Here is the Birkenau roadway leading from the Auschwitz arrivals ramp for railway transports to the gas chambers and crematoria IV & V. Far more than a million people, including babies and infants, took this route to be murdered. Please imagine being on this road.
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Widely regarded as the preeminent scholar on the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, author of the three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, said there were only two great Holocaust heroes — Mordechai Anielewicz, who led the Warsaw Uprising, and the Auschwitz escapee Rudolf Vrba.
Only one of these two men saved 200,000 lives.
Rudolf Vrba escaped from Auschwitz in April of 1944 to provide the world with undeniable evidence of the Holocaust. He soon co-authored the Vrba-Wetzler Report, now credited with saving 200,000 Hungarian Jews. Nobody saved more lives during World War II than Vrba along with his escape partner Alfréd Wetzler.
Coinciding with the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, Rudolf Vrba later co-wrote five articles with journalist Alan Bestic of the Daily Herald in London, leading to his riveting Auschwitz memoir, I Cannot Forgive (1963). Handsome, brilliant and bold, the Czechoslovakian-born, Canadian scientist later served as a formidable prosecution witness for trials of Nazi war criminals and Holocaust deniers.
Vrba was forever rankled by the complicity of some Jewish leaders, particularly in Hungary, who, he believed, had failed to adequately forewarn Jews of their fate. Had the Jewish population of Hungary been told immediately about the Vrba-Wetzler Report, far more than 200,000 Jews would have likely been saved.
Having spent 21 months and seven days in Auschwitz [in all three Auschwitz camps], Vrba believed himself to be a European who happened to be Jewish, rather than a Jew who happened to be born in Czechoslovakia. With this viewpoint, he was not an avid Zionist. Instead, Vrba revered science and freedom.
For the final third of his life, Vrba taught pharmacology at western Canada’s top university, having become a Canadian citizen in 1972. Divorced from his teenage sweetheart, Gerta (mother to his two daughters), Vrba remarried to American-born Robin Lipson in 1975 after his two-year stint at the Harvard Medical School in Boston.
Estranged from the mainstream Jewish community where he lived, Vrba died in Vancouver, in 2006, completely unheralded in Canada. Vrba went to his grave believing the Holocaust, although racially defined, was equally motivated by the massive theft of Jewish properties and possessions.
This site has been prepared as a public service. The goal is solely to enhance awareness and understanding of the Holocaust in general, and Rudolf Vrba in particular.
It has been compiled and written by one person with the essential collaboration of webmaster, Sharon Jackson, and the invaluable encouragement of just one friend, Yosef Wosk.
I knew Rudolf Vrba. We got along easily, even though I was much younger. I never made contact with Robin Vrba in New York City until approximately 90% of this website had already been built and posted. I have since gained a great deal of hitherto unknown and unpublished information about Vrba from Robin Vrba, who strongly disapproves of Jonathan Freedland’s book, The Escape Artist, alleging it is little more than a rehash of Rudolf Vrba’s own memoir.
In an ideal world, this website would awaken others to the need to recognize and celebrate Rudolf Vrba.
In an ideal world, the City of Vancouver, as well as the university where he taught for more than thirty years, plus the city of Bratislava and the nations of Canada, Israel and Slovakia, would suitably honour him.
And, in an ideal world, this ongoing research for and about Rudolf Vrba will lead to a three-volume biography.
It shouldn’t matter, but I’ll close by saying I am not Jewish.
-Alan Twigg
