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December 12, 2008
Hidden Shoah hero honored
A new UBC lecture series is dedicated to Dr. Rudolf Vrba.
MICHELLE DODEK
Sometimes a hero comes along and, for a variety of reasons, people don't recognize who they have in their midst. Rudolf Vrba was one such person.
For most of his adult life, he was known as Dr. Vrba, a researcher and lecturer in the faculty of medicine in the department of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia. Former medical student Charmaine Chang said that he had terrific charisma and she knew there was something mysterious about his past, but that was all she knew. He kept his distance from the organized Jewish community so few people knew of his incredible story unless they had read his book, I Cannot Forgive. Who was this man, whose life was lived in Slovakia, England, Israel, the United States and, finally, Vancouver? On Sunday, Nov. 30, before an audience of approximately 400 friends and admirers of Vrba, Dr. Ruth Linn, dean of the faculty of education at Haifa University, explained.
More than 700 attempts were made by Jewish prisoners to escape Auschwitz. Only five people were successful and only one pair authored a detailed report illustrating the immediate peril to the Hungarian Jewish community. The report was called the Vrba-Wexler report, after its authors. Vrba noticed, as a prisoner in Auschwitz, that the camp was gearing up for the largest transport ever and overheard guards discussing who was expected. Vrba and his friend, Alfred Wexler, felt it imperative to issue a warning so that Hungary's Jews would resist their deportation and survive. The only way to do it was to escape from Auschwitz. In April 1944, they managed to do so, going to the Slovakian Jewish community and, in separate rooms, dictating their identical accounts of Auschwitz and their urgent alarm about the Nazis' plans for Hungary.
The report was sent to the leaders of the Hungarian Jewish community, to British prime minister Winston Churchill, even to the Vatican, but no one acted. Dr. John Conway, professor emeritus of history at UBC and a friend of Vrba, explained the three reasons the information in the report went unheeded. First, there was widespread skepticism of "atrocity propaganda" throughout Europe, secondly, the Nazis had been successfully secretive and, lastly, the leaders in the Jewish community had their own reasons for suppressing the report. Some of these leaders may have felt the news of death camps was exaggerated and didn't want people to panic, and others, such as Rudolf Kastner, had other plans. Kastner was the liaison between the SS and the Budapest Jewish community. He made a deal with Adolf Eichmann to send almost 1,700 Jews, who each paid a fortune, on a train to safety in Switzerland in exchange for keeping the rest of the community calm.
By 1952, explained Linn, Kastner was the minister of trade and industry for the newly formed state of Israel, and Vrba was studying chemistry at the University of Prague. Kastner was at first touted as a hero during the Holocaust but, in 1953, he was accused of collaboration. In 1955, an Israeli judge concluded, "he had sold his soul to the devil." Despite the decision, the Israeli establishment continued a de facto support of Kastner by continuing to suppress information about Vrba and his report. This was what intrigued her the most, said Linn.
Kastner lived out his days as a recluse but Vrba did not. Once Vrba earned his PhD, he worked as a researcher and academic in many places. According to Linn, Vrba spoke his mind and often made enemies in the Jewish world for his criticism and suspicion of the Jewish establishment and Israel. By the time he became a professor at UBC in 1967, Vrba settled in to a life of relative anonymity, although he was, according to colleague
Dr. Bernard MacLeod, a world- renowned scientist who published 56 major scientific articles on mental diseases, diabetes and cancer throughout his career.
In the late 1990s, another academic, Dr. William Pearce at the University of Alberta, read a review of Vrba's book. He became fascinated by Vrba's story and threw himself into learning more about the Holocaust. He wanted the U of A to have a lecture series to promote Holocaust studies so he contacted Vrba, who agreed, in 2001, to give two public lectures in Edmonton to raise the profile of Pearce's project. The two men became friends and, when Vrba passed away in 2006, Pearce spearheaded the idea to form a lecture series at UBC in his memory. Aided by Vrba's friends and colleagues, an endowment was set up so that Vrba's legacy in both science and the Holocaust would be remembered.
It was fitting that the inaugural lecture focused on Vrba's life but, in the future, students and faculty will be the main beneficiaries of the speakers who will be brought in, according to Prof. Chris Friedrichs of the UBC history department. "This lecture series is unique because the subject of the lectures will alternate between a Holocaust subject one year and a topic of interest in the field of biochemistry and related fields the next. Lectures will be open to the public, but the topics will be related to the frontiers of research in each field," said Friedrichs.
Michelle Dodek is a Vancouver freelance writer whose full-time job is caring for her two small children.
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