But if Walter expected Krasň ansk? and Neumann to dash out of the door that instant, stuffing the report into the satchel of a messenger who would rush to Budapest as fast as a locomotive could take him, he was to be disappointed. The next day, Friday 28 April, the home for the elderly became the venue for a secret meeting of the Slovak Jewish leadership, with Neumann in the chair. They were in resistance mode, so the rules of illegal work applied: no names were to be used.
The two escapees were subjected to a final round of questioning from this group, called to defend the report like doctoral students summoned to defend a dissertation. One man, a lawyer, seemed incredulous that ‘civilised Germany’ was, in effect, executing people without due legal process. He returned to the point several times. Walter’s patience reached its limit. He sprang out of his chair and began to shout .
Back there, they are flinging people into the fire at this moment , he said. You need to do something. Immediately!
Fred tried to restrain him, but it was no good. Walter started pointing at individuals around the table, including the lawyer, accusing them of just standing there, like pillars of salt.
You, you, you – you’ll all finish up in the gas unless something is done.
Fred tried again to calm his young friend and eventually Walter’s shoulders slumped and he sank back into his chair.
After that, Krasň ansk? readied the document for dissemination. He got to work on a translation of the text into a language that would be comprehensible to the greatest number of people: it certainly would not go very far in Slovak. Krasň ansk? decided it would be most effective if it were written in German.
Meanwhile, there was an equally practical matter to attend to. April was drawing to a close; the workers’ festival of May Day was looming. That date tended to make the Slovak authorities anxious – they saw 1 May as a potential focus for anti-fascist activity – and so their habit had been to search the few remaining Jewish buildings, on the lookout for ‘Judeo-Bolshevik agitators’ . Fred and Walter could hide no longer in the pensioners’ home in ?ilina. The Working Group had arranged a safe house for them in the mountains, some fifty-five miles east of ?ilina, in the town of Liptovsk? Sv?t? Mikulá?. Walter and Fred were given money to live on and, far more precious, false papers certifying them as pure Aryans of at least three generations standing. That status would give them complete freedom of movement around Slovakia. If they were on a train or in a restaurant that was raided by the police, there would be nothing to fear: these bogus documents were flawless.
Naturally, they were not in the name of Alfréd Wetzler or Walter Rosenberg. Those men were Jews and the subjects of an international arrest warrant. Instead, the papers verified the identity of two new men. Fred was to be ‘Jozef Lánik’， while Walter Rosenberg would be reborn as ‘Rudolf Vrba’。 For Fred, the move would prove temporary: he would revert back to his original name as soon as he could. But for his friend, this was a change for good.
Rudolf Vrba was not an entirely new creation. There had been an influential Czech Catholic priest of that name who had died five years earlier, having built a reputation as an energetic antisemite: he had proposed a set of measures to secure the exclusion of Jews from Bohemian life. But the new Rudi, as he was to become, was not bothered by that association, if he was aware of it at all. （Nor, apparently, was he much fazed by sharing his new first name with the commandant of Auschwitz.） All that mattered was to be free of what, to him, was the Germanic taint of ‘Rosenberg’。 He wanted to sever every connection with that supposedly ‘civilised’ nation. Walter Rosenberg was no more. From now on, and for the rest of his days, he would be Rudolf Vrba, with a name that was impeccably Czech, carrying no hint of German or, for that matter, Jew.
The two men, reborn as Jozef and Rudi, headed for the mountains. Meanwhile, the work of their lives, the Auschwitz Report, was about to embark on a journey of its own.
21
Men of God
P RODUCING THE REPORT had been a mammoth undertaking, involving mortal risk. Distributing it, ensuring it reached the right people, would prove almost as daunting a prospect. Krasň ansk? and the Working Group had decided they would despatch the document to contacts they had in Geneva, Istanbul and London, Jews mainly, who could be trusted to petition governments or brief officials. But a priority from the very start was getting word to Hungary.
There could be no doubt about the urgency. Just as Fred and Rudi were preparing to leave ?ilina, the elderly woman who brought them food had reported with great distress that she had seen trains passing through town, filled with Hungarian Jews. ‘Thousands of them,’ she had sobbed. ‘They’re passing through ?ilina in cattle trucks .’
Even if Krasň ansk? had excised all mention of the imminent danger to Hungary’s Jews from the report – no prophecies, no forecasts, as he put it – he acted like a man who understood that time was running out. He arranged a rendezvous in Bratislava a matter of hours after the text had finally been signed off: on 28 April, he would personally hand the document to Rezs? Kasztner, a journalist in his late thirties who had emerged as the de facto leader of Hungarian Jewry. What Kasztner would – and would not – do with the report would become one of the shaping events in the life of the newly minted Rudolf Vrba.
Hungary had hardly needed the arrival of an occupying German army in March 1944 to act against its Jewish population. The regent of the kingdom, Miklós Horthy, had made antisemitism a core part of his programme when he came to power immediately after the First World War; twenty years later he had passed a raft of laws restricting the lives of Jews without requiring a directive from Berlin. All of which meant that when a copy of the Auschwitz Report reached Budapest in late April 1944 or early May, finding its way into the hands of Hungary’s anti-Nazi resistance movement, the immediate calculation was obvious: if Hungary’s Jews faced the threat of mass murder, there was no point looking to Hungary’s anti-Jewish government to protect them. Given that the government was collaborating with the Nazis, a different group of leaders was best placed to mount any kind of rescue effort: the men of God.
True, plenty of churchmen had happily endorsed the 1938–9 measures against the Jews. Still, the opposition had to work with what they had. And what they had was a handful of clerics of conscience.
First to get a copy of the report was Dr Géza Soós, a Calvinist activist who was of particular value to the resistance because he held a job, and a desk, in Hungary’s Foreign Ministry. He contacted a young pastor friend, József ?liás, telling him he had something ‘important’ to discuss . They met in the café of the National Museum in Budapest, Soós vibrating with excitement as he explained that a document had reached him that very morning. It had been smuggled across the Slovak–Hungarian border. It was, said Soós, nothing short of a miracle. It was the work of two men who had escaped from Auschwitz.
He nodded to the empty chair that separated him and the pastor, gesturing for each of them to put their briefcases on it, side by side. As discreetly as he could, Soós slipped the report from his case into ?liás’s. Then he explained what he needed. Most urgent was an accurate, clear translation of the document from German into Hungarian. Once they had that, they would need six typed copies. To be safe, those copies could not be made on office typewriters where ?liás worked, which was the Calvinist church’s Good Shepherd Mission, dedicated to the spiritual wellbeing and protection of Hungary’s 100,000 Christians of Jewish origin : Jews who had converted to Christianity. The copies had to be impossible to trace. Finally, and most importantly, ?liás was to get the report into the hands of five specific individuals, the five most senior figures in Hungarian Christianity. （The sixth copy would be for Soós himself.） But there was a crucial condition: those five could not know from where or through whom they had received the document. ‘Government officials must not learn that the report is in our hands,’ Soós explained. The resistance’s goal was to have the church leaders fully informed so that they would then ‘exert pressure on the government to prevent the tragedy awaiting the Jews’。