Here are the five newspaper articles, published in England in 1961, that kick-started the collaboration between “Dr. Rudolf Vrba” and Fleet Street journalist Alan Bestic for their co-authored book, I Cannot Forgive, in 1963. Vrba’s book, in turn, led to his contributions to Holocaust-related trials in Europe and his interview sessions with Claude Lanzmann for Shoah. Click on the newsprint image or bolded title of 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.

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.

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

There are grounds to regret that Vrba’s original title for his memoir, I Cannot Forgive, was jettisoned by his future publishers. The Nazis murdered at least six million Jews, stealing their properties and belongings, so that curt and seemingly non-Christian statement (“I Cannot Forgive”) was warranted.

The Allies also did precious little to stop the genocide, mostly failing to provide refuge or sanctuary for the Jews of Europe.

Jewish Council members, including leading Zionists, failed to adequately warn Jews not to get on the trains.

Relatively few Nazis were prosecuted for war crimes. The unelected American John McCloy radically reduced the sentences of leading Nazi criminals and he liberated leading pro-Nazi industrialists

For the rest of his life, Vrba was keenly aware of the extent to which hundreds of thousands of people throughout Europe were never prosecuted for theft, cruelty, torture and murder.

*

The preface to the British version of I Escaped from Auschwitz (via Robson Books) differs only slightly from the American version 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 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. Far more significantly, this updated version has been expanded to 446 pages, adding approximately 120 pages of background material—“The Vrba-Wetzler Report, Including the Mordowicz-Rosin Report” and Vrba’s essential essay “The Preparations for the Holocaust in Hungary: A Eyewitness Account.”

Missing from the most recent edition is Vrba’s riveting original chapter, ‘When the Music Stopped,’ in which Vrba describes an eye-to-eye encounter with Heinrich Himmler, at Auschwitz I, on July 17, 1942, supposedly seventeen days after Vrba’s own arrival on June 30. Vrba later states Himmler also visited Auschwitz in January of 1943 to “watch the world’s first conveyor belt killing.” Holocaust denialists and Vrba detractors can discredit “When the Music Stopped” because the calendar-less narrator has provided an un-verified date, but any such failing, for whatever reason, probably should not have deterred the editors from including Vrba’s brilliant and engaging account of how a meek prisoner named Yankel Meisel was clubbed to death for missing three buttons from his striped, prisoner’s tunic–when a corrective footnote could have sufficed.