During those three days and nights hidden in the woodpile, he had imagined that his revelations’ impact would be instant, that the moment he and Fred told of the hell they had endured, word would spread and the imminent massacre of Hungarian Jewry would be averted. And yet, despite his escape, despite his raising the alarm, the Jews of Hungary were being murdered, at this very moment, even as he sipped beer in a Slovak tavern.
At last, in the middle of June, came the invitation he had been waiting for: a summons to tell someone with influence the truth about Auschwitz.
Early on, the Working Group had passed a copy of the report to Giuseppe Burzio, the papal apostolic delegate in Bratislava. He had passed it to the Vatican in late May, and in mid-June he could point to a result. Monsignor Mario Martilotti, a papal envoy in Switzerland, was on assignment in Bratislava and asked to meet the authors of the document. He insisted that the venue be discreet: he nominated the Piarist monastery of Sv?t? Jur, some twenty miles from Bratislava.
The distance was short, but the journey to Sv?t? Jur was perilous. For along that route was located the Gestapo headquarters for all of Slovakia as well as for the top brass of the country’s military. Oskar Krasň ansk? decided it was too risky for all four escapees to travel together: it might attract the attention of police informers . Only Vrba and Mordowicz would go. Barely out of Auschwitz, they would have to pass under the noses of the Nazis and their Slovak collaborators. But they did not hesitate to say yes. The meeting was set for 20 June.
With Krasň ansk? at their side, the pair arrived at the elegantly maintained grounds of the monastery. After the desolation of Birkenau, here they were, a matter of weeks later, in the beauty of a cloistered garden. The men approached a gate, which was opened by a monk or priest – they could not be sure which – who apologised as he explained that the papal representative had been delayed, called into a meeting over lunch with no less than the president of Slovakia, the Catholic priest turned politician Dr Jozef Tiso. The official would not reach Sv?t? Jur for another two hours: perhaps the gentlemen would like to meet another church representative instead?
Vrba and Mordowicz declined that offer. Indeed, the delay only confirmed their desire to meet this man rather than any surrogate: if he was deemed worthy of an audience with the Slovak head of state, surely he would have the standing to make use of the information they were about to give him. He was the one to whom they needed to tell their story. They would wait.
Nearly two and a half hours passed before they heard the sound of a long, expensive limousine drawing up outside. It was a Skoda with ‘CD’ on the plates: Corps Diplomatique . From the car emerged a man in his thirties, one who struck both of the younger escapees as handsome and youthful. Perhaps they had been expecting a stooped, white-haired priest.
The man was ushered in, extending his hand to the two Jews as soon as he saw them. They were taken to a room and began to talk. They kept on for six hours straight, the words tumbling out as fast as Vrba and Mordowicz could form them. Mostly they spoke in German, with Mordowicz resorting to French when he saw incomprehension flit across Martilotti’s face. The churchman had a copy of the Auschwitz Report in his hand, but even so the escapees gave him the whole picture, from beginning to end, how the Nazis had devised a method to eliminate the Jews of Europe, how they were doing it in a camp in Poland where, by Rudi’s reckoning, close to two million Jews had been murdered already.
Martilotti pressed them on the details, going through the report methodically, line by line, yet another sceptical counsel cross-examining his witness. He returned to a few points several times, probing at an apparent contradiction here, a gap there, which only added to the impression of a man who was not convinced. Mordowicz began to sweat .
Twenty-four years old and therefore the adult of the fugitive pair, he tried to present as sober and credible a front as he could, partly to compensate for what he feared was the insufficiently grave demeanour struck by nineteen-year-old Vrba. The Vatican diplomat had given the men wine and Camel cigarettes , which they had never seen before, and at one point he lit up a cigar, inviting them to join him. Mordowicz declined the offer, anxious to let nothing slow their momentum. In fact, there was more to it than that. He wanted to show this representative of the pope that the matter at hand was so serious, what they had survived was so desperate, that there was no room for fripperies or pleasure of any kind. Of course they would not sit here smoking cigars, not when their fellow Jews were in the inferno no more than 200 miles away, being murdered in their thousands this very instant.
But Rudi took a cigar. What’s more, he watched Martilotti and copied him, borrowing the cleric’s little knife and clipping the end off his cigar, lighting it as Martilotti had lit it, then laughing at the ritual of it, the performance. Laughing, if you please. Smiling and laughing, while Auschwitz still existed. Mordowicz thought Vrba was being unforgivably childish, bafflingly so given the import of the moment.
It did not cross Mordowicz’s mind that perhaps this was the teenage Vrba’s way of staring horror in the face; or that it might be the bitter, cynical smile of one who had been robbed of any illusions about humanity. For many years to come, Rudolf Vrba would adopt the same seeming insouciance when describing the slaughter he had survived and witnessed, smiling as he recounted acts of unspeakable savagery, unnerving others the way he unnerved Mordowicz that day in the cloisters of Sv?t? Jur.
Mordowicz worried that Martilotti was unconvinced or, at the very least, unmoved by the testimony he was hearing first hand. He seemed oddly detached, never offering a judgement on the crimes the men were describing, only jotting down the occasional brief note or pausing to photograph the tattooed numbers on their arms. Perhaps the mass killing of Jews did not pierce the heart of a servant of the Catholic church. ‘Monsignor, listen to me ,’ Mordowicz began. ‘Not only Jews are being murdered there. Catholics are being murdered there also.’
He explained that Catholic priests, men just like Martilotti himself, were arriving at Auschwitz. Except they were not being killed like the Jews, herded into gas chambers. For one thing, they tended to come at night. For another, when they reached Auschwitz, they were already dead. ‘Tens, maybe hundreds of trucks would come from different areas of Kraków, Katowice, Sosnowiec,’ Mordowicz told Martilotti, and these trucks would be full of boxes. ‘And in those boxes were the corpses of priests.’ They had been shot. Their bodies were brought to the crematoria of Birkenau to be burned.
When the monsignor heard this, he put his hands to his head. This man who had been so methodical, urbane and smooth, now cried out in German, Mein Gott! Mein Gott! Vrba and Mordowicz watched as Martilotti fainted and fell to the floor, passed out cold.
When he came to, he asked through tears: ‘What can I do?’
At last Mordowicz and Vrba knew they were believed. Rudi begged him: ‘Sound the alarm,’ he said, ‘with all and any means .’
Mordowicz stressed that Martilotti had to hurry, that even during the hours they had sat in this room, talking, thousands more had been gassed, their corpses thrown into ovens. ‘You have to do one thing ,’ Mordowicz said: take the report and leave Slovakia right away, perhaps for Switzerland. ‘From there you send it to all the statesmen: to America, to England, to Sweden, to the International Red Cross. And, of course, to the pope.’