Rudolf Vrba

Rudolf Vrba

Rudolf "Rudi" Vrba (11 September 1924 – 27 March 2006) was a professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia and Holocaust survivor. Originally from Slovakia, he is known for his escape, at the age of 19, from the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland during the Second World War, and for having provided some of the earliest and most detailed information about the mass murder that was taking place there.

Vrba and a fellow prisoner, Alfréd Wetzler (1918–1988), managed to flee Auschwitz on 10 April 1944, three weeks after German forces had invaded Hungary (a German ally), and after SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann had arrived in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, to begin the deportation to Auschwitz of the country's Jewish population. The 40 pages of information the men passed to Jewish officials when they arrived in Slovakia on 24 April – which included information about the use of gas chambers and crematoria – became known as the Vrba-Wetzler report. While it confirmed material in earlier reports from Polish and other escapees, Miroslav Kárný writes that it was unique in its "unflinching detail."

Mass transports of Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz began by train on 15 May 1944 at a rate of 12,000 people a day, most of whom were sent straight to the gas chambers. There was a delay of several weeks before information from the Vrba-Wetzler report was distributed widely enough to gain the attention of governments. Vrba argued until the end of his life that, had the deportees been given access to the report – in particular had they known they were being sent to their deaths and not "resettlement" (Umsiedlung), as the Nazis had said – they might have refused to board the trains. His position is generally not accepted by Holocaust historians.

Material from the Vrba-Wetzler and earlier reports appeared in newspapers and radio broadcasts in the United States and Europe, particularly in Switzerland, throughout June and into July 1944, prompting world leaders to appeal to Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy to halt the deportations. He ordered them to be stopped on 7 July, possibly fearing he would be held personally responsible after the war. By then 437,000 Jews had already been deported, constituting almost the entire Jewish population of the Hungarian countryside, but another 200,000 living in Budapest itself were saved.