- Person
- Rudolf Vrba
- Lived
- 1924–2006
- Field
- Holocaust witness
- From
- Slovak-Canadian
The story
Rudolf Vrba was born Walter Rosenberg on 11 September 1924 in Topoľčany, Czechoslovakia. When Slovakia's wartime regime introduced its anti-Jewish laws in 1941, he was expelled from high school at fifteen and kept studying chemistry, English and Russian at home. Caught in 1942 while trying to flee deportation, he was sent to Majdanek in June that year and then to Auschwitz, where he was tattooed with the number 44070.
Over nearly two years in the camp he gathered detailed knowledge of how it worked. In the Kanada commando he sorted the belongings of new arrivals at the ramp, and from June 1943 he was a registrar in the Birkenau quarantine section, a post the camp underground helped arrange because it gave access to information. In January 1944 he learned that a new railway line was being built straight to the crematoria to receive a million Hungarian Jews.
On 7 April 1944, three weeks after German forces occupied Hungary, he and fellow prisoner Alfréd Wetzler hid in a woodpile between the camp's fences. After nearly eighty hours they crawled out and walked about 130 kilometres to Slovakia, helped along the way by Polish villagers. Reaching Žilina, they dictated a detailed account to the Slovak Jewish Council, including the fact that new arrivals were being gassed, not "resettled" as the Germans claimed. It became known as the Vrba–Wetzler report.
Mass deportations from Hungary began on 15 May. In June the report reached George Mantello in Geneva, who distributed copies, and dispatches based on it sent to London on 24 June were followed by at least 383 articles about Auschwitz in 18 days. World leaders appealed to the Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy, and on 6 July he ordered the deportations to stop. By then more than 434,000 Jews had been deported, but about 200,000 in Budapest were saved. When the US War Refugee Board published the report in November 1944, the New York Herald Tribune called it the most shocking document ever issued by a US government agency.
After the war Vrba earned degrees in chemistry in Prague and became a biochemist in England and Canada, publishing more than 50 papers on brain chemistry, diabetes and cancer at the University of British Columbia. He also kept testifying, in an affidavit for the Eichmann trial, in his memoir I Cannot Forgive and in Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah. The University of Haifa gave him an honorary doctorate in 1998, and he died in Vancouver in 2006.
Why it matters
Vrba's escape and testimony turned hidden mass murder into public knowledge, and international pressure built on that truth helped save a great many lives.
About Rudolf Vrba
Slovak Jew who escaped Auschwitz in April 1944 and co-wrote the Vrba–Wetzler report, the first detailed eyewitness account of the camp’s gas chambers to reach the free world.
Sources
- Rudolf Vrba Wikipedia
- Vrba, Rudolf 1924-2006 Encyclopedia.com
- Vrba–Wetzler report Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.