Robert Krell, left, founding president of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, and Al Szajman, the current president, unveil the monument to Rudolf Vrba at Schara Tzedeck Cemetery. (photo by Pat Johnson)
Rudolf Vrba, a scientist who had a significant but comparatively quiet career in the laboratories and lecture halls of the University of British Columbia, enjoyed a comfortable life with his wife Robin in Vancouver before his death in 2006. Unbeknownst to thousands of his students over the years, Vrba may have saved more Jews during the Holocaust than any other individual. Despite this astonishing fact, his name has remained almost unknown not only among scholars of that history but even in his own adopted community of Vancouver.
At Schara Tzedeck Cemetery in New Westminster on Oct. 26, a monument was unveiled that seeks to remedy Vrba’s relative anonymity.
“Why do so few know his name?” asked Dr. Robert Krell, founding president of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and a member of an ad hoc group that came together to recognize Vrba’s life and bravery. “Sir Martin Gilbert, the British historian, wrote that Vrba was directly responsible for saving at least 100,000 Jewish lives. Others now credit him with the preservation of as many as 200,000 Hungarian Jews.”
Before about 200 people gathered in the cemetery’s chapel prior to the monument’s unveiling, Krell recounted the exploits of Vrba and his co-conspirator, fellow Slovakian Jew Alfréd Wetzler, who were incarcerated in Auschwitz.
In April 1944, Vrba, just 19 at the time, and Wetzler, 25, contrived to conceal themselves within the Auschwitz compound, while, outside the camp, a massive search was undertaken by dogs and armed guards. After hiding silently in a woodpile for three days, the two men escaped and traveled for days by foot to Slovakia, where they shared all the information they had amassed about operations at the death camp. Vrba has been credited with having had an almost photographic memory and, over 22 months in Auschwitz, with Wetzler and he both having risen to positions of comparative privilege and trust in the camp, they were uniquely equipped to tell the world what was happening.
Vrba had worked on the arrival platforms at the camp, observing the incoming Jews and, later, in the “Kanada” compound, where the stolen valuables of arriving prisoners were stored. Wetzler was a registrar and clerk in the camp. The pair chose their moment to act because their vantage points alerted them to the imminent deportation of the last remaining large group of surviving Jews in Europe, those of Budapest.
Their account, which became known as the Auschwitz Protocols, or sometimes the Vrba-Wetzler Report, was the most credible and detailed information received to that moment about the extent of mass murder taking place in Auschwitz. More than 400,000 Hungarian Jews had already been murdered.
“The Jews of Budapest were next,” said Krell.
After dictating the report, Vrba joined the Slovakian army as a machine gunner and, later, joined the Slovak partisans, participating in 10 major battles and being awarded multiple medals for bravery.
After the war, Vrba completed a PhD in biochemistry at Charles University in Prague, then lived in Israel and England before serving as a research fellow at Harvard Medical School. He married Robin, an American, in 1975 and they made a home in Vancouver. Vrba was an associate professor in the department of pharmaceutical sciences at UBC for 30 years and Robin was a realtor.
The explanation for Vrba’s relative anonymity has been explored in books, including a recently released first volume of a two-part biography by Vancouver writer Alan Twigg. (Holocaust Hero: The Life and Times of Rudolf Vrba was reviewed in the Oct. 10 issue of the Independent.)
The unfamiliarity with Vrba’s story in Israel, in particular, has been explored by Ruth Linn, a University of Haifa academic who first heard of Vrba when she was on sabbatical in Vancouver in the late 1990s. She returned to Israel and began asking if others with expertise in the field knew of Vrba, Wetzler and their escape. Her explorations led to her 2004 book Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting, which made the case that there was a deliberate effort in Israel to silence Vrba’s voice and obscure his history.
Vrba bore particular animus toward Rezső Kasztner, a leader of the Budapest Jewish community who went on to become a mid-level bureaucrat affiliated with the Israeli establishment and the Mapai party that led the country. Vrba – and others – viewed Kasztner’s actions as having saved the lives of Kasztner, his family and several hundred of his friends and associates at the possible expense of thousands of other Hungarian Jews. Vrba believed that, had ordinary Hungarian Jews been privy to the Auschwitz Protocols, as Kasztner was, they could have made their own decisions about whether to board the deportation trains.
The new monument and the unveiling ceremony were the culmination of several years of work by a group including Krell, Yosef Wosk, Geoffrey Druker, Joseph Ragaz, Arthur Dodek and Bernie Simpson, who formed a core committee advancing the project. Dodek, who emceed the Oct. 26 event, acknowledged additional contributions from the Kahn family, Ryan Davis, Marie Doduck and Jack Micner. Mayor Patrick Johnstone of New Westminster attended.
Organizers thanked the Schara Tzedeck Cemetery Board, including chairs Arnold Silber and Jack Kowarsky, and executive director Howard Jampolsky, as well as Schara Tzedeck’s Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt.
Rosenblatt spoke of biblical and modern concepts of righteousness, citing Vrba as the definition of a hero.
“He did not escape from Auschwitz simply to save his own skin,” said the rabbi. “He escaped from Auschwitz to save Hungarian Jewry. He escaped from Auschwitz to warn the world.”
The monument, located adjacent to an area of the cemetery not yet open to burials, means that future generations who pass through mourning loved ones will have an opportunity to reflect on true heroism.
“I am struck anew by how singular his legacy was, how young he was, how hard he fought to bring the truth to the world,” said Hannah Marazzi, executive director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, which sponsored the ceremony. “It is a legacy of courage, brilliance, sorrow, resilience and endurance. But perhaps what I have treasured most is learning about his life and legacy from those here who have had the privilege of knowing him.”
Druker noted that the monument reflects an increased awareness of Vrba locally and hoped that the knowledge would expand beyond his hometown.
Druker read aloud the inscription, which recounts the details of Vrba’s life: his origins, his deportation to Majdanek and Auschwitz, his escape, his war heroism and his life as an academic.
“We hope that, in Israel, he will finally be recognized for what he is: a central hero that changed the course of the Holocaust for Hungarian Jews,” Druker said. “We want the world to recognize that too.”
Chris Friedrichs, professor emeritus of history at UBC, put Vrba in the context of his times.
“The existence of Auschwitz was no secret to those leaders,” he said. “They knew that Auschwitz was the site of a vast industrial complex where German war production was being performed by forced labour. But, as we know, this report for the first time described the actual operations of the camp in terrifying detail, making clear that Auschwitz was not only a location of industrial activity, but also the site of mass extermination of human lives on a scale that nobody had previously fully grasped.
“A huge number of Hungarian Jews had already been sent to Auschwitz, but the approximately 200,000 Jews of Budapest had not yet been deported, and it was largely thanks to this warning that the deportations were halted and the lives of most of those 200,000 Jews were saved.”
The experiences Vbra underwent at a young age, as well as his anger that his escape and the report he helped draft did not save even more lives, affected him through his life. Friedrichs, who knew Rudi and Robin Vrba, said they enjoyed a happy life in Vancouver, but the past haunted Vrba.
“For, although he could escape from Auschwitz, Rudolf Vrba could never really escape from the Shoah,” said Friedrichs. “He knew too much and he cared too much to put what he had seen behind him.… Rudolf Vrba was dedicated to relating the facts, but there was also anger, and that anger was directed not just against the Nazis, but also against Jewish leaders during the war who could not bring themselves to inform their fellow Jews about what was happening in Auschwitz. He was like a biblical prophet who had inveigled against the wilful ignorance or stubborn disbelief of those who should have known better.”
Friedrichs credits Robin, who now lives in the United States and was not able to attend the unveiling, as “not only his cherished companion for over three decades,” but with ensuring that his legacy not be forgotten.
“In fact,” said Friedrichs, “that task is a challenge for all of us. Even the Jewish community of Vancouver never fully recognized the greatness of this man and the role he had played both in saving Jewish lives and in contributing to knowledge of the Shoah.”
The monument is a belated recognition, said Friedrichs.
“What we do today is overdue, but it is not too late,” he said. “Future generations will pass by this monument and realize how proud our community should have been that this man lived and worked for 30 years in our midst. As we watch the monument being unveiled, and if we gently lay some stones upon it, we will be paying a debt of gratitude to someone who is not only a hero of the 20th century, but should continue to be an inspiration for the 21st.”
