VRBA o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-04-08 published
Rudolf VRBA,
Scientist And Professor (1924-2006)
He was the man who beat Auschwitz, writes Sandra
MARTIN. In 1944,
he escaped the death camp to warn the world and save the lives
of 150,000 Hungarian Jews, but remained bitter that 400,000 were
sacrificed
By Sandra MARTIN,
Page
S11
Yesterday was the 62nd anniversary of Walter
ROSENBERG's escape
from Auschwitz-Birkenau, the notorious Nazi concentration camp
in Poland, where more than a million people were killed during
the Second World War. Auschwitz irrevocably changed Mr.
ROSENBERG,
who was only 19 when he escaped. For the rest of his life he
lived under the name Rudolf
VRBA, the nom de guerre, as he called
it, that he adopted after his escape.
Independent, prickly and uncompromising, Mr.
VRBA, who had a
successful academic career as a biochemist at the University
of British Columbia and was the author of more than 50 scientific
papers, hated being thought of as a victim or a survivor -- and
with good reason. Nobody had rescued him -- he had beaten Auschwitz.
A tough guy who tended to be a moral absolutist, he was also
warm, funny and a generous and loyal friend. "He struck a very
fine sartorial note," said his colleague Professor Michael
WALKER.
"He was always well dressed and he had a presence and a style
about him."
Mr. VRBA was not the only person to flee the extermination camp,
but he and his friend Alfred
WETZLER were the most important
of the five escapees from that hellhole of depravity. They bore
detailed and accurate witness to the layout and function of the
gas chambers and crematoria and they spread the alarm about the
diabolical extermination plans in store for Hungarian Jews. And
that is another way that the Holocaust changed Mr.
VRBA:
Instead
of rejoicing that the Auschwitz Protocol (as his detailed report
was called) saved at least 150,000 Hungarian Jews, he remained
bitter that more lives hadn't been saved, believing to the end
of his life that the Hungarian Jewish leaders knowingly sacrificed
more than 400,000 of their countrymen in order to save themselves
and their families.
The past is not a simple place, especially for those who disinter
the myths that spread like moss over the moral complexities of
horrific events to make them more palatable for the living. Mr.
VRBA
was a troubling character to many because he threatened the solidarity
of the post-Holocaust Jewish community with his accusations of
complicity in his memoir I Can't Forgive. (First published in
London in 1963, the book was revised and expanded by Mr.
VRBA
several times during his lifetime.) As a result, it was easier
for many to ignore Mr.
VRBA's heroism than to honour it.
Ruth Linn, dean of education at Haifa University, and a native-born
Israeli, had never heard about anybody escaping from Auschwitz
and neither had her students -- until she watched French director
Claude Lanzmann's 1985 documentary Shoah. How was it possible,
she asked herself, that Mr.
VRBA's memoirs had never been translated
into Hebrew. Why had he never been recognized by Yad Vashem (the
Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority)? She was
a key player in having Mr.
VRBA's book translated, in seeing
him awarded an honorary doctorate at Haifa University in 1998,
and in accounting for his absence in popular accounts of the
Holocaust in her 2004 book, Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of
Forgetting.
By then, Mr.
VRBA had lived in Canada for nearly three decades.
Over the years, he had made crucial depositions against Nazis
trying to escape retribution, whether it was the Final Solution
leadership at the Nuremberg Trials, Adolf Eichmann after his
capture in Argentina in 1960, or former concentration guards
living undercover in Germany. He was also a principal witness
in trials of Holocaust deniers such as Ernst
ZUNDEL in Canada.
"What drove him forward was his understanding of the extent to
which the Nazi apparatus used Jewish wealth and Jewish labour
to fuel and maintain the German war effort," said Holocaust historian
Sir Martin Gilbert. "He had seen it when he was in Kanada [the
warehouses that stored confiscated Jewish goods] in Auschwitz
when he'd seen this vast amount of material being recycled, and
the use made of slave labour."
Sir
Martin was so impressed with Mr.
VRBA's heroism that he supported
a campaign to nominate Mr.
VRBA for the Order of Canada and solicited
letters from well known Canadians including then law professor
Irwin COTLER (more recently minister of justice.) "I fully concur
with you that
VRBA is a 'real hero.' Indeed, there are few more
deserving of the Order of Canada than
VRBA, and few, anywhere,
who have exhibited his moral courage," Prof.
COTLER wrote in
a handwritten letter to Sir Martin on February 18, 1992. "Canada
will honour itself -- and redeem itself somewhat -- by awarding
him the Order of Canada."
It didn't happen.
Walter ROSENBERG was born between the First and Second World
Wars in Topolcany, Czechoslovakia. He was one of five children
of Elias ROSENBERG, a steam saw-mill owner and Helena Grunfeldova.
He was 15 when the Germans began their murderous march through
Europe. After he was expelled from high school in Bratislava
under the local version of the Nuremberg anti-Jewish laws, he
worked as a labourer until he was arrested in March of 1942.
Two months later, he was deported to Maidanek and transferred
to Auschwitz on June 30.
He survived as prisoner No. 44070 for almost two years, using
his formidable memory and analytical powers to compute the numbers
of people arriving on the transports and to calculate how many
were used as slave labour or were sent to be gassed at adjacent
Birkenau. Early in 1944, after the Germans invaded Hungary, he
observed how the camp was ramping up to prepare for the arrival
of huge deportations of Hungarian Jews.
On April 7, he and an older schoolmate, Alfred
WETZLER, escaped
from Auschwitz and made their way to Zilina, Slovakia where,
on April 24, they told their harrowing tale to the local Jewish
council. Mr.
ROSENBERG and Mr.
WETZLER were put in separate rooms
as they wrote out their reports, which were then compared, checked
for accuracy against available records and compiled. The 32-page
report testifying to the atrocities at Auschwitz-Birkenau was
sent to the Allies, the Vatican, the International Red Cross
and the Jewish leadership in Hungary -- the next victims on Hitler's
extermination list.
The
Jewish council gave Mr.
ROSENBERG identity papers and he
became Rudolf
VRBA, a name he later adopted legally. The Auschwitz
Protocol reached the Hungarian Jewish leadership in early May
of 1944, but they didn't raise the alarm. Instead, they negotiated
with Adolf Eichmann in an effort to exchange Jews for trucks
and other goods needed by the depleted Nazi war effort.
"Basically, Eichmann deceived them," says Sir Martin in promising
the Hungarian Jewish leadership that the trains would take the
Jews to holding camps where they would be transferred to the
trucks which would convey them to safety in Spain. That's why
they kept silent. Between mid-May and early July 1944, nearly
440,000 Hungarian Jews (including Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie
Wiesel) boarded "resettlement trains" in good faith and ended
up in Auschwitz where most were immediately gassed. Mr.
VRBA
always felt that if the Jewish leaders had announced what Auschwitz
was about these people would have rebelled.
By June of 1944, the Allies had received the Auschwitz Protocol.
They took it very, very seriously, according to Sir Martin. "It
had such a massive impact that the Germans were forced to halt
the deportations." Coincidentally there was an American air raid
on Budapest on July 2, 1944. Hungarian Regent Admiral Miklos
Horthy believed the attack was the beginning of the threatened
Allied retribution for the Auschwitz Protocol and insisted the
deportations stop -- which they did on July 9, 1944. "About 150,000 Jews
were saved as a result of
VRBA's efforts. "He was totally and
extraordinarily successful."
Mr. VRBA warned his own relatives to flee before they, too, were
taken. After that, he joined the Czechoslovak Partisan Units
in September 1944 and fought with them until the end of the war.
He was decorated for bravery. After Czechoslovakia was liberated,
he went back to school and did a series of degrees in chemistry,
receiving his doctorate in 1951 and a post-graduate degree from
the Academy of Science in 1956. He undertook biochemical research
at Charles University in Prague from 1953 to 1958. By then, he
had married a childhood friend, a medical doctor in Prague named
Gerta VERBOVA.
They had two daughters, Helena (who has died)
and Zuza. Mr.
VRBA and his wife separated in 1958, when she defected
to the West and he went to a conference in Israel and never returned.
He worked as a biochemist in Israel for two years and then joined
the British Medical Research Council in London in 1960. Seven
years later he was appointed to the Canadian Medical Research
Council and, from there, began teaching in the pharmacology department
in the Faculty of Medicine at University of British Columbia.
In the mid-1970s, he went on sabbatical to Harvard Medical School
in Cambridge, Massachusetts., where he met his second wife, Robin,
who became a successful real-estate dealer in Vancouver.
"As a scientist, he started out very well and was well respected
for his work in proteins and chemistry," said colleague Prof. Michael
WALKER. "He was very independent and he had his own view of what
was important," and that often meant he "butted heads with the
granting authorities."
Towards the end of his career Prof.
VRBA wasn't getting many
grants. "I don't think he was treated appropriately by the Canadian
scientific community," said Prof.
WALKER. "He was prescient in
his understanding of his area, which is proteins, and how their
function may be changed if they have glucose attached to them."
Instead of complaining about his lack of research money, he "put
more effort into teaching," according to Prof.
WALKER. "
The students
loved him, especially in the last few years."
Rudolf VRBA was born Walter
ROSENBERG in Topolcany, Czechoslovakia
on September 11, 1924. He died of cancer in Vancouver on March 27,
2006. He was 81. He is survived by his second wife Robin, a daughter
from his first marriage, two grandchildren and two nephews.
V... Names VR... Names VRB... Names Welcome Home
VRBA - All Categories in OGSPI
VRBAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2006-03-30 published
VRBAN,
Josephine
Passed away peacefully after a lengthy illness, on March 29,
2006 at the age of 91. She will be sadly missed by her sister
Anna SEBANC, niece Ann
MERVAR, great-nephews Greg and Danny and
great-niece Lilli. A special thank you to the staff at Dom Lipa
for all their care. Friends will be received at the Ridley Funeral
Home, 3080 Lakeshore Blvd. W. (between Islington and Kipling
Aves., at 14th Street, 416-259-3705), on Friday from 2-4 and 7-9 p.m.
A Funeral Mass will be held on Saturday at 10 a.m. from Our Lady
of the Miraculous Medal. Interment Assumption Catholic Cemetery.
If desired, donations may be made to Dom Lipa or the Alzheimer
Society of Canada. Messages of condolence may be placed at www.RidleyFuneralHome.com
V... Names VR... Names VRB... Names Welcome Home
VRBAN - All Categories in OGSPI