Yes indeed.
Rudolf Vrba and his fellow escapee Alfred Weczler testified about the conditions at Auschwitz as accurately as they could based upon their personal experiences and discussions with fellow internees. Their famous 1944 report contains errors of memory and detail, they were, after all, two frightened kids barely out of their teens in 1944, in addition to which it focuses only on their first and second hand experiences at the camp. For all of it shortcomings it is generally consistent, both generally and in most of its details, with evidence subsequently obtained from other sources. It played a central role in making the Hungarian leader, Admiral Miklos Horthy, decide to halt the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. For details, see
This is quite different from David Irving, the maintainer of the systematic lying of such a serious nature that it resulted in legal action and court decisions. The first time was in 1968 after publishing a libelous book about the PQ17 convoy for which he was forced to pay an, at that time, unprecedented £40,000 fine in damages. The second time was in 2000 when he sued professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books Ltd. for having damaged his reputation as an historian by accusing him of manipulating and lying about historical evidence, and being a Holocaust denier. The court came to the conclusion that professor Lipstadt's accusations about David Irving being a Holocaust denier and systematic liar about history were justified, and David Irving, even while backtracking in the courtroom from some of his more outrageous claims, lost the trial and was ordered to pay £150,000 in legal costs.
Rudolf Vrba and the late Alfred Weczler continue to be honored as people whose heroic actions and testimony resulted in tens of thousands of lives being saved. Irving, in turn, has seen his career and credibility as a popularizer of history shattered beyond repair, and he currently sits in a jail in Austria awaiting a trial for violations of Austrian laws about publicly denying or deprecating the Holocaust.
Regards, Eugene Holman
