Co-editors: Seán Mac Mathúna • John Heathcote
Consulting editor: Themistocles Hoetis
Field Correspondent: Allen Hougland
Rudolf
Kasztner
Ten
Questions to the Zionists from Rabbi
Weissmandel THE
KASTNER TRIAL - shown at the Jewish Film Festival in
1997 Shamash:
The
Jewish Internet Consortium: Holocaust Home
Page Rudolf Vrba, born Walter
Rosenberg in Tropoljany, Czechoslvakia in 1924, was the
Jewish Slovak resistance fighter who escaped from Auschwitz
in 1944 to get the news of the Holocaust to the world. He
contacted the Jewish Council and told them what was going on
in the death camp and the fate with awaited the Hungarian
Jews. His account also reached Rudolf Kastner who ignored
it. Vrba later commented: Rudolf Vrba, born in
Czechoslovakia in 1924 Some historians have argued
that a giving the Hungarian Jews this warning would have
made no differance - because they claimed the Jews of
Hungary were not prepared to revolt and that any rebellion
against the Nazi's would have been suicidal. Vrba, though,
sees it differantly: Rudolf Vrba
shown holding a Hebrew version of his Book "I
Escaped Auschwitz" during a recent visit to Israel.
He presently lives in Canada. Read an account of
this published in The
Jerusalam Post Below is a full account of
Vrba's dramatic escape from Auschwitz on Friday, April 7th
1944 - just hours before the first night of Passover. The
extract is from Auschwitz
and the Allies by
Martin Gilbert (Michael Joseph, London,
England,1981) On April 7 (1944) two trains
reached Auschwitz from western Europe. The first, from
Holland, contained 240 Jews, of whom sixty-two men and
thirty-eight women were tattooed and sent to the barracks,
and the remaining 140, including twenty-two children, were
gassed. Later that same day a second train arrived from
Belgium, and 206 men and a hundred women were tattooed and
sent to the barracks, while the rest, 319 in all, including
fifty-four children, were sent straight to the gas
chamber. The destruction of the family
camp on March 7 had made a profound impression on a young
Slovak Jew, Walter Rosenberg, who subsequently changed his
name to Rudolf Vrba. Several of Vrba's close friends had
perished in the family camp, and he felt an urgent need to
inform the outside world both of what had already happened
at Auschwitz, and of the preparations which those in the
camp knew to be taking place to kill a substantially
increased number of victims, most probably from Hungary. "I
was attracted,' Vrba later wrote, 'by the possibility to
damage the plans of the Nazis by divulging them to the
Hungarian Jewish population while they are still in freedom,
and can take to the streets.' (1) Vrba had been in Auschwitz
since June 1942, and for nearly two years he had found ample
opportunity to observe the killing process at work. On three
previous occasions he had made plans to escape, in December
1942, May 1943 and January 1944, but had been unable to
carry them out. Now, together with a fellow Slovak, Alfred
Wetzler, he contacted the secret International Resistance
Group inside the camp, and put his plan of escape to David
Szmulewski one of the representatives of the resistance
leaders 'I have been told,' Vrba later wrote, 'that due to
my inexperience, personal volatility (impulsiveness) and
other factors the leadership dismissed my intentions as
unreliable." (2) The resistance leaders
understood, however, Vrba's intense personal feelings about
the destruction of the family camp, and gave him their
assurance that, even if they could not help him escape, no
obstacle would be put in his way. On March 31 his resistance
contact, Szmulewski saw him again, to tell him of the
resistance leaders' decision. "Szmulewski himself,' Vrba
later recalled 'was very sorry because of the unfavourable
"higher decision" but expressed the hope that in the case of
"no success" I would be able to avoid interrogation and thus
avoid a catastrophe for those who had had contact with me
before.' The two escapees were
determined to alert the outside world to the reality of
Auschwitz, and to the fate that seemed to be in store for
the Jews of Hungary. Wetzler, who was twenty-six, had been
an actual witness of the destruction of the Theresienstadt
family camp. Vrba was nineteen and a half. Both had been
born in Slovakia. Both had been brought to Auschwitz nearly
two years before. What these two men had seen and learned
during those two years was to provide the basis for the
first comprehensive report to reach the west. From August 1942 to June 1943
Vrba had worked in a special 'Clearing Commando', known
colloquially as 'Canada', then situated in Auschwitz Main
Camp. On the arrival of each train at the railway sidings,
the Commando's task was to drag out the dead bodies, and
then take all the luggage of the deportees for sorting, and
to prepare it for dispatch to Germany. Thus for ten months
Vrba was present at the arrival of almost most every train,
and committed to memory their place of origin and the number
of deportees in each. In June 1943 Vrba was
transferred from 'Canada' to become one of the registrars in
the Quarantine Camp at Birkenau, and as a registrar he had
the opportunity of speaking to those new arrivals who had
been selected from the incoming trains for slave labour,
instead of for gassing. Here again, he both knew and
memorized the details of the incoming transports, including
the sequence of tattoo numbers allocated to each group as it
arrived. In addition, many of the trucks taking people from
the railway sidings to Crematorium IV drove past within only
a few yards of Vrba's 'office'. As Vrba himself later wrote:
From his 'office', Vrba also
witnessed the construction of a new railway siding inside
Birkenau itself. Work on this siding, or 'ramp had begun on
15 January 1944. 'The purpose of this ramp,' Vrba later
recalled, "was no secret in Birkenau the SS were talking
about 'Hungarian Salami' and 'a million units' . . . my
lavatory was 30 yards from the new ramp, my office about 100
yards." Vrba had also been able to make
contact with the Czech family camp, as his work as registrar
enabled him to move during the daytime between several
sections of Birkenau He could make full use of this ability,
he later recalled, 'by taking a bundle of papers' with him,
moving to a section of Birkenau adjacent to the family camp.
Then he could contrive to 'get lost' among the prisoners in
that section, and without even having to shout, he could
speak across the barbed wire between the sections, to other
prisoners. There were even times when he had been able to
pass written messages across to the family camp, and to
receive messages in reply. Two days before the actual
gassing of the family camp, the SS had imposed an internal
camp curfew. But a number of those marked out to die had at
the same time been transferred to the very section in which
Vrba was then a registrar. 'Thus, for the last two days of
their lives , he later recalled, 'I had unlimited contact
with them." (4) Like Vrba, Alfred Wetzler had
also been a registrar, but in different parts of Birkenau,
including the mortuary. He too had established contacts
which enabled him to collect information about every aspect
of the killing process. The facts which he and Vrba were
able to assemble and to memorize, included the number of
Jews 'put to death by gas at Birkenau from April 1942 to
April 1944, listed by their country of origin, and the
dimensions of the camp. While planning their escape,
Vrba and Wetzler had even been able to make contact with
several of the Jews forced by the SS to drag the corpses
from the gas chambers to the crematorium. These Jewish slave
labourers were formed into a special unit, or
Sonderkommando. At regular intervals, they too would
be gassed, and then replaced by a new group. But those whom
Vrba and Wetzler contacted were able to give them details
about the size and workings of the gas chambers themselves.
These facts also the two men committed to memory. Two hours before the evening
roll-call of April 7 Vrba and Wetzler were hidden by their
colleagues in a specially prepared hide-out which a number
of inmates had prepared during work on an extension of the
camp which was then under construction beyond the camp's
inner perimeter. This area, known as 'Mexico', was being
prepared to house the expected Hungarian Jews. The hide-out was a gap in a
woodpile, made up of wooden boards. These boards were being
stored as part of the building material for the extension of
the camp. Before the inmates returned to their barracks
within the inner perimeter, they sprinkled the surrounding
area with petrol soaks and tobacco, to prevent the two
hundred guard dogs of Birkenau, kept there for just such
occasions, from sniffing out the would-be escapees. This
latter advice had come from the experience of Soviet
prisoners-of-war. At evening roll-call, after the
'Mexico' workers had returned to their barracks, the sirens
sounded. Two prisoners were missing. The guards and dogs
began their search. For three days and nights there was a
high security alarm, with continuous roll-calls and
searches. (5) Throughout those three days a tight cordon of
SS guards was kept around both the inner and outer
perimeters. But the hide-away remained
undiscovered, and by the evening of April 10, the camp
authorities assumed that the two men had already got away.
The cordon of SS guards which had surrounded the outer
perimeter of the camp withdrawn. On April 9 the head of the SS
units responsible for guarding the camp, Waffen SS Major
Hartenstein had already telegraphed news of the escape to
Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Copies of his telegram were
sent to the SS administrative headquarters at Sachsenhausen
to all commanders of Gestapo and SID units in the east, to
all Criminal Police units, and to all frontier police posts.
The telegram gave the names of the two men, Identified them
as Jews, and added: 'Immediate search unsuccessful. Request
from you further search and in case of capture full report
to concentration camp Auschwitz". (6) The telegram went on to state
that Himmler himself had been informed of the escape, and
that the fault 'of any guard' had not so far been
determined. The search within the outer
perimeter of the camp having been called off at 10 p.m. on
April 10, Vrba and Wetzler slipped past the outer line of
watchtowers, and with incredible courage set off southwards
toward Slovakia. After their escape, Vrba and
Wetzler had worked their way southwards from Birkenau
'without documents, without a compass, without a map, and
without a weapon". (7) Carefully avoiding the German 'new
settlers' who lived, as at Kozy, in former Polish homes, who
were often armed, and had the authority to shoot
"unidentifiable loiterers' at sight, they headed steadily
towards the mountains, shunning all roads and paths, and
marching only at night. One evening they were fired on by a
German police patrol, but managed to escape into the forest.
Later they met a Polish partisan, who guided them towards
the frontier, and then, on the morning of Friday April 21,
they crossed into Slovakia, finding refuge with a farmer on
the Slovak side, in the small village of Skalite. On April 6, the day before Vrba
and Wetzler began their escape, Reuven Zaslani of the Jewish
Agency had already warned British intelligence in Cairo of a
German radio broadcast in which the Germans 'propose
eliminating a million Jews in Hungary'. (8) On the following day, as Vrba
and Wetzler crouched in their woodpile, and were hiding
within half a mile of Crematorium IV, the Geneva Zionists
were once again telling the Allied representatives in
Switzerland what they knew of the fate of European Jewry
This time they told their story to the United States
Minister in Berne, Leland Harrison, and his first Counsellor
of Legation, J. Klahr Huddle. Once more Gerhart Riegner and
Richard Lichtheim who headed the delegation, reported for
more than an hour on the news which had reached them from
Nazi Europe. Several thousand Dutch Jews, they said, had
beer) saved from deportation as a result of receiving
Palestine certificates. But the Polish Jews interned in
Vittel were less fortunate: recently the Government of
Paraguay 'had refused to recognise" those documents and
passports which had been issued by the Paraguayan consul in
Berne, while several other South American consuls who had
issued similar documents 'had been dismissed'. The Zionists and the American
diplomats then had what was described as ,a general
discussion' about the 'tragic fate' of the Jews of Europe.
Riegner handed Harrison two photographs. One showed "the
dead bodies of the Jews in Transnistra", Rumanian Jews who
had been deported eastward in the autumn of 1941, and the
other showed what Riegner called 'one of the death chambers
in Treblinka". This second photograph, Riegner
told Harrison, 'was corroborating evidence to the report
lately issued by Polish circles and describing the death
camp of Treblinka". (9) Once again, there was no
mention of Auschwitz. Not even its name appeared in the
report of this long meeting. Yet the gas chambers there had
already been in operation for nearly two years. And as Vrba,
Wetzler, and their terrible information began the journey
southward, the SS were making plans to build two more gas
chambers, to repair the crematoria, and to begin what they
hoped would be the rapid, uninterrupted, and secret
destruction of the 750,000 Hungarian Jews whose fate they
now controlled. From Pages
201-205 Throughout April (1944), while
the SS prepared to deport the Jews of Hungary, other Jews
were being brought to Auschwitz as before. On April 9 the
first of three trains reached Auschwitz from the Majdanek
concentration camp, which was evacuated as the Red Army
drove steadily westwards. For eight days these "evacuees"
had been shunted towards Auschwitz in a sealed train,
without water, or medical help. During the journey, twenty
of them cut their way out of the train at a wayside station,
and tried to escape. All were shot. A further ninety-nine
were found dead on arrival at Auschwitz. Tile survivors were
tattooed, and sent to the barracks. On the following day, April 10,
a train reached Auschwitz from Italy, and on April 11 from
Athens. Of 1,500 deportees in this second train, 1,067 were
gassed. On April 29 a further train arrived from Paris,
including the Vittel deportees with their once precious, now
valueless Latin American passports. On April 30, from a
train from Italy, only thirteen men were sent to the
barracks, while all the women, children and old people were
gassed. Equally unknown to the Allies,
the Jews of Hungary were being prepared for deportation to
Auschwitz. The first stage of the Nazi plan, the scaling of
the Jews into ghettoes, had already begun on April 16, in
Ruthenia. Nine days later, the question of rescue took an
unexpected, dramatic turn : oil April 25, Joel Brand, a
leading Hungarian Zionist, was taken to SS headquarters in
Budapest. As Brand recalled two months later, Eichmann
'snapped' at him, as soon as lie was seated: Brand then recalled the
following conversation: Eichmann:
Quite. Well, I want goods for blood. Brand: I
did not understand at first and thought Eichmann meant
money. Eichmann:
No. Goods for blood. Money comes second. Brand: What
goods? Eichmann:
Go to your international authorities, they will know. For
example - lorries. I could imagine one lorry for a
hundred Jews, but that is only a suggested figure. Where
will you go ? Brand: I
must think . . . (11) This meeting between Brand and
Eichmann, unknown at the time either to the Jewish Agency or
to the Allies, was to lead within a few weeks to both the
Agency and the Allies becoming directly involved in the fate
of Hungarian Jewry, and in an SS act of deception on a
massive scale: for Eichmann wanted Brand to make contact
with the Jewish Agency representatives in Istanbul, and with
the Allies, and to offer a commercial barter, the Jews of
Hungary, alive, in exchange for goods and money: 'Goods for
blood', as Eichmann had expressed it. With the truth about Auschwitz
still unknown in the west, such an offer contained a
tantalizing appeal. But at the very moment when it was being
made, evidence was reaching the Jewish leadership in
Slovakia which contained full and horrific details of the
gassings at Auschwitz. The source of this news was the two
Auschwitz escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, whose
message had begun its westward journey with their escape
from Auschwitz 'on April 10 and their meeting with the
Slovak farmer at Skalite on April 21. As Vrba later
recalled: The farmer's name was Canecky.
During lunch he explained to Vrba and Wetzler that 'in
almost all the neighbouring villages' there were Jewish
doctors who had been exempt from deportation in the summer
of 1942 because of the 'dire lack' of doctors in Slovakia.
The exemption had covered the doctor's wife and children,
but not his parents, brothers or sisters. The farmer then told the
escapees that in the town of Cadca there was one such Jewish
doctor, a Dr. Pollak. Vrba realized that this was the same
man whom he himself had met at the time of his own
deportation in June 1942, and who, as a doctor, had been
deleted at the last moment from the deportation
list. To walk over the mountains to
Cadca would have taken the two men at least three days. But
if they could wait in Skalite until Monday morning, they
could take a train. This they did, dressed as local
peasants, and pretending to transport the farmer's pigs for
sale in Cadca's Monday market. As the local train was
controlled by local Slovak gendarmes, and not by Germans,
the risk for someone speaking Slovak, and dressed as a
peasant, was relatively small. So it was that the two men
reached Cadca without incident. There, as Vrba later
recalled: When Dr. Pollak learned
from me that all his 'resettled' relatives were dead, he
became somewhat shaky, and asked me what he could do for
me. I asked him to immediately contact the Jewish Council
in Bratislava. Before I left his office he, Dr. Pollak,
suggested that lie put bandages on my feet so that the
nurse would not suspect something unusual, because I was
a long time in his office (about fifteen
minutes). He gave me the address of
some of his friends, and we, i.e. Wetzler and myself,
slept in Cadca We travelled to Zilina next morning by
train, dressed as peasants. Oil the morning of Tuesday,
April 25, at about to a.m. we met the first
representative of the Jewish Council, Mr. Erwin Steiner,
in a park in Zilina. We (Wetzler and l) were drinking
slivovitz in the park and waiting for Steiner. Without
hair, in peasant shirts and drinking slivovitz in public
we attracted no attention, as this was a common habit of
newly recruited (already shorn) soldiers in Slovakia.
Thus we met the Jewish Council, with my feet still in
bandages provided by Dr. Pollak.' (12) On hearing the two escapees'
story, Steiner at once contacted the Jewish community in
Bratislava, the Slovak capital. The man to whom he spoke, by
telephone, in Bratislava was Oskar Krasnansky a chemical
engineer, and a leading Slovak Zionist. Although Jews were
not normally allowed to travel by train, Krasnansky managed
to obtain permission from the Police, and made his way to
Zilina. At Steiner's house Krasnansky
found the two escapees: 'They were in poor health, and
undernourished', he later recalled. 'They had eaten almost
no food for three weeks'. Krasnansky was impressed by the
escapees' 'wonderful memory', and for two days he
cross-examined them on the 'reality' of Auschwitz. Then,
after providing them with false Aryan papers, he sent them
for safety to the town of Lipovsky Mikulas. (13) Using Council documents brought
specially from Bratislava, Krasnansky checked the escapees'
account of the arrival of trains from Slovakia to Auschwitz
with the Council's own statistics of the departure of these
trains from Slovakia to their previously 'unknown
destination'. Then Krasnansky wrote a covering note to their
report, stating that it contained 'only what one or other,
or both, experienced, witnessed, or had knowledge of
directly'. Krasnansky added: Hence the statements are
to be considered as completely authentic.
(14) The question was now discussed
in Bratislava: what was to be done with this Vrba-Wetzler
report? According to Krasnansky, he himself wrote it out in
German, and gave it to a typist, Gisi Farkas, who made
several copies. 'One copy', he later recalled, 'we sent to
Istanbul. But it never arrived there. The man to whom we
gave it, who was making the journey, had been sent from
Istanbul as a "reliable courier". But possibly he was a paid
spy. As far as we later learned, he gave it to the Gestapo
in Budapest'. Krasnansky handed a second copy
of the report to the Slovak Orthodox rabbi, Dov Weissmandel
who had contacts with the Orthodox community in Switzerland,
and who offered to try to smuggle it there, for transmission
to the West. (14) A third copy was given to
Monsignor Giuseppe Burzio the Papal Chargé d'Affaires
in Bratislava, who went it on to the Vatican on May 22,
after himself questioning the two escapees. But the
Vatican's own records suggest that Burzio's report only
reached there five months later.' (15) The most urgent need, Vrba and
Wetzler believed, was to transmit the report to Hungary, and
to alert Hungarian Jewry to their own potential fate.
Krasnansky himself translated the Vrba-Wetzler report into
Hungarian, and prepared to give it to Rudolf
Kasztner the head
of the Hungarian Jewish rescue committee, on his next visit
to Bratislava. Kasztner who made the short
train journey from Budapest fairly frequently, was expected
in Bratislava before the end of April. But on April 25, the
very day on which Krasnansky was cross-examining Vrba and
Wetzler in Zilina, Kasztner and the Hungarian Jewish
leadership in Budapest were receiving Eichmann's offer to
negotiate 'goods for blood': to avoid the death camps
altogether in return for a substantial payment. On that fatal day, April 25,
two events had coincided: the truth about Auschwitz had
reached those who had the ability to make it known to the
potential victims, and the offer had been made to negotiate
'goods for blood'. Those Hungarian Jewish leaders who wished
to follow up the negotiations Were unwilling to risk the
negotiations by publicizing the facts about the annihilation
process at Auschwitz. Yet that process was known to them
from April 28, three days after Eichmann's first meeting
with Brand, when Kasztner travelled to Bratislava, where he
was given a copy of the Vrba-Wetzler report, and took it
back to Budapest. (16) But by then Kasztner and his
colleagues in the Zionist leadership in Hungary were already
committed to their negotiations with Eichmann, and to the
dispatch of their colleague, Joel Brand, to Istanbul. They
therefore gave no publicity whatsoever to the facts about
Auschwitz which were now in their possession. To this day, Vrba remains
convinced that had the facts which he and Wetzler brought to
Bratislava been immediately publicized and circulated
throughout Hungary, many of the 450,000 Jews who were later
to be deported, but who were as yet still in Hungary, would
have been stirred to resist, evade or otherwise obstruct
their deportation. Had the deportees had "knowledge of hot
ovens", Vrba later wrote, 'Instead of parcels of cold food,
they would have been less ready to board the trains and the
whole action of deportation would have been slowed
down". Not urgent warnings to their
fellow Jews to resist deportation, but secret negotiations
with the SS aimed at averting deportation altogether, had
become the avenue of hope chosen by the Hungarian Zionist
leaders. Their people thus became the innocent victims of
one of the countless Nazi deceptions of the war; "a clever
ruse", as Vrba himself later reflected, 'to neutralize the
potential resistance of a million people', and lie added:
During the first two weeks of
May the deportations to Auschwitz continued from Paris, from
Yugoslavia, from Berlin, and from the industrial labour camp
at Blechhammer. On May 14 a train arrived bringing sick and
old Jews, and Jewish children, from Plaszow, a slave labour
camp in the suburbs of Cracow. All were gassed. For the Jewish Agency, the
dispatch of Palestine certificates continued, their sole
known means of rescue. During May the first certificates
began to reach Belgium, sent from the Palestine Office in
Geneva through the International Red Cross, and these gave
protection, it was later discovered 'to some 600
recipients'. (18) Among the many enquiries that
had been made was one oil behalf of Yitzhak Gruenbaum
(Greenbaum), Polish-born chairman of the Rescue Committee of
the Jewish Agency, whose son Eliezer had been living in
Warsaw on the outbreak of war. Early that spring Gruenbaum
himself had telegraphed to Gerhart Riegner in Geneva: 'Find
my son'. Riegner's first reaction, as he later recalled, was
amazement that Gruenbaum should even imagine that it was any
longer possible to find anybody in Poland: But Riegner did not shrug off
the request. Instead, tic later recalled: This was indeed so; on March 1
a postcard from Eliezer Gruenbaum reached the World Congress
in Geneva, confirming receipt of the parcel. From Geneva,
Richard Lichtman at once wrote to Jerusalem to inform
Eliezer's father that his son was alive, and that the
postcard had come from a camp in Upper Silesia. The name of
the camp was Jawischowitz. It was, Lichtheim added,
'practically the same place as Birkenau'. (20) Jawischowitz was in fact one of
several industrial regions in the Auschwitz area to which
Jewish slave labour from Auschwitz and Birkenau were sent.
It was in no way 'practically the same place'. But the name
'Birkenau' like that of 'Auschwitz' still masked its true
function from those who used it. According to Eliezer
Gruenbaum's postcard, which had been sent from Jawischowitz
on April 29, he had received 'three food parcels' through
the World Jewish Congress relief organization, Relico, and
it was Relico's Geneva office which had received his
postcard, which had taken only six days to make its journey
from Upper Silesia to Switzerland. The name 'Birkenau' again
appeared in a Jewish Agency message on May 3. although once
again, as in Lichtheim's letter of May 1, it was not linked
or associated in any way with the name 'Auschwitz', of which
it was so integral a part. The second mention of Birkenau
was in a telegram from Yitzhak Gruenbaum's representative in
Istanbul, Eliezer Leder who reported to Jerusalem that the
British Consulate in Istanbul had confirmed the Palestine
certificates recently issued for Hungary and Rumania, and
that he, Leder, now wished to know whether it was 'advisable
sending same Birkenau'. (21) This telegram is a clear
pointer of just how little was known of the
Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. But ignorance and hope were a
powerful combination; and hope that at least some Jews could
be rescued was given further encouragement on May 5, when
the British Consul in Geneva, H. B. Livingston, informed the
Jewish Agency representatives there that the Germans had
agreed to a third exchange, 'covering 279 Jews for 111
Germans', and that this exchange could take place 'about
mid-May'. (22) Here was a possibility of
saving a further 279 Jews from Nazi Europe; Jews from Poland
who, if they could be found, could now be brought out. Both
the relatives of Palestinian Jews, and 'veteran Zionists'
were eligible. The problem was to find them. In the previous
exchange, a majority of those on the list had never been
found. They had, in fact. already been deported, and gassed.
Now the search began again. 1 Rudolf Vrba, letter to Martin
Gilbert, 30th July 1980. 2 Rudolf Vrba, letter to Martin
Gilbert, 11th July 1980. 3 Deposition by Dr. Vrba for
submission at the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Israeli Embassy,
London, England, 16th July 1961. Vrba papers. 4 Rudolf Vrba, letter to Martin
Gilbert, 30th July 1980. 5 The horror of roll-calls at
Auschwitz has been described by many survivors - such as
Filip Witter, Auschwitz Inferno London, England,
1979, pages 1-6. On 28 October 1940, for example, 84 Poles
died during a single morning's roll-call in Auschwitz Main
Camp (report sent by the Polish Underground on 31 October
1942, received in London on 28th May 1943, Polish Institute
and Sikorski Museum archive. PRM 76/1/13). 6 Text of the telegram in Erich
Kulka. Five Escapes from Auschwitz, Yuri Suhl
(editor), They Fought Back: The Story of Jewish
Resistance in Nazi Europe, London 1968, page
232. 7 Rudolf Vrba, letter to the
Martin Gilbert, 29th November 1980 . 8 Report of an interview,
Foreign Office papers, 921/152, 6(5) 44/14, Top Secret.
Zasani's purpose, the interviewer recorded, was to advance
further the Jewish Agency's scheme 'for infiltrating Jews
into Hungary and Rumania to stimulate resistance among the
Jews there'. 9 "Note: re visit to American
Legation, Berne on Friday 7 April 1944", Geneva, 11th April
1944, copy in Central Zionist Archives, L 22/92. 10 Left blank in the original
text of the interrogation. 11 Interrogation report, File
No. SIME/P 7769, No. SIMET 7769, page 18 18. in Foreign
Office papers, 371/4-,81 1. The interrogating officer was
Lieutenant W. B. Savigny. 12 Rudolf Vrba, letter to
Martin Gilbert, 30th July 1980. 13 Quoted in Erich Kulka,
Five Escapes from Auschwitz, Yuri Suhl (editor),
They Fought Back: The Story of Jewish Resistance in Nazi
Europe, London 1968, page 233. Krasnansky's note was
first published by the War Refugee Board in Washington on 26
November 1944. Al part of the official publication of the
Vrba-Wetzler report. 14 Oskar Krasnansky,
conversation with Martin Gilbert, Tel Aviv, Israel, 22
December 1980. 15 Report No. 2144 (A.E.S. S
7679/44), sent from Bratislava 22 May 1944, annotated in the
Vatican, 22 and 26 October 1944. Bruzio's covering note of
22 May 1944 is reprinted in full in Actes et Documents du
Saint Siège Relatifs à la Seconde Guerre
Mondiale, volume 10. Le Saint Siège et les
Victimes de la Guerre, January 1944 -July 1945. Vatican
1980. 16 Statement by Oskar
Krasnansky and Dr. Neumann, Yad Vashem archives. 17 Rudolf Vrba, letter to
Martin Gilbert, 30th July 1980. 18 Rescue Committee of the
Jewish Agency for Palestine, Bulletin, 'Jerusalem,
January 1945, page 7. 19 Gerhart Riegner, letter to
Martin Gilbert, 1 October 1980. 20 Central Zionist Archives,
L22/135. Eliezer Gruenbaum survived the war, and emigrated
to Palestine, but was later killed during the first
Arab-Israeli war of of 1948. 21 Central Zionist Archives, S
26/1190. 22 Central Zionist Archives L
22/56. © Martin Gilbert, 1981.
"It is my
contention that a small group of informed people, by
their silence, deprived others of the possibility or
privalage of making their own decisions in the face of
mortal danger"
"Passive and
active resistance by a million people would create panic
and havoc in Hungary. Panic in Hungary would have been
better than panic which came to the victims in front of
burning pits in Birkenau. Eichmann knew it; that is why
he smoked cigars with the Kasztners', "negotiated",
exempted the "real great rabbis", and meanwhile without
panic among the deportees, planned to "resettle" hundreds
of thousands in orderly fashion . .
."
". . . it was part
of my duty to make a summarized report of the whole
registration office, which report was daily conveyed to
the so-called Political Department of the concentration
camp Auschwitz. Having this duty enabled me again and
again to obtain first hand information about each
transport which arrived in the area of the Auschwitz
concentration camp." (3)
You know who l am.
I solved the Jewish question in Slovakia. I have
stretched out my feelers to See If your international
Jewry is still capable of doing anything. I will make a
deal with you. We are in the fifth year of the war. We
need . . . (10) and we are not immodest. I am prepared to
sell you all the Jews. I am also prepared to have them
all annihilated. It is as you wish. It is as you wish.
Anyway, what do you on want ? I presume for you the most
important are the men and women who can produce
children.
Brand:
I am not the man to decide that old men and women should
be left behind, and only people capable of producing
children should be saved.
'We met
accidentally on the march within one kilometre of the
German-Slovak border. He was working in his fields. He
saw that we had crossed the border "on our stomachs", and
invited us for lunch.'
I walked into Dr.
Pollak's surgery pretending to be a patient. There was a
female nurse present in his office, so I pretended I came
to complain about a 'gentleman's disease' and I said I
wanted the woman nurse to go out. Once alone with Dr.
Pollak I explained to him briefly who I was and from
where I knew him and from where I now came.
The statements
coincide with the reports, undoubtedly only fragmentary,
but reliable, that have been received up until now, and
the information supplied on individual transports
corresponds exactly with the official
listings.
Passive and
active resistance by a million people would create panic
and havoc in Hungary. Panic in Hungary would have been
better than panic which came to the victims in front of
burning pits in Birkenau. Eichmann knew it; that is why
he smoked cigars with the Kasztners', "negotiated",
exempted the "real great rabbis", and meanwhile without
panic among the deportees, planned to "resettle" hundreds
of thousands in orderly fashion . . . (17)
If anybody knew
what the fate of Polish Jewry had been, it is Gruenbaum.
He was the personification of the fight for Jewish rights
in Poland before the war. It was a completely crazy idea
to find an individual there, to find the son of a father
in Poland. after two and a half years of killing . .
.
I had a crazy idea
of my own. I sent tell Red Cross packages to ten
different camps, each in the name of Yitzhak Gruenbaum's
son. And from one camp, confirmation came . . .
(19)
References