Daring act that saved so many

By Kevin Cavanagh
The Hamilton Spectator

"Knowledge really is power. It changes the course of history, saves lives, provides the tools that should enable us to avoid repeating mistakes of the past.

Rudolph Vrba, who died last week in British Columbia at age 82, knew all of this as well as anyone ever did.

When he was 20 years old, Vrba staged an ingenious escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp. His flight was the ultimate transfer of knowledge, resulting in many potential victims being alerted to the mass slaughter being carried out by the Nazis.

Vrba's revelations caused international outcry in the final months of the Second World War. Because his inside knowledge got to the outside world, thousands of families avoided being rounded up and herded into gas chambers. It's estimated that Vrba's information saved the lives of 100,000 Hungarian Jews who would otherwise have become more genocide victims.

Generations are alive today because of that turn of fate. How many discoveries, contributions and achievements would not have happened in the past 62 years if Vrba's knowledge of the Holocaust had never got past the barbed wire?

Sharing and procreating knowledge would continue to define Vrba's life. Besides going on to teach medical students at the University of British Columbia, he continued to speak about his Holocaust knowledge. He provided decisive testimony against such defendants as Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. And he published the book, I Cannot Forgive, a volume of his recollections of Auschwitz.

Knowledge was the man, but knowledge without living memory loses some of its potency, and Vrba's inevitable passing sadly weakens a connection to our past. In this particular instance we lose first-hand experience about a terrifying dimension of human nature.

Vrba's was a unique voice among the dwindling number of Holocaust survivors who directly link us to a haunting chunk of history that helped shape the values of today's Canada, and the geopolitical path that the entire world has taken into the 21st century.

We are in no danger of forgetting our past. Archives and chronicles, books and other media mean we have no excuse for slipping into a pool of ignorance.

But those who do are much the poorer for it."