Hero of Auschwitz dies

When Rudolph Vrba passed away last month, a dramatic chapter in Jewish and world history passed with him. Vrba, a Vancouver resident and professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia, was one of just five people to escape the death camp Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

The testimony provided by Vrba and his co-escapee Alfred Wetzler was the first eyewitness account the Allies received of the Final Solution. And, while officials reacted slowly to Vrba's assertion that an estimated 1.7 million people had already perished in Auschwitz-Birkenau and that 800,000 Hungarian Jews were set to be deported for liquidation, it is said that Vrba's escape and testimony may have saved the lives of as many as 200,000 people.

After escaping, Vrba and Wetzler authored a 30-page document known as the Auschwitz Protocols, which offered the first irrefutable truth of the Nazi horrors and could have been – but wasn't – used to justify the bombing of Auschwitz or its feeder rail lines.

It was a remarkable act of salvation for a man who had lived quietly in Canada since 1967. Vrba's story was well known among survivors and scholars of the Holocaust. But for many Vancouverites, he was simply a neighbor, a professor, a friend.

Jewish tradition says, "He who saves one life ... it is as if he saves an entire universe." Vrba changed the course of history. May his name be inscribed forever in the annals of the righteous.