Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  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.

  Anna Maria de Souza

  Fundraiser

  1941? – September 18, 2007

  THERE WERE TWO secrets that Anna Maria de Souza, the much­-married creator of the fabulously successful Brazilian Carnival Ball, kept closely guarded: her age and the nature of her final and catastrophic illness. Italian and Brazilian in ancestry, she heated up the staid fundraising climate in Toronto with an annual fancy-dress ball that for decades was one of the most significant philanthropic galas on the Canadian social calendar. A warm-blooded, energetic outsider, she had the entrepreneurial zeal, organizing skills, and shrewd ambition of a self-made CEO. Instead of starting a company or a launching a hedge fund, she camouflaged her business skills under the patina of a society hostess. Using old-fashioned influence rather than naked power, she forged alliances with charitable foundations in campaigns that raised their profiles, her status, and close to $45 million for Toronto hospitals, universities, and arts and culture organizations for more than forty years.

  For all her flamboyance, de Souza was intensely private. Nobody knew her real age — not even her husband, Ivan, as she loved to boast. “I’ve known her for thirty-five years and it never occurred to me to wonder. She was one of those people who was ageless,” said her friend Catherine Nugent after de Souza’s death from an undisclosed form of cancer on September 18, 2007. The best guess is that she was sixty-six.

  Along with de Souza’s success came complaints about her management style. She was unapologetic in response to criticisms that she was territorial and a micro-manager who autocratically chose the event’s annual beneficiary. “This is big business, and the organization requires that we have a good board to sell the ball, a recipient who will pay for our computers, our secretarial staff,” she told Maclean’s magazine in 2006. “This work requires a huge infrastructure.”

  Even knowing how much work was involved, “there was absolutely no reason to say no,” said Paul Alofs, president of the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation, if de Souza asked if you wanted to be beneficiary of the BCB, “because it is such a massive fundraising and awareness-generating opportunity for a not-for-profit.”

  Although the ball was her biggest activity, it wasn’t her only one. She also volunteered on the Women’s Committee of the Canadian Opera Company and was curator of the Henry Birks Collection of antique Canadian silver in the late 1970s. A passionate gardener and a keen tennis player, she loved to entertain and to cook for her guests. “She was the most generous, vivacious person I know,” said Nugent. “She loved to introduce people to each other and to grow her circle of friends, but she was also shy.”

  ANNA MARIA DE Souza, the daughter of Amadeu Guidi and his wife, Honorica (née Marcolini), was born probably in 1941 — or at least in the early 1940s — in São Sebastião do Paraíso, in the mountainous state of Minas Gerais in the interior of Brazil. She grew up in a family of four brothers and one sister. Her grandfather on her mother’s side had emigrated from Genoa, Italy, as a teenager and found a job as a construction worker building homes for plantation workers.

  When money was scarce, her grandfather was paid in land. Eventually he accumulated enough acreage to start his own plantation and enough wealth to take his family back to Genoa on a trip. There he bought a villa. For the rest of his life he spent half the year in Italy and the other half in Brazil. When his daughter Honorica married, Marcolini handed over control of his Brazilian plantation to her husband, Amadeu Guidi. That’s where his granddaughter, Anna Maria, grew up, in what she later compared to paradise. It was a time in which life “was gracious and slow and everything was looked after.” She was educated at the Colégio Paula Frassinetti, where she earned a teaching degree, before attending the Escola Técnica de Comércio.

  At eighteen she married William John Griffiths, an English mining engineer for Wimpey Construction, a British firm that had a contract to build a dam in Brazil. Anna Maria went into labour with their first child on Good Friday, a holiday in Brazil. Her doctor was away, the birth was arduous, and the baby, a daughter, lived for only twenty-three days. Anna Maria survived but was unable to bear more children. To compound the tragedy, her husband died in a work-related accident ten months later.

  Widowed and still in her teens, Anna Maria went to live with her grandmother in Italy, where she attended finishing school. Afterwards, sailing back to Brazil on a cruise ship, she met a Brazilian plantation owner who recognized her marketing skills and urged her to get into the coffee exporting business. As chance would have it, at a party in Rio de Janeiro on New Year’s Eve in 1964, Anna Maria met a man named John Marston who said he imported bulk foods into Canada. If she had products to sell, he was interested in seeing them.

  With an insouciant entrepreneurship, she gathered some samples from the family coffee plantation and set out for Canada, arriving in gloomiest Toronto in February 1965. She looked up Marston — and married him three months later in a Protestant ceremony, which her mother, a Catholic, boycotted. “I fell in love with Toronto and the only thing I could do to stay was to get married,” she once confided. By 1974 the Marstons had divorced, with Anna Maria complaining later that her husband was a workaholic who had little interest in married life.

  Anna Maria had long since found ways to make her own life more interesting. The winter after she arrived in Canada, in 1966, homesickness propelled her to “kill the longing” by organizing her first Brazilian Carnival Ball, in a church basement at Dundas and Grace Streets, a largely Portuguese area of Toronto. Tickets cost five dollars, the food for the fifty guests was prepared by Anna Maria and her friends, and the aim was merely to cover costs and bring a little Mardi Gras colour to the dreary Toronto winter. The ball quickly became a tradition.

  By the early 1970s the ball, which had quickly moved above ground to the Sutton Place Hotel and then the Sheraton Centre, was making a small profit, with the proceeds going to a Brazilian orphanage. That tradition continued with 5 percent of the annual profits benefiting leper colonies, old-age homes, and other causes in or around her hometown. When Toronto charities began asking if they could reap the ball’s annual largesse, Anna Maria astutely decided to bestow the fundraising benefits on a different cause every time, thereby hooking into a fresh network and set of volunteers annually.

  Krystyne Griffin attended her first Brazilian Ball in 1977, the year she left Paris, married businessman, Griffin Poetry Prize founder, and benefactor Scott Griffin, and moved to Toronto. “Everybody told me this was the party to go to because it showed that Toronto could be fun.” They were correct. “A guy in drag dressed like Queen Alexandra walked up and smacked Scott right on the lips. That was my introduction to Anna Maria’s parties,” said Griffin. “I liked her without knowing her well.”

  The ball celebrated its fourteenth anniversary in 1980 at the Four Seasons Hotel on Avenue Road in Toronto and netted $50,000. It stayed in that location until 1988, when it moved to the yawning depths of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, the only venue that could accommodate crowds upwards of a thousand.

  Anna Maria met the late Montegu Black at the BCB in the early 1970s, when she was feeling disaffected with her globe-trotting, work-obsessed second husband, John Marston. Black thought she should meet his younger brother, Conrad, who was then plying his way as an aspiring tycoon and researching his biography of Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis. They dated for about two years after her 1974 divorce. “She was a delightful, refreshing, and enterprising person, and was a very popular and respected person in a community where she started as a stranger and, at first, hardly spoke the language,” Black wrote in an email message. “I saw her a lot at the time my parents died, ten days apart, in 1976, and she could not have been more supportive.”


  Anna Maria’s lasting love, however, was businessman Ivan de Souza. Introduced by Marvelle Koffler, wife of Murray Koffler of Shoppers Drug Mart, they had much in common, both being Portuguese-speaking and Catholic. They were married on December 22, 1982, and were devoted to each other.

  More than the venue of the ball changed over the years. As it became more lavish and raised more money (much of it matched by government programs, with costs underwritten by corporate sponsors), so too did the entertainment. Instead of handmade decorations on a Carnival theme, de Souza began importing Carnival dancers from Brazil. That meant switching the date from Mardi Gras (the carnival on the eve of Lent, the forty-day period of penance preceding Easter in the Catholic calendar) to April or May, so that the dancers could travel to Toronto in their off-season. At the fortieth anniversary of the ball in 2006, the $2 million in net proceeds went to York University’s Accolade Project, and the 1,600 guests were entertained by a thirty-minute samba parade from the Rio Carnival, including fifty dancers in feathered, beaded, and bejewelled costumes processing on foot or on wooden horses to the beat of a batucada rhythm supplied by the Cocktail Brazil Band.

  That November, de Souza was diagnosed with rampaging cancer and underwent rigorous treatment, which included chemotherapy, at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto. She looked frail but valiant at the 2007 ball, which raised $2.6 million (net) for the Arthritis and Autoimmunity Research Centre in Toronto. “She and the ball were a brand, and for a very small organization like us, she had a tremendous impact. She did a great job,” said Gerri Grant, executive director of the AARC.