A boy from Topoľčany
Rudolf Vrba was born Walter Rosenberg on 11 September 1924 in Topoľčany, in what was then Czechoslovakia. He was one of four children of Elias Rosenberg and Helena Gruenfeldová; the family owned a steam sawmill and later lived in Trnava. His maternal grandfather was an Orthodox Jew from Nitra. The name by which the world would come to know him, Rudolf Vrba, was not his at all until 1944, when it was printed on the false papers he received after escaping from Auschwitz.
He was a clever, stubborn, curious boy. In 1939 Slovakia became a client state of Nazi Germany, and in September 1941 its government passed a “Jewish Codex” modelled on the Nuremberg Laws. At fifteen Walter was expelled from his gymnasium in Bratislava. He found work as a labourer and kept studying on his own, chemistry, English, Russian, the habit of self-education that would later carry him to a doctorate. Around this time he met a girl from Trnava, Gerta Sidonová, who had also been thrown out of school; she would later become his first wife.
Deported at seventeen
In February 1942 the Slovak government announced that Jews would be “resettled” in German-occupied Poland. In fact Slovakia paid Germany 500 Reichsmarks for every Jew it deported; of the roughly 58,000 sent away between March and October 1942, only a few hundred survived. Walter refused, in his own words, to be “deported like a calf in a wagon.” Aged seventeen, with a map, a box of matches and a little money from his mother, he set out to join the Czechoslovak army in exile in England. He reached Budapest, turned back, and was arrested at the Hungarian border.
He was held at the Nováky transit camp, escaped briefly, was caught, and on 15 June 1942 was deported to the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin. There he glimpsed his older brother Sammy for the last time. Two weeks later he volunteered for what was described as farm work elsewhere, and at the end of June 1942 was taken instead, on a journey of more than two days, to Auschwitz, where he was tattooed with the number 44070.
Witness inside the machine
Vrba spent almost two years in Auschwitz, and the jobs he was given placed him where he could see the camp’s workings with terrible clarity. From August 1942 he worked in the so-called “Kanada” commando on the Judenrampe, the platform where trains of deportees arrived. Prisoners like him cleared the dead from the wagons and sorted the belongings of the new arrivals, while most of the people who had brought those belongings were taken directly to the gas chambers. He survived typhus with the help of the camp’s clandestine resistance, which then placed him in useful positions.
In 1943 he became a registrar (Blockschreiber) in the quarantine section of Birkenau, a post that gave him a room of his own, contact with new arrivals and a view of the trucks driving to the crematoria. He memorised transport after transport, their origins, sizes and fates. In January 1944 he learned that a new railway spur was being built straight to the crematoria, and he heard SS men joking that “Hungarian salami” would soon be arriving. Hungary’s Jews, the last large Jewish community in Nazi-dominated Europe still largely intact, were next. Vrba resolved that someone had to warn them and the world.
Four days in the woodpile
With fellow Slovak prisoner Alfréd Wetzler, and with help from the camp underground, Vrba planned his escape around a simple insight: when a prisoner went missing, the SS searched for three days and nights, then stood the outer guard down. On the afternoon of Friday 7 April 1944, the eve of Passover, the two men climbed into a hollow prepared inside a stack of timber between Birkenau’s inner and outer fences. Polish prisoners slid the planks back into place. To defeat the search dogs they sprinkled the area with Russian tobacco soaked in petrol, a trick suggested by a Soviet prisoner of war.
They lay there for nearly eighty hours while the hunt went on around them. On the night of 10 April they crawled out and began walking south toward Slovakia, using a map torn from a children’s atlas. They moved at night, were fed by sympathetic Polish villagers, were shot at by German police, and crossed the border near Skalité on 21 April. Vrba’s feet were so swollen that he had cut off his boots and was wearing carpet slippers. On 24 April they reached Žilina, where they met members of the Slovak Jewish Council.
The Vrba–Wetzler report
Over the following days the two men dictated and wrote out a detailed account of Auschwitz: the layout of the camps, the selection on the ramp, the prisoner-numbering system, the gas chambers and crematoria, and estimates of the numbers murdered transport by transport. The text, drafted in Slovak and translated into German, was completed by 27 April 1944. Historians have praised its precision; it was the product of many prisoners’ knowledge, including Sonderkommando members who worked in the crematoria, carried out in the memories of two men. When Vrba later testified, he said he had used “personal memotechnical methods” to retain the data.
The report travelled slowly at first. Copies reached Jewish leaders in Hungary by early May, but mass deportations from the Hungarian countryside began on 15 May, at a rate of about 12,000 people a day, and the warning was not widely spread. In June, copies reached Switzerland, where the diplomat George Mantello helped publicise them; hundreds of articles followed in the Swiss press, and the material reached the BBC, The New York Times and governments in Washington, London and the Vatican. Pope Pius XII, President Roosevelt, the King of Sweden and others appealed to Hungary’s regent, Miklós Horthy. On 6 July 1944 Horthy halted the deportations. By then more than 434,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported, most of them to their deaths, but the Jews of Budapest, around 200,000 people, were spared deportation to Auschwitz.
Weighing the impact
How much credit the report deserves for Horthy’s decision is still debated. Historians point to several pressures operating at once, including the Allied advance after D-Day, an American and British bombing raid on Budapest on 2 July, and Horthy’s fear of being held responsible. Estimates of the lives saved therefore vary: Vrba’s supporters often cite more than 200,000, while his New York Times obituary put the figure, by most estimates, at a minimum of 100,000. What is not disputed is that the report gave the outside world detailed, credible, first-hand evidence that Auschwitz was an extermination centre. When the U.S. War Refugee Board finally published it in November 1944, together with two other escapee reports as the “Auschwitz Protocols” the New York Herald Tribune called it “the most shocking document ever issued by a United States government agency.”
Vrba himself was haunted by the delay. Until the end of his life he argued that if Hungarian Jewish leaders had spread the warning immediately, many deportees might have refused to board the trains or fled. He blamed in particular Rudolf Kastner of the Budapest rescue committee, who was negotiating with Adolf Eichmann at the time. These accusations remain contested, and other survivors disagreed with him; the Hungarian-born scientist George Klein, who read the report as a teenager in Budapest and ran rather than board a train, later told Vrba that when he tried to warn people, almost nobody believed him.
A second life in science
After the escape Vrba lived underground in Slovakia and, in September 1944, joined the partisans of the Slovak National Uprising, for which he was decorated. After the war he reunited with Gerta Sidonová; they married in Prague in 1947 and had two daughters, though the marriage later ended. He earned a chemistry degree from the Czech Technical University in 1949 and a doctorate in 1951, with a thesis on the metabolism of butyric acid, and worked at Charles University’s medical school.
In 1958 he defected to Israel and worked for two years at the Weizmann Institute, then moved to England, where he spent most of the 1960s in neurochemical research for the Medical Research Council. In 1967 he moved to Canada and, after a period as a research fellow at Harvard, settled in Vancouver as an associate professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia, where he worked until the early 1990s and published more than fifty papers on brain chemistry, diabetes and cancer. He married his second wife, Robin, in 1975. His elder daughter, Helena, a doctor, died in 1982 while doing malaria research in Papua New Guinea.
Bearing witness
Vrba never stopped testifying. In 1961 he submitted an affidavit for the Eichmann trial. At the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials he identified the SS officer Robert Mulka as having been present on the ramp, and the court found him an excellent and intelligent witness. His memoir, written with the journalist Alan Bestic, was published in 1963 as I Cannot Forgive and later reissued as I Escaped from Auschwitz. In 1978 he gave a long interview to Claude Lanzmann for the documentary Shoah, and in 1985, in Toronto, he faced hostile cross-examination by the lawyer for the Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, who tried to pick apart every detail of his account.
His relationship with Jewish institutions was often prickly. His criticism of the wartime Jewish councils, and of men who later held office in Israel, made him an uncomfortable figure, and for decades his name was largely absent from mainstream histories of the Holocaust. The University of Haifa awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1998, and Slovakia honoured him posthumously with the Order of the White Double Cross in 2007.
Death and legacy
Rudolf Vrba died of cancer in Vancouver on 27 March 2006, aged 81. His papers were given to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library. In the years since, his story has moved from the margins toward the centre of Holocaust memory: Jonathan Freedland’s 2022 biography The Escape Artist became an international bestseller, and every year walkers retrace the roughly 130-kilometre route he and Wetzler took from Birkenau to Žilina.
His life poses a question that still troubles historians: what does it take for the truth to be believed? Vrba believed the Nazis’ greatest weapon was secrecy, and he risked everything to break it. That a teenager with no notes, no camera and no allies outside the wire could carry the architecture of genocide out of Auschwitz in his memory, and force the world to look at it, remains one of the most remarkable acts of resistance of the Second World War.
Sources & further reading
Rudolf Vrba, Wikipedia · Douglas Martin, obituary of Rudolf Vrba, The New York Times, 7 April 2006 (PDF via rudolfvrba.com) · Vrba, Rudolf 1924–2006, Encyclopedia.com · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.