(Jewish Group) Stop Enabling the Antisemites Who Live Closest to Our Homes

In the spring of 1987, George Klein, a brilliant Swedish microbiologist, embarked on a long journey from Europe to Vancouver, Canada. Klein was a prominent cancer specialist, professor of tumor biology—a chair created especially for him—at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. He wrote or contributed to over 1,000 research papers and was the recipient of numerous awards for scientific excellence. Internationally recognized, Klein regularly attended conferences that brought together leading scientists in his field.

But his purpose in the spring of 1987 was not a medical convention. He was on a more personal mission. He wanted to meet Rudolf Vrba. Vrba was a professor of neuropharmacology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He, too, was a prolific researcher, publishing over 50 papers on brain chemistry, diabetes, and cancer. But it was mere coincidence that the two were in overlapping fields. George Klein was drawn to Rudolf Vrba because of their overlapping histories. Klein had seen Vrba’s interview two years earlier in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, and it awakened in him deep and profound memories.

Forty-three years earlier, when George Klein was 19, he worked in the Jewish Council of Hungary in Budapest, the central agency of the Hungarian Jewish community. In May 1944, Klein happened upon a top-secret report describing what the Nazis planned for the Jews of Hungary. The deportations of Jews from the countryside was already in full force, and would soon commence in Budapest itself. Hungarian Jews had no idea that their destination was Auschwitz, and that Auschwitz was a death camp. They assumed they were being relocated to labor camps to serve the German war effort.

The report that Klein held in his hand, however, told a different story. In dry, matter-of-fact language, he learned of the mass killings, the selections, the gassings, the torture, brutality and inhumanity. He saw drawings and construction sketches of the ramps, gas chambers and crematoria. Klein later wrote: “Even as I read the report for the first time, it was evident to me that it represented the horrors of reality, rather than the many unrealistic lies and self-deceiving excuses that we had previously been fed from so many different sources.”

And so, armed with information that few others had, the teenager made the fateful decision that saved his life. “I hesitated until the last moment,” Klein later wrote. “It wasn’t until I saw the freight cars in front of me that I had the courage to run, despite the risk of being shot.”

Klein hid in a cellar until January 1945. No close acquaintances joined him. Given permission by his supervisor to tell immediate relatives and friends, Klein urged those closest to him to go underground, but, he wrote, “of the dozen or so people I warned, not one believed me.” Within two months, they, and most of the roughly half million Hungarian Jews who entered the cattle cars without resistance, were dead.

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A long read, but well-worth it. This was taken from the Rabbi's 2021 Rosh Hashana sermon.