Rudolf Vrba
Rudolf Vrba was a Slovak-Jewish biochemist who, as a teenager in 1942, was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. He escaped from the camp in April 1944, at the height of the Holocaust, and co-wrote the Vrba-Wetzler report, a detailed report about the mass murder taking place there. The report, distributed by George Mantello in Switzerland, is credited with having halted the mass deportation of Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz in July 1944, saving more than 200,000 lives. After the war, Vrba trained as a biochemist, working mostly in England and Canada.
Vrba and his fellow escapee Alfréd Wetzler fled Auschwitz three weeks after German forces invaded Hungary and shortly before the SS began mass deportations of Hungary's Jewish population to the camp. The information the men dictated to Jewish officials when they arrived in Slovakia on 24 April 1944, which included that new arrivals in Auschwitz were being gassed and not "resettled" as the Germans maintained, became known as the Vrba–Wetzler report. When the War Refugee Board published it with considerable delay in November 1944, the New York Herald Tribune described it as "the most shocking document ever issued by a United States government agency". While it confirmed material in earlier reports from Polish and other escapees, the historian Miroslav Kárný wrote that it was unique in its "unflinching detail".
There was a delay of several weeks before the report was distributed widely enough to gain the attention of governments. Mass transports of Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz began on 15 May 1944 at a rate of 12,000 people a day. Most went straight to the gas chambers. Vrba argued until the end of his life that the deportees might have refused to board the trains, or at least that their panic would have disrupted the transports, had the report been distributed sooner and more widely.
From late June and into July 1944, material from the Vrba–Wetzler report appeared in newspapers and radio broadcasts in the United States and Europe, particularly in Switzerland, prompting world leaders to appeal to Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy to halt the deportations. On 2 July, American and British forces bombed Budapest, and on 6 July, in an effort to exert his sovereignty, Horthy ordered that the deportations should end. By then, over 434,000 Jews had been deported in 147 trains—almost the entire Jewish population of the Hungarian countryside—but another 200,000 in Budapest were saved.
Early life and arrest
Vrba was born Walter Rosenberg on 11 September 1924 in Topoľčany, Czechoslovakia, one of the four children of Helena Rosenberg, née Gruenfeldová, and her husband, Elias. Vrba's mother was from Zbehy; his maternal grandfather, Bernat Grünfeld, an Orthodox Jew from Nitra, was murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp. Vrba took the name Rudolf Vrba after his escape from Auschwitz.The Rosenbergs owned a steam sawmill in Jaklovce and lived in Trnava. In September 1941 the Slovak Republic —a client state of Nazi Germany—passed a "Jewish Codex", similar to the Nuremberg Laws, which introduced restrictions on Jews' education, housing and travel. The government set up transit camps at Nováky, Sereď and Vyhne. Jews were required to wear a yellow badge and live in certain areas, and available jobs went first to non-Jews. When Vrba was excluded, at age 15, from the gymnasium in Bratislava as a result of the restrictions, he found work as a labourer and continued his studies at home, particularly chemistry, English and Russian. He met his future wife, [|Gerta Sidonová], around this time; she had also been excluded from school.
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. The deportations came at the request of Germany, which needed the labour; the Slovak government paid the Germans RM 500 per Jew on the understanding that the government would lay claim to the deportees' property. Around 800 of the 58,000 Slovak Jews deported between March and October 1942 survived. Vrba blamed the Slovak Jewish Council for having cooperated with the deportations.
Insisting that he would not be "deported like a calf in a wagon", Vrba decided to join the Czechoslovak Army in exile in England and set off in a taxi for the border, aged 17, with a map, a box of matches, and the equivalent of £10 from his mother. After making his way to Budapest, Hungary, he decided to return to Trnava but was arrested at the Hungarian border. The Slovak authorities sent him to the Nováky transit camp; he escaped briefly but was caught. An SS officer instructed that he be deported on the next transport.
Majdanek and Auschwitz
Majdanek
Vrba was deported from Czechoslovakia on 15 June 1942 to the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin, German-occupied Poland, where he briefly encountered his older brother, Sammy. They saw each other "almost simultaneously and we raised our arms in brief salute"; it was the last time he ever saw him. He also encountered "kapos" for the first time: prisoners appointed as functionaries, one of whom he recognized from Trnava. Most wore green triangles, signalling their category as "career criminals":Vrba's head and body were shaved, and he was given a uniform, wooden shoes and a cap. Caps had to be removed whenever the SS came within three yards. Prisoners were beaten for talking or moving too slowly. At roll call each morning, prisoners who had died during the night were piled up behind the living. Vrba was given a job as a builder's labourer. When a kapo asked for 400 volunteers for farm work elsewhere, Vrba signed up, looking for a chance to escape. A Czech kapo who had befriended Vrba hit him when he heard about this; the kapo explained that the "farm work" was in Auschwitz.
Auschwitz I
On 29 June 1942, the Reich Security Main Office transferred Vrba and the other volunteers to Auschwitz I, the main camp in Oświęcim, a journey of over two days. Vrba considered trying to escape from the train, but the SS announced that ten men would be shot for every one who went missing.On his second day in Auschwitz, Vrba watched as prisoners threw bodies onto a cart, stacked in piles of ten, "the head of one between the legs of another to save space". The following day he and 400 other men were beaten into a cold shower in a shower room built for 30, then marched outside naked to register. He was tattooed on his left forearm as no. 44070 and given a striped tunic, trousers, cap and wooden shoes. After registration, which took all day and into the evening, he was shown to his barracks, an attic in a block next to the main gate and the Arbeit macht frei sign.
Young and strong, Vrba was "purchased" by a kapo, Frank, in exchange for a lemon and assigned to work in the SS food store. This gave him access to soap and water, which helped to save his life. Frank, he learned, was a kind man who would pretend to beat his prisoners when the guards were watching, although the blows always missed. The camp regime was otherwise marked by its pettiness and cruelty. When Heinrich Himmler visited on 17 July 1942, the inmates were told everything had to be spotless. As the prison orchestra assembled by the gate for Himmler's arrival, the block senior and two others started beating an inmate because he was missing a tunic button:
Auschwitz II
"Kanada" commando
In August 1942 Vrba was reassigned to the Aufräumungskommando or "Kanada" commando, in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the extermination camp, 4 km from Auschwitz I. Around 200–800 prisoners worked on the nearby Judenrampe where freight trains carrying Jews arrived, removing the dead, then sorting through the new arrivals' property. Many brought kitchen utensils and clothes for different seasons, suggesting to Vrba that they believed the stories about resettlement.It took 2–3 hours to clear out a train, by which time most new arrivals were dead. Those deemed fit for work were selected for slave labour and the rest taken by truck to the gas chamber. Vrba estimated that 90 percent were gassed. He told Claude Lanzmann in 1978 that the process relied on speed and making sure no panic broke out, because panic meant the next transport would be delayed.
The new arrivals' property was taken to barracks known as Effektenlager I and II in Auschwitz I. Inmates, and apparently also some of the camp administration, called the barracks Kanada I and II because they were a "land of plenty". Everything was there—medicine, food, clothing, and cash—much of it repackaged by the Aufräumungskommando to be sent to Germany. The Aufräumungskommando lived in Auschwitz I, block 4, until 15 January 1943 when they were transferred to block 16 in Auschwitz II, sector Ib, where Vrba lived until June 1943.
After Vrba had been in Auschwitz for about five months, he fell sick with typhus; his weight dropped to and he was delirious. At his lowest point, he was helped by Josef Farber, a Slovak member of the camp resistance, who brought him medication and thereafter extended to him the protection of the Auschwitz underground.
In early 1943 Vrba was given the job of assistant registrar in one of the blocks; he told Lanzmann that the resistance movement had manoeuvered him into the position because it gave him access to information. A few weeks later, in June, he was made registrar of block 10 in Auschwitz II, the quarantine section for men, again because of the underground. The position gave him his own room and bed, and he could wear his own clothes. He was also able to speak to new arrivals who had been selected to work, and he had to write reports about the registration process, which allowed him to ask questions and take notes.
Estimates of numbers murdered
From his room in BIIa, Vrba said he could see the trucks drive toward the gas chambers. In his estimate, 10 percent of each transport was selected to work and the rest murdered. During his time on the Judenrampe from 18 August 1942 to 7 June 1943, he told Lanzmann in 1978, he had seen at least 200 trains arrive, each containing 1,000–5,000 people. In a 1998 paper, he wrote that he had witnessed 100–300 trains arrive, each locomotive pulling 20–40 freight cars and sometimes 50–60. He calculated that, between the spring of 1942 and 15 January 1944, 1.5 million had been murdered. According to the Vrba–Wetzler report, 1,765,000 were murdered in Auschwitz between April 1942 and April 1944. In 1961 Vrba swore in an affidavit for the trial of Adolf Eichmann that he believed 2.5 million had been murdered overall in the camp, plus or minus 10 percent.Vrba's estimates are higher than those of Holocaust historians but in line with estimates from SS officers and Auschwitz survivors, including members of the Sonderkommando. Early estimates ranged from one to 6.5 million. Rudolf Höss, the first Auschwitz commandant, said in 1946 that three million had been murdered in the camp, although he revised his view. In 1946 the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland estimated four million. Later scholarly estimates were lower. According to Polish historian Franciszek Piper, writing in 2000, most historians place the figure at one to 1.5 million. His own widely accepted estimate was that at least 1.3 million were sent to Auschwitz and at least 1,082,000 died, including 960,000 Jews. Piper's estimate of the death toll for April 1942 to April 1944 was 450,000, against Vrba's 1,765,000.