page_title: Rudolf Vrba
section_title: "Kanada" commando
hierarchical_section_title: Rudolf Vrba / Majdanek and Auschwitz / Auschwitz II / "Kanada" commando
caption_attribution_description: English: Birkenau concentration camp Italiano: Campo di concentramento di Birkenau
context_page_description: Rudolf "Rudi" Vrba was a Slovak-Jewish biochemist who, as a teenager in 1942, was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. He became known for having escaped from the camp in April 1944 together with Alfred Wetzler, at the height of the Holocaust, and for having co-written with him a detailed report about the mass murder that was taking place there. The report reached George Mantello in Switzerland almost two months after it arrived in Budapest. It was obtained from Moshe Krausz in Budapest by Romanian diplomat Florian Manilou who gave it to Mantello. Mantello immediately publicized a summary of the report, which led to large scale grass roots protests in Switzerland against the atrocities, to masses about the fate of Jews and about 400 headlines about the genocide. Mantello and the Swiss people are credited with having halted the mass deportation of Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz in July 1944, saving more than 200,000 lives. After the war Vrba trained as a biochemist, working mostly in England and Canada.
context_section_description: In August 1942 Vrba was reassigned to the Aufräumungskommando ("clearing-up") or "Kanada" commando, in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the extermination camp, 4 km (2.5 miles) from Auschwitz I. Around 200–800 prisoners worked on the nearby Judenrampe where freight trains carrying Jews arrived, removing the dead, then sorting through the new arrivals' property. Many brought kitchen utensils and clothes for different seasons, suggesting to Vrba that they believed the stories about resettlement.
  It took 2–3 hours to clear out a train, by which time most new arrivals were dead. Those deemed fit for work were selected for slave labour and the rest taken by truck to the gas chamber. Vrba estimated that 90 percent were gassed. He told Claude Lanzmann in 1978 that the process relied on speed and making sure no panic broke out, because panic meant the next transport would be delayed.
  [O]ur first job was to get into the wagons, get out the dead bodies—or the dying—and transport them in laufschritt, as the Germans liked to say. This means "running". Laufschritt, yeah, never walking—everything had to be done in laufschritt, immer laufen. ... There was not much medical counting to see who is dead and who feigns to be dead ... So they were put on the trucks; and once this was finished, this was the first truck to move off, and it went straight to the crematorium ..
   The whole murder machinery could work on one principle: that the people came to Auschwitz and didn't know where they were going and for what purpose. The new arrivals were supposed to be kept orderly and without panic marching into the gas chambers. Especially the panic was dangerous from women with small children. So it was important for the Nazis that none of us give some sort of message which could cause a panic ... And anybody who tried to get into touch with newcomers was either clubbed to death or taken behind the wagon and shot ...
  The new arrivals' property was taken to barracks known as Effektenlager I and II in Auschwitz I (moved to Auschwitz II after Vrba's escape). Inmates, and apparently also some of the camp administration, called the barracks Kanada I and II because they were a "land of plenty". Everything was there—medicine, food, clothing, and cash—much of it repackaged by the Aufräumungskommando to be sent to Germany. The Aufräumungskommando lived in Auschwitz I, block 4, until 15 January 1943 when they were transferred to block 16 in Auschwitz II, sector Ib, where Vrba lived until June 1943. After he had been in Auschwitz for about five months, he fell sick with typhus; his weight dropped to 42 kilos and he was delirious. At his lowest point, he was helped by Josef Farber, a Slovakian member of the camp resistance, who brought him medication and thereafter extended to him the protection of the Auschwitz underground.
  In early 1943 he was given the job of assistant registrar in one of the blocks; he told Lanzmann that the resistance movement had manoeuvered him into the position because it gave him access to information. A few weeks later, in June, he was made registrar (Blockschreiber) of block 10 in Auschwitz II, the quarantine section for men (BIIa), again because of the underground. The position gave him his own room and bed, and he could wear his own clothes. He was also able to speak to new arrivals who had been selected to work, and he had to write reports about the registration process, which allowed him to ask questions and take notes.
caption: Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the extermination camp
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