Who’s afraid of the man who escaped Auschwitz?
In the spring of 1944, two Jewish inmates, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, escaped from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp after two years of enslavement there. Their individual testimonies were conflated into what came to be known as the Vrba-Wetzler Report, which was smuggled to the West an...
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| Published in: | ʻIyunim be-ḥinukh no. 22; pp. 177 - 196 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
University of Haifa
01-12-2023
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | In the spring of 1944, two Jewish inmates, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, escaped from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp after two years of enslavement there. Their individual testimonies were conflated into what came to be known as the Vrba-Wetzler Report, which was smuggled to the West and played an important role in Admiral Horthy’s decision to stop the deportations from Hungary – albeit, only after sending 437,000 Hungarian Jews to their deaths. Their escape is an event that has been omitted from the Hebrew-language history textbooks for Israeli schools. Both it and its protagonists entered the Israeli consciousness only in 1998, when I arranged for my home university (University of Haifa) to award Vrba an honorary doctorate and to publish his memoirs and the well-known Vrba-Wetzler Report in Hebrew for the first time, after it was rejected by Yad Vashem. In this article I delve into this mystery of Vrba’s and Wetzler’s disappearance not only from Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp but also from the awareness of Israeli students, history teachers, school principals and Israeli academics until 2023. Robin Vrba actively contributed to the composition ofthis paper. |
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| ISSN: | 0793-4637 |