Rudolf Vrba

Early life and arrest

Vrba was born Walter Rosenberg in Topoľčany, Slovakia (then Czechoslovakia) to Elias Rosenberg and Helena Rosenberg, née Gruenfeldová; his mother was from Zbehy, Slovakia. The family owned a steam sawmill in Jaklovce, near Margecany, Slovakia. Vrba took the name Rudolf Vrba in April 1944 after his escape, and changed his name legally after the war.

There were restrictions in Slovakia on Jews' education, housing and travel, and they were required to wear a yellow badge. Available jobs went first to non-Jews. Because of this, Vrba was excluded, at age 15, from attending the gymnasium (high school) in Bratislava. Instead of going to school he found work as a labourer in Trnava.

In 1942 the Slovak authorities announced that Jews were to be sent to "reservations" in Poland, starting with the young men. Then aged 17, Vrba decided instead to join the Czechoslovak Army in England. At the Hungarian border the guards handed him back to the Slovak authorities, who in turn sent him to the Nováky transition camp, a holding camp for Jews awaiting deportation. He managed to escape briefly, but was caught by a policeman who, Vrba wrote, became suspicious when he saw that Vrba was wearing two pairs of socks. He was sent back to the camp, where he was beaten by the guards for having tried to escape.

Auschwitz I

Vrba was deported from Czechoslovakia on 15 June 1942 to the Majdanek concentration camp, a German camp in Poland, where he briefly found one of his brothers. Vrba saw him only once. Vrba volunteered for "farm work", and on 30 June was sent to Auschwitz I, the administrative centre of the Auschwitz camps, where he was housed in Block 4. He was assigned to work in the Aufräumungskommando (the "order" commando) in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the extermination camp, which lay 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) away from the main camp.

Property from new inmates was taken to storage facilities in Birkenau known as Effektenlager I and II (inmates called them Canada I and Canada II), then repackaged by the Aufräumungskommando to be sent to Germany. The facilities occupied several dozen barracks in the "BIIg" sector of Auschwitz II. The prisoners referred to the barracks as "Canada" because they contained food, clothes and medicine—a land of plenty. It was thanks to this access that Vrba was able to stay healthy.

The work included sorting through the arrivals' property on the Judenrampe at Auschwitz II, where trains carrying Jews arrived, and removing the dead from the trains. Some new arrivals were selected to work as slave labour, but most went straight to the gas chamber. Vrba worked there from 18 August 1942 until 7 June 1943. He told Claude Lanzmann, in interviews in 1978–1981 for the documentary film Shoah (1985), that he had seen around 200 trains arrive during those 10 months.

Auschwitz II

From 15 January 1943 Vrba was housed in Block 16 of Auschwitz II, where he continued to work in the "Canada" barracks, now tattooed as prisoner no. 44070. He tried to remember the numbers he saw arriving and the place of origin of each transport. Many had brought clothes for different seasons, as well as utensils, suggesting they believed the stories about resettlement. This strengthened Vrba's conviction that he had to escape.

In June 1943 he was given the job of registrar in the quarantine section at Birkenau sector B II, which allowed him to speak to deportees selected as slave labour. He had his own office with a desk, chair and bunk bed. From the window he could see the lorries driving towards the gas chambers, and estimated that 10 percent of each transport was selected to work and the rest killed. By April 1944 he calculated that 1,750,000 Jews had been killed, a figure higher than that accepted by historians, but which decades later he still insisted was accurate.

Escape

According to Vrba's memoir, a Polish kapo by the name of Yup told him on 15 January 1944 that he was part of a group of prisoners who were building a new railway line that would lead straight into the crematoria. Yup said an SS officer had told a million Hungarian Jews would soon be arriving at Auschwitz. Vrba said he also overheard SS guards discuss how they would soon have Hungarian salami. When Jews from the Netherlands arrived, he wrote, they brought cheese, French Jews brought sardines and Greek Jews brought halva and olives. Now it was Hungarian salami. He had to escape not only for himself, he wrote, but also to raise the alarm.

In Birkenau Vrba had encountered an acquaintance from Trnava, Alfréd Wetzler (prisoner no. 29162), who was working in the mortuary. The two men hatched an escape plan, and on 7 April 1944, with the help of two other prisoners, they hid inside a pile of wood stacked between the camp's inner and outer perimeter fences, sprinkling the area with tobacco soaked in gasoline to fool the dogs. According to Kárný, at 20:33 that evening SS-Sturmbannführer Fritz Hartjenstein, the Birkenau commander, learned by teleprinter that two Jews were missing.

The men hid for three nights and throughout the fourth day. They knew from escape attempts by others that the guards would keep searching for three days. Wetzler wrote in his memoir that they tied strips of flannel across their mouths and tightened them whenever they felt a tickle in their throats. At 9 pm on 10 April, they crawled out of the wood pile and headed south toward Slovakia 130 kilometres (81 mi) away, walking parallel to the Soła river.

Writing the report

The men crossed the Polish-Slovakian border on 21 April 1944. They went to see a local doctor in Čadca, Dr. Pollack, someone Vrba knew from his time in the first transit camp. Pollack had a contact in the Slovak Judenrat (Jewish Council), which was operating an underground group known as the "Working Group", and arranged for them to send people from their headquarters in Bratislava to meet the men. Pollack was distressed to learn the probable fate of his parents and siblings, who had been deported in 1942.

Vrba and Wetzler spent the night in Čadca in the home of a relative of the rabbi Leo Baeck, and the next day, 24 April, met the chairman of the Jewish Council, Dr. Oscar Neumann, a German-speaking lawyer. Neumann placed the men in different rooms in a former old people's home and interviewed them separately over three days. Vrba writes that he began by drawing the inner layout of Auschwitz I and II, and the position of the ramp in relation to the two camps. He described the internal organization of the camps, how Jews were being used as slave labour for Krupp, Siemens, IG Farben and D.A.W., and the mass murder in gas chambers of those who had been chosen for Sonderbehandlung, or "special treatment."

The report was written and re-written several times. Wetzler wrote the first part, Vrba the third, and the two wrote the second part together. They then worked on the whole thing together, re-writing it six times. Neumann's aide, Oscar Krasniansky, an engineer and stenographer who later took the name Oskar Isaiah Karmiel, translated it from Slovak into German with the help of Gisela Steiner. They produced a 40-page report in German, which was completed by Thursday, 27 April 1944. Vrba wrote that the report was also translated into Hungarian. The original Slovak version was not preserved.

Content

The report contains a detailed description of the geography and management of the camps; how the prisoners lived and died; and the transports that had arrived at Auschwitz since 1942, their place of origin, and the numbers "selected" for work or the gas chambers. Kárný writes that the report provides details known only to prisoners, including, for example, that discharge forms were filled out for prisoners who were gassed, indicating that death rates in the camp were actively falsified.

It also contains sketches and information about the layout of the gas chambers. In a sworn deposition for the trial of SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in 1961, and in his book I Cannot Forgive (1964), Vrba said that he and Wetzler obtained the information about the gas chambers and crematoria from Sonderkommando Filip Müller and his colleagues who worked there. Müller confirmed this in his Eyewitness Auschwitz (1979). Auschwitz scholar Robert Jan van Pelt wrote in 2002 that the description contains errors, but that given the circumstances, including the men's lack of architectural training, "one would become suspicious if it did not contain errors".

Deportations continue

Arnost Rosin (prisoner no. 29858) and Czesław Mordowicz (prisoner no. 84216) escaped from Auschwitz on 27 May 1944 and arrived in Slovakia on 6 June, the day of the Normandy landings. Hearing about the invasion of Normandy and believing the war was over, they got drunk to celebrate, using dollars they had smuggled out of Auschwitz. They were promptly arrested for violating the currency laws, and spent eight days in prison before the Jewish Council paid their fines.

Rosin and Mordowicz already knew Vrba and Wetzler. Vrba wrote that anyone who survived more than a year in Auschwitz was a senior member of the "old hands Mafia", and all were known to each other. On 15 June Rosin and Mordowicz were interviewed by Oscar Krasniansky, the engineer who had translated the Vrba–Wetzler report into German. They told him that, between 15 and 27 May 1944, 100,000 Hungarian Jews had arrived at Birkenau, and that most were killed on arrival, apparently with no knowledge of what was about to happen to them. Vrba concluded that the report had been suppressed.

Distribution

The dates on which the Vrba–Wetzler report was distributed became a matter of importance within Holocaust historiography. Vrba alleged that lives were lost because it was not distributed quickly enough by Jewish leaders, particularly by Rudolf Kastner of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee. The committee had organized safe passage for Jews into Hungary before the German invasion, and thereafter sought to help them escape the deportations.

Oscar Krasniansky of the Slovakian Jewish Council, who translated the report into German as Vrba and Wetzler were writing and dictating it, made conflicting statements about the report after the war, according to Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer. In his first statement he said he had handed the report to Rudolf Kastner on 26 April 1944 during the latter's visit to Bratislava, but Bauer writes that the report was not finished until 27 April. In another statement, Krasniansky said he had passed it to Kastner on 28 April in Bratislava, but Hansi Brand, Kastner's lover and the wife of Joel Brand, said that Kastner was not in Bratislava until August. It is clear from Kastner's post-war statements that he did have early access to the report, Bauer writes, but perhaps not in April. According to Randolph L. Braham, Kastner had a copy by 3 May, when he paid a visit to Kolozsvár (Cluj), his home town.

Kastner's reasons for not making the document public are unknown. Vrba believed until the end of his life that Kastner withheld it in order not to jeopardize negotiations between the Aid and Rescue Committee and Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of the transport of Jews out of Hungary. Shortly after Vrba arrived in Slovakia from Auschwitz in April 1944, Eichmann proposed to the Aid and Rescue Committee in Budapest (specifically to Kastner, Joel Brand and Hansi Brand) that the Nazis trade up to one million Hungarian Jews for 10,000 trucks and other goods from the Western Allies. The proposal came to nothing, but in exchange for money and other goods Kastner did obtain safe passage to Switzerland for 1,684 Jews on what became known as the Kastner train. Vrba believed that Kastner suppressed the Vrba–Wetzler report in order not to damage those negotiations with the SS.

The Jewish Council in Budapest did hand the report out to individuals. A teenager in 1944, the Hungarian biologist George Klein was working for them as a junior secretary in their offices in Síp Street. One day in late May or early June, his boss, Dr. Zoltán Kohn, a rabbi, told him that two young Slovak Jews had escaped from one of the major camps and had written a report. He gave Klein a carbon copy in Hungarian, and said he should tell only his closest family and friends; otherwise he had to promise to keep it a secret. Reading the report, he felt "a strange mixture of nausea and a kind of intellectual satisfaction":

Nausea—because I could now clearly see what had happened to my grandmother and to my uncles after they were deported from their village. I could also see what fate was being prepared for me and our remaining family as well. Intellectual satisfaction—because I knew that this had to be the truth. I immediately believed the report because it made sense. Nothing else made sense. The dry, factual, nearly scientific language, the dates, the numbers, the maps and the logic of the narrative coalesced into a solid and inexorable structure.

Klein told his uncle, a well-known physician. The uncle nearly hit him and asked how Klein could believe such nonsense: "I and others in the building in Síp Street must have lost our minds under the pressure." It was the same with other relatives and friends—middle-aged men with property and family did not believe it; the younger ones did and wanted to act. In October that year, when the time came for Klein to board a train, he ran instead.

Report arrives in Switzerland

The report was first published on 17 May 1944, in German, as Tatsachenbericht über Auschwitz und Birkenau in Geneva by Abraham Silberschein of the Jewish World Congress. Florian Manoliu of the Romanian Legation in Bern took the report to Switzerland and gave it to George Mantello, a Jewish businessman from Transylvania who was working as the first secretary of the El Salvador consulate in Geneva. It was thanks to Mantello that the report received, in the Swiss press, its first wide coverage. According to David Kranzler, Mantello asked for the help of the Swiss-Hungarian Students' League to make 50 mimeographed copies of the Vrba–Wetzler and two shorter Auschwitz reports (jointly known as the Auschwitz Protocols), which by 23 June 1944 he had distributed to the Swiss government and Jewish groups. The students made thousands of copies, which were passed to other students and MPs.

On 19 June Richard Lichtheim of the Jewish Agency in Geneva, who had received a copy of the report from Mantello, wrote to the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem to say that they knew "what has happened and where it has happened", and reported the Vrba–Wetzler figure that 90 per cent of Jews arriving at Birkenau were being killed. Vrba and Oscar Krasniasnky met Vatican Swiss legate Monsignor Mario Martilotti at the Svätý Jur monastery on 20 June. Martilotti had seen the report and questioned Vrba about it for six hours.

News coverage, deportations halted

Details from the report began to appear in newspapers, including the New York Times and BBC World Service. On 4 June 1944 the New York Times reported on the "cold-blooded murder" of Hungary's Jews. The BBC World Service carried a report on 15 June. On 20 June a 22-line story in the New York Times, "Czechs report massacre", reported that 7,000 Jews had been "dragged to gas chambers in the notorious German concentration camps at Birkenau and Oświęcim [Auschwitz]". Daniel Brigham, the New York Times correspondent in Geneva, published a story on 3 July, "Inquiry Confirms Nazi Death Camps", with the subtitle "1,715,000 Jews Said to Have Been Put to Death by the Germans up to April 15", and on 6 July a second, "Two Death Camps Places of Horror; German Establishments for Mass Killings of Jews Described by Swiss".

Braham writes that several appeals were made to Horthy, including by the Swiss government, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gustaf V of Sweden and, on 25 June, Pope Pius XII, possibly after Martilotti passed on the report. On 26 June Richard Lichtheim of the Jewish Agency in Geneva sent a telegram to England calling on the Allies to hold members of the Hungarian government personally responsible for the killings. The cable was intercepted by the Hungarian government and shown to Prime Minister Döme Sztójay, who passed it to Horthy. Horthy ordered an end to the deportations on 7 July and they stopped two days later.

That the Germans had used gas chambers was confirmed on 23 July 1944, when the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin, Poland, was captured by Soviet soldiers, with its gas chambers intact and 820,000 shoes. Auschwitz itself was liberated by the 28th and 106th corps of the 1st Ukrainian Front of the Red Army on 27 January 1945. The SS had tried to destroy the evidence, but the Red Army found what was left of four crematoria, as well as 5,525 pairs of women's shoes, 38,000 pairs of men's, 348,820 men's suits, 836,225 items of women's clothing, large numbers of toothbrushes, glasses and dentures, and seven tons of hair.

Resistance activities

After he handed his information to the Slovakian Jewish Council in April 1944, Vrba said Krasniansky had assured him that the report was in the right hands. Vrba and Wetzler spent the next six weeks in Liptovský Mikuláš, and continued to make and distribute copies of their report whenever they could. The Slovak Judenrat gave Vrba papers in the name of Rudolf Vrba, showing that he was a "pure Aryan" going back three generations, and supported him financially to the tune of 200 Slovak crowns a week, equivalent to an average worker's salary, and as Vrba wrote, "sufficient to sustain me in an illegal life in Bratislava." On 29 August 1944 the Slovak Army rose up against the Nazis and the reestablishment of Czechoslovakia was announced. Vrba joined the Czechoslovak partisan units in September 1944, and was later awarded the Czechoslovak Medal of Bravery.

After the war, testimony

In 1944 Vrba married a childhood friend, Gerta, who took the surname Vrbová, the female version of Vrba. They moved to Prague in 1945, where Vrbová graduated in medicine. Vrba graduated, in 1949, with a degree in chemistry ((Ing. Chern.) from the Czech Technical University in Prague, and in 1951 he received his doctorate (Dr. Tech. Sc.) for a thesis entitled "On the metabolism of butyric acid". The couple had two daughters: Helena (1952–1982) and Zuzana (b. 1954). Vrba undertook post-doctoral research at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, where he received his C.Sc. in 1956. From 1953 to 1958 he worked for Charles University Medical School in Prague.

Vrba's marriage ended around this time. In 1958 he received an invitation to an international conference in Israel, and while there he defected. He worked for the next two years at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. He said later that he could not continue to live in Israel because the same men who had, in his view, betrayed the Jewish community in Hungary were now in positions of power there. In 1960 he moved instead to England, where he worked for two years in the Neuropsychiatric Research Unit in Carshalton, Surrey, and seven years for the Medical Research Council. He became a British subject by naturalization on 4 August 1966.

On 11 May 1960 Eichmann was captured by the Mossad in Buenos Aires and taken to Jerusalem to stand trial. (He was sentenced to death in December 1961.) Vrba contacted Alan Bestic of the Daily Herald in the UK, who wrote up Vrba's story in five installments over one week, beginning on 27 February 1961 with the headline "I Warned the World of Eichmann's Murders". Vrba submitted a statement in evidence against Eichmann to the Israeli Embassy in London. Vrba also testified against Robert Mulka of the SS at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in 1964, telling the court that he had seen Mulka on the Judenrampe at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Mulka was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Following the Herald articles, Bestic helped to write Vrba's memoir, I Cannot Forgive (1964), republished as I Escaped from Auschwitz (2002). The book was later published in German (1964), French (1988), Dutch (1996), Czech (1998) and Hebrew (1998).

Move to Canada, Zündel trial

Vrba moved to Canada in 1967, where he worked for the Medical Research Council of Canada from 1967 to 1973. He became a Canadian citizen in 1972. From 1973 to 1975 he was a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, focusing on cancer research, where, in 1974, he met his second wife, Robin Vrba. They married in 1975 and returned to Vancouver, where she became a real-estate agent and he an associate professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia. He worked there until the early 1990s, publishing over 50 research papers on the chemistry of the brain, diabetes and cancer.

Vrba testified in January 1985 at the seven-week trial in Toronto of Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, which ended with Zündel's conviction for knowingly publishing false material about the Holocaust. Vrba acknowledged that several passages in I Cannot Forgive (1964) were based on secondhand accounts. According to his deposition for Eichmann's trial in 1961, he obtained his information about the gas chambers and crematoria from Sonderkommando Filip Müller and others who worked there, something that Müller confirmed in 1979. Zündel's lawyer, Doug Christie, accused Vrba of lying about Auschwitz and asked whether he had seen anyone gassed. Vrba replied that he had watched people being taken into the buildings and had seen SS officers throw in gas canisters after them:

Therefore, I concluded it was not a kitchen or a bakery, but it was a gas chamber. It is possible they are still there or that there is a tunnel and they are now in China. Otherwise, they were gassed.

Vrba died of cancer on 27 March 2006 in Vancouver. He was survived by his first wife, Gerta Vrbová; his second wife, Robin Vrba; his daughter, Zuzana Vrbová Jackson; and his grandchildren, Hannah and Jan. He was pre-deceased by his elder daughter, Dr. Helena Vrbová, who died in 1982 in Papua New Guinea, during a malaria research project. Robin Vrba made a gift of Vrba's papers to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in New York.

Vrba's fellow escapee, Alfréd Wetzler, died in Bratislava, Slovakia, on 8 February 1988. Wetzler was the author of Escape From Hell: The True Story of the Auschwitz Protocol (2007), first published as Čo Dante nevidel (1963) under the pseudonym Jozef Lánik.

Documentaries, books

Several documentaries have told Vrba's story, including Genocide (1973), directed by Michael Darlow for ITV in the UK; Auschwitz and the Allies (1982), directed by Rex Bloomstein and Martin Gilbert for the BBC; and Shoah (1985), directed by Claude Lanzmann.

Vrba was featured in Witness to Auschwitz (1990), directed by Robin Taylor for the CBC in Canada; Auschwitz: The Great Escape (2007) for the UK's Channel Five; and Escape From Auschwitz (2008) for PBS in the United States. George Klein, the Hungarian-Swedish biologist who read the Vrba–Wetzler report in Budapest as a teenager, wrote about his meeting with Vrba decades later in "The Ultimate Fear of the Traveller Returning from Hell", published in Klein's book Pietà (1992).

Vrba was also the focus of Ruth Linn's Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting (Cornell University Press, 2004). An academic conference was held in New York in April 2011 to discuss the Vrba–Wetzler and other Auschwitz reports, resulting in a book, The Auschwitz Reports and the Holocaust in Hungary (2011), edited by Randolph L. Braham and William vanden Heuvel and published by Columbia University Press. In 2014 historian Michael Fleming reappraised the impact of the Vrba–Wetzler report in Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Awards

The University of Haifa awarded Vrba an honorary doctorate in 1998 at the instigation of Ruth Linn. He received the Order of the White Double Cross, 1st class, from the Slovakian government in 2007. British historian Martin Gilbert supported an unsuccessful campaign in 1992 to have Vrba awarded the Order of Canada.

Dispute about Hungarian Jews

Vrba is clear that warning the Hungarian community was one of the motives for his escape. He wrote that in January 1944 a Polish kapo told him that a million Hungarian Jews would soon arrive at Auschwitz, and that a new railway line was being built to accommodate them. He also overheard SS guards discuss how they would soon be eating Hungarian salami.

There is no mention of Hungarian Jews in the Vrba–Wetzler report. Vrba first said he escaped to warn Hungarian Jews on 27 February 1961, in the first installment of a five-article series for the Daily Herald in England, written up by Alan Bestic. In the second installment the next day he described having overheard the SS say they were looking forward to Hungarian salami. Vrba's failure to mention Hungarian Jews until 1961 has led several historians, including Miroslav Kárný and Randolph L. Braham, to dispute Vrba's later recollections, although they do not doubt the Vrba–Wetzler report itself.

The report said that a large compound was being built at Auschwitz: "Work is now proceeding on a still larger compound which is to be added later on to the already existing camp. The purpose of this extensive planning is not known to us." It also stated: "When we left on April 7, 1944 we heard that large convoys of Greek Jews were expected." Miroslav Kárný argues that, long after the war was over, Vrba wanted to testify about the deportations out of a sense of longing, to force the world to face the magnitude of the Nazis' crimes. The suspicion is that this led to a degree of embellishment in later accounts. Kárný wrote in 1998:

It is generally accepted that at the time Vrba and Wetzler were preparing their escape, it was known in Auschwitz that annihilation mechanisms were being perfected in order to kill hundreds of thousands of Hungary's Jews. It was this knowledge, according to Vrba, that became the main motive for their escape. ... But in fact, there is no mention in the Vrba and Wetzler report that preparations were under way for the annihilation of Hungary's Jews. ... If Vrba and Wetzler considered it necessary to record rumors about the expected arrival of Greece's Jewish transports, then why wouldn't they have recorded a rumor—had they known it—about the expected transports of hundreds of thousands of Hungary's Jews?

In a later edition of his memoirs, Vrba responded that he is certain the reference to the imminent Hungarian deportations was in the original Slovakian version of the Vrba–Wetzler report, some of which he wrote by hand, but which did not survive. He wrote that he recalled Oscar Krasniansky of the Slovakian Jewish Council, who translated the report into German, arguing that only actual deaths should be recorded, and not speculation, to lend the report maximum credibility. Vrba speculated that this was the reason Krasniansky omitted the references to Hungary from the German translation, which was the version that was copied around the world.

Vrba's allegations

The Vrba–Wetzler report was not distributed widely until weeks after Vrba's escape in April 1944. Between 15 May and 7 July 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews (12,000 a day) were deported to Auschwitz. Vrba believed they would have run or fought had they been told they were being sent to their deaths.

Vrba alleged that the Vrba–Wetzler report was withheld deliberately by Rudolf Kastner and the Jewish Aid and Rescue Committee in Budapest in order not to jeopardize complex, and ultimately futile, negotiations between the committee and Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann had suggested to several leading committee members—Rudolf Kastner, Joel Brand and Hansi Brand—that they arrange an exchange of up to one million Jews for money and trucks from the US or UK, the so-called "blood for goods" proposal. Vrba maintained that Eichmann intended only to placate the Jewish leadership, including the Hungarian Jewish Council, by pretending to negotiate to avoid panic within the community, which would have slowed down the transports.

The Aid and Rescue Committee's first meeting with Eichmann was on 25 April 1944. At around the same time Kastner is believed to have received a copy of the Vrba–Wetzler report, possibly in German. Vrba alleged that Kastner failed to distribute the report in order not to jeopardize the Eichmann deal, but acted on it privately by arranging for 1,684 Hungarian Jews to escape to Switzerland on the Kastner train, which left Budapest on 30 June 1944.

John Conway alleged that the Kastner train consisted of Kastner's immediate family, "their relatives, a coterie of Zionists, some distinguished Jewish intellectuals, and a number of wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs". Other scholars dispute this. Ladislaus Löb, who was on the train, writes that the party also included over 200 children under 14, many of them orphans, and hundreds of ordinary people such as teachers and nurses. Kastner was assassinated in Israel in 1957 as a result of allegations that he had collaborated with the SS.

Survivor versus expert discourse

In the view of Yehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, by the time the Vrba–Wetzler report was prepared, it was already too late for anything to alter the Nazis' deportation plans. Bauer cautions about the need to distinguish between the receipt of information and its "internalization"—the point at which it is deemed worthy of action—arguing that this is a complicated process: "During the Holocaust, countless individuals received information and rejected it, suppressed it, or rationalized about it, were thrown into despair without any possibility of acting on it, or seemingly internalized it and then behaved as though it had never reached them."

Bauer argues that Vrba's "wild attacks on Kastner and on the Slovak underground are ahistorical and simply wrong from the start ..." Vrba, in response, alleged that Bauer was one of the Israeli historians who had downplayed Vrba's role in Holocaust historiography in order to defend the Israeli establishment.

Vrba was criticized in 2001 in a collection of articles in Hebrew, Leadership under Duress: The Working Group in Slovakia, 1942–1944, by a group of leading Israeli historians with ties to the Slovak community, including Bauer, Hanna Yablonka, Gila Fatran and Livia Rothkirchen. The introduction by Giora Amir describes as "a bunch of mockers, pseudo-historians and historians" those who, like Vrba, argue that the Slovakian Jewish Council may have collaborated with the Nazis by concealing what was happening in Auschwitz. Amir writes that the "baseless" accusation was given credence when the University of Haifa awarded an honorary doctorate "to the head of these mockers, Peter [sic] Vrba". Amir continues:

The heroism of this person, who together with the late Alfréd Wetzler, was among the first to escape from Auschwitz, is beyond doubt. But the fact that, just because he was an Auschwitz prisoner endowed with personal heroism, he has crowned himself as knowledgeable to judge all those involved in the noble work of rescue, and accuse them falsely, deeply disturbs us, the Czech community.

The criticism of Vrba stems from the tension between what Ruth Linn calls survivor and expert discourse. Bauer referred to Vrba's memoir as "not a memoir in the usual sense", alleging that it "contains excerpts of conversations of which there is no chance that they are accurate and it has elements of a second-hand story that does not necessarily correspond with reality". When writing about himself and his personal experiences, Vrba's account is an important and true one, Bauer wrote, but he argued that Vrba was not justified in seeing himself as an expert on Holocaust history. Vrba often dismissed the opinion of historians. Regarding the numbers killed at Auschwitz, he said that Bauer and historian Raul Hilberg did not know enough about the history of Auschwitz.

Linn argued in 2004 that certain Israeli historians had misrepresented Vrba's story. Vrba believed they had sought to erase his story from Holocaust historiography because of his views about Kastner and the Hungarian Judenrat, some of whom went on to hold prominent positions in Israel. Linn wrote that Vrba's and Wetzler's names are omitted or their contribution minimized in Hebrew textbooks: standard histories refer to the escape by "two young Slovak Jews", "two chaps", or "two young people", and represent Vrba and Wetzler as emissaries of the Polish underground in Auschwitz. Vrba's book was not translated into Hebrew until 1998, 35 years after its publication in English. Linn arranged for the publication of Vrba's memoir and the Vrba-Wetzler report in Hebrew by the Haifa University Press, after it was rejected by Yad Vashem. Before this there was no English or Hebrew version at Yad Vashem of the Vrba–Wetzler report, an issue the museum attributed to lack of funding. There was a Hungarian translation, but it did not note the names of its authors and, Linn wrote, could be found only in a file that dealt with Rudolf Kastner.

In 2005 Uri Dromi of the Israel Democracy Institute responded that there were at least four Israeli books on the Holocaust that mention Vrba, and that Wetzler's testimony is recounted at length in Livia Rothkirchen's Hurban yahadut Slovakia ("The Destruction of Slovakian Jewry"), published by Yad Vashem in 1961. Robert Rozett, head librarian at Yad Vashem and author of the entry on the "Auschwitz Report" in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, said of the Vrba controversy in 2005: "There are people who come into the subject from a certain angle and think that they've uncovered the truth. A historian who deals seriously with the subject understands that the truth is complex and multifaceted."