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Rudolf Vrba (11 September, 1924 – March 27, 2006) was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia in Canada. He came to public attention for being one of only five Jews known to have escaped from the death camp at Auschwitz, and for the report he and fellow escapee Alfred Wetzler subsequently gave the Allies of what was happening in the camp, the first detailed report to reach the West. Although its release to the Hungarian leadership was delayed until after the mass transport of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz had begun, the report — which became known as the Auschwitz Protocols — is nevertheless credited with having saved 100,000 lives.
On the news of Vrba's death from cancer at the age of 82, Ruth Linn, dean of education at Haifa University and author of Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting, a book about Vrba's experiences, called him an "exemplary courageous hero and warrior," and said: "We have lost a rare history maker that the history tellers are yet to find the right words to describe" (The Globe and Mail, March 31, 2006).
Arrest and escape
Born Walter Rosenberg in Slovakia, Vrba was arrested in 1942 while he was trying to flee to England and was sent to the Majdanek camp. Later he was transferred to Auschwitz, where he worked sorting the possessions confiscated from arriving prisoners. In April 1944, Vrba and another Slovak Jew, Alfred Wetzler, hid for four days between the inner and outer perimeter fences, then, when the guards concluded that they were long gone, they escaped. They made their way to Slovakia, where they contacted the remaining Jewish leaders and dictated a detailed 40-page report on every aspect of the Auschwitz camp and its workings. The report reached the British and US governments by the middle of 1944 and received wide publicity. At the beginning of July, the international outcry caused by the report apparently played a major part in the decision of the Hungarian leader Admiral Miklos Horthy to halt the deportation of the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Thus, Vrba and Wetzler are widely given credit for saving about 100,000 lives.
After the war, Vrba spent time in Czechoslovakia, England and Israel before settling in Canada as a Professor of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia.
Controversy
The Vrba-Wetzler report was in the hands of the Hungarian Jewish leadership in late April or early May 1944, but few of those 437,000 Jews sent from Hungary to Auschwitz in the following month knew what was in store for them; nor, apparently, did the Hungarian government. The circumstances surrounding this have been the topic of a bitter debate ever since (see Rudolf Kasztner).
Vrba was one of those who accused the Hungarian Jewish leadership — and even the Slovak Jewish leadership, which are rarely so accused — of squandering the opportunity given by the report to save a very large number of lives. His biographer Linn believes that Vrba's stance on this issue has led to the memory of his heroism being actively suppressed.
Sources
- Bauer, Yehuda. Jews for Sale? Nazi–Jewish Negotiations 1933–1945 (Yale University Press, 1994).
- Hume, Mark. "Auschwitz escapee who told the world dies in B.C.", The Globe and Mail, March 31, 2006
- Linn, Ruth. Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting. Ithaca, New York:Cornell University Press, 2004, 176 pages.
- Linn, Ruth, Genocide and the politics of remembering: the nameless, the celebrated, and the would-be Holocaust heroes, Journal of Genocide Research (2003), 565–586.
- Proudfoot, Shannon (31 March 2006). Auschwitz escapee alerted world to horrors of the Holocaust. Ottawa Citizen