New information on Rudolf Vrba’s family
- Mattan Segev-Frank
- 7 hours ago
- 13 min read
Tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of the passing of Rudolf Vrba, the heroic man who, together with Alfred Wetzler, escaped from the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp on 7 April 1944 and helped alert the world during World War II to the atrocities being committed there by Nazi Germany. In a previous post, I revealed Vrba’s connection to my own family and promised that one day I would share what I had traced about his own family as well. In this post I am making good on that promise.
Vrba and Wetzler’s escape is connected to one of the most significant rescue efforts of the war. The information they conveyed to the Slovak “Working Group”, later compiled into what became known as the Vrba-Wetzler Report, or the Auschwitz Protocol, helped trigger international pressure that contributed to the halting of the deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1944. The rescue did not lie in the report alone, but in the chain of actions it set in motion. That chain helped save roughly 200,000 Hungarian Jews from deportation and extermination.
And yet, for all the books, films, debates, and commemorations devoted to Rudolf Vrba, one part of his story has remained surprisingly dim: the family into which he was born, the older half-siblings he mentions only briefly, and the fractured domestic world that preceded both his heroism and his suffering.
In both his memoir and the writings of his first wife, Gerta Vrbová, Vrba is described primarily as having grown up with his mother. His father died before his sixth birthday, and although his older half-siblings remained somewhere in the background, they never seem to have occupied much space in the story as it came down to us. That is understandable. Families often protect what is painful, fragmentary, or private. But the result is that several people who belonged to Rudolf Vrba’s closest family circle were left without proper commemoration.
I want to change that.
As the Israeli poet Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky wrote, “Each man has a name, given him by God, and given him by his father and mother”. I believe that every victim of the Holocaust deserves to be remembered properly. Even in the case of someone as famous as Rudolf Vrba, important parts of the family story can still remain in the shadows. What follows is my attempt to recover some of those missing names, relationships, and fates.
Rudolf Vrba’s family before Rudolf Vrba
Like most lives, Rudolf Vrba’s story did not begin with him. It began earlier, in another generation, in another geography, and in a set of family circumstances that changed dramatically over time.
Rudolf Vrba was born Walter Rosenberg on 11 September 1924 in Topoľčany, Slovakia, to Elias Rosenberg and Helena, née Grünfeld. In his memoir, he notes that his father had previously been married and had children from that first marriage. One of those brothers appears under the nickname “Sammy.” His sister “Fanci” is mentioned by nickname as well. Another brother is referred to only in passing, without being named. Gerta Vrbová’s memoir even includes a photograph showing Rudolf’s mother Helena, his sister Fanci, and Helena’s uncle and aunt Arnold and Terezia Frank, who were my great-grandparents. That personal family connection was one of the paths that drew me deeper into this research and the academic paper I have written about Rudolf Vrba's Credibility and the Historical Controversy Surrounding It.
I understand why these much older half-siblings may have occupied only a limited place in Rudolf’s inner world. I also understand that omitting or altering personal details may at times have served to preserve privacy. But once such omissions pass into public memory, they can leave family members unremembered. In the case of a figure whose life has been told and retold, that silence becomes even more striking.
Family origins in Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia
In August 1885, Illés (Eliyahu) Rozenberg was born in Oroszkő, then in Hungary and today Repedea, Romania. He was the firstborn child of Salamon Rozenberg of Oroszkő and Eszter Feige, née Lerner, of Leordina, Romania, born just eight months after their marriage. Six more children followed, and the family lived between Repedea and Leordina.
On 22 August 1912, Illés married Gizella (Gittel) Fried, daughter of Majer Fried and Klara (Chantsche) née Stuhl. Klara had previously given birth, in 1908, to a son named Adolf, who died in 1911 (whose father is not listed in his birth record). After their marriage, Illés Rozenberg and Gizella Fried had three children, all born in Repedea:
Františka “Fanci”, born 10 April 1912
Salamon “Sammy”, born 21 April 1914
Ludevit (Izsak) “Lajos”, born 25 February 1916
I have not yet located a death record for Gizella Rosenberg, but she must have died within about a year of Ludevit’s birth.
At some point afterward, Illés, also rendered as Elias in German, moved with his three children north, to the area that is now part of Slovakia. On 3 April 1918, in Bratislava, he married Helene, or Ilona (Cheyla) Grünfeld, who had been born on 16 September 1895 in Üzbég, now Zbehy in Slovakia, to Bernhard (Baruch) Grünfeld and Therese (Reizel), née Just. After the marriage, the family settled in Topoľčany.
It took Helena several years to conceive. On 11 September 1924, she gave birth to Walter. After his birth, the family moved again, this time to Jaklovce in the eastern part of Czechoslovakia, where Elias bought a sawmill. Their hopes for a stable future were soon shattered. Elias Rosenberg died on 7 August 1928, before Walter turned six. With his death, the already complex Rosenberg household began to dissolve.
A shattered household: Rudolf Vrba’s family in the 1930 census
Some of the most revealing documents I found are in the Czechoslovak census of early December 1930. It offers a rare snapshot of Rudolf Vrba’s family at a moment when it had already fragmented, years before the Holocaust would complete that destruction.
Rudolf Vrba’s family scattered across Slovakia
Helena Rosenberg, née Grünfeld, was then alone in Jaklovce. She lived in house no. 253, inherited from her husband Elias Rosenberg. The owners were listed as “Rosenberg and heirs”. She worked as an accountant for the wood merchant Weiss, most likely the man who had bought Elias’s business after his death. Her census sheet also records that she had given birth to two children, one of whom had died. She was struggling to secure her own livelihood and, at that point, was in no position to care not only for her young son but also for the three orphans from her husband’s first marriage.
Her six-year-old son Walter, listed as a school pupil, was staying in Nitra with Helena’s parents and younger sister. His grandfather Bernhard Grünfeld was a mixed-goods merchant and owned the apartment complex in which they lived, a complex that housed several families. By then, two of Bernhard and Therese’s eight children, Ilona and Margit, were already dead, while most of the surviving siblings were adults living in separate households of their own.
Elias’s children from his first marriage were all then in Trenčín, but not together. Each had been placed in a different household as an apprentice, receiving not only work and vocational training but also board and lodging. Fani appears as a lodger in the household of the widow Gizella Roth while apprenticing in the drugstore of Mr. Kubíček. Salamon was a wood merchant’s apprentice living with the family of his employer, Alexander Kohn. Ludevit was apprenticed at a hardware store and lived with the family of his employer, Zigmond Schwartz.
This census snapshot is striking. Before deportation, before camps, before escape, the family was already dispersed across towns and households, held together only loosely by memory and blood.
Walter remained with his grandparents for about three years, until his grandmother suffered an injury from which she never recovered. During this period, his mother tried to support herself and her son by sewing women’s undergarments and clothing and selling them as a travelling saleswoman. But stability remained out of reach. In 1933, when Walter was nine years old, she placed him in an orphanage in Bratislava.
There, his abilities quickly became apparent. The educators noticed his intelligence and advised his mother to move him to a better school, one where he could develop more fully. That meant taking him out of the orphanage and placing him in a flat under the care of a governess. This was the arrangement in which Walter spent much of his formative adolescence, until the age of fifteen.
In 1939, when his mother finally established a more stable home in Trnava, he rejoined her. According to the 1940 Slovak census, they lived at 38 Sv. Jakuba Street in Trnava, together with Helena’s boyfriend, Armin Reichsfeld, previously misidentified as Ignatz in some sources.
Trnava was a turning point. There Walter met several people who would profoundly shape his future: Otto Pressburger, a friend he would encounter again in Majdanek and who would teach him the vital importance of optimism in the darkest of places; Alfred Wetzler, with whom he would later escape from Auschwitz; Gerta Sidonová, two years younger than he was, who had a schoolgirl crush on him and who would later become his wife; and Josef Weiss, who would reconnect Walter and Gerta after Walter’s return from Auschwitz.
The wartime fate of Rudolf Vrba’s family
From the 1930s onward, Walter’s path and those of his older half-siblings diverged. But they did not lose touch entirely.
Both of his half-brothers perished in the Holocaust. Salamon appears on the list of the very first deportation of men from Slovakia, which left Žilina for the Lublin area on 27 March 1942. This was the second transport from Slovakia, as the very first train carrying 999 young women left Poprad to Auschwitz just 2 days before. Walter himself was deported on 15 June 1942 and also arrived in Majdanek. Men deemed fit for work were registered into Majdanek, while those considered unfit were sent on, together with women, children, and the elderly, to the gas chambers in Sobibór.
The two brothers saw each other there once. They saluted one another across the barbed wire fence separating section 2, where Walter was held, from section 3, where Salamon was imprisoned. They could not speak, because guards arrived and began beating prisoners. On 30 June 1942, Walter was transferred from Majdanek to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the brothers never met again as Salamon perished in Majdanek
It remains unknown where or how their brother Ludevit died.
Their sister Františka, or “Fanci” as she was known in the family, survived. During the war she married Bedrich Horny, previously Horn, born on 19 June 1905 in Horovce, Slovakia. They had two sons: Stefan, born on 17 April 1942, and Jan, whose details I am withholding for privacy reasons, as I do not know whether he is still living. After the war, the family immigrated to Montreal, Canada. Rudolf and his sister Fanci remained in contact, and it is perhaps no surprise that he eventually chose to immigrate to Canada as well, close to her family. Bedrich and Františka both died there, though I have not yet established the dates. Their son Stefan, who eulogized Vrba at his funeral, died in 2016.
Walter’s mother, Ilona Rosenberg, née Grünfeld, married Armin Reichsfeld in 1942. Armin Reichsfeld had been born on 11 October 1899 in Dechtice, Slovakia, to Aron Reichsfeld and Roza, née Neuman.
In 1942, Helena received an exemption from deportation. Her entry in the exemption list shows that she was still living that year at 38 Sv. Jakuba Street in Trnava.
Reconsidering the Reichsfeld story
In The Escape Artist, Jonathan Freedland quotes an interview with Vrba’s widow Robin, conducted on 16 November 2020, in which she repeated a story Rudolf had told her regarding Helena’s marriage to Armin Reichsfeld. According to that account, Reichsfeld possessed an exemption from deportation that allowed him to nominate a single relative to be spared. He was therefore said to have had to choose between his sister and Ilona. According to the story, he chose Ilona, married her, and only later learned that this decision, which had led to his sister’s deportation, meant that his sister was murdered because of his choice.
Freedland further recounts that after Walter returned and described what deportation meant, Reichsfeld was devastated by the consequences of what he had done. When deportations resumed in the autumn of 1944, he is said to have quietly accepted his fate and lined up for deportation, wanting to share his sister’s destiny. Rudolf reportedly described it as “suicide by deportation”.
It is a powerful and deeply moving story. Yet the surviving documentation points to a more complex reality.
First, in the exemption list Helena is still recorded as Rosenbergová, meaning that she was not yet married to Reichsfeld at that time.
Second, both Helena and Armin’s sister Irma Reichsfeld, born Maria, appear on the 1942 list of exemptions, only six rows apart. In other words, the documentary record does not support the idea that Armin’s sister was deported because he had chosen Helena over her.
Despite this exemption, however, Irma was deported from Trnava on 7 June 1942. In Yad Vashem’s databases, she appears both on a deportation list from Trnava to the Žilina camp and on another list from the same date for a transport that left Bratislava for Sobibór. After her deportation, her anxious brother Armin submitted her name to RELICO, the Relief Committee of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in Geneva.
It may well be that Armin lost the will to live after learning the fate of his beloved sister. That part of the family tragedy may be entirely true. But the documentary evidence suggests that the stark “Sophie’s Choice” narrative later attached to this story was not, in fact, what happened.
Deportation, survival, and what remained
After the Slovak National Uprising and the subsequent German invasion of Slovakia in 1944, exemptions were cancelled and deportations resumed for those Jews who remained in the country. Helena too was arrested and deported to Theresienstadt on 12 March 1945.
Her prisoner card, now under the name Helene Reichsfeld, née Grünfeld, shows that in 1944 her address was Kuschergasse 34 in Bratislava, while her domicile was listed as Dechtice, and that she had been deported from the Sereď camp.
Her marriage to Armin lasted less than two years. He was deported in the autumn of 1944 and murdered. Helena survived Theresienstadt and returned to Bratislava, where she appears in a list of Czechoslovak survivors as living on Námestie 1. mája, or 1st of May Square.
On 24 April 1947, a notice was published in the Central Court Gazette, where the District Court in Trnava notified the public of case No. 11384 M 247/47-5:
It’s translation: “The District Court in Trnava announces that at the request of Helena Reichsfeldová, a resident of Bratislava, proceedings have been initiated to declare Armin Reichsfeld, born on 11 October 1899 in Dehtice, whose domicile was there and whose last residence was in Trnava, married, of Jewish religion, who was deported to Poland in 1944 as part of racial persecution, from which time there has been no news of him, so he must be considered deceased. Jozef Weiss in Trnava, Štefánikova street, was appointed guardian.
The District Court calls on the missing person to report himself, and all those who know if the missing person is alive, to notify the court or guardian of this case, and also to report any data from which it can be established that the missing person is alive, otherwise the court will declare the missing person dead on a later motion, which must be filed after the one-time publication of the decree in the Central Court Gazette and after the expiration of the edict period. The edict period is determined for a period of 6 weeks, counting from the date of posting the decree on the court notice board, the court will declare the missing person dead upon a repeated request. The edict period ends on 15 June 1947. District Court in Trnava, Department II., on 24 April 1947”. Notice that the lawyer appointed as guardian is the same Josef Weiss who reintroduced Gerta and Rudolf.
Helena remained in Bratislava until her death on 13 February 1991. Vrba mentions that she had a third husband after the war, but that information does not yet appear to be publicly available, and I have therefore not been able to identify him.
After the war, Walter Rosenberg kept the undercover identity given to him by the Slovak Working Group: Rudolf Vrba. This was so even though he was deeply disappointed by aspects of how his case had been handled by them. He married Gerta Sidonová, who had herself lost both parents in the Holocaust. Together they completed the schooling the war had interrupted, moved to Prague for their academic studies, and had two daughters, Helena and Zuza.
Walter Rosenberg was replaced in public memory by Rudolf Vrba, whose tormented and heroic life has been recounted in many forms: in his own memoir I Cannot Forgive; in Gerta Vrbová’s Trust and Deceit and Betrayed Generation; in Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist; in Alan Twigg’s Holocaust Hero; in Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary Shoah; and in several television documentaries. But the fame of Rudolf Vrba also had the effect, perhaps inevitably, of pushing other parts of his family story to the margins.
Symbolically and coincidentally, Vrba passed away in Vancouver, Canada on 27 March 2026, on the anniversary of his brother's deportation to Majdanek.
This post is also my tribute to my dear cousin Zuza, whom I had the privilege of knowing, if only briefly. We met only twice in person, but we remained in contact by email until her mother Gerta called to tell me of her passing in September 2013. Zuza died before seeing one initiative of hers come fully to life: in 2014, the Vrba-Wetzler Memorial inaugurated the memorial walk dedicated to Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, from Auschwitz to Žilina.
Why Rudolf Vrba’s family deserves remembrance too
Genealogical research has an essential role to play in completing, enriching, and deepening historical scholarship. Far from narrowing our field of vision, it often allows us to place individuals, families, and communities back into their full human context: across generations, across borders, and across the ruptures caused by war, migration, and persecution. In my view, any historian who wishes to work thoroughly today stands to gain from embracing genealogical methods as part of their toolkit. These methods do not diminish historical inquiry; they sharpen it. They help recover forgotten relationships, test inherited narratives against documentation, and reveal the personal structures beneath larger historical events. The old tendency to treat genealogy as something secondary or too “small-scale” no longer does justice to what it can offer. When used carefully and critically, genealogical research is not a retreat from serious history, but one of the ways of doing it more fully.
On the twentieth anniversary of Rudolf Vrba’s passing, I felt that remembering him fully also meant remembering those who made up his first world: the parents who shaped his beginnings, the half-siblings from whom life and history separated him, and the family members whose names slipped to the margins of the story. Rudolf Vrba’s courage changed history. But he did not come from nowhere. He came from a family, from losses, from bonds that were broken long before and during the Holocaust. To recover even part of that family story is, in its own small way, an act of remembrance. May their names remain with us too.
Yours, Mattan Segev-Frank
· I would like to publicly thank my friend and colleague Lucia Zuštiakovà, who translates my content to Slovak, buat also help me trace priceless sources and enriches my research with her advice, insight and friendship. I am eternally thankful to you, especially at moments of pride like the publication of this specific post.
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