Rudolf Vrba

Rudolf Vrba , born as Walter Rosenberg on September 11, 1924 in Topoľčany , Czechoslovakia - died on March 27, 2006 in Vancouver , Canada , was a Czechoslovak resistance fighter against the Nazi state and survivor of the Shoah and eventually became a professor of pharmacology at the university of British Columbia in Vancouver. He became known worldwide because he and his fellow inmate , Alfréd Wetzler , managed to break out of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in April 1944 and flee to occupied Czechoslovakia in order to save the Jews in Slovakia and Slovakia, who were extremely endangered by Nazi persecution To warn Hungary and to precisely inform the western allies about the quasi industrial German mass murder there.

The Vrba-Wetzler Report, part of the Auschwitz Protocols , which was created according to their statements and subsequently confirmed , is a shocking document of evidence from 1944 of the Nazi genocide against Jews from almost all of Europe.

Life

Resistance to National Socialism, Auschwitz prisoner

At the age of 15, Rosenberg was banned from high school in Bratislava due to anti-Jewish laws (the Slovak version of the Nuremberg Laws ) . In March 1942 he wanted to escape from Trnava via Hungary and Yugoslavia to England and join the Czech fighters in exile there, but was arrested.

He broke out again briefly from the Nováky camp , but was arrested again, deported to the Majdanek concentration camp on June 14, and from there to Auschwitz on June 30, 1942. He stayed there for almost two years as a prisoner no. 44070 and worked among others in " Canada " mentioned Effektenlager . On April 7, 1944, he escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau together with Alfréd Wetzler . For three days they had hidden themselves in a pile of wood that was between the small and large chain of posts . The great chain of posts was always disbanded at night, after three days the SS reduced their search and managed to escape.

In Žilina in Slovakia, where they made contact with representatives of the Judenrat, Rosenberg and Wetzler, under his pseudonym Rudolf Vrba , dictated a detailed report on the death camps in Auschwitz until the end of April 1944, which was originally written in Slovak and German and later in several Languages ​​translated - reached the Western Allies in June 1944 and became known as the “Vrba-Wetzler Report” . On 35 pages, this report of the two prison functionaries, who have been detained for a long time, describes the geography of the extermination camp, the methods of mass murder with the gas chambers , the removal of traces through the crematoria and the events in Auschwitz since April 1942 , which have been practiced and expanded for two years Report from Auschwitz inmates believed in the West because of its accuracy and authenticity. (See also: contemporary knowledge of the Holocaust .)

Although - to Vrba's great disappointment - almost none of the potential Jewish deportation victims in Hungary were warned of the fate that lay ahead, the report had the effect that the Hungarian ruler , Admiral Horthy , on July 7, 1944, after 300,000 Hungarian Jews had been killed and the deportations ceased. The report had been published in the Swiss press, and Horthy was then bombarded with appeals from the Allied and neutral sides. Probably 100,000 lives were saved in this way.

In September 1944, Vrba, who lived in hiding, went to the partisans and took part in the Slovak National Uprising , which had started shortly before. He has received several awards for his bravery. After the end of the German occupation, he officially took the cover name Rudolf Vrba.

After the Second World War

After the war he studied chemistry and biochemistry in Prague, received his engineering degree in 1949, his doctorate in 1951 and finally a postgraduate degree from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences ( C.Sc. ) in 1956.

He worked at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and Charles University in Prague.

emigration

In 1958 he used a stay in Israel as a member of a scientific delegation to leave Czechoslovakia, and then worked for the Ministry of Agriculture in Israel . He became a member of the Medical Research Council in London, later the Medical Research Council in Canada, and finally worked at Harvard Medical School in the USA.

In 1976 he became an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he taught pharmacology. He is also known internationally as the author of fifty scientific articles on the chemistry of the brain and for his research in the fields of diabetes and cancer .

Rudolf Vrba wrote (in collaboration with Alan Bestic) a book about his personal memories of Auschwitz ("I cannot forgive", London 1963; New York 1964), which is also available in German (Munich 1964 and 1999), French ( Paris 1988), Dutch (Kempen 1996) and Czech (Prague 1998).

The heroic flight of Vrbas and Wetzler and their subsequent informational activities remained untroubled in Israel for 35 years. At the Eichmann trial in 1961, the Vrba-Wetzler report was discussed, but Vrba himself was not called as a witness. It was not until 1998 that Ruth Linn, dean of the University of Haifa , managed to publish a Hebrew translation of Vrba's book.

Even before 1985, Vrba was interviewed by Claude Lanzmann for the documentary " Shoah ".

Rudolf Vrba died of cancer in Canada in 2006.

Appreciation

• To: I can't forgive (2010): The survivor's report also commemorates those who were beaten to death, died of typhus, hung on the gallows, and murdered in the gas chambers. Without heroic poetry, without sentimentality, sometimes with self-deprecating tones (...)

Honors

• In 1998 the University of Haifa awarded him an honorary doctorate in recognition of his heroic escape and his contribution to Holocaust education.
• Since 1999 the One World International Human Rights Film Festival in the Czech Republic , founded by Mary Robinson and Václav Havel , has annually presented a “Rudolf Vrba Award” in the “Right to know” category for documentary films that “draw attention to an unknown or hushed up human rights problem ".
• In 2007 he was posthumously awarded the Slovak Order of the White Double Cross and in Lubina , where Vrba fought as a partisan at the time, two memorial plaques were placed in memory of Vrba and his friend Wetzler.

report

• I cannot forgive , Rütten & Loening, Munich 1964
  • (New edition under the title :) When Canada was in Auschwitz. My escape from the extermination camp. Piper, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-492-22694-9 .
  • New translation: I cannot forgive. My escape from Auschwitz . Translated from the English by Sigrid Ruschmeier and Brigitte Walitzek, foreword by Beate Klarsfeld , with part of the picture. Edited, with notes and an afterword by Dagi Knellessen and Werner Renz. Schöffling, Frankfurt 2010, ISBN 3-89561-416-5 .
  • Excerpt: A refugee prisoner reports, in Hans Günther Adler , Hermann Langbein , Ella Lingens-Reiner Eds .: Auschwitz. Certificates and reports. Series of publications 1520. Federal Agency for Civic Education BpB, 6th edition Bonn 2014 ISBN 3-8389-0520-2 pp. 194–202 (first 1962). The entire report is at the same time official document NG-2061 in the Nuremberg trial against the main war criminals of the IMT and therefore also contained in the relevant document collections

Movie

• Mark Hayhurst, directed: 1944: Bombs on Auschwitz? Documentary with game scenes based on historical quotations and interviews with contemporary witnesses. Germany, 2019, first broadcast on January 21, 2020 ( information from the broadcaster , Jan 2020)

literature

• Yehuda Bauer : Comments on the “Auschwitz Report” by Rudolf Vrba . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Volume 45, 1997, Issue 2, pp. 297–308; (in the magazine archive: online, PDF, approx. 7 MB )
• Yehuda Bauer: Rudolf Vrba and the Auschwitz Protocols. One response to John S. Conway. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 54th year 2006, issue 4, pp. 701–710 ( online ; PDF; 1.7 MB).
• Chapter The Auschwitz Protocols. In: Randolph L. Braham : The politics of genocide. The Holocaust in Hungary . Columbia University Press, New York 1981, pp. 708-716
• Martin Gilbert : Auschwitz and the Allies . Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York 1981.
• Lici Calderon: An Eyewitness at the Death Factory, The Magazine of the University of Akron, Summer 1990.
• The Vrba-Wetzler report. In: Israel Gutman (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust Vol. 1. Macmillan, New York 1990, ISBN 0-02-896090-4 .
• Ruth Linn: Genocide and the politics of remembering: the nameless, the celebrated, and the would-be Holocaust heroes . In: Journal of Genocide Research 5, 2003, pp. 565-586.
• Ruth Linn: Escaping Auschwitz. A Culture of Forgetting . Cornell University Press, Ithaca / London 2004, ISBN 0-8014-4130-7 .
• Mark Hume: Auschwitz escapee who told the world dies in BC The Globe and Mail , Toronto, March 31, 2006
• Henryk Świebocki (Ed.): London was informed ... reports from Auschwitz refugees . Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum , Oświęcim 1997, ISBN 83-85047-64-6 . With the Vrba-Wetzler report, with additional footnotes by the editor.
• The disregarded warning. Reflections on the Auschwitz report from 1944. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 44th year 1996, issue 1, pp. 1–24; in the magazine archive: online (PDF; 7.7 MB)

Web links

• Literature by and about Rudolf Vrba in the catalog of the German National Library
• CV ( memento of June 24, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) on the University of British Columbia website (PDF file)
• "Auschwitz Refugee, Holocaust Witness and Prosecutor" ( Memento from February 22, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
• The conversation held in 1996 with Rudolf Vrba on Deutschlandfunk in Cologne ( memento from September 19, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) (including about Slovak and Hungarian Jewish councils and about the secession of Slovakia at that time)
• Excerpts from the interview by Claude Lanzmann with Rudolf Vrba for the film Shoah : online in the Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Article in the Guardian
• Vrba, Rudolf. In: Theresienstadt Lexicon.
• Documentation Escape from Auschwitz by Alex Dunlop, German adaptation by Georg Stuhlpfarrer [1]

Individual evidence

1. ↑ A German and English version of the report in the Collection of German History in Documents and Pictures from the German Historical Institute in Washington : Report of the Auschwitz refugees Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba (end of April 1944)
2. ^ Marler Zeitung , May 6, 2015, literature page