Address: VELETRŽNÍ 196/17, PRAGUE 7
Born 19. 08. 1909
Last residence before deportation: Prague XIII
Address/place of registration in the Protectorate: Prague XII, nám. Krále Jiřího 23
Transport N, no. 327 (17. 12. 1941, Prague -> Terezín)
Transport Aa, no. 58 (11. 03. 1942, Terezín -> Izbica)
Murdered
He was born on the 19th August 1909 in Úvaly (Prague-East District). He was the youngest child of Bohumil Gottlieb Vrba and Ida Vrbová (born Bondy). The eldest child, his sister, Milada, was born in 1907, and his elder brother, Jiří, in 1908. His sister married Karl Popper and their daughter, Sonja, was born in 1931.
By the time of his marriage to Elly Taussigová on the 17th February 1935 he was a qualified (JUDR) lawyer. In the late 1930s he held a position with the Prague City Council.
His son, Ivan, was born on the 13th October 1936.
With his wife, Elly, and son, Ivan, he was deported from Prague to Terezín on the 17th December 1941. Subsequently, the three were forced on Transport Aa of the 11th March 1942 from Terezín to the Izbica Ghetto in south east Poland.
As a relatively young man so in Nazi terms a productive person he may if he reached Izbica have been sent to a nearby labour camp in Kranystaw county in south east Poland or if transported to the Belzec extermination camp used there for labour and later exterminated there. There is also the possibility that he was one of the five hundred Jews from Transport Aa who were marched on the 18th March 1942, to the settlement of Kraśniczyn and later exterminated in the Sobibor or Majdanek extermination camps.
His parents perished in Riga, Latvia, on a date unknown in 1942. His sister , brother-in-law and niece lost their lives in Auschwitz in February 1943. It is now known that his elder brother, George Jiří Vrba, survived the Holocaust initially as an illegal Jewish immigrant in Palestine, and died in the city of Hamilton, in Ontario, Canada in 1992 ,having emigrated with his wife, Elsa, and daughter Sonja, and son, Peter, to Canada in 1949.