03 April, 2006
Rudolph Vrba, one of the five Jews who escaped from the Auschwitz death camp and delivered the first report about the shocking reality of the Nazi concentration camp to Hungarian Jewish leaders and to World Jewish Congress secretary general Gerhart Riegner in Switzerland, has died in Canada at the age of 82. Born in Slovakia in 1924, the Nazis sent Vrba to Majdanek in 1941, at the age of 18, and later to Auschwitz Birkenau. He managed to escape past Nazi guards in April 1944 with his compatriot, Alfred Wetzler. Two weeks later, they wrote a 30-page document about the death camps that came to be known as the Auschwitz Protocols. The document estimated the number of people killed at Auschwitz at the time as 1.7 million, and warned that the Germans were planning to send 800,000 Hungarian Jews to the camp. Many copies of the document were distributed, in the hope that one would reach the Allies.
In June 1944, a copy reached the State Department via Gerhard Riegner of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, Switzerland. Two days later, parts of the report were aired on the BBC, but the Allies ignored the report's calls to bomb Auschwitz. Vrba fought with a partisan unit following his escape. In 1967, he emigrated to Canada, where he became a professor of pharmacology. Canadian Jewish Congress chief executive Bernie Farber said: "There are very few stories from those that were actually there... his story was breathtaking… He had what has been described as a photographic memory," Farber said.