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Rudolf Vrba, November 1978

Rudolf Vrba (September 11, 1924 - March 27, 2006) was a Slovakian Jewish biochemist who, alongside Alfréd Wetzler, escaped from the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in 1944 and authored the Vrba-Wetzler Report exposing the Holocaust to the public. The report led to Hungary ending the deportation of Jews to concentration camps. According to historian Martin Gilbert, "No other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler had determined for them."

Biography[]

Vrba was born Walter Rosenberg in Topoľčany, Czechoslovakia (now in Slovakia) in 1924. In 1939 Czechoslovakia was occupied by Nazi Germany, who imposed the so-called "Nuremberg Laws" intended to exclude Jews from society which forced them to move to certain areas and wear yellow star badges to identify them. Vrba was forced to find work as a labourer at age 15 after being excluded from school as a result of the laws. According to Vrba himself, he learned to live with the laws until February 1942, when the Slovak government announced that the Jewish population was to be resettled on "reservations" in German-occupied Poland at the request of the Nazi government so they could be used for slave labour to support the German war effort. Refusing to be deported "like a calf in a wagon", Vrba ran away to join the Czechoslovak Army-in-exile but was arrested at the Hungarian border and deported to the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland.

After two weeks at Majdanek Vrba signed up for farm work at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in the hope of escaping. However, he abandoned his escape plan after the guards announced that ten prisoners would be shot for every one man missing. It soon became clear that Auschwitz was in fact an extermination camp and that the majority of inmates were being gassed to death after being found unfit for labour. Protected from death by a kapo (prisoner functionary) named Frank, Vrba was assigned to the "Kanada" work detail in Auschwitz-II Birkenau, the part of the camp where the gas chambers were, and put to work sorting out the belongings of all new arrivals (most of whom were gassed upon arrival) and moving the bodies of the murdered victims to the crematorium. Vrba and fellow Slovak Jew Alfréd Wetzler kept a register of the number of new arrivals per day and the number being sent to the gas chambers, reckoning that around 1,750,000 Jews had been exterminated between their arrival in the camp and April 1944. They observed that the majority of the new arrivals had brought their belongings with them, suggesting that they had got on the trains willingly believing the lie that they would be resettled, and decided that they had to warn Europe's Jewish population that they were being taken to be killed.

On 7 April 1944, Vrba and Wetzler enacted their escape plan. Waiting for the guards overseeing work duty to turn their backs, they made a run for it and hid inside a hollowed-out woodpile, with the hole they were hiding in covered up with a wooden plank by their compatriots. After four days in hiding, they broke out of the woodpile, cut through the perimeter fence and made their escape disguised in Dutch clothes they had stolen from the storehouse. They remained on the run for a fortnight before reaching the Slovakian town of Čadca, where they met up with Oscar Krasniansky of the Slovakian Jewish Council, who convinced them to write down their experiences.

Over the next three days, Vrba and Wetzler compiled a 40-page report on the inner workings of Auschwitz, including a ground plan of the camp, construction details of the crematoria and gas chambers, and details of the arrivals, selections and exterminations at the camp since 1942. Members of the Jewish Council translated the Slovak report into German before handing it over to Rudolf Kastner of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, who initially did not pass it on for fear of disrupting negotiations to save up to one million Jews from Auschwitz. Once negotiations were concluded, Kastner sent the report to contacts in the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, who did not initially make it public; however, they did make a number of copies which were distributed amongst the Hungarian Jewish community in order to warn them not to get on the trains for resettlement.

Vrba and Wetzler discovered that deportations to Auschwitz were still going on in June 1944 when they interviewed two Auschwitz escapees and were told that 100, 000 Jews had arrived in Auschwitz the previous month, concluding their report had been suppressed. However, meanwhile El Salvadoran consular official George Mantello obtained copies of both the Vrba-Wetzler Report and two other reports from Auschwitz escapees which had confirmed the details given by Vrba and Wetzler and published all three reports under the title "The Auschwitz Protocols" in Switzerland, revealing the full details of the Holocaust to the world. Seeing that the war was going against them, and fearing that they might be held personally responsible for the Holocaust in the event that they lost the war, the Hungarian government immediately halted deportations to Auschwitz, saving around 260,000 Jews from deportation. Deportations were resumed later that year after a coup by the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party, but by this point tens of thousands of Jews had already been saved by the diplomatic intervention of various governments.

Near the end of the war, Vrba participated in the uprising against the Nazi puppet government of Czechoslovakia and was awarded the Czechoslovak Medal of Bravery. He remained unaware of the effect of his report until he read about it in Gerald Reitlinger's 1953 book The Final Solution eight years after the war. When Adolf Eichmann, one of the main organizers of the Jewish extermination program, was put on trial in Israel in 1961, Vrba was one of the many Holocaust survivors who gave evidence against him, submitting an affidavit to the court about what he had witnessed in Auschwitz and giving his estimate of the total number of Jews killed there. He also testified at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in West Germany, giving evidence that he had seen defendant Robert Mulka, second-in-command of the camp, selecting Jews for the gas chambers. Mulka was convicted of murder based on Vrba's evidence and sentenced to 14 year's imprisonment.

Vrba often spoke publicly about his Auschwitz experiences, writing a memoir entitled I Escaped From Auschwitz and giving an interview for the 1985 Holocaust documentary Shoah. He also testified at the 1985 trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel in order to prove the existence of the Auschwitz gas chambers. Vrba died of cancer in 2006.

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