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Order of the White Double Cross, 1st class, Slovakia (2007) Rudolf Vrba (born Walter Rosenberg; 11 September 1924 – 27 March 2006) was a Slovak-Jewish biochemist who, as a teenager in 1942, was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. He escaped from the camp in April 1944, at the height of the Holocaust, and co ...
- 2
- Czechoslovak
- British (1966), Canadian (1972)
- Vrba–Wetzler report
- Overview
- Early life
- Escape from Auschwitz
- Vrba-Wetzler Report
- Post-Holocaust
Rudolf Vrba, (born September 11, 1924, Topoľčany, Czechoslovakia [now in Slovakia]—died March 27, 2006, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), Slovak Jewish biochemist, one of five Jewish prisoners to ever escape Auschwitz, the most lethal of the extermination camps in existence during World War II. Vrba’s detailed retelling of events at Auschwitz i...
Rosenberg was one of four children in a Jewish family that owned a sawmill in Jaklovce, in what is now Slovakia. At age 15 he was prohibited from attending school because of his status as a Jew. He was forced to serve as a labourer until age 17, when the government of the German puppet state of independent Slovakia commanded that he and other Jews ...
In June 1942 Rosenberg underwent forced relocation from Nováky to Majdanek, a concentration camp in Poland. After two weeks he was transferred to Auschwitz, another concentration camp in Poland, and after six months he was transferred to Birkenau, a subsidiary death camp of Auschwitz. Rosenberg’s job within Auschwitz allowed him access to areas that Nazi authorities seldom permitted Jewish prisoners to enter. He was assigned to a unit that monitored victims’ arrivals at the camp and managed the property of those who had been murdered.
In 1943 Rosenberg became a registrar of the camp for men. He memorized information about the protocol of mass murder that the Germans designed and identified a key tactic that enabled the killings to proceed efficiently: the Nazis kept new prisoners clueless about the horrors that awaited them. When he learned that SS officers anticipated the arrival to the camp of Hungarian Jews, the last major intact Jewish community in Europe, he decided to risk escaping Auschwitz with the intent of warning the Hungarian Jewish community about the death camps. Having studied the unsuccessful escape attempts of other prisoners, he armed himself with knowledge to plan his own escape.
Along with Slovak Jewish resistance forces, Rosenberg and Wetzler composed a detailed retelling of the Auschwitz-Birkenau murder process. Their account, the Vrba-Wetzler Report, contained maps, visual depictions of the gas chambers, and a description of the victims transported to the camp. It also included an estimate of the number of Jews murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau since June 1942, tallying the total to 1.75 million. After contributing to the report, Rosenberg assumed a forged identity, taking on the name Rudolf Vrba.
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The document, translated into multiple languages, was released anonymously in Switzerland in the summer of 1944. The United States verified the report, making it the first such testimony to achieve official credibility. The report is credited with piercing the shield of detachment that had characterized the initial American stance toward the Holocaust. The Hungarian Jewish leadership, however, neglected to act on the information as Vrba had hoped, and more than 437,000 Hungarian Jews were killed at Auschwitz. Nevertheless, international outcry surrounding the account delayed the slaughter of Hungarian Jews to some extent, saving hundreds of thousands of lives. In the wake of World War II, the report was used as evidence in the Nürnberg trials of defeated Nazi leaders.
Vrba eventually completed a doctorate degree and some postdoctoral research in biology and chemistry at Charles University in Prague. In 1958 he defected from Czechoslovakia, then under a Communist regime, when attending a scientific conference in Israel, where he remained until 1960. After later moving to Britain, he conducted medical research for a number of institutions, culminating in his appointment in 1976 as a professor of pharmacology at the medical school of the University of British Columbia, Canada, where he worked for the next 15 years.
Vrba contributed to more than 50 research papers in pharmacology and related fields. He documented the story of his escape from Auschwitz in an autobiography, I Cannot Forgive (1963; published as Factory of Death in 1964). He later estimated that, over the course of his lifetime, he had devoted 95 percent of his time to science and 5 percent to speaking and writing about the Holocaust.
Dec 29, 2022 · From now on, and for the rest of his days, he would be Rudolf Vrba, with a name that was impeccably Czech, carrying no hint of German or, for that matter, Jew. The two men, reborn as Jozef and...
Apr 7, 2006 · Rudolf Vrba, who as a young man escaped from Auschwitz and provided the first eyewitness evidence not only of the magnitude of the tragedy unfolding at the death camp but also of the exact...
Apr 25, 2011 · Information taken from Rudolf Vrba’s autobiography I Escaped From Auschwitz. Images from the Secrets of the Dead re-enactments in Escape from Auschwitz. Follow the route used by Vrba and...
Oct 16, 2022 · The whistleblower whose story had gripped me was a Slovak Jew born as Walter Rosenberg, though he would later adopt the name Rudolf Vrba. On the last day of June 1942, at the age of 17, he...
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Jun 30, 2022 · O ne day in 1978 Rudolf Vrba was in a restaurant in New York when he spotted a number tattooed on a waiter’s arm. Vrba (pictured) told him that he must be a Jew from Bedzin, Poland, who had...
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