Obituary: Rudolf Vrba (original) (raw)

The truth about the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp was the best-kept secret of the Nazi architects of the Final Solution, guarded from discovery by more than 2,000 SS personnel, 200 vicious dogs, two lines of electrified fences, and a terrorised, fearful Polish population living around the camp. Throughout the five years of its existence there were hundreds of attempts by prisoners to escape. Seventy-six of these were by Jews. Of them only five succeeded in getting away to reveal the secrets of Auschwitz and to survive the war to tell their stories. Rudolf Vrba, who has died of cancer aged 81, was the most prominent escapee of the five.

In later life he settled in Vancouver. There he became professor of biochemistry in the pharmacology department of the medical school of the University of British Columbia (UBC).

Among attempts to break down the wall of silence around the Auschwitz secrets, historians have no doubt that the escape of Vrba and his fellow prisoner, Alfred Wetzler, was by far the most important. Born as Walter Rosenberg in Topolcany, Czechoslovakia, Vrba was the son of a sawmill owner. In 1939, aged 15, he was expelled from the high school (gymnasium) in Bratislava, under the Slovak puppet state's version of the Nazis' anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws.

Early in March 1942, in rebellion against the deportation laws, Vrba ripped the yellow Star of David off his clothes and left his Czechoslovakian home in a taxi, heading for Britain via Hungary. Later, having been intercepted by frontier guards, he was first sent to the Novaky transition camp in Slovakia, where he tried to escape, but again was caught and beaten. On June 14 1942 he was deported to the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland and two weeks later, on June 30, to Auschwitz. After six months in Auschwitz, he was transferred to Birkenau (Auschwitz II) and had the number 44070 tattooed on his arm.

From August 1942 until June 1943 Vrba was assigned - both in Auschwitz and in Birkenau - to work in the special slave labour unit that handled the property of those who had been gassed. In camp slang, the unit was known as "Canada" because of the food and the gold and other precious materials that the Germans confiscated from the luggage of the incoming "resettlement" deportees. The Auschwitz treasures from "Canada" were packaged for Germany, and the gold was quickly melted into ingots and deposited in the Reichsbank.

A major aspect of Vrba's duties during 1942 and 1943 was to be present at the arrival of most transports of deportees and to sort the belongings of the gassed victims. From this vantage point he was able to assess how little the deportees knew about Auschwitz when they entered the camp. Their luggage contained clothing for all seasons and basic utensils, a clear sign of their naive preparation for a new life in the area of "resettlement" in the east.

In the summer of 1943, Vrba improved his position for collecting information when he was appointed registrar in the quarantine camp for men. At the beginning of 1944, he noticed that preparations were under way for an additional railway line, for an expected transports of Jews who, in the SS camp language were called "Hungarian salami". Transports from different countries, Vrba would later explain, were characterised by certain long lasting provisions packed in the prisoners' luggage for the final journey into the unknown.

As he subsequently wrote: "When a series of transports of Jews from the Netherlands arrived, cheeses enriched the wartime rations. It was sardines when a series of transports of French Jews arrived, halva and olives when transports of Jews from Greece reached the camp, and now the SS were talking of 'Hungarian salami', a well-known Hungarian provision suitable for taking along on a long journey."

For almost two years he had thought of escape, at first selfishly, because he had merely wanted his freedom, but now, "I had an imperative reason. It was no longer a question of reporting a crime but of preventing one." He began his first scientific study: to assess every unsuccessful escape attempt, to analyse its flaws and to correct them.

On Friday, April 7 1944, (the eve of Passover), Vrba and Wetzler sneaked into a previously used hideout sprinkled with gasoline-soaked tobacco to prevent the dogs from sniffing them out. They stayed there for three nights, until the camp authorities assumed that the two men had already got beyond the outer perimeter. When the cordon of SS guards that had surrounded that perimeter was withdrawn, Vrba and Wetzler were ready to sneak out.

They knew one thing for certain: as shaven-headed inmates, clad in striped pyjamas and with numbers tattooed on their arms, there was no point in relying on any help in the world outside Auschwitz. "At the moment of our escape," explained Vrba, "all connections with whatever friends and social contacts we had in Auschwitz were severed, and we had absolutely no connection waiting for us outside the death camp where we had spent the past two years." As he later phrased it: "We were de facto written off by the world from the moment we were loaded into a deportation train in the spring of 1942. To start with, we had to step into a complete 'social vacuum' outside Auschwitz. The only administrative evidence of our existence was an international warrant about us, issued telegraphically and distributed to all stations of the Gestapo."

The warrant was also telegraphed to all stations of the Kripo (criminal police), the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, security service), and the Grepo (Grenzpolizei, border police). It even reached the desk of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS.

After a perilous 11 days of walking and hiding, the escapees made it back to their native country, Slovakia. Almost at once, they managed to establish contact with the leaders of the remainder of the Jewish community. There had been 88,000 Jews in Slovakia; there were by then about 25,000. They warned that preparations were being made for the murder of nearly 800,000 Hungarian Jews. They also suspected that 3,000 Czech Jews, in the Auschwitz-Birkenau "family camp" would be gassed within a few months. For three days Vrba and Wetzler conveyed in detail to the members of the Jewish Council the geographical plan of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the specifics of the Germans' method of mass murder - tattooing, gassing, and cremation - and the course of events they had witnessed at the camp.

They also and most significantly gave an estimate of the number of Jews killed in Auschwitz between June 1942 and April 1944: about 1.75 million. The 32-page Vrba-Wetzler report was the first document about the Auschwitz death camp to reach the free world and to be accepted as credible. Its authenticity broke the barrier of scepticism and apathy that had existed up to that point.

It is doubtful, however, that its content reached more than a small number of the prospective victims, though Vrba's and Wetzler's alarming assessment was in the hands of Hungarian Jewish leaders as early as April 28 or at least no later than early May 1944. Between mid-May and early July, about 437,000 Hungarian Jews boarded the "resettlement trains" that carried them to the Auschwitz death camps, where most were immediately gassed. Vrba's and Wetzler's predictions regarding the "Hungarian salami" were soon confirmed by two other Auschwitz inmates, Cslaw Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin, who succeeded in escaping from Auschwitz on May 27 1944, and reached Slovakia on June 6. They reported that during the month of May Hungarian Jews were being murdered in Auschwitz at an unprecedented rate. Human fat was used to accelerate the burning of the corpses.

Each escapee was provided with high-quality forged documents and the 19-year-old Walter Rosenberg became Rudolf Vrba - a name that he maintained until his death; April 7, his day of escape, became his birthday. Following his disclosures, and after hiding out in the Tatras mountains, in September 1944 he joined the Czechoslovak partisans and was later decorated for bravery.

The Vrba-Wetzler report had an immediate impact. The publication of portions of the report in the Swiss press in the final days of June 1944, and by the western allies shortly afterwards, produced a spontaneous international denunciation, which led to protests from the Pope, the US secretary of state, Cordell Hull, the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, the International Red Cross, and the King of Sweden. This amounted to what was called a "bombardment" of Admiral Miklos Horthy's conscience.

Horthy, the regent of Hungary, had led his country into the war on the Nazi side. But by 1944, with the Red Army approaching from the east, he was sending out feelers to the western allies with the aim of pulling his country out of the Axis. On July 5, Eden stated that the BBC would be employed to warn the Hungarian leaders. On July 7 Horthy ordered a halt to the deportations from Hungary, which became effective only on July 9. Almost 200,000 Jews in Budapest were thus saved from deportation.

The Jews of Hungary were subsequently to be harassed by members of the indigenous fascist Arrow Cross (Nyilas) movement, but their anti-semitic butchery was no match for German efficiency. They managed to kill approximately 50,000 Jews during their three months of fearsome rule, from October 1944 until the arrival of the Red Army, but this was a small number compared with the approximately 437,000 Hungarian Jews smoothly liquidated by the Germans in less than eight weeks in the spring of 1944.

The Vrba-Wetzler report continues to generate historical debate to this day. Many, including Vrba himself, have questioned whether the report was disseminated and acted upon as rapidly and as forcefully as it should have been. In an unanswerable "what if", Vrba continued to question to his last day whether more victims could have been saved had the allied and the Jewish leadership of the time pursued a more vigorous course of action in light of his report. This line of thought has at times made his ideas somewhat incongruent with the predominant Israeli historical narrative concerning the events of that time. Whereas the two escapees accurately predicted the fate of the Hungarian Jews, what they could not have foreseen was that their postwar memoirs and documented report would be kept from the Israeli Hebrew-reading public.

Although I am a native Israeli, who graduated from the prestigious Reali private high school, I had never heard about the escape from Auschwitz at the numerous Holocaust ceremonies I attended. Nor had I ever read about it in any detail in any of the Hebrew Holocaust textbooks at school in my own time or in those given to my three children, although Vrba's memoirs, I Cannot Forgive, written with Alan Bestic, were first published in London in 1963.

I became acquainted with Vrba's escape from Auschwitz during my adult life, through the non-Israeli Paris-based film-maker Claude Lanzmann, who considered Vrba's testimony central to the understanding of the Holocaust in his 1987 movie Shoah. The "presence" of the "absence" of the escape from Auschwitz in Israeli historiography on the one hand, and the moral visibility and sanctity of Auschwitz in the country's hegemonic narrative on the other, remained a puzzle for me, and my desire to gain firsthand knowledge of the escape stayed with me for many years.

Purely coincidentally, while lecturing at UBC I mentioned Vrba to a friend and was told that he taught there. Thus did we first meet. In June 1998, I succeeded in convincing my university, Haifa, to award Vrba an honorary doctorate in recognition of his heroic escape from Auschwitz and his contribution to Holocaust education. The award ceremony was planned to coincide with the first publication of the book in Hebrew by the Haifa University Press.

To my surprise, even at this undeniably historic moment, some Israeli scholars made a desperate last-minute attempt to belittle the hero and his memoirs. No less interesting was the position, as intellectual bystanders, taken up by the Holocaust historians' establishment in Israel. Not one of them publicly protested about the campaign against Vrba. It was here that the profound question posed by the American political thinker Michael Walzer crept into my mind: "What is the use, after all, of a silent intellectual?" In my book, Escaping Auschwitz, a Culture of Forgetting (2004) I try to delve into the mystery of Vrba's disappearance not only from the Auschwitz camp, but also from the Israeli Holocaust narrative.

Vrba was the only academic of the five escapees, and it is perhaps unsurprising that he chose biochemistry for his life's work, after that life was saved by the mixture of tobacco and gasoline. After the war he read biology and chemistry at Charles University, Prague, took a doctorate and then defected from a scientific delegation to the west. He worked in Israel from 1958 to 1960 at the biological research institute in Beit Dagan.

Then from 1960 to 1967 he worked in Britain, first at the neuropsychiatric research unit in Carshalton, then at the Medical Research Council. Then came the move to UBC, and after a two year sabbatical at Harvard University, a UBC professorship.

It was not just tobacco and gasoline that saved Vrba's life. It was also saved because Vrba admired knowledge, he was a scholar who knew its power, and believed that the deportees should have been given that power too. He felt that if they had known the fate that awaited them in Auschwitz, many lives would have been saved. He promised himself to bring them that knowledge, and he kept his promise. Meanwhile, I Cannot Forgive has recently been republished as I Escaped from Auschwitz.

His companion on that epic escape, Alfred Wetzler, died in Slovakia in the late 1980s.

Vrba is survived by his wife Robin, and a daughter, Zuza, who lives in Cambridge. His elder daughter, Helinka, predeceased him.

· Rudolf Vrba, Auschwitz escapee and pharmacologist, born September 11 1924; died March 26 2006