Rudolf Vrba

Rudolf Vrba   (biochemist)
Born	Walter Rosenberg 11 September 1924
Died	27 March 2006 (Age 81)

Rudolf Vrba (born Walter Rosenberg) 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-wrote the Vrba-Wetzler Report, a detailed report about the mass murder taking place there. The report, distributed by George Mantello in Switzerland, is credited with having halted the mass deportation of Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz in July 1944, saving more than 200,000 lives. After the war, Vrba trained as a biochemist, working mostly in England and Canada.

New arrivals were gassed

Rudolf Vrba and his fellow escapee Alfréd Wetzler fled Auschwitz three weeks after German forces invaded Hungary and shortly before the SS began mass deportations of Hungary's Jewish population to the camp. The information the men dictated to Jewish officials when they arrived in Slovakia on 24 April 1944, which included that new arrivals in Auschwitz were being gassed and not "resettled" as the Germans maintained, became known as the Vrba–Wetzler Report (VWR), also known as the Auschwitz Protocols. When the War Refugee Board published it with considerable delay in November 1944, the New York Herald Tribune described it as "the most shocking document ever issued by a United States government agency". While it confirmed material in earlier reports from Polish and other escapees, the historian Miroslav Kárný wrote that it was unique in its "unflinching detail".

There was a delay of several weeks before the report was distributed widely enough to gain the attention of governments. Mass transports of Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz began on 15 May 1944 at a rate of 12,000 people a day. Most went straight to the gas chambers. Vrba argued until the end of his life that the deportees might have refused to board the trains, or at least that their panic would have disrupted the transports, had the report been distributed sooner and more widely.

From late June and into July 1944, material from the Vrba–Wetzler Report appeared in newspapers and radio broadcasts in the United States and Europe, particularly in Switzerland, prompting world leaders to appeal to Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy to halt the deportations. On 2 July 1944, American and British forces bombed Budapest, and on 6 July, in an effort to exert his sovereignty, Horthy ordered that the deportations should end. By then, over 434,000 Jews had been deported in 147 trains—almost the entire Jewish population of the Hungarian countryside—but another 200,000 in Budapest were saved.

Resistance in Auschwitz

Speaking on the Resistance in Auschwitz

The Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.

Holocaust survivor Rudolf Vrba describes consequences of German social-democrats' fight for better conditions for prisoners in Auschwitz.

From a film "Shoah" (1985) by Claude Lanzmann.

Betrayed by the Zionist Movement

On 24 August 2024, Jonathan Cook posted on X:

Tony Greenstein offers an excoriating account of how Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland falsified the historical record in his biography of Rudolph Vrba, the first Jew to escape Auschwitz.

One might wonder why Vrba's incredible story has been buried for decades, given how keen Hollywood is to make Holocaust movies.

Greenstein explains. Vrba's efforts to warn other Jews of their coming fate in the Nazi death camps were betrayed by European leaders of the then-young Zionist Movement, who silenced him.

The Zionist Movement was prepared to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Jews in return for the Nazis escorting the Zionist elite out of danger in Europe to Palestine. There the Zionist Movement was already well-advanced in its preparations to expel the native Palestinian population and build a self-declared Jewish state on the ruins of its homeland.

The Zionists' attitude reflected that of the movement's founding father, Theodor Herzl: "The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”

Vrba was hugely critical of the Zionist Movement for collaborating with the Nazis, and had no love for the Jewish state it spawned.

That explains why Israel's Holocaust museum Yad Vashem has effectively excised Vrba's astonishing story from its halls, and why Israeli schoolchildren learn nothing of Vrba. It's also presumably why Hollywood has never picked up the most Hollywood story to come out of the Holocaust.

The anti-Zionist Vrba's story exposes the ideological foundations of Israel to be fully in sympathy with ugly European ethic nationalisms that culminated in Nazism. His story explains how Israel is capable of, and committing, a genocide in Gaza.

Freedland's task was to appropriate Vrba story, strip out its anti-Zionist message, and incorporate it into the now-dominant Zionist narrative carefully crafted after the Second World War.

Vrba's story is now doubtless ready for a Hollywood makeover – one that, if it happens, will enrich Freedland.

Thanks to Freedland, the threat posed by the true story of Vrba has been neutralised. That accords with the fate of anti-Zionist Jews, whose stories are either ignored or sanitised to accord with Zionist history.

That process continues today:

The many anti-Zionist Jews who supported Jeremy Corbyn were ignored or expelled from the Labour Party because they undermined the bogus antisemitism narrative Freedland and many others promoted to get rid of a leader who genuinely supported the Palestinian people's right to statehood.

And the many anti-Zionist Jews who attend the marches to protest the genocide in Gaza have been disappeared because they give the lie to the establishment media's efforts to paint those marches as a antisemitic.

Greenstein recently published an important book, "Zionism During the Holocaust", that deals extensively with the collusion of those who helped to found Israel with the Nazis. I recommend everyone seek it out.

Greenstein's review of Freedland's book, "The Escape Artist", can be read here.

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References

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