Alan Twigg conducted ten interviews with people who knew Rudolf Vrba. In this section of the site we feature video clips from those interviews that were mainly conducted in the first half of 2022.
Dr. Helen Karsai was born in 1948 in Žilina (Slovakia) where the Vrba-Wetzler Report was written. She and her fellow Vancouver oncologist Joseph Ragaz and Robin Vrba participated in the second annual memorial trek from Auschwitz to Karsai’s hometown of Žilina to trace Vrba and Wetzler’s eleven-day path to freedom, in 2015. Karsai also visited Auschwitz escapee Arnost Rosin in Dusseldorf and his co-escapee Czelaw Mordowicz in Toronto, as well as Rudolf Vrba’s mother in Bratislava. She and Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz were two of the few people in Vancouver who could converse freely with Vrba in his native tongue. In the first of her lively interview segments, Karsai recalls visiting Vrba’s mother, at his request, as well as mutual friends and acquaintances in Bratislava.
In this video, Helen speaks about the first time she met Rudolf Vrba in the 1980s at a talk he was slated to give about being a witness at the trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel in Canada. Instead, Vrba changed the topic of his talk entirely.
Being a Jew in Slovakia after the war was difficult. Here she recalls the day her father told her she was Jewish.
Karsai recalls visiting Vrba’s mother, the fact that Vrba’s father died of a kidney disease before the war and how pleased Rudolf Vrba was when his daughter, Zuzka, brought her two-year-old son to Vancouver to meet his grandfather.
“If my daughter needed help, I would swim to Papua, New Guinea,” Vrba told Karsai, after he learned of the tragic death of his eldest daughter, Dr. Helena Vrbova, in 1982 .
Helen Karsai speaks of being with Rudi for his radiation treatments, and a letter he received from an Israeli military officer thanking him for what he did in 1944. She also recalls Vrba resenting any notion that, in their complete ignorance of their fate, Jews had boarded the trains like sheep–an antisemitic fallacy. She speaks of meeting Czeslaw Mordowicz who lived next door to her mother in Toronto.
Helen Karsai explains how a misunderstanding had evolved between Mordowicz and Vrba and how she served as a go-between to help resolve it.
Karsai recalls a pleasant day in Dusseldorf with Arnošt Rosin who had worked for her grandfather’s distillery before WWII and he knew her grandfather well. She mentions how Vrba convinced her to visit Germany and how Rosin told her that Vrba deserved to be the ‘star’. Wetzler, on the other hand, felt he had been under-represented in Vrba’s book. Karsai explains this was purposeful: in the early 1960s, when I Cannot Forgive was released, Wetzler was still living behind the Iron Curtain and Vrba, as an anti-Communist, did not want to put him at risk.
Helen Karsai never met Wetzler but she suggests that some enmity evolved between the pair. Whereas Wetzler evolved Communist sympathies; Vrba did not. Because the new European feature film “Escape from Auschwitz” is based on Wetzler’s own book, Vrba has been relegated to second fiddle and Wetzler is portrayed as the more handsome, strong, purposeful escapee. In fact, Vrba was arguably the more dynamic personality.
Helen Karsai speaks of Vrba as a motivator, someone who guided her in her reading and understanding of the Holocaust. In 2015, she took the Vrba-Wetzler Memorial Trek and was surprised to learn that teachers in Slovakia only taught history up to the 19th century because the 20th century was deemed too problematic. She was also shocked to learn that the young people did not know any Slovakian songs, only American songs.
Helen Karsai speaks of walking in the mountains with Rudolf Vrba and enjoying their wide-ranging conversations.
The story of my mother’s narrow escape
Watching the film 999: The Forgotten Girls prompted Dr. Helen Karsai to write about her mother’s last-minute escape from the “work assignment” that had some of her friends taken to Auschwitz, where most were killed. She attended the Canadian premiere of the movie in February of 2024 when it was screened in the Rothstein Theatre in Vancouver. She subsequently contributed this article to the Jewish Independent newspaper.
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This is a brilliantly made movie, which combined clips from home movies, historic film footage and photos, interviews with survivors and others, Slovak folk songs, and more. The movie explained how the Hlinka Guards (Slovak militia) rounded up young, unmarried Jewish girls from small towns in eastern Slovakia. The Jewish girls from the city of Humenné were put on buses and transported to the city of Poprad, where they were put into military barracks. On March 25, 1942, when the number of girls reached 999, they were put into a cattle-car train and left Poprad and their native Slovakia for an “unknown destination.” The train went into the Third Reich for “volunteer work.” This was the first transport to Auschwitz. Most of these girls died there.
I heard a similar story from my mother, Klara (Tamara) Kulkova, who was born in northern Slovakia, in the town of Zilina. She remembered that, in the summer of 1940, she attended a Jewish camp of the Maccabi movement, and that she enjoyed that summer very much with her classmates and some older girls. She fondly remembered these days as being full of fun and laughter.
Then came the years of repression for Jews. They were not allowed to go to school or summer camp. In March 1942, my mother heard from her friends that they had received a letter, which summoned them to volunteer for a work assignment. She asked her parents for permission to volunteer, too.
At the time, nobody had any idea where these Jewish girls were going. For some reason, my mom’s father was not suspicious, despite that he had, by this time, given away his Ripper liquor-producing business to a Slovak employee for the company to continue functioning and given up the family’s spacious middle-class apartment, as Jews were forced to live in smaller accommodations. He gave my mom permission to go with her friends. So, my mom and her parents went to the gathering place in Zilina. The Hlinka Guards read the names of the invited girls and my mom’s name was not on the list. At this point, my mom asked a guard if she could join. He said, “Well, you are already here, I will add your name and you can come with your friends.”
The boys who had also been in the Maccabi summer camp decided to come help the girls with their luggage. My mom mentioned Duri Singer and I met Martin Schpitzer, who told me that the boys felt fear for the fate of these girls. They asked the guards in charge of these Jewish girls, where is this transport going? They got no answer. They also asked how long the working assignment would be, and again they did not get any answer, only smiles from the guards.
The train arrived in Poprad and the girls went into a military barrack. My mom remembers that her cousin, Erika Tellemanova, was with her, as well as some friends: Dita Linksova, Rosa Scheinbergerova, Iluska Weilova, Zuzka Policerova and Anika Grossmanova. She recalled that the military barrack did not have toilets. There was a hole in the ground, called a Turkish toilet, which they had to use. They slept on hay, on one side was Erika Tellemanova and on her other side was Rita Brownova. They stayed there for a few days, waiting for more girls to arrive from other towns, as the train out of Slovakia was, in my mom’s memory, to have around 1,000 unmarried Jewish girls on it.
In the meantime, after the boys returned, Duri Singer went straight to my grandparents and insisted that my grandfather try to get my mother out of the transport. My grandfather, Leon Kulka, listened. He then went to his lawyer and they traveled to the capital city of Bratislava, to the department of the Hlinka Guards. They met the head of the transport department and explained that they had not received a response about their application for “economically needed Jews” to be exempted from the deportations. They asked for my mom to be released and their request was granted. A telegram was sent from Bratislava to Poprad to release my mom.
My grandfather went back to Zilina and filled up his car with liquor, then traveled to Poprad to get my mother. The head of the camp said this was the first request he had received to release somebody and suggested that my grandfather take my mom and leave quickly. There was the possibility that some other Hlinka Guard would object to the release. Of course, all the liquor was left for the guards in the camp. Much later, my mom understood that the day after she left was the third transport of Jewish girls from Poprad to Auschwitz concentration camp.
After all this happened, my grandparents decided to send my mom away from Zilina, and she became a babysitter to her niece, Maya Berger, in the town of Sučany.
It took many years for my mom to be able to tell me about March 1942. It was only after the Second World War that the fate of the women transported became known. My mom lost her good friends, so she was only able to add very slowly some details about this tragic time in her life.
Helen Karsai is a retired medical doctor, who used to work at BC Cancer Agency. In the 1980s, she was a co-chair of the Western Association of Holocaust Survivors, Families and Friends. Her previous printed article was “Secrets of My Native Town,” published in the Spring 2022 Zachor, the magazine of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
