killed at Auschwitz, he said "Yehuda
   Bauer simply doesn't know what he's talking about, but with his
   impressive title, he thinks he can throw around figures without doing
   any research. Hilberg and Bauer don't know enough about the history of
   Auschwitz or the Einsatzgruppen."

   It has also been alleged that Vrba embellished what he said was his
   eyewitness account. Vrba wrote in his memoir, written in 1963, that he
   overheard SS officers in Auschwitz discuss how they would soon have
   "Hungarian salami ... by the ton," allegedly a reference to the
   imminent arrival of hundreds of thousands of deported Hungarian Jews.
   However, Vrba did not mention in the Vrba-Wetzler report, written in
   April 1944, that he had advance warning of the mass deportation of
   Hungary's Jews, which began in May 1944. If he had known about such a
   momentous event, why would he not have mentioned it at the time?

   Czech historian Miroslav Kárný writes: "It is generally accepted that
   at the time Vrba and Wetzler were preparing their escape, it was known
   in Auschwitz that annihilation mechanisms were being perfected in order
   to kill hundreds of thousands of Hungary's Jews. It was this knowledge,
   according to Vrba, that became the main motive for their escape. ...
   But in fact, there is no mention in the Vrba and Wetzler report that
   preparations were under way for the annihilation of Hungary's Jews. ...
   If Vrba and Wetzler considered it necessary to record rumors about the
   expected arrival of Greece's Jewish transports, then why wouldn't they
   have recorded a rumor — had they known it — about the expected
   transports of hundreds of thousands of Hungary's Jews? ..."

   Kárný argues that, although Vrba and Wetzler did not, in his view, have
   advance warning of the imminent Hungarian Endloesung, Vbra later — long
   after the war was over — wanted to testify about it out of a longing to
   force the world to face the magnitude of the Nazis' crimes. The
   suspicion is that Vrba's longing may have led to a degree of
   embellishment, in his subsequent accounts (although not in the
   Vbra-Wetzler report itself), regarding how much he actually knew when
   he escaped from the camp.

   In a later edition of his memoirs, Vrba responded that he is certain
   the reference to the imminent Hungarian deportations was in the
   original, Slovakian version of Vrba-Wetzler report, some of which he
   wrote by hand. He wrote that he recalled Oscar Krasniansky of the
   Slovakian Jewish Council, who translated the report into German,
   arguing that only actual deaths should be recorded, and not
   speculation, in order to lend the report maximum credibility. Vrba
   speculates this was the reason Krasniansky omitted the references to
   Hungary from the German translation the latter prepared, which was the
   main version that was copied around the world. The original version in
   Slovak did not survive.

Vrba's story allegedly suppressed

   Vrba believed that successive Israeli historians have virtually erased
   his story from the Israeli Holocaust narrative because of his
   controversial views about Rudolf Kastner and the Hungarian Judenrat,
   many of whom went on to hold prominent positions in Israel.

   Ruth Linn, dean of education at Haifa University in Israel, writes:
   "Ever since I saw the Lanzmann documentary, this question stayed in my
   mind: Am I the only crazy Israeli who fell asleep in class when we
   studied this in the Holocaust? Or maybe we never studied it ... In
   terms of literature, [Escape from Auschwitz: I cannot forgive] is in
   the class of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, first-class novelists of the
   Holocaust. But then I turned the book back and forth and I see on the
   cover, 'First published 1963.' And the year is 1994. I said to myself,
   'Where has this book been for 31 years? I never read about it in
   Israel."

   Linn alleges that a "family of Israeli historians" have misnamed,
   misreported, miscredited, and misrepresented Vrba's story. She writes
   that the story is misrepresented in Hebrew textbooks by omitting Vrba's
   and Wetzler's names or by minimizing their contribution. Standard
   histories of the Holocaust typically refer only to the escape by "two
   young Slovak Jews", "two chaps," or "two young people," and represent
   Vrba and Wetzler as emissaries of the Polish underground in Auschwitz,
   as mere messengers.

   Linn cites the non-publication in Hebrew of Vrba's memoirs for 35 years
   after their publication in English, and the failure to translate the
   Vrba-Wetzler report itself into Hebrew. Yad Vashem holds one of the
   world's most extensive collections of Holocaust documentation, and yet,
   as of 2004, there was no English or Hebrew version of the Vrba-Wetzler
   report. The Hungarian version, marked 015/9, is held in the archives in
   a file about Rudolf Kastner, and without the names of its authors. Linn
   quotes Yad Vashem's response to an inquiry in June 1997 from Yehoshua
   Ben Ami, the Hebrew translator of Vrba's memoirs, about having the
   report translated into Hebrew: "Indeed, it would have been important to
   translate the Vrba-Wetzler report, just as it is important to translate
   other significant documents ... Hopefully we will have the money one
   day."

   Uri Dromi of the Israel Democracy Institute writes that Vrba's story
   has in fact been told, citing at least four popular Israeli books on
   the Holocaust that mention Vrba and Wetzler's escape, and that
   Weztler's testimony is recounted at length in Livia Rothkirchen's
   Hurban yahadut Slovakia (The Destruction of Slovakian Jewry), published
   by Yad Vashem in 1961. Yeshayahu Jelinek, a historian of Slovakia's
   Jewish community, credits Vrba's obscurity to the general obscurity of
   Slovakian Jews: "Who ever thinks about the Jews of Slovakia? A
   medium-size ghetto in Poland was larger than our whole community.
   Everyone knows about Hannah Szenes. How many people know about Haviva
   Raik?"

   Dr. Robert Rozett, head librarian at Yad Vashem, Israel's official
   Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem, and author of the entry on
   the "Auschwitz Report" in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, has said of
   the Vrba controversy: "There are people who come into the subject from
   a certain angle and think that they've uncovered the truth. A historian
   who deals seriously with the subject understands that the truth is
   complex and multifaceted."

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