Rudolf Vrba

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File:RudolfVrba1997.jpg
Dr. Rudolf Vrba in 1997.

Rudolf 'Rudi' Vrba, born Walter Rosenberg (September 11, 1924 – March 27, 2006), was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of Britishi am a dik ed Columbia in Canada. In April 1944, Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler became the second and third of only five Jews[1] to escape successfully from the German death camp at Auschwitz and pass information to the Allies about the mass murder that was taking place there.[2] The 32 pages of information that the men dictated to horrified Jewish officials in Slovakia became known as the Vrba-Wetzler report.[3][4] It is regarded as one of the most important documents of the twentieth century,[5] because it was the first detailed information about the death camp to reach the Allies that they accepted as credible.[6]

Although the report's release to the public was controversially delayed[7] 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.[8][9] Publication of information from the report on June 15, 1944 by the British Broadcasting Corporation,[10] and on June 20 by The New York Times,[11] may have contributed to the decision on July 7, 1944 by Hungarian leader Admiral Miklós Horthy to halt the mass deportations, thereby saving up to 200,000 Jews.[12]

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,[13] 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."[14] Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has called Vrba "one of the Heroes of the Holocaust,"[15] but also a "bitter Auschwitz survivor,"[16] 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."[17]

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.

Vrba was born Walter Rosenberg in Topoľčany, Slovakia, to Elias and Helena (neé 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,[18] 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.[19]

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.[19] 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.[20]

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 Novaky transition camp in Slovakia.[20] He escaped from Novaky 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.[19] He was sent back to the camp, where he was savagely beaten by the guards in retribution for his escape.[20]

On June 14, 1942, Vrba was deported to the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland,[12] where he briefly found one of his brothers — Vrba saw him just once. Vrba volunteered for "farm work",[19] and on June 30,<ref name=Karny553>Karny, Miroslav. "The Vrba and Wetzler report," in [[Michael Berenbaum|Berenbau

  1. ^ Dromi, Uri. ""Deaf ears, blind eyes", Haaretz, January 1 2005.
  2. ^ 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.)
  3. ^ Gutman, Yisrael. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Macmillan Publishing Company. ISBN 0-02-896090-4
  4. ^ "The Vrba Wetzler Report" The Holocaust History Project, retrieved April 2 2006.
  5. ^ "Vrba, Rudolf", no byline, BC Bookworld author bank, retrieved April 01, 2006.
  6. ^ A two-part report had been prepared by the Polish underground on August 10 and 12, 1943, based on information from Witold Pilecki, 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.)
  7. ^ 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.
  8. ^ 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.
  9. ^ Hume, Mark. "Auschwitz escapee who told the world dies in B.C.", The Globe and Mail, March 31 2006.
  10. ^ 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.
  11. ^ 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.)
  12. ^ a b Linn, Ruth. "Rudolf Vrba", obituary in The Guardian, April 13 2006.
  13. ^ 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.
  14. ^ Linn, Ruth. (2004) Escaping Auschwitz. A culture of forgetting, Cornell University Press, p. 108.
  15. ^ Yehuda Bauer in a letter to Mr. Ben Ami, the Hebrew translator of Vrba's memoir, cited in Linn, Ruth. (2004) Escaping Auschwitz. A culture of forgetting, Cornell University Press, p. 111.
  16. ^ Bauer, Yehuda. Rethinking the Holocaust. Yale University Press; New Ed edition, 2002, p. 230.
  17. ^ Conway, John. "Escaping Auschwitz: Sixty years later", Vierteljahreshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 53, no. 3, 2005, pp. 461-472.
  18. ^ "Rudolf Vrba: Curriculum Vitae", UBC Pharmacology & Therapeutics.
  19. ^ a b c d Rudolf Vrba, The Daily Telegraph, April 12, 2006.
  20. ^ a b c Vrba, Rudolf. I Escaped from Auschwitz, Barricade Books, 2002, p. 207.
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