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Rudolf Vrba (birth name Walter Rosenberg, b. September 11, 1924, in Topoľčany, Slovakia) was a Slovak Jewish survivor, one of the few prisoners to escape from Auschwitz, and an associate professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
He was born to Elias Rosenberg and Helena Rosenberg (née Gruenfeldová). In March 1939, the newly formed Slovak Republic, a client state of Germany, enacted restrictions and measures against Jews, limiting their employment in military and government positions.
In 1941, a new Jewish Code was enacted, forcing Slovak Jews to wear yellow armbands, excluding them from many jobs and limiting their education. Because of these restraints, Vrba could not attend high school and worked as a labourer.
In 1942, Vrba set out to join the Czechoslovak government-in-exile army in England but was arrested by Hungarian guards and was sent back to Slovakia. After a short time in a transition concentration camp for Jews, on June 15, 1942, Vrba was deported to the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. Fifteen days later he was sent to Auschwitz I camp. He was allocated to work in the Aufräumungskommando (order commandos) in Auschwitz II–Birkenau, where he cataloged assets confiscated from prisoners. Vrba worked from August 18, 1942, to June 7, 1943, repacking properties stolen from prisoners to be sent to Germany.
For a short time, he was moved to Auschwitz II–Birkenau camp. In June 1943 he was given the job of registrar in the quarantine section at Birkenau sector B II.
Working at Birkenau sector B II, he met Alfréd Wetzler, another Slovak Jewish prisoner and together the two men planned to escape from the concentration camp. On April 7, 1944, helped by two other prisoners, Vrba and Wetzler hid inside a pile of wood in the camp, sprinkling the area with tobacco soaked in gasoline to mask their smell from guard dogs.
On April 10, Vrba and Wetzler left their hiding place and headed south, crossing the Polish–Slovakian border; they eventually reached the city of Bratislava, where they were hidden by the local Jewish Council. Here they wrote in Slovak the “Vrba–Wetzler report,” a document that described the organization and structure of Auschwitz, which was also translated into German and Hungarian and distributed clandestinely.
In April of 1944, after escaping Auschwitz, Walter Rosenberg changed his name to Rudolf Vrba; he kept that name until his death. In September 1944 Vrba joined the Czechoslovak partisans’ fight against the Nazi army; at this time he married his first wife, Gerta.
After the war the couple moved to Prague, where Vrba graduated with a degree in medicine. In 1949 he received a degree in chemistry and two years later, a doctorate. Working as researcher at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Vrba achieved a Kandidat Nauk (the first of two levels of scientific doctoral degrees in former Soviet and Eastern Bloc countries).
From 1953 to 1958 he worked at Charles University Medical School in Prague.
In 1958, Vrba traveled to Israel for an international conference and defected. He lived in Israel for two years, working at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.
In 1960, he moved to England, where he worked for two years at the Neuropsychiatric Research Unit in Carshalton, Surrey, and for seven years at the Medical Research Council (UK branch).
In the 1960s, following the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, Vrba told his survival story to the British journalist Alan Bestic, who in 1964 co-authored Vrba’s biography I Cannot Forgive (published by Grove Press in New York). In that same year, Vrba testified at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in Germany.
In 1967 he moved to Canada, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1972. From 1967 to 1973 Vrba worked for the Medical Research Council of Canada. For two years he was a research fellow at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, where he met his second wife, Robin (née Lipson). In 1975, the couple moved to Vancouver, where Vrba worked as associate professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia until the early 1990s.
Vrba dedicated himself to fighting the neo-Nazi movement in Canada.
Rudolf Vrba died March 27, 2006, in Vancouver.
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Created August, 2018 by Shyla Seller
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