The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

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Freedland first came across Vrba in Claude Lanzmann’s epic nine-hour film, Shoah, which he first saw as a 19-year-old in London. “Vrba seemed of a different generation from the other interviewees, though actually he wasn’t,” Freedland says now. Only now did I understand that this was the same man who lay quiet and motionless for three days in the hollow pile of lumber while Auschwitz was on maximum alert, only a few yards from the armed SS men and their dogs combing the area so thoroughly. If he could do that, then he certainly could also don the mask of a professor and manage everyday conversation with his colleagues in Vancouver, Canada, that paradise land that is never fully appreciated by its own citizens, a people without the slightest notion of the planet Auschwitz. [225] Death [ edit ]

Nevertheless he went to see her straight away, and the two sat in her garden, sitting socially distanced, talking over five sessions. Despite the significant influence Vrba had on Klein's life, Klein's first sight of Vrba was the latter's interview in Shoah in 1985. He disagreed with Vrba's allegations about Kastner; Klein had seen Kastner at work in the Jewish Council offices in Budapest, where Klein had worked as a secretary, and he viewed Kastner as a hero. He told Vrba how he had tried himself, in the spring of 1944, to convince others in Budapest of the Vrba–Wetzler report's veracity, but no one had believed him, which inclined him to the view that Vrba was wrong to argue that the Jews would have acted had they known about the death camps. Vrba said that Klein's experience illustrated his point: distributing the report via informal channels had lent it no authority. [223] In 1945 Vrba reconnected with a childhood friend, Gerta Sidonová, from Trnava. They both wanted to study for degrees, so they took courses set up by Czechoslovakia's Department of Education for those who had missed out on schooling because of the Nazis. They moved after that to Prague, where they married in 1947; Sidonová took the surname Vrbová, the female version of Vrba. She graduated in medicine, then went into research. [190] In 1949 Vrba obtained a degree in chemistry (Ing. Chem.) from the Czech Technical University in Prague, which earned him a postgraduate fellowship from the Ministry of Education, and in 1951 he received his doctorate (Dr. Tech. Sc.) for a thesis entitled "On the metabolism of butyric acid". [191] [192] The couple had two daughters: Helena (1952–1982) [193] and Zuzana (b.1954). [194] Vrba undertook post-doctoral research at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, where he received his C.Sc. in 1956. From 1953 to 1958 he worked for Charles University Medical School in Prague. [191] His marriage ended around this time. [195] Defection to Israel, move to England [ edit ] Vrba has been in Auschwitz for close to two years and has performed very different roles and tasks. He has lived in the main camp, and in Birkenau. He has been part of different commandos. So we get a very good view on many different parts of the camp. According to the historian Zoltán Tibori Szabó, the report was first published in Geneva in May 1944, in German, by Abraham Silberschein of the World Jewish Congress as Tatsachenbericht über Auschwitz und Birkenau, dated 17 May 1944. [130] Florian Manoliu of the Romanian Legation in Bern took the report to Switzerland and gave it to George Mantello, a Jewish businessman from Transylvania, who was working as the first secretary of the El Salvador consulate in Geneva. It was thanks to Mantello that the report received, in the Swiss press, its first wide coverage. [131] Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, May/June 1944Vrba described the ramp, selection, the Sonderkommando, and the camps' internal organization; the building of Auschwitz III and how Jews were being used as slave labour for Krupp, Siemens, IG Farben, and DAW; and the gas chambers. [116] Wetzler gave them the data from the central registry hidden in the remaining tube, and described the high death toll among Soviet POWs, the destruction of the Czech family camp, the medical experiments, and the names of doctors involved in them. [117] He also handed over the label from the Zyklon B canister. [118] Every word, he wrote, "has the effect of a blow on the head". [119] Vrba's place in Holocaust historiography was the focus of Ruth Linn's Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting (Cornell University Press, 2004). The Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies at the City University of New York held an academic conference in April 2011 to discuss the Vrba–Wetzler and other Auschwitz reports, resulting in a book, The Auschwitz Reports and the Holocaust in Hungary (Columbia University Press, 2011), edited by Randolph L. Braham and William vanden Heuvel. [226] In 2014 the British historian Michael Fleming reappraised the impact of the Vrba–Wetzler report in Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust (Cambridge University Press, 2014). [232] Awards [ edit ] Martin Gilbert Several appeals were made to Horthy, including by the Spanish, Swiss and Turkish governments, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gustaf V of Sweden, the International Committee of the Red Cross and, on 25 June 1944, Pope Pius XII. [174] The Pope's telegram did not mention Jews: "We are being beseeched in various quarters to do everything in our power that, in this noble and chivalrous nation, the sufferings, already so heavy, endured by a large number of unfortunate people, because of their nationality or race, may not be extended and aggravated." [139] That was his great insight as a teenager, that the difference between truth and lies could be the difference between life and death.”

Then they headed west, towards the little birch wood that gave Birkenau its name. They advanced not on foot, but on their stomachs, inching along, commando style. They did not get up until they had reached the trees, the same small forest that held the pits that had once burned corpses day and night. But if Walter expected Krasňanský and Neumann to dash out of the door that instant, stuffing the report into the satchel of a messenger who would rush to Budapest as fast as a locomotive could take him, he was to be disappointed. The next day, Friday 28 April, the home for the elderly became the venue for a secret meeting of the Slovak Jewish leadership, with Neumann in the chair. They were in resistance mode, so the rules of illegal work applied: no names were to be used.Vrba wrote that he learned to live with the restrictions but rebelled when the Slovak government announced, in February 1942, that thousands of Jews were to be deported to "reservations" in German-occupied Poland. [24] [c] The deportations came at the request of Germany, which needed the labour; the Slovak government paid the Germans RM500 per Jew on the understanding that the government would lay claim to the deportees' property. [26] Around 800 of the 58,000 Slovakian Jews deported between March and October 1942 survived. [27] Vrba blamed the Slovak Jewish Council for having cooperated with the deportations. [28] Rosenberg, who changed his name to Rudolf Vrba, with his then wife Gerta and daughter Helena in 1953. Photograph: courtesy of Caroline Hilton

The woman looked not so much scared as affronted by this intrusion from a ghoulish man in pyjama stripes, his breath foul, his head shaved, a prisoner who was surely therefore some kind of criminal. Instantly, she approached a German officer as if she were the aggrieved patron of a Prague department store, demanding to see the manager. “Officer, one of the gangsters has told me that I and my children are to be killed,” she complained, in perfect German. Vrba stated that warning the Hungarian community was one of the motives for his escape. His statement to that effect was first published on 27 February 1961, in the first installment of a five-article series about Vrba by a journalist, Alan Bestic, for the Daily Herald in England. In the second installment the next day, Vrba described having overheard the SS say they were looking forward to Hungarian salami, a reference to the provisions Hungarian Jews were likely to carry. [237] Vrba said that in January 1944 a kapo had told him the Germans were building a new railway line to bring the Jews of Hungary directly into Auschwitz II. [238]The Swiss students made thousands of copies, which were passed to other students and MPs. [136] At least 383 articles about Auschwitz appeared in the Swiss press between 23 June and 11 July 1944. [138] According to Michael Fleming, this was more than the number of articles published about the Holocaust during the war by all the British popular newspapers combined. [139] Importance of dates [ edit ]