Author: Ruth Linn
Publication: The Guardian
Date: April 13, 2006
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,,1752845,00.html
Escapee from Auschwitz who revealed the truth
about the camp
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
