Quoting Tony Greenstein’s Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation, pages 267–269:
Rudolf Vrba […] wrote that:
I am a Jew. In spite of that — indeed because of that I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler’s gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr. Kasztner. […] I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks’ notice that Eichmann planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers… Kasztner went to Eichmann and told him, ‘I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet.’²⁶
When Professor Jacob Talmon criticised Hannah Arendt for referring to this, Vrba asked:
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 example Dr. R. Kasztner — bartered their own lives and the lives of 1,684 other ‘prominent’ Jews directly from Eichmann.²⁷
These letters are not found in Hebrew history text books.²⁸ The [Auschwitz] Protocols were erased from Zionism’s holocaust historiography because they did not accord with its narrative.²⁹ That was why Vrba described Israel as a ‘state of the Judenrats and Kastners’.³⁰ For Fatran, Vrba could never be considered as credible as Zionist members of the Judenrat or Vaada.
It was not until 1997 that Vrba appeared in Bauer’s writings as a reliable eyewitness and it was not until 1999, a year after Vrba’s memoirs were published in Hebrew, that an account of his escape from Auschwitz was mentioned in Gutman’s Hebrew writings for school students.³¹
Bauer had been forced to accept that the [Auschwitz] Protocols could be credited with making three major breakthroughs: changing the Allies’ belief that Auschwitz was a huge labour camp, mainly for Poles; that it was the first detailed and reliable report of the extermination and thirdly ‘it jolted the Swiss into undertaking wide publication of the German mass killing at Auschwitz.’³²
Linn, an Education Professor at Haifa University, first became aware of Vrba via his interview in Lanzmann’s Shoah. Linn met Vrba by chance at the University of British Columbia.³³ Despite having been taught about the Holocaust, she had not heard of him. When Linn conducted a survey of her own students 98% were ignorant of the fact that any Jews had escaped from Auschwitz. Neither the escape nor the [Auschwitz] Protocols had formed part of Israeli schools’ Holocaust curriculum.
Linn’s explanation was that ‘Vrba’s escape contradict[ed] Bauer’s thesis that the Jews didn’t know, and that if they were aware, then they didn’t really grasp the situation.’ The Jewish leaders however ‘did know and did grasp what was happening, because they saved themselves.’ Linn reserved her main ire for Gutman whose The Holocaust and its meaning, a basic text taught in Israeli schools did not mention Vrba and Wetzler’s escape from Auschwitz.³⁴
Official Israeli holocaust history has erased the record of anti-Zionist Jewish resistance to the [Fascists]. This was not only because of the fiction that only Zionists represented the Jews of Europe but because some of the most prominent Jewish collaborators with the [Fascists] were Zionists.³⁵ In its place Israel’s holocaust historians have substituted the heroic myth of Zionist resistance.³⁶
Vrba was first given academic legitimacy by a German journal. In 1996, he gave his views of the role of the Jewish Councils, in Vierteljahrsheft fuer Zeitgeschichte. Bauer responded, agreeing that the Hungarian Jews who were deported to Auschwitz were ignorant of their impending fate.³⁷
It was only after a dogged campaign by Linn that the [Auschwitz] Protocols and Vrba’s memoirs were printed in Hebrew in 1998 and that Vrba received an honorary doctorate from Haifa University.³⁸ Linn asked whether a narrative of escape or resistance by a non-Zionist Jew could ever be made to harmonise with the national myths dominating Israel.³⁹
In 1963 Vrba published his memoirs, I Escaped from Auschwitz. They were published in virtually every language bar one — Hebrew. Publishers, including YV [Yad Vashem], weren’t interested.⁴⁰ Marek Edelman’s The Ghetto Fights, first published in 1945, suffered a similar fate, only being translated into Hebrew in 2001.
Like Vrba, Edelman never ‘ascended’ to Israel, refusing to become the ‘dead and obedient hero who could be moulded along with the political order of that time… extremely inconvenient for the creation of a heroic Zionist condensing and compensating myth… Israel was not their home.’⁴¹
After the war Edelman insisted on living in Poland and refused to accept the Zionist claim to ownership of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.⁴²
Vrba and Wetzler were rendered anonymous. Oskar Neumann referred to ‘two young Jewish chaps…’ in his 1956 memoirs.⁴³ Oskar Krasniansky refers to ‘two young people’⁴⁴ and Rothkirchen to ‘two young men’.⁴⁵ In Bauer’s The Holocaust — Some Historical Aspects they are referred to as ‘two Slovak Jews’⁴⁶ Dina Porat wrote about ‘two young Slovak Jews…’⁴⁷ Porat cited Martin Gilbert’s Auschwitz and the Allies as her source, yet Gilbert named both.⁴⁸
In the 1990 edition of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Wetzler and Vrba are mentioned by name.⁴⁹ But in the 2001 edition they are referred to as ‘two Jewish prisoners.’ The USHMM and the Hebrew inscription of the Auschwitz escape in YV refers to ‘two young Slovak Jews.’⁵⁰
Erich Kulka interviewed Vrba and Wetzler in Czechoslovakia, giving them full recognition.⁵¹ After he joined YV, Vrba was referred to as ‘Rosenberg-Vrba’.⁵²
Whilst admitting that the [Auschwitz] Protocols had saved about 200,000 Jews from deportation he complained that Vrba had ‘attacked and humiliated’ former members of UZ [Ústredňa Židov; the Slovakian Jewish Council or Judenrat].⁵³
In YV the Hungarian version of the Protocols can only be found in a file dealing with the Kasztner case, minus its authors’ names!⁵⁴ Nor is there an English or Hebrew version.⁵⁵ The escapees are referred to as ‘two young Slovak Jews.’ As John Conway noted: ‘energetic steps were taken for more than thirty years to prevent Vrba’s version of events from appearing in Hebrew’.⁵⁶
The silencing of Vrba and Wetzler was exploited by [Shoah] deniers such as Arthur Butz, author of Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Butz argued that if the content of the Protocols were true, Israeli historians would certainly know their names and publicise their report.’⁵⁷ Butz alleged that the Protocols were invented by the [War Refugee Board]. Another holocaust denier who adopted this line of argument was Robert Faurisson.⁵⁸
The five Jewish escapees from Auschwitz were airbrushed out of Zionist history. When Otto Kulka asked why Vrba and Wexler’s part in informing the UZ was missing from Rothkirchen’s presentation at a 1968 YV conference on Jewish Resistance, she replied, ‘I was speaking of the organised escapes. The escapes from Auschwitz were acts of individual heroism.’ This was both untrue and irrelevant. The Zionists played no part in the camp’s resistance.⁵⁹
As Porat conceded, ‘one notion remained unchanged in the Yishuv’, that the Jewish Resistance was primarily Zionist.’⁶⁰ The problem was that neither Edelman nor Vrba had even a ‘minimal layer of Zionist veneer.’⁶¹
In 1994, at a conference at the USHMM, Vrba asked who was the better historian, those who had direct experience of the [Fascists] or those who wrote about them?⁶² Vrba’s crime was that he was neither a Zionist nor a historian.⁶³
A useful summary of how the experiences of those who were present during the Holocaust was marginalised is given by Conway.⁶⁴ Fatran described his allegations that the UZ concealed information about the Holocaust from Slovakian Jewry as being ‘blatantly contrary to the historical truth’⁶⁵ despite the fact that she had justified such concealment.⁶⁶
(Emphasis added.)
