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The Man Who Outsmarted Auschwitz: Rudolf Vrba's Story

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In 1994 April 10th Rudolf Vrba and his partner successfully escaped from Auschwitz.

They started walking to Slovakia where they would worn the people about the Nazi.

Rudolf Vrba showed his part of resistance by warning the people about the Nazis and saving thousands of lives.

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Holocaust, Hebrew Shoʾah ("Catastrophe"), Yiddish and Hebrew Ḥurban ("Destruction"), the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this "the final solution to the Jewish question." Yiddish-speaking Jews and survivors in the years immediately following their liberation called the murder of the Jews the Ḥurban, the word used to describe the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 bce and the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 ce. Shoʾah ("Catastrophe") is the term preferred by Israelis and the French, most especially after Claude Lanzmann's masterful 1985 motion picture documentary of that title. It is also preferred by people who speak Hebrew and by those who want to be more particular about the Jewish experience or who are uncomfortable with the religious connotations of the word Holocaust. Less universal and more particular, Shoʾah emphasizes the annihilation of the Jews, not the totality of Nazi victims. More particular terms also were used by Raul Hilberg, who called his pioneering work The Destruction of the European Jews, and Lucy S. Dawidowicz, who entitled her book on the Holocaust The War Against the Jews. In part she showed how Germany fought two wars simultaneously: World War II and the racial war against the Jews. The Allies fought only the World War. The word Holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston, a translation of the Hebrew word ʿolah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. This word was chosen because in the ultimate manifestation of the Nazi killing program-the extermination camps -the bodies of the victims were consumed whole in crematoria and open fires.

Even before the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they had made no secret of their anti-Semitism. As early as 1919 Adolf Hitler had written, "Rational anti-Semitism, however, must lead to systematic legal opposition....Its final objective must unswervingly be the removal of the Jews altogether." In Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"; 1925-27), Hitler further developed the idea of the Jews as an evil race struggling for world domination. Nazi anti-Semitism was rooted in religious anti-Semitism and enhanced by political anti-Semitism. To this the Nazis added a further dimension: racial anti-Semitism. Nazi racial ideology characterized the Jews as Untermenschen (German: "subhumans"). The Nazis portrayed the Jews as a race and not as a religious group. Religious anti-Semitism could be resolved by conversion, political anti-Semitism by expulsion. Ultimately, the logic of Nazi racial anti-Semitism led to annihilation.

Hitler's worldview revolved around two concepts: territorial expansion (that is, greater Lebensraum-"living space"-for the German people) and racial supremacy. After World War I the Allies denied Germany colonies in Africa, so Hitler sought to expand German territory and secure food and resources-scarce during World War I-in Europe itself. Hitler viewed the Jews as racial polluters, a cancer on German society in what has been termed by Holocaust survivor and historian Saul Friedländer "redemptive anti-Semitism," focused on redeeming Germany from its ills and ridding it of a cancer on the body politic. Historian Timothy Snyder characterized the struggle as even more elemental, as "zoological," and "ecological," a struggle of the species. Hitler opposed Jews for the values they brought into the world. Social justice and compassionate assistance to the weak stood in the way of what he perceived as the natural order, in which the powerful exercise unrestrained power. In Hitler's view, such restraint on the exercise of power would inevitably lead to the weakening, even the defeat, of the master race.

When Hitler came to power legally on January 30, 1933, as the head of a coalition government, his first objective was to consolidate power and to eliminate political opposition. The assault against the Jews began on April 1 with a boycott of Jewish businesses. A week later the Nazis dismissed Jews from the civil service, and by the end of the month the participation of Jews in German schools was restricted by a quota. On May 10 thousands of Nazi students, together with many professors, stormed university libraries and bookstores in 30 cities throughout Germany to remove tens of thousands of books written by non- Aryans and those opposed to Nazi ideology. The books were tossed into bonfires in an effort to cleanse German culture of "un-Germanic" writings. A century earlier Heinrich Heine -a German poet of Jewish origin-had said, "Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people." In Nazi Germany the time between the burning of Jewish books and the burning of Jews was eight years.

As discrimination against Jews increased, German law required a legal definition of a Jew and an Aryan. Promulgated at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nürnberg on September 15, 1935, the Nürnberg Laws-the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Law of the Reich Citizen-became the centrepiece of anti-Jewish legislation and a precedent for defining and categorizing Jews in all German-controlled lands. Marriage and sexual relations between Jews and citizens of "German or kindred blood" were prohibited. Only "racial" Germans were entitled to civil and political rights. Jews were reduced to subjects of the state. The Nürnberg Laws formally divided Germans and Jews, yet neither the word German nor the word Jew was defined. That task was left to the bureaucracy. Two basic categories were established in November: Jews, those with at least three Jewish grandparents; and Mischlinge ("mongrels," or "mixed breeds"), people with one or two Jewish grandparents. Thus, the definition of a Jew was primarily based not on the identity an individual affirmed or the religion he or she practiced but on his or her ancestry. Categorization was the first stage of destruction.

Responding with alarm to Hitler's rise, the Jewish community sought to defend their rights as Germans. For those Jews who felt themselves fully German and who had patriotically fought in World War I, the Nazification of German society was especially painful. Zionist activity intensified. "Wear it with pride," journalist Robert Weltsch wrote in 1933 of the Jewish identity the Nazis had so stigmatized. Religious philosopher Martin Buber led an effort at Jewish adult education, preparing the community for the long journey ahead. Rabbi Leo Baeck circulated a prayer for Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) in 1935 that instructed Jews on how to behave: "We bow down before God; we stand erect before man." Yet while few, if any, could foresee its eventual outcome, the Jewish condition was increasingly perilous and was expected to worsen.

By the late 1930s there was a desperate search for countries of refuge. Those who could obtain visas and qualify under stringent quotas emigrated to the United States. Many went to Palestine, where the small Jewish community was willing to receive refugees. Still others sought refuge in neighbouring European countries. Most countries, however, were unwilling to receive large numbers of refugees.

Responding to domestic pressures to act on behalf of Jewish refugees, U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt convened, but did not attend, the Évian Conference on resettlement, in Évian-les-Bains, France, in July 1938. In his invitation to government leaders, Roosevelt specified that they would not have to change laws or spend government funds; only philanthropic funds would be used for resettlement. Britain was assured that Palestine would not be on the agenda. The result was that little was attempted and less accomplished.

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Holocaust | Definition, Concentration Camps, History, & Facts

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Holocaust, the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. Today the Holocaust is viewed as the emblematic manifestation of absolute evil. Learn more about the Holocaust in this article.

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“There is no doubt that this persecution of the Jews in Hungary and their expulsion from enemy territory is probably the biggest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilized men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races in Europe.”

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Rudolf sitting for a picture in the first role

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Rudolf sitting for a picture in the first role

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Rudolp Vrba was born in Topoľčany Slovakia on September 11, 1924 in his early life he grew up with 3 siblings with both of his parents.

As he got older he started to be excluded from school when one day he ignored orders to assemble for deportations where he would be sent to Auschwitz's and later escape.

Him and a partner later escaped Auschwitz's he changed his name from Walter to Rudolp where he would continue to be called that untill his death

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Rudolp went to school to study chemistry and biology after meeting his wife who was also excluded from school. where they would later marry and have 2 kids. Eventually Rudolp grew old and died at the age of 82 in 2006. Even tho he is no longer here with us we still will remember him as a hero who is part of the reason Jews no longer get discriminated in treated differently.

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Rudolp played a part in resistance by not following the rules of the Nazis. He also shared important information that he wasn't supposed to tell anyone. Another way he showed resistance is by escaping prison because the prison he escaped was one of the hardest ones to escape saying that less then 10 people escaped.

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Rudolp Vrba was a young man when he first did his act of resistance in March of 1942 at just 17 years old.

He ignored the guards rule to assemble for deportation which was very brave because they could've done anything to him.

His second act of resistance was April 1944 him and another cellmate escaped their concentration camp to go tell the people of the Nazis up coming deportation. Rudolph Vrba was a young man who got sent to Auschwitz's for ignoring the guards rules to assemble and in 1944 he escaped and warned many of people and saved thousands of lives.

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How was Rudolp vrba an important figure in history?

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How was Rudolp vrba an important figure in history?

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Rudolp Vrba was a important figure In history because he saved over 100 thousand lives.

He also was a young Resistance member who was brave enough to stand up to the Nazis.

Lastly he is an important figure of history because he was one of 5 people to escape Auschwitz alive .

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Rudolp made a legacy when he met his wife who was getting excluded from school just like him. They eventually had 2 kids who carried their legacy that are probably Alive today. in the end him and his wife both died.

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Rudolp Vrba grew up with both of his parents.

And met his wife in high school.

They had kids about 20 years later.

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Oral history interview with Rudolf Vrba - Collections Search - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Rudolf Vrba, born in Trnava, Slovakia, describes growing up in Bratislava, Slovakia; identifying as a Slovak; being allowed to attend only eight grades of school because he was Jewish (he was 14 years old when he was no longer allowed to attend school in 1939); anti-Jewish laws that were passed;

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Sunday People | May 04, 2025

MORE than a million people were slaughtered in Auschwitz - 90% of them Jews.

That tally may have been even higher without the astonishing actions of two men who managed to escape and reveal to the world the true horrors Hitler and his henchmen had unleashed there.

Rudolph Vrba, born Walter Rosenburg, was 17 when he arrived at the camp in June 1942.

Within days, he witnessed the hanging of two prisoners who had tried to escape. But the guards' brutality made him determined to break out.

For 10 nightmarish months, the young Slovakian was forced to clear wagons of bodies at the railway station, rifling through the possessions of the dead.

Malnourished, traumatised and battling typhus, Vrba made a mental record of what he saw - the number of train arrivals, wagons and prisoners.

This story is from the May 04, 2025 edition of Sunday People.

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This story is from the May 04, 2025 edition of Sunday People.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.

Already a subscriber? Sign In

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Escape that lifted lid on Holocaust | Sunday People - Newspaper - Read this story on Magzter.com

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Read this exciting story from Sunday People May 04, 2025 issue. MORE than a million people were slaughtered in Auschwitz - 90% of them Jews.