Affirming the truth

Rudolf Vrba died on March 27, 2006. The following obit appeared in the April 24 issue of National Review magazine:

Just five Jews escaped from Auschwitz and lived to tell the tale. Rudolf Vrba was one of them. Born in Slovakia, he was 18 when the Germans deported him in the spring of 1942, first to Majdanek, then to Auschwitz. As resourceful as he was brave, he obtained a job that allowed him to move about in the camp. In April 1944, he arranged that some friendly Poles would hide him and a companion, Fred Wetzler, under a pile of planks. In a search lasting three days, the SS failed to detect them, and they were able to get away. Once across the border into Hungary, Vrba wrote the first eyewitness report informing the world about the death camps; it was to be an important document at the Nuremberg trials. He then joined Czech partisans. I Cannot Forgive, the much-reprinted autobiography he published in 1964, gives a sense of what it was like to live so continuously on the edge of death. After the war, this remarkable man moved to Israel, Britain, and finally Canada, where he was a professor of pharmacology, teaching and researching and setting an extraordinary example until death did at last catch up. RIP.

Rudolf Vrba. According to Larry Darby, he was a liar and a fraud. According to history, he's a hero.