This link will take you to the website of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum where there are five audio-only interviews with Rudolf Vrba. Perhaps most remarkable is Vrba’s relative equanimity as he consents to matter-of-factly respond to a string of naive questions for an hour.

Due the lack of visual content, this significant material will doubtless be under-regarded, particularly because Vrba’s accent makes his English hard to understand upon first hearing, or even second hearing. Nonetheless, any serious Vrba scholar is well-advised to listen and discover significant pieces of information, informally offered, that cannot be otherwise gleaning by reading his memoir.

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn510183

Vrba describes his experiences at Majdanek, where he saw children killed, women clubbed, and bones broken; spending 14 days in the camp then volunteering in June 1942 with 400 other men to go to Auschwitz; the selection process in the camp; his friends from the Sonderkommando unit who were killed; and how each day was a fight for the possibility of living another day; the separation of the Sonderkommandos from the general prisoners; the attitudes of the Sonderkommandos while they were working; hearing in January 1944 that a large extermination action was being planned, thereby increasing his desire to escape; escaping with his friend code-named Vecla Margovich (Alfred Wetzler); being questioned by the Jewish Council in Bratislava, who did not believe at first what he said about Auschwitz; receiving help from the Communist group in Trnava; his return to Bratislava; living with the partisans for about two months (likely in the fall of 1944); and his thoughts on the war crime trials for Auschwitz guards.

Trnava 1941

Trnava 1941

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