Gerta Vrbova

Gerta Vrbová

Memoirs of Vrbová, who was born as Gerti Sidon in Trnava, Slovakia, in 1927 to a cosmopolitan affluent Jewish family. Describes anti-Jewish measures of the Slovakian authorities in 1939-41. In spring 1942 Vrbová's family, threatened with deportation, fled to Budapest, where they lived under assumed Hungarian identities. In 1943 they were denounced and sent to a detention camp, from which they were released through bribery. In 1944 Vrbová's father was arrested and killed. After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, she and her family returned to Slovakia and lived with forged identity papers in Bratislava. There she met a childhood friend, Rudolf Vrba, who had escaped from Auschwitz and told her about the mass murders. In November 1944 she and her mother were arrested by the Gestapo; she managed to flee, but her mother refused to and perished. Vrbová went to Budapest, where she lived under an assumed identity until the Soviet liberation of the city. After the war she married Vrba and they settled in Great Britain.

A Tale of Survival in Slovakia and Hungary, 1939-1945

Trust and Deceit

In the second century, Galen recognized that nerve and muscle were functionally inseparable since contraction of muscle occurred only if the nerves supplying that muscle were intact. He therefore concluded that the shortening of a muscle was controlled by the central nervous sytem while the extension of a muscle could occur in the absence of innervation. Nerves, he thought, were the means of transport for animal spirits to the muscles; the way in which animal spirits may bring about contraction dominated the study of muscle physiology from that time until the historical discovery of Galvani that muscle could be stimulated electrically and that nerve and muscle were themselves a source of electrical energy. It is now well known that nerves conduct electrically and that transmission from nerve to striated muscle is mediated by the chemical which is liberated from nerve terminals onto the muscle membrane. In vertebrates this chemical is acetylcholine (ACh). Thus the concept of spirits that are released from nerves and control muscle contraction directly, is no longer tenable. Nevertheless the concept of 'substances' transported down nerv~s which directly control many aspects of muscle has not been abandoned, and has in fact been frequently reinvoked to account for the long-term regula tion of many characteristics of muscle (see review by Gutmann, 1976) and for the maintenance of its structural integrity.

Gerta Vrbova

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