Published: December 26, 2022
By Rudy Owens, MA, MPH
I remember clearly the first time I learned about one of the 20th century’s greatest and yet least-known humanitarians and heroes, Rudolf Vrba.
Vrba is one of a small number of Jewish prisoners to have successfully escaped from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camps, located in Oswiecim, Poland, in the spring of 1944, as the camps were speeding up the murder of Jewish civilians still living in areas of Nazi control and influence.
That so few know his story remains a tragedy to us all, because of this event’s sheer improbability and the obvious audacity of what he and his fellow Czechoslovakian prisoner, Alfred Wetzler, accomplished in April 1944. The two successfully undertook an escape and resistance mission, in order to save more than 800,000 Hungarian Jewish citizens from extermination at the Birkenau death camp gas chambers.
They provided a detailed report on Auschwitz-Birkenau to Slovakian Jewish leaders, who helped disseminate it to other Jewish leaders, the Papacy, and the Allies, making it the first reliable document to reach the world and the Allies and to be accepted as credible. The report broke the apathy and indifference to the genocide, already long underway by the Nazis. Yet the report and its news never reached the populace it was intended to save, and more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews would be killed between May and July 1944, when the transportations were halted.
I first saw their photographs hanging in the museum at the site of the Auschwitz camp complex in July 2000. At that time, I was completing a documentary photography project focused on the Nazi death and concentration camps.
Standing in the museum, housed in a former Nazi administrative building, I read with utter amazement a short history of an impossible feat. Two young Slovakian Jewish internees had escaped the greatest hidden facility in the Nazi’s universe of militarized camps across Europe and the nerve center of the Nazi death machinery still operating in 1944.
Surviving to bear witness
Vrba published his gripping account of this heroic and true story in his celebrated 1963 memoir, I Escaped from Auschwitz. The book remains in print in over a dozen languages around the world.
Vrba’s own words written on Sept. 7, 1963, in a letter to the British newspaper, the Observer, summarized what he details with scientific precision in his book. “With my friend Fred Wetzler from Slovakia, I managed to escape from Auschwitz on April 7, 1944, and we headed straight for the Zionist leaders. In April 1944, we handed to a high representative of the Zionist movement, Dr. Oskar Neumann, a sixty-page detailed report on the fact that extermination of 1,760,000 Jews had taken place in Auschwitz and that preparations were complete for the annihilation of one million Jewish Hungarians during the very next weeks. Did the Judenrat (or the Judenverrat) in Hungary tell their Jews what was awaiting them? No, they remained silent and for this silence some of their leaders—for instance Dr. [ Rezsö] Kasztner—bartered their own lives and the lives of 1,684 other ‘prominent’ Jews directly from [Adolf] Eichmann. They were not ‘helpless and benumbed hostages’ but clever diplomats who knew what their silence was worth. The 1,684 Jews whom they bought from Eichmann included not only various prominent Zionists, not only relatives of Kasztner, etc., but also such Jews who were able to pay with millions, like the family of Manfred Weiss. At the same time, they silently watched as more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews, unaware of their fate, were tricked into Auschwitz, where thousands of their children were not even gassed but merely thrown into the pyre alive.”
At the time I learned of Vrba, 37 years after Vrba had written the accounts in this letter and his book, I had little knowledge of this difficult story or that he continues to be ostracized in Holocaust historiography to this day. The dispute, despite Vrba and Wetzler’s astounding feat of heroism, has kept Vrba’s legacy mostly unknown to the world, except among those who have studied the Holocaust in greater detail.
To this day, I clearly remember that moment discovering him and Wetzler at a museum, located at the killing factory both escaped. I gazed at wonder, in particular at Vrba’s photo. He had a wry smile. He exuded vitality, even in a black and white still photograph taken years after the war. I realized I was beholding someone who did the impossible. His energy and almost ironic look had hypnotic power, which I can’t fully describe. Once you know there are real people like this, it can also provide hope. Here was a mensch in its truest sense.
By the time both young men escaped, they had miraculously avoided starvation and death, living two hellish years in this factory of death. At the time of their escape, Vrba was only 19 years old and Wetzler 25 years of age. They had managed to survive because of their youth, intelligence, ability to adapt to what was unthinkable, and to work with the camps’ resistance movement.
“It was not time for feelings,” he told French documentary filmmaker Claude Lanzmann in 1978 for his nine-hour film, The Shoah. Vrba was only a teenager when the Nazis occupied most of his home country and six months short of his 20th birthday at the time of his escape, yet he possessed wisdom decades beyond his years.
Vrba described his mindset to survive the camps this way: “The first sign of surviving was accepting a different mentality, accepting the reality, which is so very different from the textbook from which we have been educated, and still living.” Others who arrived and could not mentally adapt, often perished in a month, if they were not gassed immediately.
“I think many people died in Auschwitz very fast because they could simply not face that this is real,” he later said in a 1990 interview. His insights bear uncanny similarity to those of fellow Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. Frankl also published a memoir, in 1946, on his survival and his insights on finding purpose called Man’s Search for Meaning.
By January 1944, it was already known within the Auschwitz-Birkenau resistance of the Nazis’ plans to kill Europe’s remaining Jewish residents would be speeding up. About 800,000 Hungarian Jews were next on the deportation lists for spring 1944. The resistance leaders wanted to alert Hungary’s Jews that imminent mass murder awaited them if they complied with the Nazis’ proven means of violently coercing and transporting unsuspecting civilians to a place where none knew they faced mass gassing by Zyklon B in cleverly disguised concrete death chambers and then incineration in nearby crematoria.
Most Jews left alive in Europe still believed the Nazis’ lethally efficient lies that they would be deported to labor camps somewhere “in the east.”
When asked by French director Lanzmann why he escaped, Vrba responded in his wry yet precise manner what led him and Wetzler to risk everything to save people Europe and even the Allies had abandoned to mass murder. “Naturally I was interested in surviving, myself. … But not at any price,” said Vrba. “I thought it would be possible to give the warning.”
Because Vrba and Wetzler had observed the camps’ entire operations, including how mass murder functioned to the stealing of the victims’ possessions, they understood the nature of the Nazis’ genocidal enterprise and its methods of deception that were instrumental to its success. The whole system thrived on a massive lie, requiring efficiently controlled crowd behavior, aided by a terrifying ecosystem that the camps represented.
“To give it a meaning, to the two years which I spent in Auschwitz, and to escape only for my own sake would be ridiculous,” Vrba told Lanzmann. “And because I had the information in considerable detail that the Hungarian Jews were going to be murdered en masse, in a very short time [in May 1944]. And I could see that the whole murder machinery could work only on one principle: that the people came to Auschwitz didn’t know where they were going, and for what purpose.”
Breaking the “machinery of death”
Vrba’s plan was to alert the Jewish leadership and others outside the camp about the pending deportations and killings, with detailed facts he had memorized about the extermination system that awaited them. Vrba had worked nearly a year on the ramp, where trains arrived with Jews doomed for death. Vrba’s extensive knowledge how the death camp worked correctly led him to surmise that the victims were not aware of the pending slaughter.
He likened the industrial process to the killing of pigs in a slaughterhouse, with its ruthless efficiency. Were the persecuted Jewish residents of Hungary to become aware of the facts, they would not comply, he concluded. And anything that created delays would disrupt what the Nazis’ machinery of death prized: efficiency.
“It was a question of the people who arrived had to arrive in the gas chamber as soon as possible, and without a hitch,” Vrba told the producers of the British World at War documentary TV series. Vrba’s interview described how the Nazis’ system worked with lethal efficacy, aided by their banal ability to lie to those they lined up for slaughter. This system made it nearly impossible victims would mount any resistance once they arrived.
Vrba described the effect of the deception this way as the trains arrived at the ramp: “The idea for a mother, being told after this terrible journey that her children were going to be gassed, was an utter outrageous idea in her mind. Because, after all what she suffered, here comes a gangster [a shaved prisoner] who wants to increase her suffering. So, she is tempted to go immediately to the next neat officer and say that ‘This man says, sir, that my children are going to be gassed!’ And he says, ‘Madam, do you think we are barbarians?’”
Reporter and author Jonathan Freedland, author of a book published in 2022 on Vrba’s exploits, called The Escape Artist, said Vrba’s greatest strategic insight was accurately assessing the critical role of facts and making those facts known to the world. The sharing of the facts ultimately saved 200,000 lives. Freeland describes Vrba’s strategy this way: “The only way to break the Nazi killing machine was to break the lie.”
Vrba’s memoir made special note of the complete ignorance arriving victims had of their imminent slaughter: “Inside of Auschwitz, virtually all prisoners know that most newly arrived Jews would be killed in the gas chambers. However, throughout my stay in Auschwitz from June 1942 until April 1944, during which time hundreds of transports of Jews arrived from all over Europe, I never met a single prisoner who had known anything about the gas chambers of Auschwitz before he arrived.”
In Vrba’s assessment, even if Hungarian Jews would face likely death or harm by not boarding trains, their resistance could break “the machinery of death” by slowing it down. He described the blunt reality of confronting genocide this way to Lanzmann. “It’s a big difference to slaughter pigs or to hunt deer. If you have hunt each one, you have to hunt each one separately.”
Vrba realized he had to act after Nazis killed nearly 5,000 Czech Jewish prisoners in early March 1944 in Birkenau, including men, women, and children.
Vrba observed that even when told in advance of their murder, the prisoners lacked the capacity to revolt in face of imminent death inside the camps. Vrba also determined that that the camps’ resistance movement’s primary goal would remain self-survival, not the saving of other Jews not yet deported. “But for me, in my mind, resistance meant the destruction of the execution camp,” he said. “That’s what I understood.”
At that point, Vrba planned what called “individualistic action” to try and alert the Jews of Hungary. Vrba also knew from his intelligence gathering from the camps’ resistance movement that German preparations in the camp meant they were ready to receive up to 800,000 Jews. This coincided with the German occupation of Hungary on March 19, 1944.
In his book, Vrba writes: “I believed that if I escaped the confines of Auschwitz and managed to get back into the world outside and spread the news about the fate awaiting potential candidates for ‘resettlement,’ I could make some significant difference by breaking the cornerstone of the streamlined mass murder in Auschwitz, i.e., its secrecy.”
The escape to Slovakia
Vrba and Wetzler carried out their improbable escape on April 7, 1944, with the help of resistance co-conspirators.
The pair ducked into a hiding place, a space in piled lumber, that was then covered up by their fellow prisoners. Inside, they spent three fretful days while Nazi guards and guard dogs conducted their search inside and around the camps. Wetzler described in testimony after the war that the ground around the bunker was dusted with tobacco. That tobacco had been soaked in petrol, which prevented dogs from smelling them. The pair tied scarves tied around their mouths to prevent being discovered by accidental coughing. After 80 hours, on the third night, after the roll call on April 10, 1944, they left their hiding spot.
What followed was a harrowing journey of 11 days, living off the land and nearly being captured and killed, including from a hail of bullets from Nazi soldiers after they were spotted on their traverse. As a survival story, it stands out as one the greatest ever published.
On what can only be called an epic quest of survival, the pair followed the contours the River Sola from southwest Poland as it flowed to Slovakia. They were aided by a Polish peasant woman, who helped them, risking her own life with her kindness.
On April 21, 1944, Vrba and Wetzler entered the village of Skalite, Slovakia. The pair stayed four days with the farmer, who fed them and gave them clothes and took them to the office of Jewish doctor, who Vrba met and was able to persuade to arrange a meeting with local surviving Jewish leaders.
On April 24, 1944, the pair were taken to the headquarters of the local Jewish council, or Judenrat, in the town Zilina, Slovakia. The pair were interrogated separately, with both sharing that more than 800,000 Hungarian Jews were getting ready to be mass murdered. Vrba and Wetzler shared it was now the Hungarians’ hour, and that they had to be informed immediately to either create panic or incite an uprising.
The pair drafted what became the primary content of what is known as “The Auschwitz Report,” the first detailed account of the Nazis’ mass murder machine at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Vrba said the negotiations with the Nazis at this point was ridiculous, particularly once Jewish leaders had been informed about the planned mass murders. “For the Jews, there remained nothing but resistance,” he said.
Two other Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Czesław Mordowicz from Poland and Arnošt Rosin from Slovakia, also successfully escaped on May 27, 1944. After the two reached Slovakia, they also provided reports to the Slovakia Jewish Council on the events at Birkenau in April-May 1944, including the killing of Hungarian Jewish civilians sent by train transports. The pair added seven more pages to the existing Vrba-Wetzler report.
(Learn more about the report and its distribution to Allied governments, the Papacy, and Jewish leaders in Hungary. An English translation of the report is published by the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. A copy of the multiple reports, also known as the Auschwitz Protocols, are housed in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, including a copy of the translated Vrba-Wetzler report.)
Vrba’s interviews with Claude Lanzmann for The Shoah
Holocaust historians have long marginalized Vrba. This outcome is similar to the treatment he received in his challenging interviews with Lanzmann that were later used in Lanzmann’s epic oral history film about the Holocaust, The Shoah. The interviews can now be found in versions shared on YouTube, in Lanzmann’s film The Shoah, and on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) website.
The minimizing of Vrba’s accomplishment is more evident in post-World War II historic scholarship on the Holocaust embraced in Israel. That narrative celebrated defiance and rejected any notions of collaboration. One historian of the Holocaust, Yehuda Bauer, called Vrba a “bitter Auschwitz survivor,” “not credible,” “embittered and furious,” and “[his] despair and bitterness are overdone.”
Such personal attacks are tragically disconnected from the actual Vrba many can see and hear for themselves in interviews like this video compiled from his interviews with Lanzmann.
In those recordings, he refuses to be sentimental or have alternative narratives, such as those provided by Lanzmann, supplant his razor-sharp and factual memory.
“I don’t think that crying has helped anybody,” he told Lanzmann of his demeanor in describing the unimaginable. It was clear throughout every combative interview filmed that Vrba was the expert on the Holocaust and he would never let someone who did not survive Auschwitz in person define the “truth” for others.
Vrba’s intentional defiance, which likely and repeatedly ensured his survival when it mattered the most, remain vital for all to see. His riveting recollections describe the cruel decisions he and others had to make to choose life in a living hell on earth.
In those harsh settings, he studied his surroundings and those around him and resolved to carry on, through both his intelligence and his ability to demonstrate strength. Describing his realization shortly after arriving at Auschwitz in mid-1942, he writes in his memoir: “…for I was learning Auschwitz lessons slowly but surely. Food meant strength, even if the bread contained sawdust and the tea looked like sewer water. Strength meant survival, for, as the block senior had said, there was no place in the camp for sick weaklings.”
Celebrated Canadian author Alan Twigg, creator of a carefully curated and researched website on Vrba’s contributions to humanity and to saving lives, counts 15 times Vrba managed to evade likely death before his 20th birthday. Vrba’s entire being radiated resilience.
One of the most pointed exchanges with Lanzmann can be found in interview footage archived by USHMM. (Go here, to clip FV3235.) The clip almost perfectly embodies decades of treatment Vrba endured from critics because of his first-hand account of events he endured and his assessment of failures by others to save lives.
When asked why the Nazis were so successful, Vrba replied: “Once Nazis conceived such a plan of mass murder, they understood that such a plan can be carried out better with the help of traitors.”
Vrba pushed back repeatedly against Lanzmann’s criticism of him for use of the word “traitor” in describing the failures of leaders in the besieged Jewish communities, like Hungarian Jewish leader Kasztner, to notify the wider population in Hungary of their pending murder at Auschwitz.
In his characteristically calm fashion, Vrba replied, “I am not a rabbi to explain differences and nuances in shades of treason at expense of your neighbor. I leave this to the big philosophers. … A Slovak proverb says that this is a problem for a horse. Because he’s got a big head and he can think about it.” Lanzmann, then criticized Vrba for smiling, which Vrba frequently did in his interviews. Vrba retorted, “What should I do, should I cry?”
Vrba the iconoclast and unbreakable survivor
Vrba’s lack of sentimentalism and his astounding ability to recall the slightest details make for compelling viewing in any footage that is now widely found on the internet, including the clips published by USHMM.
Decades after the events, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he did some of his most widely known interviews, he could vividly describe the clothing and fashion of Nazi officers. They wore fine gloves and had walking sticks when they lined up to great arriving trains filled with Jews awaiting imminent death in the Birkenau gas chambers.
In his interviews with Lanzmann, Vrba also describes how he stood apart from others who followed the orders to voluntarily arrive at collection points and go into the transport train.
He casually told Lanzmann that he never voluntarily submitted to captivity: “When it was announced to me from the Jewish community leaders that I would have to come and let myself be shipped to an unknown place, naturally it did not come into my mind to obey such a stupid instruction…” And yet, Vrba said, most did obey the orders, under horrific threats of violence and murder from Nazis.
In terms of his survival skills, Vrba’s exploits speak for themselves.
He was beaten repeatedly, stabbed, shot at multiple times, starved, and infected with typhus. He evaded two imprisonments. He survived two of the deadliest Nazi camps ever: Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. He and Wetzler are among only 196 persons to have successfully escaped Auschwitz-Birkenau, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial. And once having escaped perhaps worst place on earth at its time, he then survived life as a partisan, later to be awarded for his bravery fighting Nazis for birth country, Czechoslovakia.
On the Rudolf Vrba website run by author Twigg, Dr. Arthur Dodek describes what made Vrba stand apart from other Holocaust survivors. “I met many other [Holocaust] survivors and nobody ever wanted to talk about anything,” Dodek said in 2022. “He was the first survivor who wanted to tell me. Every survivor has hidden things. How he survived, only he knew. But he did tell me: ‘You have to be strong. If you show any weakness, you’re finished. At all times I had to show I was strong.’”
Professor Ruth Linn, a friend of Vrba’s and former dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Haifa (2001-2006), published her book Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting in 2003. One of her goals was to provide long-overdue recognition of Vrba’s heroism and success saving lives. She also arranged for the first publication Vrba’s memoir and the Vrba-Wetzler Report into Hebrew, to ensure that the Israeli Hebrew-reading public, long unaware of Vrba’s deeds, could become aware of his contributions during the Holocaust.
In her work, she defends Vrba’s long-held assertion that Vrba’s and Wetzler’s Auschwitz Report was hidden from hundreds of thousands of imperiled Hungarian Jews in 1944 by one of the prominent Jewish leaders in Hungary, Kasztner. This remained Vrba’s lifelong claim that forever exiled him from many in Israel and among many Holocaust historians and documentarians.
She writes, “During his intense negotiation with the SS, prominent lawyer and journalist Rezsö Kasztner kept the Vrba-Wetzler report secret in order not to create panic among the potential deportees to Auschwitz. In his postwar memoirs Kasztner was quick to state that by the end of April he was fully aware of the implications of the term ‘Hungarian salami,’ a statement that suggests that he was cognizant of the Vrba-Wetzler report and the predictions of these escapees about the imminent fate of the Hungarian Jews.”
Kasztner negotiated with none other than the Holocaust mastermind, SS Lt. Col. Adolf Eichmann. Their negotiations secured the freedom and lives of 1,684 prominent Jews, including 388 members of his Kasztner’s family and friends from his hometown Cluj, who made their way by train to Switzerland in 1944 after he had been given the report. Kasztner was murdered in Israel in 1957 by reportedly “right wing extremists,” based on his controversial role in the Holocaust round-ups in Hungary in 1944, according to many accounts, including Yad Vashem.
After copies of the report reached Allied and other world leaders, Swiss officials, and Pope Pius XII, in spring 1944, the first newspaper story about the report was published in a Swiss newspaper in June 1944. Another nearly 400 articles in the Swiss press followed. Increasingly, world leaders could no longer ignore reports of the ongoing Holocaust.
Hungary’s regent, Admiral Miklos Horthy, halted further deportations on July 7, 1944, following global pressure from world leaders, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The action saved almost 200,000 Jews in Budapest from deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
During that time, no Allied bombers were launched directly on Birkenau’s killing machine, despite the massive camp being identified in aerial surveillance.
Instead, the Allies launched sorties on the I.G. Farben war factory in the Auschwitz camp complex at Oswiecim, also known as Monowitz. Leadership within the U.S. War Department, despite having Vrba and Wetzler’s published evidence of the mass killings at Auschwitz, rejected calls to bomb the rail lines and camp facilities. Today this remains one of the greatest moral failures of the Allies’ collective war efforts.
“The industrial area of Auschwitz itself was hit twice,” writes historian and Holocaust scholar David Wyman, in his article on the failure in his 1978 essay on the Allies’ failures. “Yet the War Department persisted in rejecting each new request to bomb the death camp on the basis of its initial, perfunctory judgment that the proposals were ‘impracticable’ because they would require ‘diversion of considerable air support.’ That the terrible plight of the Jews did not merit any active response remains a source of wonder, and a lesson, even today.”
Vrba’s legacy and lessons
For his part, Vrba until his death remained marginalized by many in the global Jewish community because he did not abide by rules of “official narratives” desired by some. Based on statements Vrba shared throughout his life, he never wavered in his lifelong commitment to his version of events following the release of his and Wetzler’s report. He never forgot the hundreds of thousand lives he saw stolen by the Nazis for nearly two years.
As one commentary in The Guardian noted in its review of Freedland’s account of Vrba’s legacy, “Vrba never shied away from such controversies and sometimes alienated Jewish audiences, according to Freedland, by refusing to ‘serve up a morally comfortable narrative in which the only villains were the Nazis.’”
For his part, author Twigg, on his website dedicated to Vrba’s legacy, provides one of the best summaries of Vrba’s accounts on the complex and complicitous failures by what he called “traitors,” following the publication of the Auschwitz Report. It should be required reading by anyone who serves professionally in any civil service job and especially those who have roles as an official ombudsman.
For me, Vrba will forever remain a beacon in how anyone lives life and confronts morally problematic choices. Vrba will forever be a truth teller. He escaped to tell to the world what it did not want to fathom.
Vrba showed how courageous souls, backed by facts, can disrupt and challenge those who use lies to commit crimes and perpetrate violence. Vrba demonstrated how mastery of facts could be a weapon to fight the alluring power of the “lie” that the Nazis perfected with grim lethality.
The world owes this man much for his contributions to humanity’s collective Holocaust memory. Collectively, we need to celebrate his achievements.
My greatest regret now was not following up on my gut-instinct to travel from Seattle to Vancouver in 2000, when I learned he lived so close. I had wanted to meet and photograph him while he was still alive, to help share his remarkable and true story. I will never know what would have happened had I tried.
This story represents the very least I can do today for him and others, who did not survive the Nazis’ genocidal machine. Thank you, Rudi. You will never be forgotten.
Rudolf Vrba, born: Sept.11, 1924; died: March 26, 2006.
Primary Sources:
Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. “Escapes and reports.” https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/resistance/escapes-and-reports/.
Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. “Reports by Auschwitz escapees.” https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/informing-the-world/reports-by-auschwitz-escapees/.
Freeland, Jonathan. “Jonathan Freedland on The Escape Artist.” https://youtu.be/WdV_FdrnmQI.
Linn, Ruth. Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting. Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London, 2003.
Reisz, Matthew. “The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland review – how an Auschwitz breakout alerted the world.” The Guardian (June 12, 2022). https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/12/the-escape-artist-by-jonathan-freedland-review-how-an-auschwitz-breakout-alerted-the-world.
Twigg, Alan. Rudolf Vrba (website). https://rudolfvrba.com/.
Vrba, Rudolf. I Escaped from Auschwitz. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020. (First published 1963.)
Vrba, Rudolf. Interviews and outtakes with Claude Lanzmann for The Shoah. https://youtu.be/5D4l5xcZgxM.
Vrba, Rudolf. Interview for World at War documentary series. Thames Television, 1974. https://youtu.be/SE11I2HoLsU.
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Rudolf Vrba – Auschwitz.” (Interviews with Claude Lanzmann) CR 137 and film ID 3235—camera rolls #138, 138A, 139. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1004165.
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Transcript of interview with Rudolf Vrba and Claudd Lanzmann. https://collections.ushmm.org/film_findingaids/RG-60.5016_01_trs_en.pdf.
Wyman, David. “Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed.” Commentary (May 1979). https://www.commentary.org/articles/david-wyman/why-auschwitz-was-never-bombed/.
Other Sources:
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Oral history interview with Rudolf Vrba.” https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn510183.
(Page last updated January 11, 2023)