In 1961, around the time Rudolf Vrba was lighting that cigarette, five newspaper articles were published in England that kick-started the collaboration between Vrba [credited as “Dr. Rudolf Vrba” because he was a relative nobody at the time] and Fleet Street journalist Alan Bestic that led to their co-authored book, I Cannot Forgive, in 1963.

For sixty years since then, there have been grounds to regret that Vrba’s original title for his memoir, I Cannot Forgive, was jettisoned by subsequent publishers. [See book jackets below.]

Succinctly put, Rudolf Vrba could “not forgive” for at least six reasons:

1. If the Nazis had indeed murdered at least six million Jews, stealing their properties and belongings, murdering approximately 1.5 million children, committing unfathomable degradations and tortures and experiments in the process, as a seemingly non-Christian statement, I Cannot Forgive can be easily understood from the standpoint of any sympathetic reader, as well as easily justifiable from the perspective of its author.

2. The Allies and other neutral nations did precious little to stop the genocide. With very few exceptions (Albania, Denmark and possibly Sweden), most so-called western countries failed to make concerted efforts to provide sanctuary for most of the doomed Jews of Europe.

3. Jewish Council members throughout Europe, often including leading Zionists, consistently failed to adequately warn Jews not to get on the trains, even though there were numerous warnings [See PRECURSORS section] before the Vrba-Wetzler Report finally forced foreign leaders to pressure the Hungarian government to literally stop the bleeding.

4. Relatively few Nazis were prosecuted for war crimes.

5. An unelected American lawyer who was made the de facto ruler of West Germany in the early 1950s, John McCloy, radically reduced jail sentences of leading Nazi war criminals and also freed many convicted, pro-Nazi industrialists.

6. As Vrba was keenly aware, hundreds of thousands of so-called civilians throughout Europe were never prosecuted for theft, cruelty, torture and murder during the process that sent Jews into slave labour and extermination camps.

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Rudolf Vrba’s book led to his contributions to Holocaust-related trials in Europe and his interview sessions with Claude Lanzmann for Shoah, but none of this would have occurred without the prior publication of the five aforementioned newspaper articles in 1961. To read them here in full, you can simply click on the newsprint image at right or else on the bolded title for each.

1. I WARNED THE WORLD of Eichmann’s Murders Published February 27, 1961

“When Adolf Eichmann faces trial in Tel-Aviv in April, there can be no doubt about his guilt. Those six million graves cannot be denied. The question of his sentence, too, will be only of academic interest. Civilization has no yardstick to measure punishment for such a creature. The trial, indeed, will be like an old film we all know off by heart. And Eichmann will be but a fading, flickering figure in the middle, already a fossil of history…”

Download the Word document of this article here.

2. TWO HOUR WAIT FOR DEATH Published February 28, 1961

“The day that Himmler and Adolf Eichmann visted us in Auschwitz, the camp has almost a festive air. As the cars approached, the prisoners’ orchestra was playing a famous aria from the Czech opera, The Bartered Bride, “Why Should We Not Be Merry, When God Gives us Health.” As they passed through the sombre gates, the tune changed to “The Triumphal March” from Aida. The heroes drove on to the battlefield where children were being murdered on an industrial scale… It was August, 1942…”

Download the Word document of this article here.

3. ESCAPE AT LAST Published March 1, 1961

“Hitler and his master butcher, Adolf Eichmann, had three sound reasons for making Auschwitz the most closely guarded concentration camp in the world. They wanted to keep their victims. And -infinitely more important – they wanted to keep their atrocities from the rest of the world. They knew they would rouse the fury of every civilized man if the secret leaked out. Worse, their monstrosities would be remembered for ever in the history books…”

Download the Word document of this article here.

4. A WOMAN’S CRY Published March 2, 1961

“Auschwitz was 40 miles behind me. The Slovak border was 40 miles ahead. I lay on the side of a hill, my face ground into its rocks while German bullets wasped their way around me. It seemed like the end of my journey, the end of my plan to warn a million Hungarian Jews that they were ear-marked for the gas chambers… The end of my aim to tell the civilized world about Eichmann’s secret horror camp. The end of my life. And then there was a miracle…”

Download the Word document of this article here.

5. HE WEPT — And passed my message to the world. Published March 3, 1961

“I am a Jew. In spite of that — indeed because of it — I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of Quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler’s gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr. Kastner, leader of the Council which spoke for all Jews in Hungary. There were similar Councils all over occupied Europe and without their co-operation the Germans could never have carried out their mass massacres. I escaped to Auschwitz to expose this confidence trick and to warn the Hungarian Jewish leaders that Adolph Eichmann planned the liquidation of 1,000,000 of their people…”

Download the Word document of this article here.

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Since 1963, Rudolf Vrba’s book has been in continuous publication in many languages. Jonathan Freedland’s 2022 spinoff The Escape Artist largely owes its origins to these preceding volumes which were insufficiently (negligibly) credited in his book. (The mention of Vrba’s memoir, clearly the fundamental source, is hidden is small type, in a long list of references, on page 358).

Here is a selection of various editions. Click to enlarge.

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When The Music Stopped

The most recent British version of I Escaped from Auschwitz (via Robson Books, 2002) differs only slightly from the American version that was also published in 2002 (via Barricade Books Inc).

The final paragraph of the British version states: “Although this book has been in print continuously in many languages since its first publication, it has been out of print in Britain for a great many years. So it is extremely gratifying to have this new edition published now for a new generation, especially since it contains, for the first time, the Auschwitz Protocols. I wrote this book with gratitude to all those who contributed to the defeat of Nazism. I only hope that I, too, have contributed to this end to the best of my knowledge and abilities, and that this book too will help to open the eyes of many to prevent the bestial forces, which we thought we had broken forever, from ever returning.”

The final paragraph of the American version is briefer. It states: “I wrote this book with gratitude to all those who contributed to the defeat of Nazism. I only hope that I, too, have contributed to this end to the best of my knowledge and abilities, and that this book too will help to open the eyes of many to prevent the bestial forces, which we thought we had broken forever, from ever returning.”

The American reprint of I Escaped from Auschwitz from New York-based Skyhorse Publishing in 2020 retains the abbreviated final paragraph but this updated version has been expanded to 446 pages, adding approximately 120 pages of background material, including a section called “The Vrba-Wetzler Report, Including the Mordowicz-Rosin Report” as well as Vrba’s essential essay “The Preparations for the Holocaust in Hungary: A Eyewitness Account.”

Missing from the most recent editions, however, is Vrba’s riveting original, first chapter, ‘When the Music Stopped,’ in which Vrba describes an eye-to-eye encounter with Heinrich Himmler, at Auschwitz I, on July 17, 1942, seventeen days after Vrba’s own arrival on June 30. For years, Holocaust denialists and Vrba detractors sought to discredit this chapter because its calendar-less narrator had provided–they claimed–an unverifiable date for that encounter…

Fast forward to March of 2025.

During research for the first volume of a Vrba biography project, Holocaust Hero, I uncovered proof that Vrba was correct all along–Heinrich Himmler did visit the overall Auschwitz complex for a second time in mid-July, 1942, just as Vrba had cited. This means Vrba’s engaging account of how a meek prisoner named Yankel Meisel was clubbed to death for missing three buttons from his striped prisoner’s tunic should be re-inserted for all subsequent reprints.

In the first chapter of the original version of I Cannot Forgive (1963), Vrba describes his face-to-face encounter with Heinrich Himmler by writing “… he passed closed to me, close enough for me to touch him, and for a moment our eyes met.” Having been in Auschwitz for 17 days, Vrba was still very fit and was therefore he had been placed in the front row for Himmler’s inspection…

The removal of that essential chapter was something Vrba did forgive. He was a realist, a pragmatist, a scientist. At the time, he could not provide proof from any historical sources that Himmler had visited Auschwitz in 1942. According to his wife, Robin Vrba, he had to relent to an editorial demand to drop that opening chapter in order to have the book finally published in his native Czechoslovakia. When she arranged for a new American/English edition from Skyhorse Publishing, she and her co-editor (from Czechoslovakia) consequentially took a cautionary approach and excluded that first chapter.

Henceforth, whether the complete version of Vrba’s memoir is called I Cannot Forgive or called I Escaped From Auschwitz, the original version can take its rightful place within the canon of essential, 20th century books–a Holocaust classic.

I have found irrefutable evidence that after Himmler first visited Auschwitz with construction chief Karl Bischoff and the SS architect Fritz Ertl in 1941, he returned in mid-July of 1942 to inspect development of the Buna complex, aka “I.G. Auschwitz, and well as witness a test of mass murder gassing. The proof of this visit has been found in the construction journal that was kept by Buna’s chief construction engineer Maximilian Faust. In his weekly report, Faust wrote:  “July 18. Visit from the Reichsführer SS with a big entourage, including Obergruppenführer Schmauser und Obersturmbannführer Höss, to whom the Reichsführer SS personally conveyed his promotion to Obersturmbannführer. The Reichsführer was greeted by the undersigned at the Feierabendhaus. Then we drove to the powerhouse and, from the vantage point of the high-rise bunker, gave our high-ranking visitor an overview of the entire plant, explaining the complex as a whole by using a site plan prepared for this purpose…”

This excerpt [above] is from Faust’s Wochenbericht [weekly report] No. 60/61 for the period July 13–26, 1942, sgd. Faust, NI-14551. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, Case VI, Prosecution Exhibit 1991, reel 033, pp. 353–355, here p. 354. (Transl. KL).

Corroboration for the evidence in Faust’s notebook was then found in ‘Genesis of the Camp’, the first section of an essay by Danuta Czech called Konzentrationslager Auschwitz — A Historical Outline within Auschwitz Nazi Extermination Camp, a very detailed but seldom-cited publication by Interpress Publishers in Warsaw in 1978, supported by the Council for the Protection of Monuments of Struggle and Martyrdom. Danuta Czech (1922–2004) was a highly respected Polish Holocaust historian as well as the deputy director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim. Her essential essay on the origins of the Auschwitz concentration camp states on page 22 that Reichsführer SS Himmler came to Oswiecim for the first time on March 1, 1941 accompanied by SS-Brigadeführer Fritz Bracht, SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Schmauser, SS-Oberführer Glicks and representatives of IG Farben. Then, on pages 27-28, Danuta Czech the states, “On 17-18 July 1942, Himmler visited Oswiecim for a second time accompanied by [SS-Brigadeführer Fritz] Bracht, [SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst] Schmauser and the chief of Amtsgruppe C of WVHA, SS-Gruppenführer Heinz Kammler, who was in charge of construction for the concentration camps, the army, the SS and Police, as well as the armaments industry.” The two-day visit is re-confirmed by Franciszek Piper, chair of the Historical Department at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, on page 115, who confirms the presence of Bracht and Schmauser but omits Kammler.

After the war, Max Faust was not charged with any war crimes but he did fully admit on the witness stand to escorting Himmler through the Buna Works. Offended by the notion of complicity, he said, “Yes, sir, but this came about only because the other managers of IG Farben happened to be away. That I gave the so-called RFSS a two-hour guided tour of the construction site has been since 1952 the pretext for all newspapers to print a photo that shows me with Himmler, often with the caption ‘Murderers among us.’ I am being written about, and I can’t stop it. But I would like to take the opportunity to protest against it. Surely, I can’t be blamed for giving Herr Himmler a two-hour tour of a construction site.” Hermann Langbein cites the chief engineer Max Faust as one of two IG Farben “masters” who were accused of favouring inmates by the Nazi overseers. In one of his weekly reports, Faust wrote, “Regarding the treatment of inmates, I was always against shooting inmates or beating them half to death on the construction site. However, it is my view that a moderate form of chastisement is absolutely essential for preserving the necessary discipline among the inmates.”

There are at least three photos of Faust touring Auschwitz with Himmler and Höss. Here is one of them.

Himmler [left] listens to Maximilian Faust [fedora] alongside Obersturmbannführer Höss [right], July, 18, 1942. Photo from Auschwitz Nazi Extermination Camp, Warsaw: Interpress Publishers, 1978.

HERE IS THE EXTENDED TEXT FROM THE FAUST NOTEBOOK ENTRY CITED ABOVE: “…The Reichsführer asked about the prospective start-up dates, which were given as May to August 1943. Here he asked why these dates could not be moved up by increased deployment of manpower. We pointed out to him the difficulties regarding acquisition of manpower and materials. When he asked why the mining facility had not yet been begun, we replied that we had not yet received a final mandate from the Heereswaffenamt. To his question about the reason for this, we replied that this eluded our knowledge, and that the Heereswaffenamt probably had not yet been able to decide on this, also because of the difficulties in obtaining materials. The Reichsführer directed one of his adjutants to make a note of the matter. Further, the Reichsführer asked whether we—now that 3 Buna plants were already operational—could not erect our manufacturing buildings in each case again, using the same plans. We replied that this already had occurred in part, but that, on the other hand, operational improvements had also necessitated changes in the structural designs. He said that if time was lost as a result, it was preferable to build more quickly, using the same plans, and accept certain handicaps in manufacturing. Special attention was paid to the ready-mixed concrete construction method, which he recommended to Obersturmbannführer Höss for emulation in the SS’s concentration camps. Upon his departure, the Reichsführer promised us all possible support and asked us to report any shortages.”

— Alan Twigg