VRBA, Rudolf

Nationality: British and Canadian (originally Czechoslovakian: British citizenship, 1966; Canadian citizenship, 1972.) Born: Walter Rosenberg, Topolcany, 11 September 1924. Education: Czech Technical University, Prague, 1945-49, Ing. Chem. 1949; Dr. Techn. Sc. 1951; Czechoslovak Academy of Science, Prague, C.Sc. 1956. Military Service: Czechoslovak Partisan Units 1944-45: Chechoslovak Medal for Bravery, Medal of Meritorious Fighter, and Order of Slovak National Insurrection. Career: Escaped from Auschwitz, 1944. Researcher, Institute of Industrial Hygiene and Occupational Diseases, Ministry of Health, Prague, 1953-58; biochemist, Veterinary Research Institute, Ministry of Agriculture, Beth Dagan, Israel, 1958-60; scientific staff member, British MRC, Neuropsychiatric Research Unit, Carshalton, Surrey, England, 1960-67; associate, Medical Research Council of Canada, 1967-73; visiting lecturer, Harvard Medical School, and research fellow, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, 1973-75. Since 1976 associate professor, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Helped produce several films on the Holocaust, 1972-85. Awards: Laufberger Medal for Physiology, Czech Academy of Science and Medical Society J.E. Purkinje, Prague, 1993. Ph.D.: Honoris Causa, University of Haifa, 1998.

Publications

Memoir

I Cannot Forgive, with Alan Bestic. 1963; as 44070: The Conspiracy of the Twentieth Century, 1989.

Other

The Auschwitz Report of April 1944, with Alfred Wetzler. 1981; annotated edition, as London Has Been Informed, edited by Henryk Swiebocki, 1997.

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Rudolf Vrba was one of the few who escaped from the Nazis during World War II, doing so from Auschwitz on 7 April 1944. With Alfred Wetzler, with whom he escaped, he wrote the Vrba-Wetzler report, which played no small role in alerting the world to the Holocaust.

The book has a swift and enthralling narrative with an adventure-like feel to it. This is because of the events it discusses (escapes, evasions of capture) and because, unlike most of the victims, the men and women discussed in this memoir were not the most wretched of the camps. It is also, however, because of the time and place it was published, and the audience for which it was written, more used to John Buchan than Primo Levi .

The book's genesis sheds some light on the way it tells its horror-filled story. In 1958 Vrba, who had been studying and living in Prague, left to take up a place with the British Medical Research Council in London. At the time of the Adolf Eichmann trial, Vrba was encouraged to go to a major British paper, the Daily Herald, to tell them his story. Falling in with an Irish journalist, Alan Bestic, he wrote five pieces for the paper, which were a great success. One morning, however, Vrba was buttonholed by the man who delivered his milk, a war veteran. "I thoroughly disliked your articles … To be frank with you, I think that you came to this country from Czechoslovakia with the aim of disturbing our good post-war relations with Germany," he said. "What you are saying now is just malicious and incredible." Like many ordinary people, the story of the camps was too much for this milkman: while the concentration camp at Belsen was well known, the death camps of the east were less familiar to Britain at that time. Vrba realized that, although he had described what had happened, he had not explained well enough how it had come to be, how "this was all arranged by the perfidious German administration of the time." A year later the prosecutor at Frankfurt wrote to Vrba too: "I have got here eighty books of evidence about Auschwitz, and I still do not know anything about Auschwitz." Vrba says that he would have to write 81 books to make sure no detail was missed but has to settle for "choosing from my recollection those pieces which in their totality would enable even my honest old milkman to understand the principles used by the Germans to make the unthinkable and unspeakable machinery of Auschwitz a reality." Along with Kitty Hart 's memoir I Am Alive! the book was one of the first in Britain addressed to the general public. There were few Holocaust memoirs in Britain (or in the anglophone world) in the early 1960s, despite the influence of Anne Frank's diary.

Vrba was a witness in many trials and made a deposition for the Eichmann trial. He is also one of the narrators in Claude Lanzmann 's film Shoah.

The book—accessible, clear, and narrative driven—made a big impact and remains a major Holocaust text, not least for the extraordinary story of the escape from Auschwitz and the creation of the Vrba-Wetzler report.

—Robert Eaglestone

See the essay on I Cannot Forgive.