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Rudolf "Rudi" Vrba (11 September, 1924 – March 27, 2006) was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia (UBC) 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 40-page report he and fellow escapee Alfred Wetzler subsequently supplied to 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 or the Vrba-Wetzler report — is nevertheless credited with having saved 100,000 lives.
Because it was the first report to attempt to estimate the numbers being murdered in Auschwitz, it is regarded as one of the most important documents of the 20th century. Copies of it are kept in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in New York, in the Vatican archives, and at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.
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 Topolcany, Slovakia, Vrba was arrested in 1942 at the age of 18, while trying to flee to England and was sent to the Majdanek camp. Later he was transferred to Auschwitz, where from August 1942 until June 1943, he worked in what was called "Kanada," the camp's name for the work detail that sorted the possessions confiscated from arriving prisoners, and dealt with the dead bodies among them.
From the main camp, Vrba was later sent to the death camp at Birkenau, but on arrival he was chosen to work rather than be sent to the gas chambers. By April 1944, he had calculated that around 1.7 million Jews had already been killed in the death camps, and had overhead guards discussing how another "million units" were about to arrive from Hungary.
Vrba and another Slovak Jew, Alfred Wetzler, decided to escape, and hid for four days between the inner and outer perimeter fences, masking their scent from the dogs using tobacco soaked in gasoline. They knew from previous escape attempts by other prisoners that, once their absence was noticed, the guards would search the outer area of the fences for three days. The men therefore remained in hiding between the fences until the night of the third day, and then made their way to the Sola River, using a page torn from a child's atlas they had found inside Birkenau.
The Auschwitz Protocols
Once they'd crossed the Slovakian border, the men traveled straight to the Slovak Jewish Council to tell them what was happening inside the camps, dictating a detailed 40-page report on every aspect of the Auschwitz camp and its workings. The report was initially sent to Slovakia, Hungary, and Switzerland, but was not passed immediately to the Jewish population in Hungary. The circumstances surrounding this have been the topic of a bitter debate ever since (see Rudolf Kasztner). John Conway, professor of history at UBC, has written:
A month later, nearly half a million Jews were deported to their deaths. None of them knew what was in store for them. As 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. (Globe and Mail, March 31, 2006)
The report reached the British and U.S. governments by the middle of 1944, when it 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 100,000 lives.
Vrba 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.
After the war
After the war, Vrba spent time in Czechoslovakia, England and Israel. He graduated in chemistry and biochemistry from the Prague Technical University in 1951 and the Czechoslovak Academy of Science in 1956, later becoming a British citizen, and publishing his memoir, I Cannot Forgive.
He settled in Canada in 1967, then spent 1973-5 as a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, before returning to Canada to become an associate professor of pharmacology at UBC, specializing in neurology.
He was featured in the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, and in CBC's Man Alive. He appeared as a witness at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in 1964, and at the seven-week trial of Ernst Zundel in 1985.
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