Rudolf Vrba
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Rudolf 'Rudi' Vrba (or Verba) (11 September, 1924 – March 27, 2006), born Walter Rosenberg, was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia in Canada. He came to public attention in 1944 when, in April that year, he and Alfred Wetzler became the second and third of only five Jews Dromi, Uri. "["Deaf ears, blind eyes"], Haaretz, January 1, 2005. to escape successfully from the German death camp at Auschwitz in Poland and pass information to the Allies about the mass murder that was taking place there. According to Ruth Linn, 76 Jews escaped overall, though only five managed to pass information about the camp to the Allies. (Linn, Ruth. (2004) Escaping Auschwitz. A culture of forgetting, Cornell University Press, p. 15.) Hundreds of Polish prisoners escaped from Auschwitz, but it was harder for Jewish inmates, according to Polish historian Henry Swiebocki, because many had no friends or relatives in Poland that they could rely on, spoke no Polish, and had limited contact with the Polish resistance inside the camp. (Swiebocki, Henryk. "Prisoner Escapes" in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, p. 511, Gutman, Yisrael & Berenbaum, Michael (eds), Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994.) Miroslav Karny, citing Polish historian Tadeusz Iwaszko, writes that 667 prisoners are known to have tried to escape, 270 of whom were caught and killed. Very little documentation exists about the remaining 397. (Karny, Miroslav. "The Vrba and Wetzler report," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, p. 553, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994.)
The 32-page Vrba-Wetzler report, as it became known, Gutman, Yisrael. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Macmillan Publishing Company. ISBN 0028960904 ["The Vrba Wetzler Report"] The Holocaust History Project, retrieved April 2, 2006. is regarded as one of the most important documents of the 20th century, "[Vrba, Rudolf]", no byline, BC Bookworld author bank, retrieved April 01, 2006. because it was the first detailed information about the death camp to reach the Allies that they accepted as credible, A two-part report had been prepared by the Polish underground on August 10 and 12, 1943, and was sent to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in London. The report included details about the gas chambers, about "selection," and about the sterilization experiments. It stated that there were three crematoria in Birkenau able to burn 10,000 people daily, and that 30,000 people had been gassed in one day. The author wrote: "History knows no parallel of such destruction of human life." Raul Hilberg writes that the report was filed away with a note that there was no indication as to the reliability of the source. (Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews, Yale University Press, 2003, p. 1212.) and one of the first attempts to estimate the numbers being murdered. Although its release was controversially delayed Karny, Miroslav. "The Vrba and Wetzler Report," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 556. until after the mass transport of 437,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz had begun on May 15, 1944, the report is nevertheless credited with having saved lives. Linn, Ruth. (2003) "Genocide and the Politics of Remembering: The Nameless, the Celebrated and the Would-Be Holocaust Heroes," Journal of Genocide Research, 5, 4 (December 2003), pp. 565-586. Hume, Mark. "[Auschwitz escapee who told the world dies in B.C.]", The Globe and Mail, March 31, 2006. Publication of information from the report on June 15, 1944 by the BBC, The BBC first broadcast information from the report on June 18, not June 15, according to Ruth Linn in Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting, p. 28. and on June 20 by The New York Times, Although information from the report was published in June 1944, the full report was first published on November 25, 1944 by the U.S. War Refugee Board, the same day that the last 13 prisoners, all women, were killed in Auschwitz. The women were "unmittelbar getötet," leaving open whether they were gassed or otherwise disposed of. (Czech, Danuta (ed) Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1989, pp.920 and 933, using information from a series called Hefte von Auschwitz, and cited in Karny, Miroslav. "The Vrba and Wetzler report," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, p. 564, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994.) may have contributed to the decision on July 7, 1944 by Hungarian leader Admiral Miklos Horthy to halt the mass deportations, thereby saving up to 200,000 Jews, Linn, Ruth. ["Rudolf Vrba"], obituary in The Guardian, April 13, 2006. allegedly out of fear that the Allies would hold members of the Hungarian government personally responsible for the deportees' deaths. Rees, Laurence. (2005). Auschwitz: A New History. Public Affairs, pp. 242-3.
The timing of the report's distribution remains a source of controversy. It was made available to officials in Hungary and elsewhere before the deportations to Auschwitz had begun, Karny, Miroslav. "The Vrba and Wetzler report," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Museum, 1994, p. 556. but was not further disseminated until weeks later. Vrba believed that more lives could have been saved if it had been publicized as soon as it was received, because Hungarian Jews might have chosen to escape rather than board the trains to Auschwitz if they had known they were to be killed and not resettled. Some members of the Jewish-Hungarian Aid and Rescue Committee were involved at the time in a series of complex, but ultimately futile, negotiations with Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of the deportations, to exchange Jewish lives for money and goods (see Joel Brand, Rudolf Kastner, and Kastner train), and Vrba alleged that his report was withheld from the public in order not to jeopardize those negotiations. Historians disagree as to whether there is any truth in Vrba's allegations, whether the Hungarian-Jewish community was already aware of the nature of Auschwitz before the report was prepared, and whether its earlier distribution would have made any difference.
On the news of his death from cancer in March 2006, Ruth Linn, dean of education at Haifa University and author of a book about Vrba, said: "We have lost a rare history maker that the history tellers are yet to find the right words to describe."
Because he was a Jew, he was excluded at the age of 15 from the Gymnasium (high school) of Bratislava under the so-called "Slovak State's" version of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws, ["Rudolf Vrba: Curriculum Vitae]", UBC Pharmacology & Therapeutics. and went on to work as a labourer in Trnava.
In March 1942, at the age of 17, Vrba decided to leave Slovakia and flee to England. He removed the yellow Star of David that Jews were forced to wear at the time, and took a taxi from Topoľčany to Hungary using $20 dollars his mother had given him, all she could afford. 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. Vrba, Rudolf. I Escaped from Auschwitz, Barricade Books, 2002, p. 207. He decided to return to Slovakia, but was caught by Hungarian border guards while crossing the Hungary-Slovakia border. They turned him over to the Slovakian authorities, who in turn sent him to the Novaky transition camp in Slovakia. He escaped from Novaky along with prisoner Josef Knapp, but was caught several days later by Slovakian police and sent back to the camp, where he was savagely beaten by the guards as retribution for his escape.
On June 14, 1942, Vrba was deported to the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, and on June 30, Karny, Miroslav. "The Vrba and Wetzler report," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, p. 553, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994. he was transferred again, this time to Auschwitz I, Lungen, Paul. ["Auschwitz escapee hoped to warn Hungarian Jews"], Canadian Jewish News, January 27, 2005. the main camp of the Auschwitz complex and the administrative center for the satellite camps.
From August 1942, he worked there in what was called "Canada," the camp's name for the work detail that sorted the possessions confiscated from arriving prisoners, and disposed of the dead bodies among them. Six months after arriving at Auschwitz I, According to Linn, and Vrba's memoirs. In his testimony at the 1985 Ernst Zundel trial Vrba gave the exact date as January 15, 1943. However, Lungen gives June 1943 as the transfer date, which would indicate 12 months later. he was sent to the Auschwitz II death camp at Birkenau, some four kilometers away. On arrival, he 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. The number 44070 was tattooed on his arm, and he was given the job of registrar in the quarantine section of the camp. 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.
Vrba was later described by those who knew him as possessing a "photographic memory," and as he roamed through the main camp and Birkenau, he attempted to commit to memory the numbers of Jews arriving and the place of origin of each transport. By April 1944, his own calculation was that 1,750,000 Jews had already been killed in the camps, a figure significantly higher than those now accepted by mainstream historians.
While sorting through the prisoners' luggage, he noticed that many of them had packed as though for the long term. He saw clothes for different seasons, utensils for a variety of uses, children's books, and notebooks, which convinced him that the Jews were not aware of what awaited them, but believed the Nazis' storis about resettlement. This strengthened his conviction that he had to get news to the Hungarian Jewish community that they were being transported there to be killed. He wrote in his memoirs:
He 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, Jews from the Netherlands packed cheeses, the French Jews sardines, Jews from Greece would bring halva and olives, and from Hungary, they brought salami. Linn, Ruth. ["Rudolf Vrba"], obituary in The Guardian, April 13, 2006. though there is no mention of the deportation of Hungarian Jews in the report he eventually helped produce, Gilbert, Martin. "What Was Known and When," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 551. and Czech historian Miroslav Kárný disputes that Vrba heard them say this at all. "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? ... Though they did not know about about the imminent Hungarian Endloesung, they longed to testify 'in order that the astounding Nazi crimes might not keep secret,' to warn the world, and to appeal for the salvation of hundreds of thousands people who were in prisons in Auschwitz and other death camps or would soon arrive at the camps ..." (Karny, Miroslav. "The Vrba and Wetzler report," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 559.) At the time a new area of the camp called "Mexico" was being constructed to accommodate the new inmates.
The men knew from previous escape attempts by other prisoners that, once their absence was noticed during the evening appel, or roll call, the guards would continue to search for them for three days. They therefore remained in hiding until the fourth night, April 10, then made their way south, walking parallel to the Soła river, heading for the Polish border with Slovakia 80 miles away, guiding themselves using a page torn from a child's atlas Vrba had found while working in "Canada."
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, who in turn referred them to a contact of his, Adre Steiner of the underground Working Group, Fatran, Gila; The "Working Group", Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 8:2 (1994), pp. 164-201. a small group of activists working under the Slovak Judenrat, or Jewish Council, whom they met in the town of Žilina, where they arrived eighteen days after their escape. Karny, Miroslav. "The Vrba and Wetzler report," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994, p. 554.
Vrba and Wetzler were interviewed separately, each describing the location and layout of Auschwitz, and giving a detailed account of how the Jews had their property stolen, then were murdered. Vrba also reported that prisoners were being used as slave labor for major German companies, and he provided the Judenrat with times and dates of Slovak and Czech transports, which the officials were able to check against their own records.
The report was written and re-written over a period of several days. Wetzler wrote the first part, Vrba the third, and the two wrote the second part together. They then spent two or three days working on the report together, and ended up re-writing it six times. This description of how the report was written was recorded in the first post-war edition, issued in 1946, Oswiecim, hrobka styroch milionov l'udi, Bratislva, p. 74. Wetzler also confirmed it in a letter to Miroslav Karny, dated April 14, 1982. Cited in Karny, Miroslav. "The Vrba and Wetzler report," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 564, footnote 5. As they were writing it, Dr. Oscar Krasnansky of the Judenrat, with the assistance of Gisela Steiner, translated it from Slovak to German, producing a 32-page report, which he had completed by April 27, 1944. The original Slovak version of the report was not preserved, according to Czech historian Miroslav Karny. The German version, which did survive, contained a precise description of the geography of the camps, its construction, the organization of the management and security, how the prisoners were numbered and categorized, their diet, how they lived, the selections, gassings, shootings, injections, and how the camp conditions themselves were causing deaths. Karny, Miroslav. "The Vrba and Wetzler report," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Museum, 1994, p. 554. Karny 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.
It appears that Kastner chose not to publicize the contents of the report, 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, trucks, and other goods. (See the controversy section below.)
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. Bauer, Yehuda. Jews for Sale? Nazi–Jewish Negotiations 1933–1945. Yale University Press, 1994, p. 157. Bauer writes that Soos, in turn, gave it to Joszef Elias, head of the Joe Pasztor Misszio, the Good Shepherd Mission, a Protestant missionary organization. Elias's secretary, Maria Szekely, translated the report into Hungarian and prepared six copies. These went to Soos; the daughter-in-law of Admiral Miklos Horthy, the Hungarian head of state; Cardinal Justinian Seredi; Bishop Laszlo Ravasz of the Calvinist Church; Bishop Sandor Raffay of the Lutheran Church; and Otto Komoly, the de jure head of Kastner's Aid and Rescue Committee. Erno Peto of the Judenrat said he gave other copies to Horthy's son; to Angelo Rotta, the papal nuntius; and to Lajos Remenyi-Schneller, the Hungarian finance minister. All had received the report, according to Bauer, by the time the mass deportations began on May 14. Szenes, Sandor. Befejezetlen mult: Keresztenyek es zsidok, sorsak (Unfinished past: Christians and Jews, destinies), Budapest 1986, cited in Bauer, Yehuda. Jews for Sale? Nazi–Jewish Negotiations 1933–1945. Yale University Press, 1994, pp. 157 and 279.
A copy was sent to the Vatican on May 22, according to Israeli historian Yisrael Gutman, although there is disagreement among the sources as to when and by which route the Vatican first received the information. Miroslav Karny writes that the Bratislava Working Group, led by Rabbi Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl and Gisi Fleishmann provided one copy of the report to Giuseppe Burzio, the Vatican chargé d'affaires in Bratislava, and that Burzio sent it to the Vatican on May 22. However, according to Karny, the report did not arrive at the Vatican until five months later, in the second half of October, Karny, Miroslav. "The Vrba and Wetzler report," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1994); this edition 1998, p. 556. as he says is evident from the official Vatican edition of the document. Karny, Miroslav. "The Vrba and Wetzler report," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1994); this edition 1998, p. 556 and footnote 13, p. 565, citing Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, vol. 10 (Vatican City 1980), document 204, p. 281.
Ruth Linn writes that Dr. Krasnansky arranged for Vrba and Czesław Mordowicz, a Jewish prisoner who escaped from Auschwitz on June 6, to meet Vatican legate Monsignor Mario Martilotti secretly on June 20 at a remote Slovakian monastery; the Svaty Jur monastery, according to Karny. Vrba and Wetzler believed they had in fact met Monsignor Burzio, This was Angelo Burzio, according to Linn, but Guiseppe Burzio, according to Karny. but Burzio had arranged for Martiolotti, who was his assistant, to attend the meeting. According to Linn, Martilotti said he would take the report back to Switzerland the next day, then would forward it to the Vatican, which he did, writes Linn. Linn, Ruth. (2004) Escaping Auschwitz. A culture of forgetting, Cornell University Press, p. 28, citing Conway, John. "First report about Auschwitz," p. 145 in Conway 1979, 1984, 1986. She writes that the Pope issued an unprecedented appeal on June 25 in an open telegram to the Hungarian regent Miklos Horthy, calling on him to "spare so many unfortunate people further sufferings," but without mentioning Jews. Linn, Ruth. (2004) Escaping Auschwitz. A culture of forgetting, Cornell University Press, p. 28. Karny, however, writes that there is no evidence that Martilotti's report of the meeting ever reached the Vatican, according to the Vatican's own papers on the report. Vatican State Secretary Domenico Tardini first asked one of the men working in his office to make a copy of the report on October 22, according to Karny. Karny writes that Vatican editors have concluded from this that the report did not arrive until on or just before this date. (Karny, Miroslav. "The Vrba and Wetzler report," in Berenbaum, Michael & Gutman, Yisrael (eds). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1994); this edition 1998, p. 556.)
Historian Raul Hilberg writes that the report was also brought to Switzerland, where it was passed to Jaromir Kopecki, representative of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, on or around June 10. Kopecki passed it to Roswell McCelland, representative of the War Refugee Board, who sent it to the Board's executive director on June 16. Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews, Yale University Press, 2003, p. 1215.
However, on June 6, Arnost Rosin and Czesław Mordowicz, two prisoners who escaped from Auschwitz on May 27 — one month after Vrba and Wetzler — arrived in Slovakia and reported that, between May 15 and 27, 100,000 Hungarian Jews had arrived at the camp, most of them killed on arrival, allegedly with no forewarning 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 UBC and a friend of Vrba, has written that, "[a]s a result, Vrba and Wetzler concluded that their information had been suppressed. Vrba, for one, remains convinced that if the intended victims had been warned, they would have resisted or hid or fled." (The information in the Vrba-Wetzler Report was combined with more details supplied by Rosin and Mordowicz, and the two reports later became known jointly as the Auschwitz Protocols. )
The Vrba-Wetzler Report is known to have reached the British and U.S. governments by mid-June. 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 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. The mass deportations stopped on July 9.
Although the mass deportations under the Horthy regime stopped on July 7, 1944, after 437,000 had been sent to Auschwitz to their deaths, Jews continued to be deported 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 200 kilometers from Budapest to Vienna, Austria, marching without food in the rain and snow. Eventually, protests from neutral countries and reportedly even from other SS officers forced Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, to instruct Eichmann to halt the marches. Rees, Laurence. Auschwitz: A New History. Public Affairs, 2005, p. 257-8.
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 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.
He 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," Vrba, Rudolf. ["Full curriculum vitae"], University of British Columbia. followed by post-doctoral research at the Czechoslovak Academy of Science, where, in 1956, he received his C. Sc. He immigrated to Israel in 1958, and worked there for two years at the Weizmann Institute of Science,Barkat, Amiran. "[Death camp escapee Vrba dies at 82]", Haaretz, April 2, 2006. then moved to England in 1960, where for two years he worked in the Neuropsychiatric Research Unit in Carshalton, Surrey, and spent seven years on the British Medical Research Council. Sanderson, David & Smith, Lewis. "[Witness to Auschwitz horror dies at 82]", The Times, April 01, 2006. In 1963 he published his memoir, Escape from Auschwitz: I cannot forgive, which was also published in German (1964), French (1988), Dutch (1996), Czech (1998), and Hebrew (1998). He became a British citizen in 1966.
Vrba settled in Canada in 1967, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1972, then spent 1973 to 1975 as a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, before returning to Canada to become an associate professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia, 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. In 1998, at the instigation of Israeli academic 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." Conway, John. ["Escaping Auschwitz: Sixty years later"], Vierteljahreshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 53, no. 3, 2005, pp. 461-472.
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." [Rudolf Vrba], One World 2006 website, retrieved April 2, 2006. 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).
His story was told in Genocide, part of the BBC'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. He also appeared as a witness at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in 1964, and at the seven-week trial of Ernst Zundel in 1985.
Vrba died in 2006; he was survived by his wife Robin, daughter Zuza, and two grandchildren. Medoff, Rafael. ["In memoriam: the man who exposed Auschwitz"] (pdf), The Jewish Tribune, April 20, 2006, p. 4.
The issue of why Rudolf Kastner, the de facto head of the Aid and Rescue Committee, failed to distribute the report widely remains controversial and to some extent a matter of conjecture. Vrba condemned the response of Kastner, as well as that of the Hungarian and Slovakian Judenräte (Jewish councils), believing that many of the 437,000 Hungarian Jews who ended up being 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. Linn argues "A small calculation suggests that, if only one percent of the 437,000 Hungarian Jewish victims had been persuaded of the truth of the report and had chosen not to board the boxcar trains to Auschwitz, almost three times 1,684 Jews [the number on the Kastner train] could probably have been saved". (Linn, Ruth. Escaping Auschwitz. A culture of forgetting, Cornell University Press, 2004, p. 47)
At the time the report was received, 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 a number of them — as many as one million, who were supposedly to be allowed to settle anywhere but Palestine — in exchange for trucks and other goods from the Western Allies. [April 25: "Blood for Trucks" Negotiations Start], Yad VaShem website. Accessed April 5, 2005. The "one million Jews", who would have to leave Hungary and emigrate anywhere but Palestine, were being offered for 25,000 trucks supplied by the Western Allies, which would be used for German civilian purposes, or on the Eastern Front.
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 received a copy of the Vrba-Wetzler Report. Bauer, Yehuda. Jews for Sale? Nazi–Jewish Negotiations 1933–1945. Yale University Press, 1994, p. 156. Vrba alleges 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, consisting of, according to historian John Conway of UBC, "themselves, their relatives, a coterie of Zionists, some distinguished Jewish intellectuals, and a number of wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs." (See Kastner train.) Historian Yehuda Bauer argues against this interpretation of Kastner's motivation, writing that Kaster put his own family on the train only in order to prove to the other passengers that it was safe, Bauer, Yehuda. Jews for Sale? Nazi–Jewish Negotiations 1933–1945. Yale University Press, 1994, p. 198. but Vrba, in response, alleged that Bauer is one of the Israeli historians who have downplayed his role 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 about Kastner were heard by the Supreme Court of Israel in 1957, after Malchiel Gruenwald, an amateur writer and stamp collector, accused Kastner in a self-published pamphlet of being a collaborator. Because Kastner was by then a government minister, the Israeli government sued the writer for libel, and although Kastner was eventually exonerated, he was shot on March 3, 1957 by an assassin as a result of the controversy, and died of his wounds nine days later. Hecht, Ben. Perfidy. Milah Press, first published 1961; this edition 1999. ISBN 0964688638
Ruth Linn, dean of education at Haifa University in Israel, alleges that standard histories of the Holocaust do not mention Vrba or Wexler by name, referring instead to "two young Slovak Jews", "two chaps," or "two young people," and that a translator who completed a Hebrew version of Vrba's biography Escape from Auschwitz: I cannot forgive was unable to find a commercial publisher.
British historian Martin Gilbert disagrees with Vrba's criticism of Kastner, arguing 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" — but see "The greatest 'idealist' Eichmann ever encountered among the Jews was Dr. Rudolf Kastner, with whom he negotiated during the Jewish deportations from Hungary and with whom he came to an agreement that he, Eichmann, would permit the 'illegal' departure of a few thousand Jews to Palestine (the trains were in fact guarded by German police) in exchange for 'quiet and order' in the camps from which hundreds of thousands were shipped to Auschwitz. The few thousand saved by the agreement, prominent Jews and members of the Zionist youth organizations, were, in Eichmann's words, 'the best biological material.' Dr. Kastner, as Eichmann understood it, had sacrificed his fellow-Jews to his 'idea,' and this was as it should be." (Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Penguin Classics, Jan 1, 1994, p. 42.)
Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has argued against Vrba's contention that more lives would have been saved if the report had been released earlier, writing that it was already too late for anything to alter the Nazis' deportation plans. Bauer, Yehuda. "Anmerkungen zum 'Auschwitz-Bericht' von Rudolf Vrba," Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 45 1997, pp. 297-307. 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, Yehuda. Jews for Sale? Nazi–Jewish Negotiations 1933–1945. Yale University Press, 1994, p. 72.
Others argue that Vrba's story has not been suppressed. Uri Dromi of the Israel Democracy Institute writes that at least four popular Israeli books on the Holocaust 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?"
In Yehuda Bauer's view, "[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. The fury was directed at those who tried to save lives, in effect, accusing them of murder. It is almost pointless to try to quarrel with this anger, since facts and logical arguments cannot assuage it."
Dr. Robert Rozett, head librarian at Yad Vashem, and author of the entry on the Auschwitz Report in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, states regarding the 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."
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.Early life and arrest
Vrba was born Walter Rosenberg in Topoľčany, Slovakia, to Elias and Helena (neé Grunfeldova) Rosenberg, who owned a steam saw-mill in Jaklovce near Margecany.Auschwitz
I was determined to get out, but no longer because I wanted freedom for myself. I wanted to warn those yet to come what lay ahead because I knew they would rise and fight, as the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto had fought. Once they knew the truth, they would refuse to walk meekly to the slaughterhouses. ... 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. Vrba, Rudolf. ["The one that got away" (Extract from the book "I Escaped From Auschwitz")], The Guardian, April 14, 2006.
Escape
Vrba and a fellow Slovak Jew, Alfred Wetzler, who came from Vrba's home town, trusted each other implicitly and decided to try to escape together. On Friday, April 7, 1944, on the eve of Passover, with the help of the camp underground, 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. ["April 7"], Yad Vashem. At 20:33 that evening, the commander of Auschwitz II, SS-Sturmbanführer Hartjenstein, was informed by teleprinter that two Jews had escaped. The Vrba-Wetzler Report
How and when the report was distributed
According to Karny, the report was written and translated by April 28, 1944 at the latest. Dr. Krasnansky had heard that Rudolf Kastner, a Jewish lawyer and journalist who acted as the head of the Zionist Va'adat Ezrah Vehatzalah — Aid and Rescue Committee — in Budapest, was
due to visit Bratislava, Linn, Ruth. (2004) Escaping Auschwitz. A culture of forgetting, Cornell University Press, p. 27. as he did regularly. Krasnansky quickly translated the report into Hungarian for him, and according to one of Krasnansky'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. Resistance activities and after the war
Controversy
Vrba's allegations
Vrba's story allegedly suppressed
There are further allegations that successive Israeli historians have virtually erased Vrba's story from the Israeli Holocaust narrative Johnson, Pat. ["Israeli narrative omits Vrba"], Jewish Independent, April 21, 2006. because of his controversial views about Kastner and the Hungarian Judenrat, many of whom went on to hold prominent positions in Israel.
It was eventually published in Hebrew in 1998, 35 years after its publication in English, and then only at the instigation of Linn herself. It was also Linn who asked Haifa University to award Vrba an honorary doctorate. Although a version of the Vrba-Wetzler report is displayed at the Yad Vashem memorial museum in Jerusalem, it is available only in Hungarian and German, minus the names of its authors. Countering 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
Alfréd Wetzler
Sources
Yehuda Bauer
John Conway
Ben Hecht
Raul Hilberg
Miroslav Karny
Ruth Linn
See also
Notes
References
Further reading
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