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Rudolf Vrba
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dogs from sniffing them out, then fled for eleven days overland to Slovakia after the SS cordon around the camp was withdrawn.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
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
Submitted on April 26, 2006 in By David.
