Holocaust Hero: Little known UBC prof Rudolf Vrba profiled in new book from Vancouver writer

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Holocaust Hero: The Life and Times of Rudolf Vrba by Vancouver journalist Alan Twigg is the first of two biographies focused on Rudolf Vrba, a Slovak-Jewish biochemist who, as a teen in 1942, was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. He escaped the camp in the spring of 1944 and then wrote, with fellow escapee Alfréd Wetzler, the Vrba-Wetzler Report, which detailed the mass murder being committed inside the camp.

Vrba died in 2006 at age 81 after spending just over 30 years in Vancouver, 25 of those as a UBC professor. Postmedia caught up with Twigg, who was not only Vrba’s biographer, but also his friend.

Question:  What made you want to dig into Rudolf Vrba’s story?  

Answer: Most of the world knows precious little about Vrba. Even though he escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau and co-wrote the Vrba-Wetzler Report, his personal story has not been told. Vrba is not even famous in Israel because he told the Zionists a lot of things they didn’t want to hear. Recently, Jonathan Freedland rehashed the contents of Vrba’s own book from 1963, without most people realizing it, but nobody has delved deeply into Vrba’s extensive archives at the FDR Presidential Library in New York. I’ve also taken the time to interview a lot of people in Vancouver who knew him.

Q: What areas of his life does Volume 1 cover?  

A: It covers the early years when he escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau at age 19 and successfully blew the whistle on the Holocaust, writing a report that was so convincing that world leaders could not, NOT, believe it. Eighty years later, the academic historians have finally agreed he and his co-escapee named Alfred Wetzler saved 200,000 lives.

Q: What about Volume 2 (to be released in the fall of 2027)? 

A: It’ll cover the last 50 years of Vrba’s life. That includes his featured role in Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary Shoah. His success as a Nazi hunter. His success with women. His friendships with major historians. How he came to Vancouver. His volatile relationship with the feminist playwright Betty Lambert — before his long and happy marriage to Vancouver realtor Robin Vrba. His complete annihilation of the credibility of the Holocaust denialist Ernst Zundel. The suicide of his brilliant eldest daughter in Papua New Guinea.

Q: After five years of research, what is your biggest discovery?   

A: I uncovered the real story about how Vrba really escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau. The truth is revealed for the first time in the book. I confirmed the story from three sources, including Robin Vrba.

Q: Is there any fiction or lore about Vrba that you felt compelled to explain, and correct?  

A: Well, if only there was fiction and lore! My guess is that most people reading this interview will not have heard of him… I suppose the main fiction might be that he was intimidating. I’ve heard that about a lot of people. Margaret Atwood. Robertson Davies. Joni Mitchell. You meet such people, and you realize they are not intimidating at all. They just don’t suffer fools.

Q: What is one of the most important things you learned from him?  

A: We were on a sidewalk in Kits and he said, “Alan, if something ever goes wrong, if ever you have a problem, let’s say you lose your car keys, or you have a flat tire, just stop and ask yourself, ‘Is this going to be a problem for me a year from now?’ You will find that most problems are not really that important.”

Q: What do you think is the most important part of his legacy?  

A: Do not kowtow.

Q: If you could talk to him about the current Israel/Palestine conflict, and the state of the world, what do you think he would say?  

A: He might point out that the “conflict” could end tomorrow if the people who started the war gave back the hostages.

Q: In a nutshell, what was Rudolf Vrba like? 

A: Rudi was so much more than a mere escape artist and he ceased to be a practicing Jew as a young teen, well before being sent to Auschwitz. He was an anti-romanticist who was trained by circumstances to never exhibit weakness. When he was interviewed by Claude Lanzmann for Shoah, he was smiling and dressed to the nines, presenting himself as invulnerable. He was a brilliant scientist, able to converse in seven languages, and he could be a kind and a good friend. He was a Nazi hunter and a ladies’ man with a wicked sense of humour who loved to carouse. After making his harrowing escape with Alfréd Wetzler in April of 1944 and co-writing the Vrba-Wetzler Report, he became The Jew Who Knew Too Much.

Q: What do you hope to accomplish with this work? 

A: Rudi lived longer here in Vancouver, by far, than anywhere else he lived, so I hope the two volumes of biography will finally convince our so-called world class city to have the decency and knowledge to finally recognize possibly greatest hero of the Second World War.

Historians now agree that Vrba must be credited with saving 200,000 lives. He is buried here, in our midst, and not in a Jewish cemetery. He is ours. He taught at UBC for about 25 years and there is a not single sign of his presence. What sort of place are we if we can’t have the awareness and smarts to recognize someone like Rudolf Vrba?

Q: Aside from learning about Vrba the man, what do you hope readers take away from this story?  

A: Germany enabled (Adolf) Hitler to establish a police state; now it’s happening south of the border. Support the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.