Madam, do you think we are barbarians?

I made myself watch the latest Ken Burns documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust - not that it isn't well done, but it's harrowing.  Everything touching the Holocaust is.

As bleak headlines came in about mass graves in the Ukraine and Putin's nuclear threats, I gripped the armrest and listened as author Daniel Mendelsohn recounted the ghastly stories of what happened to his great-uncle, his wife, and four daughters in Poland. As he pointed out that there were many ways of dying during the Holocaust, he looked off to one side with a hint of a shrug and the ghost of a wry, resigned smile, and I remembered Rudolf Vrba.

Vrba, who was born Walter Rosenberg in Slovakia and survived two years in Auschwitz, appeared in interviews for such documentaries as The World at War and Shoah.  He stood out, even amongst interviewees with equally horrifying stories, with his wry and articulate black humour.  In particular, I remember his description of the Nazi guards ordering the prisoners to move:  Schnell!  "They are a sporty people," Vrba observed, drily.

He also supplied the example of a distraught mother approaching a concentration camp officer, when she had been warned that her children were to be gassed. "Madam," he mirrored the officer's wolfish reply.  "Do you think we are barbarians?"

Vrba's story is remarkable in other ways.  He, along with fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler, became among the handful of people who ever escaped from Auschwitz.  The meticulous report they wrote on the workings and layout of Auschwitz, along with their desperate struggle to make the world, including their fellow European Jews, understand the enormity of the Final Solution, may have saved thousands of lives.

After the war, Vrba obtained a PhD in chemistry, and, twenty years later, emigrated to Canada, where he worked for the Medical Research Council of Canada, and became a Canadian citizen. He eventually moved to Vancouver, where he was a professor of Pharmacology at the University of British Columbia.

In the mid-eighties, he testified against Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel.  This attracted a lot of attention in in Victoria, because Doug Christie, an eccentric lawyer who had a tollbooth-sized office in the middle of a downtown parking lot near the Victoria courthouse, was acting for Zündel.  When Christie asked Vrba if he had, in fact, seen anyone gassed at Auschwitz, Vrba's reply was mordant:  he had deduced, having witnessed officers tossing canisters into the chamber, that "it was not a kitchen or a bakery".  When Christie tried to throw doubt on Vrba's story that he had escaped Auschwitz at night without food, Vrba shot back:  "Perhaps in Girl Guides or Boy Scouts in Victoria, they didn't teach you how this can be done, but it can."

More than forty years after his ordeal, he was still having to defend it -- and still would today.  I imagine he was well acquainted with despair.  He died in Vancouver in 2006.

Ken Burns was a guest on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, just as The U.S. and the Holocaust was transmitting for the first time.  Work on the documentary series began a little under a decade ago, and Burns and his co-creators watched in growing horror as the issues discussed in the documentary, the racism and refusal to help refugees in particular, became ever more pertinent.

We don't seem to learn a thing from history -- or we learn the wrong things...