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PLEASE NOTE: THE WORLD'S MOST EXTENSIVE WEBSITE ABOUT RUDOLF VRBA CAN NOW BE EASILY FOUND AT
www.rudolfvrba.com
You will be better served by the new site.
It has has far more information on Vrba than any other site.
VISIT INSTEAD: www.rudolfvrba.com
*
The most significant author of British Columbia is not Pauline Johnson, Douglas Coupland, William Gibson, David Suzuki or Alice Munro.
It's Prisoner #44070, aka Rudolf Vrba, one of the most significant chroniclers of the Holocaust.
According to the Auschwitz Museum, as many as 196 prisoners can be said to have escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau and its various confines (out of 928 attempts), but this estimate is very misleading. It was far easier for non-Jews to escape from less restrictive work parties, particularly towards the end of the war. Vrba expert Ruth Linn estimates there were about 500-700 attempts to escape, and most failed. Some 75 of these attempts were made by Jews; five Jews made it successfully to freedom during three escapes in April and May of 1943. The most significant of these five was Rudolf "Rudi" Vrba, the co-author of the most authoritative report on the true nature of the concentration camps, co-authored with his co-escapee Alfred Wetzler.
Before Vrba, less convincing reports had been rendered by Polish escapees such as Kazmierz Halon (after he'd escaped in February of 1943) and Witold Pilecki, Jan Redzei and Edward Ciesielski (after their escapes in April of 1943). Vrba and Wetzler co-wrote the first authoritative and irrefutable reportage of mass murder that was accepted as credible by the Allies. He called Vancouver home for the last thirty-one years of his life. In 2020, Slovakia's Oscar submission for best international film was director Peter Bebjak's The Auschwitz Report, about the remarkable escape made by Vrba and Alfred Wetzler who had grown up in the same town of Trvana in Slovakia.
In conversation with Alan Twigg in 2001, Rudi Vrba described how he and Wetzler successfully escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau. On Passover Eve, April 7, 1944, they hid inside a construction woodpile, in a previously prepared chamber, for three days and nights, using petrol-soaked tobacco spread around the woodpile to keep guard dogs from sniffing them out and alerting search parties. The pair fled overland towards Slovakia after the SS cordon around the camp was withdrawn on April 10.
After a perilous, eleven-day journey, both men reached Zilina in Slovakia where they were taken into separate rooms at the headquarters of the Jewish community. They dictated separate reports that resulted in their report on Auschwitz death camps, dated April 25th, 1944, in Zilina, Slovakia. This report became known in the historiography of the Holocaust as the "Vrba-Wetzler Report" and became the most important document within the "Auschwitz Protocols" (not officially released to the general public, by the U.S. War Refugee Board, until November 26, 1944). It describes the geography of the Auschwitz camp, the methodology of the gas chambers and a history of events in Auschwitz since April of 1942.
Siegfried Lederer had successfully fled earlier on April 5, 1944, in the company of a Nazi corporal named Viktor Pestek who had fallen in love with a Jewish woman in the camp. Pestek was able to get a Nazi uniform for Lederer who subsequently alerted Jews in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia about how the Nazis were mass murdering Jews. Vrba and Wetzler escaped only six days after Lederer, so, essentially, they were alerting Jewish authorities around the same time, but Vrba and Wetzler had developed a system for corroborating their reports and so their estimates were harder to dismiss. The following month, two more Jews, Ceslav Mordowitz and Arnost Rosin, escaped from Auschwitz on May 27, 1944.
Having first worked as a slave labourer, sorting the belongings of gassed victims within the Canada warehouse, Vrba later gained a privileged (much safer) position as a schreiber (writer, registrar). Wetzler was already a schreiber. As block registrars, with relative freedom of movement, Vrba (born Walter Rosenberg, a Slovakian Jew) and Wetzler (also Slovakian) were able to observe preparations underway at Birkenau for the eradication of Europe's last remaining Jewish community, the 800,000 Jews of Hungary. Secretly, as a team, they were able to carefully count the incoming trains between June, 1942 and April, 1944. In their 32-page Vrba-Wetzler Report, they forewarned of Nazi preparations to kill those Hungarian Jews at the Birkenau compound. Vrba also chiefly wrote a report that was given to the Papal Nuncio in Slovakia, then forwarded to the Vatican. The Vrba-Wetzler Report not only attempted to rationally estimate the scale of mass murder at Auschwitz, it also described methodology. As such, it's one of the most important documents of the 20th century. Copies are kept in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in New York, in the Vatican archives and at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.
The methodology of mass extermination was described as follows:
"At present, there are four crematoria in operation at BIRKENAU, two large ones, I and II, and two smaller ones, III and IV. Those of type I and II consist of 3 parts, i.e.: (A) the furnace room; (B) the large halls; and (C) the gas chamber. A huge chimney rises from the furnace room around which are grouped nine furnaces, each having four openings. Each opening can take three normal corpses at once and after an hour and a half the bodies are completely burned. This corresponds to a daily capacity of about 2,000 bodies. Next to this is a large "reception hall" which is arranged so as to give the impression of the antechamber of a bathing establishment. It holds 2,000 people and apparently there is a similar waiting room of the floor below. From there a door and a few steps lead down into the very long and narrow gas chamber. The walls of this chamber are also camouflaged with simulated entries to shower rooms in order to mislead the victims. This roof is fitted with three traps which can be hermetically closed from the outside. A track leads from the gas chamber to the furnace room. The gassing takes place as follows: The unfortunate victims are brought into hall (B), where they are told to undress. To complete the fiction that they are going to bathe, each person receives a towel and a small piece of soap issued by two men clad in white coats. They are then crowded into the gas chamber (C) in such numbers there is, of course, only standing room. To compress this crowd into the narrow space, shots are often fired to induce those already at the far end to huddle still closer together. When everybody is inside, the heavy doors are closed. Then there is a short pause, presumably to allow the room temperature to rise to a certain level, after which SS men with gas masks climb on the roof, open the traps, and shake down a preparation in powder from out of tin cans labeled 'CYKLON For use against vermin', which is manufactured by a Hamburg concern. It is presumed that this is a 'CYANIDE' mixture of some sort which turns into gas at a certain temperature. After three minutes everyone in the chamber is dead. No one is known to have survived this ordeal, although it was not uncommon to discover signs of life after the primitive measures employed in the Birch Wood. The chamber is then opened, aired, and the 'special squad' carts the bodies on flat trucks to the furnace rooms, where the burning takes place. Crematoria III and IV work on nearly the same principle, but their capacity is only half as large. Thus, the total capacity of the four cremating and gassing plants at BIRKENAU amounts to about 6,000 daily."
By the end of June, 1944, the Vrba-Wetzler Report had reached the governments of the Allies, but it was hardly soon enough. Estimates vary as to exactly how many prisoners were killed in the combined work camp/death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, but it is clear there are more than in any other death camp. The most conservative estimates place the figure at 1.1 million. For the rest of his life, Vrba would claim that some Jewish leaders, most notably Hungarian-born Yisrael (Rudolf) Kasztner (1906-1957), had failed to promptly and adequately alert the Jews of eastern Europe as to the dangers of extermination, thereby resulting in the deaths of thousands who might have been spared.
Vrba's reportage and expert witness testimonials from 1944 to 2006, when he died in Vancouver, made him one of the most essential individuals of the twentieth century. He was featured in numerous documentary films, most notably Shoah directed by Claude Lanzmann (Paris 1985), as well Genocide (in the "World at War" series) directed by Jeremy lsaacs (BBC, London, 1973), Auschwitz and the Allies directed by Rex Bloomstein, in collaboration with Martin Gilbert (BBC, London, 1982) and Witness to Auschwitz directed by Robert Taylor (CBC, Toronto, 1990).
Vrba also appeared as a witness for various investigations and trials, such as the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial of 1964. In Canada, he was called upon to provide testimony at the seven-week trial of Ontario's Ernst Zundel in 1985, when Zundel was found guilty of misleading the public as a Holocaust denier. In 2001, the Czech Republic's annual One World International Human Rights Film Festival established a film award in his name.
Rudolf Vrba was born as Walter Rosenberg in Topolcany, Czechoslovakia in 1924 as the son of Elias Rosenberg (owner of a steam saw-mill in Jaklovce near Margecany in Slovakia), and Helena (nee Grunfeldova) of Zbehy, Slovakia. At the age of fifteen he was excluded from the High School (Gymnasium) of Bratislava under the so-called "Slovak State's" version of the Nuremberg anti-Jewish laws. He worked as a labourer in Trnava until 1942. In March 1942, having reaching neighbouring Hungary and been unable to find help in Budapest, he was arrested and beaten by border police while trying to return home. He was incarcerated in a labour camp where he escaped for several days, only to be recaptured and badly beaten by Hrlinka (pro-Nazi) guards in Slovakia. On June 14th, 1942, he was deported to the Majdanek concentration camp here he naively volunteered for "farm work" a place called Auschwitz. He was transferred to Auschwitz on June 30, 1942.
As Prisoner #44070 for almost two years, he worked in the so-called "Canada" warehouse where suitcases and other belongings of those taken away to the gas chambers were sorted, and as a registrar in Birkenau where his work with the camp underground led him to his escape with Wetzler soon after Vrba had had a consummated love affair with 22-year-old Alice Munk, an inmate in the Czechoslovakian "family camp." Soon after she, too, was murdered by the Nazis, along most of the members of the so-called Czech Family Camp, he made his escape. After contacting Jewish authorities, Walter Rosenberg joined the Czechoslovak Partisan Units in September of 1944 and adopted Rudolf Vrba as a nom de guerre. He fought until the end of the war in a unit commanded by Milan Uher ("Hero of the Slovak National Uprising in Memoriam") and was decorated with the Czechoslovak Medal for Bravery, the Order of Slovak National Insurrection and Order of Meritorious Fighter. He subsequently legalized his name as Rudolf Vrba and became a citizen of Great Britain.
Vrba graduated in chemistry and biochemistry from the Prague Technical University in 1951 and obtained a post-graduate degree from the Czechoslovak Academy of Science in 1956. After research at Charles University Medical School in Prague until 1958, he worked for two years as a biochemist at the Ministry of Agriculture in Israel. He then became a member of the Research Staff of the British Medical Research Council in London (1960-1967). When Vrba immigrated to Canada in 1967 and became Associate of the Medical Research Council of Canada, he began to use Rudi as his common first name, but only for those who knew him well; he preferred Rudolf for those who did not. He worked for two years (1973-1975) in the United States as a Lecturer and Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School. In Boston, he met and married his second wife, Robin, shortly before he joined the medical faculty at the University of British Columbia in 1976 as associate professor of pharmacology. Specializing in the chemistry of the brain, Vrba published more than fifty original scientific papers and also undertook research pertaining to cancer and diabetes.
The author of this brief summary invited Rudolf Vrba to make a rare public appearance in Vancouver as a guest speaker at the 16th annual BC Book Prizes awards banquet in 2001; otherwise, he was rarely, if ever, cited as a B.C. author. In 1997, he provided a keynote address for the annual Kristallnacht Commemorative Program at the Vancouver Jewish Community Centre on November 9, speaking on ‘Money and the Holocaust: The Role of the Holocaust in German Economic and Military Strategy, 1941-1945.’ Vrba expressed his belief that the theft of Jewish property was a prime motivation for the murders of six million Jews between 1941 and 1945. His speech was based on his extensive research and his unique perspective as a slave labourer in the Canada section of Auschwitz-Birkenau where confiscated Jewish clothing and goods were processed.
The last time I saw Rudy Vrba, we met for coffee on West Broadway. He seemed fine, jovial, fatherly. We discussed our mutual friend, Stephen Vizinczey, and he left me with some parting advice: "Whenever something bad happens, something upsetting or irritating, like locking your keys inside your car, or somebody steals your bicycle, stop and ask yourself, 'Am I going to remember this a year from now?' The anxiety will subside." Quite simply, Rudi Vrba knew things other people didn't know.
Rudi Vrba died of cancer in Vancouver on March 27, 2006, at age 81, predeceased by his elder daughter, Dr. Helena Vrbova, and survived by his first wife, Gerta Vrbova, their other daughter, Zuza Vrbova Jackson and his second wife, Robin Vrba, as well as two grandchildren born to Zuza. Vrba's papers were gifted by Robin Vrba to the Franklin D. Roosevelt President Library and Museum in New York. Efforts were made to have Rudolf Vrba buried in the oldest Jewish cemetery on the B.C. mainland, part of Mountain View Cemetery in Vancouver, but his widow ultimately made arrangements for his burial in a little-visited cemetery on the outskirts of the city.
As an author, Vrba most significantly published a memoir, I Cannot Forgive (1963), with Alan Bestic, that has been translated worldwide. It has been reprinted several times as I Escaped from Auschwitz (2002), most recently in a new version co-edited by Robin Vrba in 2020. The first Hebrew edition of Vrba's memoir was not published until 1988, largely due to the efforts of Israeli academic Ruth Linn who wrote the most significant book about Vrba, Escaping Auschwitz, investigating the reasons why his outspokenness was resented by the Israeli establishment. In 2022, a British journalist and thriller writer, Jonathan Freedland, re-told Vrba's story as The Escape Artist, deep-sixing the fact that Vrba's own version of events was still very much in print.
Vrba concludes his recollections with this statement: "It is of evil to assent to evil actively or passively, as an instrument, as an observer, or as a victim. Under certain circumstances even ignorance is evil."
VISIT WWW.RUDOLFVRBA.COM FOR MUCH MORE DETAILED INFORMATION.
BOOKS:
I Cannot Forgive (London, UK: Sidgwick & Jackson / Gibbs & Philips, 1963; New York: Grove Press, 1964). With Alan Bestic
Factory of Death (London, Transworld Publishers, 1964). With Alan Bestic
44070: The Conspiracy of the Twentieth Century (Bellingham, WA: Star & Cross Publishing House, 1989). With Alan Bestic.
Je me suis evade d'Auschwitz (Paris: Ramsay, 1988)
Als Kanada in Auschwitz lag (Munich: Piper, 1999)
Borahti mi-Aushvits (Haifa University Press, 1998)
I Escaped from Auschwitz (London: Robson Books; Fort Lee, New Jersey: Barricade Books, 2002)
I Escaped from Auschwitz (2022), co-edited by Robin Vrba
ABOUT VRBA:
Escaping Auschwitz. A Culture of Forgetting (Cornell University Press, 2004) by Ruth Linn
The Escape Artist (2022) by Jonathan Freedland
[BCBW 2022] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
Duo: Vrba and Wetzler / Bottom duo: Vrba & Twigg, UBC, Vancouver 2001
www.rudolfvrba.com
You will be better served by the new site.
It has has far more information on Vrba than any other site.
VISIT INSTEAD: www.rudolfvrba.com
*
The most significant author of British Columbia is not Pauline Johnson, Douglas Coupland, William Gibson, David Suzuki or Alice Munro.
It's Prisoner #44070, aka Rudolf Vrba, one of the most significant chroniclers of the Holocaust.
According to the Auschwitz Museum, as many as 196 prisoners can be said to have escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau and its various confines (out of 928 attempts), but this estimate is very misleading. It was far easier for non-Jews to escape from less restrictive work parties, particularly towards the end of the war. Vrba expert Ruth Linn estimates there were about 500-700 attempts to escape, and most failed. Some 75 of these attempts were made by Jews; five Jews made it successfully to freedom during three escapes in April and May of 1943. The most significant of these five was Rudolf "Rudi" Vrba, the co-author of the most authoritative report on the true nature of the concentration camps, co-authored with his co-escapee Alfred Wetzler.
Before Vrba, less convincing reports had been rendered by Polish escapees such as Kazmierz Halon (after he'd escaped in February of 1943) and Witold Pilecki, Jan Redzei and Edward Ciesielski (after their escapes in April of 1943). Vrba and Wetzler co-wrote the first authoritative and irrefutable reportage of mass murder that was accepted as credible by the Allies. He called Vancouver home for the last thirty-one years of his life. In 2020, Slovakia's Oscar submission for best international film was director Peter Bebjak's The Auschwitz Report, about the remarkable escape made by Vrba and Alfred Wetzler who had grown up in the same town of Trvana in Slovakia.
In conversation with Alan Twigg in 2001, Rudi Vrba described how he and Wetzler successfully escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau. On Passover Eve, April 7, 1944, they hid inside a construction woodpile, in a previously prepared chamber, for three days and nights, using petrol-soaked tobacco spread around the woodpile to keep guard dogs from sniffing them out and alerting search parties. The pair fled overland towards Slovakia after the SS cordon around the camp was withdrawn on April 10.
After a perilous, eleven-day journey, both men reached Zilina in Slovakia where they were taken into separate rooms at the headquarters of the Jewish community. They dictated separate reports that resulted in their report on Auschwitz death camps, dated April 25th, 1944, in Zilina, Slovakia. This report became known in the historiography of the Holocaust as the "Vrba-Wetzler Report" and became the most important document within the "Auschwitz Protocols" (not officially released to the general public, by the U.S. War Refugee Board, until November 26, 1944). It describes the geography of the Auschwitz camp, the methodology of the gas chambers and a history of events in Auschwitz since April of 1942.
Siegfried Lederer had successfully fled earlier on April 5, 1944, in the company of a Nazi corporal named Viktor Pestek who had fallen in love with a Jewish woman in the camp. Pestek was able to get a Nazi uniform for Lederer who subsequently alerted Jews in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia about how the Nazis were mass murdering Jews. Vrba and Wetzler escaped only six days after Lederer, so, essentially, they were alerting Jewish authorities around the same time, but Vrba and Wetzler had developed a system for corroborating their reports and so their estimates were harder to dismiss. The following month, two more Jews, Ceslav Mordowitz and Arnost Rosin, escaped from Auschwitz on May 27, 1944.
Having first worked as a slave labourer, sorting the belongings of gassed victims within the Canada warehouse, Vrba later gained a privileged (much safer) position as a schreiber (writer, registrar). Wetzler was already a schreiber. As block registrars, with relative freedom of movement, Vrba (born Walter Rosenberg, a Slovakian Jew) and Wetzler (also Slovakian) were able to observe preparations underway at Birkenau for the eradication of Europe's last remaining Jewish community, the 800,000 Jews of Hungary. Secretly, as a team, they were able to carefully count the incoming trains between June, 1942 and April, 1944. In their 32-page Vrba-Wetzler Report, they forewarned of Nazi preparations to kill those Hungarian Jews at the Birkenau compound. Vrba also chiefly wrote a report that was given to the Papal Nuncio in Slovakia, then forwarded to the Vatican. The Vrba-Wetzler Report not only attempted to rationally estimate the scale of mass murder at Auschwitz, it also described methodology. As such, it's one of the most important documents of the 20th century. Copies are kept in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in New York, in the Vatican archives and at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.
The methodology of mass extermination was described as follows:
"At present, there are four crematoria in operation at BIRKENAU, two large ones, I and II, and two smaller ones, III and IV. Those of type I and II consist of 3 parts, i.e.: (A) the furnace room; (B) the large halls; and (C) the gas chamber. A huge chimney rises from the furnace room around which are grouped nine furnaces, each having four openings. Each opening can take three normal corpses at once and after an hour and a half the bodies are completely burned. This corresponds to a daily capacity of about 2,000 bodies. Next to this is a large "reception hall" which is arranged so as to give the impression of the antechamber of a bathing establishment. It holds 2,000 people and apparently there is a similar waiting room of the floor below. From there a door and a few steps lead down into the very long and narrow gas chamber. The walls of this chamber are also camouflaged with simulated entries to shower rooms in order to mislead the victims. This roof is fitted with three traps which can be hermetically closed from the outside. A track leads from the gas chamber to the furnace room. The gassing takes place as follows: The unfortunate victims are brought into hall (B), where they are told to undress. To complete the fiction that they are going to bathe, each person receives a towel and a small piece of soap issued by two men clad in white coats. They are then crowded into the gas chamber (C) in such numbers there is, of course, only standing room. To compress this crowd into the narrow space, shots are often fired to induce those already at the far end to huddle still closer together. When everybody is inside, the heavy doors are closed. Then there is a short pause, presumably to allow the room temperature to rise to a certain level, after which SS men with gas masks climb on the roof, open the traps, and shake down a preparation in powder from out of tin cans labeled 'CYKLON For use against vermin', which is manufactured by a Hamburg concern. It is presumed that this is a 'CYANIDE' mixture of some sort which turns into gas at a certain temperature. After three minutes everyone in the chamber is dead. No one is known to have survived this ordeal, although it was not uncommon to discover signs of life after the primitive measures employed in the Birch Wood. The chamber is then opened, aired, and the 'special squad' carts the bodies on flat trucks to the furnace rooms, where the burning takes place. Crematoria III and IV work on nearly the same principle, but their capacity is only half as large. Thus, the total capacity of the four cremating and gassing plants at BIRKENAU amounts to about 6,000 daily."
By the end of June, 1944, the Vrba-Wetzler Report had reached the governments of the Allies, but it was hardly soon enough. Estimates vary as to exactly how many prisoners were killed in the combined work camp/death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, but it is clear there are more than in any other death camp. The most conservative estimates place the figure at 1.1 million. For the rest of his life, Vrba would claim that some Jewish leaders, most notably Hungarian-born Yisrael (Rudolf) Kasztner (1906-1957), had failed to promptly and adequately alert the Jews of eastern Europe as to the dangers of extermination, thereby resulting in the deaths of thousands who might have been spared.
Vrba's reportage and expert witness testimonials from 1944 to 2006, when he died in Vancouver, made him one of the most essential individuals of the twentieth century. He was featured in numerous documentary films, most notably Shoah directed by Claude Lanzmann (Paris 1985), as well Genocide (in the "World at War" series) directed by Jeremy lsaacs (BBC, London, 1973), Auschwitz and the Allies directed by Rex Bloomstein, in collaboration with Martin Gilbert (BBC, London, 1982) and Witness to Auschwitz directed by Robert Taylor (CBC, Toronto, 1990).
Vrba also appeared as a witness for various investigations and trials, such as the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial of 1964. In Canada, he was called upon to provide testimony at the seven-week trial of Ontario's Ernst Zundel in 1985, when Zundel was found guilty of misleading the public as a Holocaust denier. In 2001, the Czech Republic's annual One World International Human Rights Film Festival established a film award in his name.
Rudolf Vrba was born as Walter Rosenberg in Topolcany, Czechoslovakia in 1924 as the son of Elias Rosenberg (owner of a steam saw-mill in Jaklovce near Margecany in Slovakia), and Helena (nee Grunfeldova) of Zbehy, Slovakia. At the age of fifteen he was excluded from the High School (Gymnasium) of Bratislava under the so-called "Slovak State's" version of the Nuremberg anti-Jewish laws. He worked as a labourer in Trnava until 1942. In March 1942, having reaching neighbouring Hungary and been unable to find help in Budapest, he was arrested and beaten by border police while trying to return home. He was incarcerated in a labour camp where he escaped for several days, only to be recaptured and badly beaten by Hrlinka (pro-Nazi) guards in Slovakia. On June 14th, 1942, he was deported to the Majdanek concentration camp here he naively volunteered for "farm work" a place called Auschwitz. He was transferred to Auschwitz on June 30, 1942.
As Prisoner #44070 for almost two years, he worked in the so-called "Canada" warehouse where suitcases and other belongings of those taken away to the gas chambers were sorted, and as a registrar in Birkenau where his work with the camp underground led him to his escape with Wetzler soon after Vrba had had a consummated love affair with 22-year-old Alice Munk, an inmate in the Czechoslovakian "family camp." Soon after she, too, was murdered by the Nazis, along most of the members of the so-called Czech Family Camp, he made his escape. After contacting Jewish authorities, Walter Rosenberg joined the Czechoslovak Partisan Units in September of 1944 and adopted Rudolf Vrba as a nom de guerre. He fought until the end of the war in a unit commanded by Milan Uher ("Hero of the Slovak National Uprising in Memoriam") and was decorated with the Czechoslovak Medal for Bravery, the Order of Slovak National Insurrection and Order of Meritorious Fighter. He subsequently legalized his name as Rudolf Vrba and became a citizen of Great Britain.
Vrba graduated in chemistry and biochemistry from the Prague Technical University in 1951 and obtained a post-graduate degree from the Czechoslovak Academy of Science in 1956. After research at Charles University Medical School in Prague until 1958, he worked for two years as a biochemist at the Ministry of Agriculture in Israel. He then became a member of the Research Staff of the British Medical Research Council in London (1960-1967). When Vrba immigrated to Canada in 1967 and became Associate of the Medical Research Council of Canada, he began to use Rudi as his common first name, but only for those who knew him well; he preferred Rudolf for those who did not. He worked for two years (1973-1975) in the United States as a Lecturer and Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School. In Boston, he met and married his second wife, Robin, shortly before he joined the medical faculty at the University of British Columbia in 1976 as associate professor of pharmacology. Specializing in the chemistry of the brain, Vrba published more than fifty original scientific papers and also undertook research pertaining to cancer and diabetes.
The author of this brief summary invited Rudolf Vrba to make a rare public appearance in Vancouver as a guest speaker at the 16th annual BC Book Prizes awards banquet in 2001; otherwise, he was rarely, if ever, cited as a B.C. author. In 1997, he provided a keynote address for the annual Kristallnacht Commemorative Program at the Vancouver Jewish Community Centre on November 9, speaking on ‘Money and the Holocaust: The Role of the Holocaust in German Economic and Military Strategy, 1941-1945.’ Vrba expressed his belief that the theft of Jewish property was a prime motivation for the murders of six million Jews between 1941 and 1945. His speech was based on his extensive research and his unique perspective as a slave labourer in the Canada section of Auschwitz-Birkenau where confiscated Jewish clothing and goods were processed.
The last time I saw Rudy Vrba, we met for coffee on West Broadway. He seemed fine, jovial, fatherly. We discussed our mutual friend, Stephen Vizinczey, and he left me with some parting advice: "Whenever something bad happens, something upsetting or irritating, like locking your keys inside your car, or somebody steals your bicycle, stop and ask yourself, 'Am I going to remember this a year from now?' The anxiety will subside." Quite simply, Rudi Vrba knew things other people didn't know.
Rudi Vrba died of cancer in Vancouver on March 27, 2006, at age 81, predeceased by his elder daughter, Dr. Helena Vrbova, and survived by his first wife, Gerta Vrbova, their other daughter, Zuza Vrbova Jackson and his second wife, Robin Vrba, as well as two grandchildren born to Zuza. Vrba's papers were gifted by Robin Vrba to the Franklin D. Roosevelt President Library and Museum in New York. Efforts were made to have Rudolf Vrba buried in the oldest Jewish cemetery on the B.C. mainland, part of Mountain View Cemetery in Vancouver, but his widow ultimately made arrangements for his burial in a little-visited cemetery on the outskirts of the city.
As an author, Vrba most significantly published a memoir, I Cannot Forgive (1963), with Alan Bestic, that has been translated worldwide. It has been reprinted several times as I Escaped from Auschwitz (2002), most recently in a new version co-edited by Robin Vrba in 2020. The first Hebrew edition of Vrba's memoir was not published until 1988, largely due to the efforts of Israeli academic Ruth Linn who wrote the most significant book about Vrba, Escaping Auschwitz, investigating the reasons why his outspokenness was resented by the Israeli establishment. In 2022, a British journalist and thriller writer, Jonathan Freedland, re-told Vrba's story as The Escape Artist, deep-sixing the fact that Vrba's own version of events was still very much in print.
Vrba concludes his recollections with this statement: "It is of evil to assent to evil actively or passively, as an instrument, as an observer, or as a victim. Under certain circumstances even ignorance is evil."
VISIT WWW.RUDOLFVRBA.COM FOR MUCH MORE DETAILED INFORMATION.
BOOKS:
I Cannot Forgive (London, UK: Sidgwick & Jackson / Gibbs & Philips, 1963; New York: Grove Press, 1964). With Alan Bestic
Factory of Death (London, Transworld Publishers, 1964). With Alan Bestic
44070: The Conspiracy of the Twentieth Century (Bellingham, WA: Star & Cross Publishing House, 1989). With Alan Bestic.
Je me suis evade d'Auschwitz (Paris: Ramsay, 1988)
Als Kanada in Auschwitz lag (Munich: Piper, 1999)
Borahti mi-Aushvits (Haifa University Press, 1998)
I Escaped from Auschwitz (London: Robson Books; Fort Lee, New Jersey: Barricade Books, 2002)
I Escaped from Auschwitz (2022), co-edited by Robin Vrba
ABOUT VRBA:
Escaping Auschwitz. A Culture of Forgetting (Cornell University Press, 2004) by Ruth Linn
The Escape Artist (2022) by Jonathan Freedland
[BCBW 2022] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
Duo: Vrba and Wetzler / Bottom duo: Vrba & Twigg, UBC, Vancouver 2001
Articles: 2 Articles for this author
Curriculum Vitae
UBC Pharmacology Dept. info
Rudolf Vrba was born as Walter Rosenberg in Topolcany, Czechoslovakia in 1924 as the son of Elias Rosenberg (owner of a steam saw-mill in Jaklovce near Margecany in Slovakia), and Helena neé Grunfeldova of Zbehy, Slovakia. At the age of fifteen he was excluded from the High School (Gymnasium) of Bratislava under the so-called "Slovak State's" version of the Nuremberg anti-Jewish laws. He worked as a labourer in Trnava until 1942. In March 1942 he was arrested for being Jewish, and on June 14th, 1942, he was deported first to Maidanek and from there he was then transferred to Auschwitz on June 30, 1942. He remained Auschwitz prisoner no.44070 for almost two years. He escaped from the Auschwitz death camp (together with Alfred Wetzler) on April 7th, 1944 and under his "nom de guerre" as Rudolf Vrba he co-authored (with A. Wetzler) the Report on Auschwitz death camps on April 25th, 1944 in Zilina, Slovakia. This report became known in the historiography of the Holocaust as the "Vrba-Wetzler Report" or "Auschwitz Protocols", and contains a precise description of: 1-the geography of the Auschwitz annihilation camp; 2-the methodology of the mass murder in gas chambers practiced in Auschwitz already for two years; 3-a history of events that took place in Auschwitz since April 1942.
The Vrba-Wetzler Report reached the Governments of the Allies in June 1944. Rudolf Vrba joined the Czechoslovak Partisan Units in September 1944 and fought until the end of the war in the distinguished unit commanded by Milan Uher ("Hero of the Slovak National Uprising In Memoriam"). He was decorated by the Czechoslovak Medal for Bravery, the Order of Slovak National Insurection and Order of Meritorious Fighter. After Czechoslovakia was liberated from German occupation, his nom de guerre , (Rudolf Vrba) was legalized. After WW II, he studied Chemistry in Prague, graduated in 1949 (Ing. Chern.) and received his doctorate (Dr. Tech. Sc.) in 1951, followed by a post-graduate degree from the Czechoslovak Academy of Science in 1956 (C.Sc.). Since then he has become internationally known as the author of more than fifty original research papers on the chemistry of the brain, as well as for his research work relevant to diabetes and cancer.
In 1951-52 he pursued biochemical research at the Czechoslovak Academy of Science, followed by five years of research work (1953-1958) at Charles University Medical School in Prague in the research team of Professor J. Teyssinger. He later worked as a biochemist at the Ministry of Agriculture in Israel for two years (1958-1960) and then became member of the Research Staff of the British Medical Research Council in London (1960-1967). He was appointed as Associate of the Medical Research Council of Canada (1967-1973), and he also worked for two years (1973-1975) in the United States as Lecturer and Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School. Since 1976 he has been Associate Professor teaching Pharmacology at the Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
Rudolf Vrba participated in a prominent way in the production of four films relevant to the history of the Holocaust: (1) "Genocide" (in the "World at War" series; directed by Jeremy lsaacs, BBC, London, 1973); (2) "Auschwitz and the Allies" (Directed by Rex Bloomstein, in collaboration with Martin Gilbert; BBC, London, 1982); (3) "Shoah" (directed by Claude Lanzmann, Paris, 1985); (4) "Witness to Auschwitz" (directed by Robert Taylor, CBC, Toronto, 1990).
Rudolf Vrba published (in collaboration with A. Bestic) a book of personal recollections on Auschwitz ("I cannot forgive", London, U.K., 1964 and New York, U.S.A., 1964) which was published in numerous editions also in German (Munich, 1964), French (Paris, 1988), Dutch (Kempen, 1996), Czech (Prague, 1998) and Hebrew (Haifa, 1998). He also published in international journals several studies on various aspects of the Holocaust in relation to German economy, military strategy and medicine. In 1998 the University of Haifa conferred to Rudolf Vrba the title of Doctor of Philosophy Honoris Causa.
Rudolf Vrba
Obituary
British Columbia's most heroic author succumbed to cancer on March 26, 2006, at age 81-and the world took note. The Guardian Weekly recalled how Rudi Vrba-born Walter Rosenberg in Topolcany, Czechoslovakia-became "the most prominent"; of the five people who escaped from Auschwitz.
Having worked as a slave labourer, sorting the belongings of gassed victims of the Holocaust, Vrba and his co-escapee Alfred Wetzler developed a system for estimating the number of people being murdered. By monitoring the incoming trains, they calculated that 1.75 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered between June, 1942 and April, 1944.
The pair hid inside a woodpile for three days and nights, using petrol-soaked tobacco to keep guard dogs from sniffing them out, then fled for eleven days overland to Slovakia after the SS cordon around the camp was withdrawn. In their historic, 32-page Vrba-Wetzler Report, submitted to the Jewish Council, they forewarned of Nazi preparations to kill 800,000 Hungarian Jews, having observed massive preparations underway at adjoining Birkenau.
Although the Vrba-Wetzler Report was hushed-up by some Jewish authorities, and has therefore been suppressed by some Hebrew histories, it became widely accepted by the Allies as the first reliable account of events inside Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In September of 1944, Walter Rosenberg joined Czechoslovak partisans under his new name, Rudolf Vrba, with forged papers and a new birthdate, April 7, to commemorate the date of his escape. After Czechoslovakia was liberated from German occupation, his nom de guerre, (Rudolf Vrba) was legalized. He subsequently gained his doctorate in biology and chemistry, defected to the West, worked briefly in Israel (1958-1960), worked in Britain (1960-1967) and immigrated to Vancouver in 1967.
At UBC, Vrba taught in the pharmacology department of the medical school. As a biochemistry professor, he specialized in the brain. During our first meeting at UBC, over lunch, discussing literary matters, Rudi took a brief interest in a brain tumour I had, and an imminent operation. He asked two concise questions, then simply stated I should be okay. We might have been discussing flowers or dessert. The subject was mutually dropped after 60 seconds. And he was right.
Rudi knew things other people didn't know. The last time I saw him, we met for coffee on West Broadway. He seemed fine, jovial, fatherly. We discussed our mutual friend, Stephen Vizinczey. He left me with some parting advice. "Alan, when something bad happens, something upsetting or irritating, like locking your keys inside your car, or somebody steals your bicycle, stop yourself and ask, 'Am I going to remember this a year from now?' The anxiety will subside.";
Rudi Vrba had a critical-minded, humanitarian perspective that proved immensely valuable to the world. He continued to bravely use it, testifying again and again, and concluded in his memoirs, I Cannot Forgive, published in 1963: "It is of evil to assent to evil actively or passively, as an instrument, as an observer, or as a victim. Under certain circumstances even ignorance is evil.";
Although he was featured in numerous documentary films, most notably Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, and he appeared as the subject of Man Alive profile for CBC, Rudi Vrba kept a low profile in British Columbia where few people knew his name, let alone his place in twentieth century history.
In Canada, he was called upon to provide testimony at the seven-week trial of Ontario's Ernst Zundel in 1985, when Zundel was found guilty of misleading the public as a Holocaust denier. In 2001 the Czech Republic's annual One World International Human Rights Film Festival established a film award in his name.
An elder sister predeceased him; he is survived by his wife, Robin, and a daughter. Copies of the original Vrba-Wetzler report are kept in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in New York, in the Vatican archives, and at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.
by Alan Twigg
