Alan Bestic from the book cover of “The Importance of Being Irish.”
Rudolf Vrba’s good fortune in having Wetzler as his escape partner was only matched by his good fortune in finding Alan Bestic as a writing partner and Robin Lipson as a second wife. Whereas it’s often difficult for historians to reference Vrba without bringing Wetzler into the equation, and the importance of Vrba’s 26-year marriage to Robin has been made clear in Holocaust Hero (Firefly Books, 2025), Bestic’s essential role in Vrba’s story remains under-recognized. It doesn’t help matters that Bestic’s introduction to the original 1963/1964 version of the book has been omitted from future editions. It serves, first and foremost, as an important character reference. Vrba, after all, was clearly a ‘foreigner’ in England, someone from a rather unknown area–the eastern part of Czechoslovakia–so the book’s publishers obviously they required the veteran journalist Bestic to essentially vouch for him. In the process, Bestic has been somewhat miscast as a professional side-kick when, in fact, his co-author billing on the book’s cover was fully merited.
While Bestic most certainly did not outwit the Nazis by hiding in a woodpile with him, or deal with him as a spouse, the intimacy of co-writing a disturbing Auschwitz memoir, in search of the truth, is not a job for the squeamish or unsophisticated. In their literary foxhole, fuelled by laughter and alcohol, they survived to tell the tale. Steeped in humanity, rich in details, the duo’s co-written memoir, is easily one of the most engaging, most readable, most penetrating Holocaust books. Precious little content can be deemed extraneous. While not shirking on the horrors of Auschwitz, it’s leavened by Vrba’s wry, gallows humour. Vrba and Bestic obviously got along and shared a mission to educate the proverbial Everyman. This collaboration was a remarkable fluke of human chemistry. Vrba later spoke many times about hoping to write a book that his milkman could read and with Bestic he found a Fleet Street veteran of the newspaper wars who knew exactly how to aim their prose.
The question arises: Why, then, has there been almost zero recognition for Bestic’s essential co-creativity? Possibly that is because most commentators on the Holocaust now tend to be academic historians who are taught to write in an almost regimental style, antithetical to lively writing. Trained to pay more attention to footnotes than drama or, for that matter, compassion, the many academics who have examined Vrba’s story do not bother mentioning, in their own work, the virtues of I Cannot Forgive (later re-titled) as ‘pure literature.’ If it is not over-shadowed by Jonathan Freedland’s piggy-backed, duplicitous account, the Bestic-Vrba collaboration could well stand the test of time as literature, first, and history second. Meanwhile, Bestic’s life and personality remain in the shadows.
Here [below] is Bestic’s introduction to Vrba’s memoir, dated London, October, 1963.
Preface
Rudolf Vrba does not fit into the popular image of a man from Auschwitz. His face is comparatively unlined. His hair has no tinge of grey. He seems younger, if anything, than his thirty-nine years and his eyes reflect humour rather than tragedy.
There is no chip on his shoulder; and bitterness, where it exists, is controlled carefully by undeniable facts, not by fancies which the years have nourished.
He looks, indeed, what he is, a blending of cosmopolitan intellectual and scientist; and this in itself is remarkable, for Vrba, because he was a Jew, had to leave school at the age of fifteen in his native Slovakia and work as a labourer.
He studied secretly until he rebelled against the Fascist regime of Monsignor Tiso, thus qualifying for Auschwitz where intellectual pursuits were not encouraged; and even after his escape he denied himself the luxury of education for a further year, for he believed that he had the most important work to do, a war to fight, indeed, against the Nazis of whose corrupt philosophies and barbaric actions he had gained by that time such an intimate knowledge. He joined the Partisans in Western Slovakia; was decorated with the Order of the Insurrection, the Medal of Bravery and the Medal of Honour; and, only when the fight had been won, did he turn to academy.
In 1945, he enrolled at the Department of Chemical Technology of the Czech Technical University in Prague, graduated there in 1949 and was awarded a post-graduate Fellowship by the Ministry of Education. In 1951, he obtained his Doctorate of Technical Science.
Since then his work has attracted the interest of the scientific world. He has written extensively on his subject, neuro-chemistry, and has lectured not only in Britain, where he is continuing his research, but in France, Denmark, Israel, Austria and the Soviet Union.
I regard this considerable academic triumph in some ways as even more remarkable than his dramatic escape from Auschwitz. Neither, it is true, would have been possible, had Vrba not possessed a keen, cool intellect. Where the escape demanded physical courage of a high order, however, his academic achievements needed qualities which are, perhaps, even more rare.
Basic ability was not enough in his case. He had to stifle, if not to destroy, his memories of the past. He had to blanket, if not to obliterate, the stench of the crematoria, the sight of the unprecedented agony, the thought of utter degradation and, perhaps more important, more difficult, the thought of the men who were responsible for it.
This, Doctor Rudolf Vrba, from the small Slovak town of Trnava, has done on a scale which I would have thought impossible. His Auschwitz number, 44070, is tattooed on his arm; but the scars of the place, the physical and mental scars, he has removed.
It is difficult to explain just how he has done so; perhaps he is not quite sure himself. I know, however, perhaps better than anyone else, that his particular brand of therapy has been thoroughly effective; for, when I asked him to tell me his Auschwitz story for this book, I did so with vague misgivings. I felt that those scars might well re-open, if I plunged his mind back into the cauldron of that camp with all its horrors.
I was, I am glad to say, wrong. It would be equally wrong to suggest, however, that he found the task with which I faced him easy. In fact, I believe he undertook it because he felt it his duty to remind a world which is inclined to forget too quickly that there were and are men who helped to murder millions.
He worked with me hard and patiently. Indeed, I would like to pay tribute to him for the immense trouble he took over every details; for the meticulous, almost fanatical respect he revealed for accuracy; and the courage which this cold-blooded survey of two ghastly years demanded.
— Alan Bestic
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There is one other major difference between the original, hardcover version of Rudolf Vrba’s co-written memoir and all subsequent versions. The first compilation includes 14 pages of very revealing and mostly disturbing b&w photos of Auschwitz victims and the conditions in Auschwitz-Birkenau, sourced from the Wiener Library, as well as a page devoted to the non-barbershop quartet of Heydrich, Eichmann, Hoess and Kramer (before he became known as “The Beast of Belsen”. Those 15 pages culminated in a final page showing the tractor at Bergen-Belsen moving piles of naked, emaciated corpses. The by-now-famous photograph of that tractor at work at Bergen-Belsen (a camp without furnaces that relied on old-fashioned forms of murder, chiefly starvation) featured a terse caption, “The Final Solution.” These were images that Rudolf Vrba wanted his milkman to see. The concise, cryptic captions are themselves effectively unsettling, even to this day. It is within I Cannot Forgive that the general public was introduced to one of the most oft-seen images of Auschwitz ever since–a few Nazi officers are casually policing an enormous cavalcade of obedient, newly-arrived victims, all still fully clothed, glad to finally off the train, assembled on a crematorium ramp, divided into twin sections, in 1944; with mostly women and children on the left to be gassed. The caption describes “a fresh batch of Hungarian Jews….”
Precious few authoritative memoirs of Auschwitz have ever risked disturbing its potential readers in this way. Venerated Holocaust authors such as Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel of Viktor Frankl would never have dared to do what Vrba and Bestic believed to be essential, to risk alienating the public, inviting censure, severely lessening commercial viability, to tell-and-to-show the depths of depravity to which mankind could sink. A lifetime later, the inclusion of several images in particular remains shocking; therefore the negative impact that such explicit horror would have surely had on bookstore merchants and librarians (as gatekeepers for the general public) would have certainly limited sales. It is not difficult, therefore, to posit that likely Rudolf Vrba, ever since, has been punished, discriminated against, besmirched and banished, as an enfant terrible within the vast Holocaust canon–entirely miscast as a hothead–for daring to believe that the public deserved to know, to really know, what the Holocaust was truly like.
Claude Lanzmann’s much-acclaimed Shoah documentary is a fairytale compared to several of the photographic images that Vrba and Bestic selected for I Cannot Forgive. Without those images in the middle of the text, at the heart of the book, the title I Cannot Forgive loses its resonance. To some, the phrase I Cannot Forgive might be considered churlish. If someone cannot forgive, does that not make that person seem, well, anti-Christian? When the decision was made to dispense with the book’s original title, the much less provocative I Escaped from Auschwitz required that all that upsetting imagery must be jettisoned.
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Here follows the obituary for Alan Bestic from the Irish Times, published on (Saturday) June 14, 2014.
Newsman and anatomist of 1960s Ireland
Alan Bestic: July 11th, 1921 – May 12th, 2014
Alan Bestic (second from left, arm on table) with a group of journalistic colleagues. Photograph: Irish Times
Alan “Sammy” Bestic, who has died aged 92, knew from an early age that he wanted to be a journalist. His trade remained one of the loves of his life from the first day he entered the Irish Times building on the eve of the second World War to his death last month in Surrey.
On the day he started work with The Irish Times he had been so nervous that he paced up and down for an hour before entering. The lessons he learned inside that ramshackle old building took him on a lifelong adventure that saw him travel the world. He wrote five books based on what he saw and heard.
His death breaks a link with a golden generation of writers and writing in The Irish Times. Among colleagues in the dusty old Westmoreland Street offices were humorous writers like Patrick Campbell and columnist Brian O’Nolan, more “serious” journalists like Cathal O’Shannon, Lionel Fleming and Jack White, and those who combined the two facets, like Sammy Bestic (named after a cartoon charter of the 1930s), Brian Inglis and Tony Gray. All eventually moved on to pastures new, much to the chagrin of idiosyncratic editor Bertie Smyllie. Lusitania sinking Few should have been surprised that Sammy outlived them all. His father – also Alan – survived the German torpedo which hit the liner Lusitania (he was third officer) off Kinsale in 1915, and the Luftwaffe sinking of the Irish Lights tender Isolda (he was captain) off Wexford in 1940.
Alan senior was a sailor of the old school, making one of the last sail journeys to Australia, where he signed off. The Denbigh Castle sank on the return journey. He contributed articles about marine matters to The Irish Times into old age.
Sammy Bestic’s love of writing came from Johnny Draper, his English teacher at Kingstown Grammar school, now part of Newpark Comprehensive in south Dublin, where the Bestic family lived. He studied shorthand and typing at night school, where he met his wife-to-be, Patricia Geraghty. They were married in the sacristy of her parish church, as Catholic girls could not be encouraged to marry Protestants.
Smyllie sent Sammy to Poland as the second World War ended. He was among the first wave to report from Soviet-occupied Poland and East Germany. Out of this came the remarkable co-written tale of Rudolf Vrba in I Cannot Forgive, about a young Slovakian Jewish boy who not only survived Auschwitz but escaped from it.
In 1951, Bestic left Dublin to work in London’s Fleet Street and his work appeared in the Daily Herald and the Daily Telegraph, and later, when he became a freelance, in many other British national papers and magazines. Along the way he had a Mark Twain episode – he was reported to have died in the Congo while covering the Niemba ambush in 1961 [In fact, the ambush was in 1960. — A.T.]
A brief return to Ireland decades later gave him material for one of his five books, The Importance of Being Irish (1969): “The scampi belt, the Bacardi brigade … they own a house in Foxrock and have a Mercedes on the firm. The wife has a Mini for shopping and a swimming pool in the garden is on order. There is a cottage in Connemara – ‘I can really think down there’ – wine name-droppers, BA (pass), top convent wife with Ulysses in the handbag.” Paul Howard later mined that seam with his character Ross O’Carroll Kelly – Sammy Bestic just got there a few decades earlier. His Sex and the Singular English gave the stiff-upper-lip brigade a similar seeing to.
Bestic also wrote a very early exposé of Britain’s drugs problem, Turn Me On Man, published in 1966 as soft drugs became popular with the young. Fighting drug abuse remained high on his personal radar. He lived to see the Surrey Drug and Alcohol Care charity he founded given the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service in 2011. Throughout his long life as an exile he maintained a lively interest in all Ireland’s sporting teams – particularly rugby ones – failing dismally the so-called “Tebbit test” for immigrants: “If you live in England you should support the English national teams”.
In the weeks before his death he said: “If I could, I’d do it all over again.” His son TV reporter Richard Bestic said: ” My father never became a rich man in monetary terms. Instead, with the skills he learned at The Irish Times, he travelled the world with his reporter’s notebook and pen and wrote some terrific tales of his adventures. He had a trained eye for the absurd.”
Alan “Sammy” Bestic died in Surrey following a chest infection. He is survived by his children, Paul, Penny (Fabb), Richard and Patrick.
*
It was reported in 2020 that screenwriters Evan Parter and Paul Hilborn were working on an adaptation of Vrba’s memoir for a film in conjunction with film producer Ben Shields Catlin. According to an industry publication called Deadline, there were plans afoot to mount the project via Catlin’s Story in the Sky studio. The rights for film adaptation were reportedly accorded by Robin Vrba, who manages her late husband’s estate (with assistance from a brother, who is a lawyer). “Rudi considered it his duty to help the world fully realize the horror of Nazism and recognize the alarming signs in the future,” she said. The sale of film rights was in conjunction with the re-release of Vrba’s 1963 classic memoir, I Cannot Forgive, on April 21, 2020, under its second title, I Escaped from Auschwitz. In a statement on behalf of the project, the creative team announced, “The book, I Escaped from Auschwitz, which tells about a person’s desire to uncover the monstrous truth and save his people, can be called the most inspiring memoir ever read by us. We are very grateful to Robin for entrusting us with sharing Rudi’s* story with the world. ”In August of 2022, it was further reported that Next Productions was aligned for production, financing and sales of the project and the movie adaptation of the book would be titled Untold, to be directed by Aaron Schneider who directed Tom Hanks in Greyhound and has won an Oscar for best live-action short for Two Soldiers. Next Productions and parent company The Exchange had jointly optioned feature script and book rights. It was announced that Alex Wolff was slated to star as Vrba. As of 2024, the rights to use Vrba’s book as the basis for a movie reverted to Robin Vrba. So it was back to the proverbial drawing board.
[*Rudolf Vrba preferred people who did not know him to refer to him as Rudolf Vrba. If someone who did know him wished to shorten his first name as a sign of familiarity, he preferred the name Rudi, not Rudy. Hence Robin Vrba uses the term Rudi; the press release assumes familiarity but the first name is misspelled.]
Next: LANZMANN & SHOAH
