Coincidental to the release of this publication, a monument to Vrba\u2019s memory is to be unveiled later this month at Schara Tzedeck Cemetery, righting what many locals see as an unjust historic oversight.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n While Vrba wrote his own memoirs, somewhat incredibly, Twigg\u2019s book is the first real Vrba biography.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s never been an in-depth biography of Rudolf Vrba,\u201d said Twigg, who deliberately did not replicate the contents of Vrba\u2019s own 1963 book, written with Alan Bestic, titled I Cannot Forgive<\/i> and re-released in the 1980s as Escape from Auschwitz<\/i>. \u201cI tried to concentrate on information that was not available anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n While this first volume is an eye-opener for those who know nothing of Vrba, it contains bombshells and fascinating depth even for those who have read Vrba\u2019s book or who otherwise know something about his story. And Twigg promises more to come in the next volume.<\/p>\n \u201cThe really revealing material is going to be in Volume Two,\u201d Twigg told the Independent<\/i>. \u201cThat volume will be almost entirely original material and it will show the evolution of Rudi\u2019s character.\u201d<\/p>\n Those who know of Vrba are aware of his daring escape. But that was, in many ways, the beginning of his historic story. He joined the Partisans and was a decorated war hero. He was an extraordinary intellectual, a difficult personality, had a dark humour many people didn\u2019t understand, and carried anger throughout his life.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s so important if you\u2019re writing a biography to get across his character, not just the events of his life,\u201d said Twigg. The participation of Vrba\u2019s widow, Robin, was invaluable and the book includes extended transcriptions of Twigg\u2019s engaging conversations with her.<\/p>\n Rudolf Vrba was originally a false name that came on the forged papers given to Walter Rosenberg soon after he filed his report and then joined the Czechoslovakian resistance after his escape from Auschwitz.<\/p>\n Born in Slovakia, Rosenberg\/Vrba was transported to Auschwitz in June 1942. He steadfastly viewed the plunder of Jewish assets \u2013 not antisemitism as its own accelerant \u2013 as the motive for the Holocaust.<\/p>\n Vrba is said to have had a near-photographic memory, which allowed him to store away data that would change the course of history. It is believed that he greeted almost every train arriving at Auschwitz for 10 months, mentally noting estimated numbers and places of origin.<\/p>\n Eventually, he gained the coveted job of registrar of Birkenau\u2019s quarantine camp, allowing him unusual access to additional information and limited freedom of movement. He learned that plans were afoot to liquidate the last remaining large population of European Jews \u2013 the 800,000 in Hungary \u2013 whose destruction would be streamlined by the construction of a new rail line to expedite transportation to the crematoria.<\/p>\n Vrba connected with Alfr\u00e9d Wetzler, another Slovakian Jew who was registrar of the morgue.<\/p>\n On April 7, 1944, Vrba and Wetzler hid in a woodpile, still on the Birkenau site but outside the barbed wire prisoner encampment. Gasoline-soaked tobacco threw search dogs off their scent. They hid there for three days and nights as search parties worked 24\/7 to find the escapees. After the intensive search was called off, they made their move.<\/p>\n The pair made an 11-day trek by foot through Poland to the border with Slovakia, where they connected with the Jewish community.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cTheir feet were bloodied and misshapen,\u201d Twigg reports. \u201cA doctor was summoned. The malnourished pair recovered and soon cooperated with Jewish Council officials to produce an anonymous report that would be so detailed and emotionless that it could not not<\/i> be believed.\u201d<\/p>\n The Vrba-Wetzler Report, as it became known, was the first to have any significant reverberations, apparently because of the mathematical tallies and objective, scientific-like writing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n With the report, pressure came down on Admiral Mikl\u00f3s Horthy, the Hungarian leader viewed by most as a Nazi collaborationist, to halt the deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. By 1944, the tide had begun to turn against the Nazis and so it was not moral considerations, Twigg suggests, that turned Horthy against the deportations, but the fear of war crimes charges after the war. Regardless of Horthy\u2019s motivations, it was this impact of the Vrba-Wetzler Report that is believed to have saved at least 100,000 and as many as 200,000 lives.<\/p>\n The deportations did not end permanently, though. And here Vrba\u2019s history is inescapably tied up with that of another Rudolf \u2013 Rudolf (Rezs\u0151) Kasztner, one of the most polarizing figures in Holocaust history.<\/p>\n \u201cA controversy persists to this day as to the extent prominent Jewish and Zionist leaders should be held accountable for a myriad of failures to adequately inform Jews about the lethal dangers of boarding the trains,\u201d Twigg writes. \u201cFor the rest of his days, Vrba would chiefly lay the blame for the failure to adequately inform approximately 800,000 Jews in Hungary about the Holocaust on Kasztner, the Zionist leader from northern Transylvania.\u201d<\/p>\n Kasztner was the first non-Slovakian official to see the Vrba-Wetzler Report and a harsh dispute rages still around what happened next.<\/p>\n In meetings among the leadership of Hungarian Jewry, it was apparently Kasztner who pressed for an approach in which, rather than alerting the Jewish population, the leadership would keep the information to themselves and negotiate directly with Adolf Eichmann for favourable terms that made it possible for Kasztner and other senior Jewish figures to save themselves and a number of others.<\/p>\n Kasztner (and those sympathetic to his narrative) would have seen some logic in the fact that the Nazi war effort was foundering and the Germans desperately needed goods and money, something Kasztner and his associates believed they could access through Jewish channels internationally. With the Soviets approaching from the east, they may have thought they could buy time and save more than their limited numbers.<\/p>\n Eventually, Kasztner negotiated with Eichmann that a trainload of about 1,684 Jews, many or most of Kasztner\u2019s own choosing, would set off for Switzerland. It is estimated that the passage for each passenger had been \u201cbought\u201d from Eichmann for about $1,000.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The passengers did not go directly to Switzerland, though, but were rerouted to Bergen-Belsen. Unlike the other Hungarian Jews arriving at the concentration camps, however, these 1,600 or so were kept separate and eventually did make it to Switzerland, in two transports, later in the year.<\/p>\n In the meantime, 400,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz, where almost all of them were murdered.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The title of Vrba\u2019s book, I Cannot Forgive<\/i>, is assumed to refer to the Nazis. Twigg, among others, believes it is simultaneously a reference to Kasztner and his coterie of Jewish leaders.<\/p>\n Vrba was openly critical of the Jewish leadership, particularly those in Hungary and especially Kasztner, who by this time had risen to a moderately senior post in the Israeli government, along with other Hungarian Jewish leaders who were senior or mid-level figures in the governing party, Mapai. To some extent, put simply, the Hungarian Jews who had negotiated with Eichmann and who Vrba blamed for preventing his report from saving exponentially more Jewish lives, became integrated into the nascent elite of the new Jewish state. It was decidedly not in their interests to have the provocative professor, now halfway around the world in Vancouver, obtain any wider audience for his book.<\/p>\n Ruth Linn, an Israeli scholar of moral psychology and Holocaust memory at the University of Haifa, has Vancouver connections and stumbled onto Vrba\u2019s story a couple of decades ago. She could not understand why his name was almost completely unknown in Israel. She spearheaded the first publication of the Vrba-Wetzler Report in Hebrew, in 1998, and, in 2004, wrote Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting<\/i>, which examined why Vrba\u2019s account had been marginalized in Israel and how politics and memory shaped Holocaust historiography.<\/p>\n Capturing the dichotomy of the debate around Kasztner\u2019s role in the Hungarian Holocaust, Twigg juxtaposes two quotes. An Israeli judge, Benjamin Halevi, said of Kasztner, \u201cHe didn\u2019t sell his soul to the devil; he was the devil.\u201d Canadian author and publisher Anna Porter, who has written about the subject, said, \u201cIf you\u2019re in hell, who do you negotiate with but the devil?\u201d<\/p>\n A 1955 libel trial instigated by Kasztner proved his undoing. Ostensibly a case against Malkiel Gruenwald, who publicized the wartime actions of Kasztner, the trial turned into an examination of the facts of the case. Halevi, the judge who deemed Kasztner the devil himself, ruled that, by saving a chosen few, Kasztner had sacrificed the majority of Hungarian Jews. More than two years later, Israel\u2019s Supreme Court overturned the judgment, but Kasztner did not live to see his legal redemption. He was assassinated outside his home in March 1957.<\/p>\n Twigg came to the Vrba story more by happenstance than design. Twigg edited BC Bookworld<\/i>, a newspaper about books and authors, for more than three decades.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI used to keep track of all the books of British Columbia and I had categories,\u201d he said. He could cross-reference, for example, all books on Japanese-Canadians or forestry.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Based on this knowledge, in 2022, Twigg wrote Out of Hiding: Holocaust Literature of British Columbi<\/i>a. (See jewishindependent.ca\/a-roadmap-to-remembering<\/a>.) Its largest, though still necessarily brief, section is on Vrba. However, this was inadequate for Twigg, who decided to expand the project \u2013 first as a comprehensive website (rudolfvrba.com<\/a>) \u2013 now as this book.<\/p>\n Not directly related to Holocaust Hero <\/i>but timely, if profoundly overdue, an ad hoc group of friends and admirers of Vrba will erect the world\u2019s only monument to him on Sunday, Oct. 26, beginning with a ceremony in the chapel at Schara Tzedeck Cemetery at 2 p.m. The program will feature reflections on Vrba\u2019s life, legacy and enduring impact from Dr. Robert Krell, Dr. Joseph Ragaz and Prof. Chris Friedrichs, and will conclude with the dedication of the memorial monument.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rudolf Vrba, left, and author Alan Twigg at the University of British Columbia in 2001. Twigg\u2019s new book on Vrba, Holocaust Hero: The Life & Times of Rudolf Vrba, breaks much new ground. (photo by Beverly Cramp) Celebrated German factory owner Oskar Schindler is estimated to have saved the lives of about 1,200 Jews during […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":47705,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[21128,4242,53,8501,24378],"class_list":["post-47703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-alan-twigg","tag-history","tag-holocaust","tag-rudolf-vrba","tag-vrba-wetzler-report"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"image](\"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/oct-10-cov.10.Twigg-Vrba-book-Holocaust-Hero-cover.jpg\")
<\/a>A new book \u2013 the first of a meticulous two-volume assessment of Vrba\u2019s life \u2013 has just been released by Vancouver author Alan Twigg. It goes great lengths to broadening awareness of Vrba\u2019s heroism and correcting the many misconceptions around his legacy. In the process, Holocaust Hero: The Life & Times of Rudolf Vrba<\/i> breaks much new ground.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n