Working the Dead Beat (44 page)

In the midst of the legal turmoil, Saumur had married Yvette Ouellette, a Witness from Montreal, in 1949. They decided not to have children because their missionary work was more important, especially since they believed the end of the world was imminent. That decision left them free to devote themselves to furthering the work of the Witnesses.

Eventually the couple ministered all over Canada. In one case, after discovering that one of his potential converts was illiterate, Saumur taught her to read and write so that she could study the Bible on her own. After his wife died in 2002, Saumur moved into a Witness retirement home in Grimsby, Ontario. He died there of pneumonia on March 22, 2007, at the age of eighty-six.

Meanwhile, How, a slight, dapper man with a thick shock of hair, kept on promoting the interests of the Jehovah's Witnesses. Looking almost biblical despite his short stature, he thundered about the rights and entitlements of his co-religionists in courtrooms across the country and around the world. “He was a very hard-working and tenacious lawyer, but he was wise enough to know that he couldn't do all the heavy lifting himself, so he would prepare the briefs and the submissions and then enlist others, such as constitutional expert Frank Scott, to help him argue cases before the court,” according to lawyer and writer William Kaplan.

How was an anomaly. He practised his faith devoutly while using the country's institutions to win guarantees for Witnesses' rights. He respected the courts and was willing to accept the rewards of Canadian society if they didn't overtly violate the tenets of his faith. For example, in the late 1950s he agreed to accept the honorary designation Queen's Counsel after he received a guarantee that he wouldn't first have to swear an oath recognizing the Queen as head of state.

It was this ability to navigate between the religious and legal worlds that made How such a powerhouse lawyer for the Jehovah's Witnesses. In winning freedoms for them, he helped establish implied rights for everyone. In doing so, he influenced legalists, intellectuals, and civil libertarians, including future politicians such as Pierre Trudeau, whose government enacted the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982.

Not all of the cases How argued were celebrated in the larger world. Some, especially the ones in which he fought for the right to refuse blood transfusions, especially for children, are medically and ethically problematic for many people. Jehovah's Witnesses believe the Bible prohibits the consumption of blood, a stricture that encompasses transfusions and most blood products, even in life-threatening medical emergencies. How was counsel for the Jehovah's Witnesses in controversial and unsuccessful appeals to deny blood transfusions for underage children and in an Ontario Court of Appeal case that confirmed an adult's right to make health-care treatment decisions.

In 1954 he married Margaret Biegel, a British Jehovah's Witness. Like many Jehovah's Witnesses, they had no children, and she worked as his secretary as his law career expanded. She died of cancer in 1987. Two years later, in November 1989, he married Linda Manning, a much younger American lawyer and Jehovah's Witness who had moved north to work in the Canadian organization's legal department. Until well into his eighties he continued to represent the Witnesses' legal interests, appearing as a consultant counsel in Osaka, Japan, in 1993 and in Singapore from 1994 to 1996.

The American College of Trial Lawyers gave him its Award for Courageous Advocacy on September 8, 1997, the first time a Canadian lawyer had received this distinction. He was awarded the medal of the Law Society of Upper Canada in 1998 and a certificate of appreciation and recognition from the Bar of Montreal the following year. In 2000 he was named an officer of the Order of Canada for “consistently and courageously” fighting legal battles to advance civil liberties and helping “pave the way” for the Canadian Bill of Rights and Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Calling him a “man of conscience,” the citation lauded him for working at “minimal compensation” to defend clients “in every province of Canada, many American states and several other countries.”

He died December 30, 2008, in Georgetown, Ontario, of pneumonia as a result of complications of prostate cancer. He was eighty-nine.

 

Rudolf Vrba

Auschwitz Survivor and Biochemist

September 11, 1924 – March 27, 2006

A
USCHWITZ WAS THE
largest and most notorious of the five Nazi death camps. More than a million people, overwhelmingly Jews, were slaughtered there in gas chambers, on scaffolds, or before firing squads, or were allowed to perish from disease, beatings, and starvation. Walter Rosenberg was an exception. He escaped and survived to raise the alarm about what was really happening to Hungarian Jews behind the barbed wire in the most sophisticated and industrialized extermination facility of Adolf Hitler's nefarious campaign to engineer “the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe.”

Rosenberg was only nineteen when he and his older friend Alfred Wetzler eluded the guards and their vicious dogs on April 7, 1944, and escaped from Auschwitz. Three weeks earlier, German forces had invaded Hungary. The infamous Adolf Eichmann had established headquarters in Budapest to oversee the deportation to Auschwitz of the country's Jewish population. Mass transports began on May 15, 1944, at a rate of twelve thousand people a day. The victims were told they were being resettled, but most were sent straight to the gas chambers.

Rosenberg and Wetzler were not the only people to slip out of Auschwitz, but they were the most important escapees from that hellhole of murder and depravity because they brought with them detailed descriptions of the layout and function of the gas chambers and crematoria. They hoped that their copious eyewitness testimony to Jewish authorities about what was really happening behind the iron gates adorned with the slogan
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
(“Work shall make you free”) would make Jewish victims rebel and fight back rather than passively accepting their fates. That didn't happen, but the alarm did eventually reach the Allies, and many lives were saved.

A prickly man who tended to be a moral absolutist, Rosenberg hated being thought of as a victim or a survivor, and with good reason: nobody had rescued him — he had beaten Auschwitz. For the rest of his life, even as an acclaimed biochemist at the University of British Columbia, he lived under the name Rudolf Vrba, the
nom de guerre
that he adopted after Auschwitz, and every year he celebrated his birthday on April 7, the day of his escape.

Instead of rejoicing that the “Auschwitz Protocol,” as his detailed report was called, saved an estimated 150,000 Hungarian Jews, he remained angry that more lives hadn't been saved. He believed to the end of his life that Hungarian Jewish leaders had knowingly sacrificed more than 400,000 of their own countrymen in order to negotiate safe passage for themselves and their families.

The past is not a simple place, especially for those who scrape away the myths that spread like moss over horrific events to make moral complexities more palatable for the living. Vrba was a troubling character to many because he threatened the solidarity of the post-Holocaust Jewish community with his accusations of complicity in his memoir
Escape from Auschwitz: I Can't Forgive
. As a result, it was easier for many to ignore Vrba's heroism than to honour it.

Ruth Linn, dean of education at Haifa University and a native-born Israeli, had never heard about anybody escaping from Auschwitz — and neither had her students — until she watched French director Claude Lanzmann's 1985 documentary,
Shoah.
How was it possible, she asked herself, that Vrba's memoirs had never been translated into Hebrew? Why had he never been recognized by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority? Linn was a key player in having Vrba's memoir translated, in seeing him awarded an honorary doctorate at Haifa University in 1998, and in rectifying his absence from popular accounts of the Holocaust by detailing those omissions in her 2004 book,
Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting.

Over the years Vrba had made crucial depositions against Nazis trying to escape retribution, whether it was the members of the “final solution” leadership at the Nuremberg trials, Adolf Eichmann after his capture in Argentina in 1960, or former concentration camp guards living undercover in Germany. He was also a feisty witness in the trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel in Toronto in 1985. When Zundel's lawyer accused Vrba of lying about Auschwitz and demanded to know if he had ever seen anybody gassed, he replied that he had watched people being taken into the buildings and seen SS officers throw in gas canisters after them. “Therefore, I concluded it was not a kitchen or a bakery, but it was a gas chamber. It is possible they are still there or that there is a tunnel and they are now in China. Otherwise, they were gassed.”

Holocaust historian Sir Martin Gilbert was so impressed with Vrba's heroism that he supported a campaign to nominate him for the Order of Canada and solicited letters from well-known Canadians, including law professor and former justice minister Irwin Cotler. “I fully concur with you that Vrba is a ‘real hero.' Indeed, there are few more deserving of the Order of Canada than Vrba, and few, anywhere, who have exhibited his moral courage,” Cotler said in a handwritten letter to Gilbert on February 18, 1992. “Canada will honour itself — and redeem itself somewhat — by awarding him the Order of Canada.”

It didn't happen, and now it is too late. Rudolf Vrba died of cancer at the age of eighty-one in Vancouver, on March 27, 2006, a week before the sixty-second anniversary of his escape from Auschwitz.

WALTER ROSENBERG WAS
born in Topol'čany, Czechoslovakia, on September 11, 1924, one of five children of Elias Rosenberg, a steam-sawmill owner, and Helena Grunfeldova. He was fifteen when the Germans began their murderous march through Europe.

After he was expelled from high school in Bratislava under the local version of the Nuremberg anti-Jewish laws, Rosenberg studied at home and worked as a labourer. His fervour rising, he fled his homeland, hoping to join the Czechoslovakian forces in exile in Britain. Before he crossed the border into Hungary, he tore the yellow star off his shoulder. Nevertheless, he was arrested in March 1942 and escaped, only to be apprehended again by a policeman who was suspicious of a young man wearing two pairs of socks. Two months later he was deported to Majdanek, a concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland, and from there transferred to Auschwitz on June 30.

Largely because he was strong and healthy, Rosenberg survived as prisoner number 44070 for almost two years in a place where the average life expectancy was a few months. At first he was assigned to dig up dead bodies so they could be incinerated in the ovens at nearby Birkenau. When the guards learned he could speak German, he was forced to become a clerk in the storage facility named “Canada” — so called because the country was considered a land of plenty. It housed the food, medicine, clothing, and other valuables confiscated from prisoners on their arrival at Auschwitz and its satellite camps.

Work in “Canada,” while soul-destroying, was a privileged position in the camp hierarchy, for the food rations were better and the work was not as physically arduous as hard-labour details. Using his capacious memory and analytical powers, he memorized the architecture of the camp and, especially after he became registrar, computed the numbers of people arriving on the transports and roughly calculated how many were set aside to be used as slave labour or sent to be gassed.

Early in 1944, Rosenberg observed that the camp was ramping up to prepare for the arrival of huge deportations of Hungarian Jews. With Alfred Wetzler, an older friend from his hometown, he escaped with the help of the prison underground. Knowing that the prison guards typically abandoned a search after three days, the two men hid for that many days and nights in a space hollowed out of a woodpile just outside the first of two barbed-wire inner perimeters. Other prisoners had sprinkled the woodpile with Russian tobacco dipped in gasoline to camouflage the duo's scent and thwart the sniffer dogs.

Wearing suits, overcoats, and boots they had smuggled out of “Canada,” they made their way to Žilina, Slovakia, where on April 24 they told their harrowing tale to the local Jewish council. Rosenberg and Wetzler were put in separate rooms as they wrote out their reports, which were then compared, checked for accuracy against available records, and compiled. The thirty-two-page report testifying to the atrocities at Auschwitz-Birkenau was sent to the Allies, the Vatican, the International Red Cross, and the Jewish leadership in Hungary — the next victims on Hitler's extermination list.

The Jewish council gave Rosenberg identity papers and he became Rudolf Vrba, a name he later adopted legally. The “Auschwitz Protocol” reached the Hungarian Jewish leadership in early May 1944, but they didn't raise the alarm. Instead they negotiated with Adolf Eichmann in an effort to exchange Jews for trucks and other goods needed by the depleted Nazi war effort on the eastern front against the Soviets.

“Basically, Eichmann deceived them,” says Gilbert, by promising the Hungarian Jewish leadership that the trains would take the Jews to holding camps, where they would be transferred to trucks that would convey them to safety in Spain. That's why they kept silent. Between mid-May and early July 1944, nearly 440,000 Hungarian Jews (including future Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel) boarded “resettlement trains” in good faith and ended up in Auschwitz, where most were immediately gassed. Vrba always believed that if the Jewish leaders had broadcast the truth about Auschwitz, the deportees would have fought back or tried to flee instead of numbly climbing into the railcars.

By June 1944 the Allies had received the “Auschwitz Protocol” — almost two months after Vrba's first meeting with Jewish authorities, an unconscionable delay in his view. The
BBC
broadcast details on June 15, and the
New York Times
published the first of three articles about the gas chambers at Birkenau and Auschwitz five days later, on June 20. Coincidentally, there was an American air raid on Budapest on July 2, 1944. Hungarian regent admiral Miklós Horthy believed the attack was the beginning of an Allied retribution in response to the publication of the Auschwitz Protocol. On July 7 he ordered a halt to the deportations; they stopped two days later. According to Gilbert, that alone made Vrba “totally and extraordinarily successful.”

Vrba warned his own relatives to flee before they too were taken. After that, he joined the Czechoslovak partisan units in September 1944. He fought with them until the end of the war and was decorated for bravery.

After Czechoslovakia was liberated, he went back to school and did a series of degrees in chemistry, receiving his doctorate in 1951 and a further postgraduate degree from the Academy of Science in 1956. He undertook biochemical research at Charles University in Prague from 1953 to 1958. His choice of academic discipline might seem ironic considering that he had escaped death in a Nazi gas chamber, but he was probably always interested in chemicals — how else would he have discovered the odorous and beneficial side effects of combining Russian tobacco and gasoline?

By then he had married a childhood friend, a medical doctor in Prague named Gerta Verbova. They had two daughters, Helena (now deceased) and Zuza. Vrba and his wife separated in 1958, when she defected to the West and he went to a conference in Israel and simply didn't return home.

He worked as a biochemist in Israel for two years but never felt at ease there because of the tensions between what historian Ruth Linn called “survivor discourse” (actual experience that can be hard to document and is therefore easily questioned) and “expert discourse” (sourced accounts by scholars). Vrba also resented what he felt was pandering to Hungarian Jewish elders, such as Rezsö Kasztner, who had used their wits and their financial resources to escape the Holocaust while others perished.

As a Jewish relief leader in Budapest, Kasztner had successfully negotiated with Eichmann to allow 1,685 Hungarian Jews (including members of Kasztner's family) to travel by train to Switzerland instead of Auschwitz, in exchange for money, gold, and diamonds — what came to be called the “blood for goods” proposal. Kasztner, who settled in Israel after the war, was accused of collaboration with the Nazis and assassinated in 1957.

In 1960,Vrba joined the British Medical Research Council and moved to London. Seven years later he was appointed to the Canadian Medical Research Council, and from there he began teaching in the pharmacology department of the faculty of medicine at
UBC
. In the mid-1970s he went on sabbatical to Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he met his second wife, Robin. She became a successful real estate dealer in Vancouver.

Vrba lived in Canada for nearly four decades. He forged a successful academic career as a biochemist at the University of British Columbia and was the author of more than fifty scientific papers on the function of proteins in the brain in relation to cancer and diabetes. Before he retired in the early 1990s, he liked to say that he spent ninety-five percent of his time on biochemistry and only five percent on the Holocaust. But it was that five percent that made him so memorable.