I shall never forgive…
RUDOLF VRBA, I CANNOT FORGIVE
RUDOLF VRBA and Alfréd Wetzler escaped from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on April 7, 1944. They were only the second and third prisoners to escape from Birkenau, and the commandant, Rudolf Höss, spared no effort to find them. That the escape succeeded was due to the fact that both men had been assigned to the Aufraumungskommando, the cleanup unit. Its job included removing the luggage and the corpses from the arriving boxcars, scrubbing the floors clean of blood, urine, and feces, and transporting the bags to the storage area. After each train's passengers had been murdered, these workers burned the bodies, cleared out and sifted the ashes, ground larger bone fragments in a mill, and packed the ash into bags marked “Fertilizer.”
They carried the former passengers’ bags to the “Canada” storage area, so named by the prisoners because, for them, Canada represented a place of plenty.1 The thirty-five “Canada” buildings were, in fact, a place of plenty for the camp's officers, the guards, and the Reich—a profit center that provided clothing, gold and valuables, hair, and children's toys.
It was a streamlined operation, completely routine. The steam engine pulled the train into the station. The doors of all the freight cars were unchained and opened at the same time. The deportees were ordered to leave their luggage and run down a wooden ramp, their way illuminated by closely spaced lampposts. Heavily armed SS men surrounded the new arrivals, most of whom had been traveling without food or water for several days, crowded eighty to one hundred in a wagon. They stumbled into the nightmarish light, stepping over the dead and the dying as they were hurried along with shouts, threats, and lashes from the bamboo canes carried by the guards. The selection process took less than a minute per person. Those deemed unfit for work were trucked—exactly one hundred to each truck—to Birkenau's gas chambers, a big improvement from the days when prisoners were gassed with truck exhaust fumes. Over a million Polish Jews had already been murdered in Auschwitz when Vrba and Wetzler escaped. They had kept count.
For both these young Slovak men, “Canada” provided the means of escape. They took civilian clothing and German money, then hid in a woodpile while the search of the surrounding countryside was at its height. Once the guards had given up, the pair crawled out under the two electrified barbed-wire fences. For a week they traveled at night, avoiding the local residents and hiding in barns or outbuildings during the day. When they reached Bratislava, they contacted the Jewish Council the next day. They told their incredible story, illustrated by drawings of the barracks, the gas chambers, and crematoria. They reported on the selection process that sent women and children directly from the trains to be gassed, on the desperate attempts of people to save themselves, on the collection of valuables, and on the systematic disposal of bodies.
In January 1944 Vrba had witnessed the building of two new crematoria and a new railway ramp that led directly to the gas chambers, bypassing the need for trucks. The purpose of the additional facilities, he had learned from one of the German kapos, or prisoner-guards, was to accommodate the arrival of a million Jews from Hungary. “We’ll be eating fine Hungarian salami,” the man had said, referring to food he hoped the prisoners would bring. He was tired of Polish food.2
Vrba's mother was still in her own home in Slovakia, one of the 25,000 Jews who had, so far, escaped deportation. She was happy to take care of her son while he recovered from his travels. Strangely, when she berated him about not sending postcards, he did not mention Auschwitz. Only twenty years old, Vrba was already a veteran of the most terrifying place on earth. He felt overwhelmed by the importance of his message to all surviving Jews, particularly the Hungarians: do not board the trains.
“The Auschwitz Protocols,” as Vrba and Wetzler's report was labeled by the Bratislava Working Group, was translated into German and English within a couple of weeks. Then they tried to decide what to do with the information. They knew that anyone caught with the document—or its authors—would be executed.
ON APRIL 28, Eichmann summoned Joel Brand back to the Majestic Hotel.3 Obersturmbannführer Otto Klages, chief of the Budapest SD, was sitting at the table next to Eichmann. Klages was taller than Eichmann and an imposing figure in his gray uniform. They both greeted Brand with smiles and nods, as though they had been expecting a friend. Eichmann handed over a package of letters from Switzerland and a bag of money that Saly Mayer had sent for the tiyul effort organized by the Aid and Rescue Committee. It was an extraordinary situation: the most senior German in charge of murdering all the Jews was handing confiscated money to a Jew whose mission it was to rescue Jews from the Germans.
“You see, Brand, what a reasonable man I am?” Eichmann asked, his voice lowered in tune with his newly cordial stance. “We intercepted these packages at the border. The money is for your children’s-relief work. I have nothing against your work for children. Some letters are in Hebrew, some in Yiddish, others in Hungarian. I don’t have time to censor all this. Let me know if there is anything here that I should know about.”
Brand was stunned.
Eichmann went on to say that he now had consent from Berlin that he could continue these discussions. Had Brand received similar approval from his associates? He did not wait for a reply. He continued with a long speech on the desirability of new frontline trucks, fresh from the factory, with all the accessories and fully equipped. Abruptly, he looked at Brand, who had been standing all this time, silent, holding the bag of letters and money, and he asked, “So you want to have a million Jews?”
Brand stammered yes, he would like all the Jews.
“One million is all we are discussing now,” Eichmann said, his voice rising, “and ten thousand trucks. Brand, you are getting a bargain.” He had a list of additional goods he would consider. Coffee, soap, tea, cocoa, and, if they didn’t have all the trucks ready at once, perhaps a slightly reduced number of trucks. “Remember,” he insisted, “I can assure your Allies that they will not be used on the Western Front.”
Klages suggested, jocularly, that they would stop the whole Aktion, the ghettoization and deportation of the Jews—if World Jewry had the trucks winterized. The German army, Brand thought, was settling in for a long campaign in the east.
Eichmann then suggested that, if Brand returned from his mission to Istanbul with an agreement in principle about the deal, he would bring 10 percent of the Jews on offer—“ten thousand of them, think about that, Brand!”—to the border. The exchange could start right away. “You see what a reasonable man I am, Brand?”
Encouraged by his surprisingly affable reception, Brand asked whether Eichmann could put a stop to the rounding up of Jews in the countryside. “Every day we are getting alarming reports about hunger and disease, dysentery, typhoid, pneumonia,” he began. “The gendarmes are beating and torturing women and even children to make them confess where they have hidden some small objects of value, and dentists are pulling gold teeth from the mouths of old men—”
“Atrocity propaganda, Brand!” Eichmann shouted. And he advised his visitor not to bring up the subject again.