explicit
02.04.06, 21:13
Pare slow o tym panu ,...
uklony
Rudolph Vrba - Auschwitz escapee dies of cancer
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One of five Jewish inmates who escaped Auschwitz and who subsequently warned
of the presence of Nazi death camps during World War II succumbed to cancer
in Vancouver this week at the age of 82,
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Historical documents confirm that Jewish leaders in Slovakia, Hungary,
Switzerland and elsewhere knew by May 1944 what was happening in Auschwitz,
but they did not warn the approximately one million Hungarian Jews who were
slated for slaughter, he said.
Instead, Vrba claims, they used the information to “organize a train of 1,700
[Hungarian Jews] that travelled to Switzerland.”
www.cjnews.com/viewarticle.asp?id=5413
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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:
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.
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:
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)
www.fantompowa.net/Flame/vrba.htm
