Holocaust Hero: The Life and Times of Rudolf Vrba by Vancouver journalist Alan Twigg is the first of two biographies focused on Rudolf Vrba, a Slovak- Jewish biochemist who, as a teen in 1942, was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. He escaped the camp in the spring of 1944 and then wrote, with fellow escapee Alfréd Wetzler, the Vrba-Wetzler Report, which detailed the mass murder being committed inside the camp .

Vrba died in 2006 at age 81 after spending just over 30 years in Vancouver, 25 of those as a UBC professor. Postmedia caught up with Twigg , who was not only Vrba’s biographer, but also his friend.

Question: What made you want to dig into Rudolf Vrba’s story?

Answer: Most of the world knows precious little about Vrba. Even though he escaped f

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