It was in Bratislava that Josef made an introduction that would change Rudi’s life. Or rather a reintroduction. He mentioned that a mutual friend from Trnava was also in Bratislava, having spent much of the intervening two years in hiding in Hungary. Like Rudi, she was living on Aryan papers and under a false name – she was now Gerti Jurkovi? – but Rudi would have remembered her as Gerta Sidonová. She was the girl in the pom-pom hat, the one young Walter had shooed away for looking too childish.
In that summer, ‘Gerti’ was just seventeen, working as a junior secretary for a house-removals company, a job Josef had arranged as part of his activities with a Zionist underground cell engaged in, among other things, forging identity documents for Jews. The group liked to place people in office jobs: that way they would have access to typewriters and other equipment that could prove useful.
Josef had mentioned Rudi’s presence in Bratislava quite casually, but for Gerta it was thrilling news. So much time had passed, so much had happened, and yet she still carried a torch for the serious, brilliant, imaginative boy she had known in Trnava. They made a plan to meet that week, on a little pebble beach on the banks of the Danube.
Josef offered a word of warning. ‘Walter has had some very bad experiences ,’ he said. He had been in a camp. He had changed.
‘Be prepared to meet another man, not the one you know.’
If anything, that only made Gerta more excited to see him again.
She waited at the agreed spot. It felt like old times, back when they used to meet in Trnava: he was always late then too. But she did not mind. The sun was shining and she was in the shade of a weeping willow tree, the only sound the music of the moving river. It was so peaceful and perfect. And then, there he was.
He was coming down the path towards the beach and gave Gerta a wave. But while his mouth made a smile, his eyes took no part in it: they were filled with sadness, even despair. Josef was right. The Walter she had known was gone. This man was not much taller than the boy in Trnava, no more than five foot six inches, but he was stronger and squarer. Still, it was the eyes that struck her most. She had always liked the hint of mischief in Walter’s eyes, but Rudi’s were filled with sadness and something she had not expected: suspicion.
And yet his intelligence was undimmed; as they talked, the old smile would occasionally break through. And when it did, and when he held her hand, she thought she truly loved him, perhaps for ever .
Gerta stood up and embraced him, but his body stiffened . She suggested a swim. She hoped that might somehow narrow the distance between them.
But as he took off his shirt, she saw the five blue digits inked on his forearm: 44070. She blurted out the words: ‘What have you been doing tattooing yourself?’ A strange smile formed on Rudi’s lips; it struck Gerta as not only sarcastic but cruel. Yet his eyes did not alter. ‘Where did you think I was , in a sanatorium?’ Gerta felt this man, this ‘Rudi’， had returned from wherever he had been filled with hate and, at this moment, that hate seemed to be directed at her.
There was a silence and then he put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close. He said he was sorry, but that she would understand once she knew what he had lived through these last two years.
And so there they sat, under a tree by the river, as Rudi told her, with great precision and little emotion, of the death camp he had been in from the last day of June 1942 until a few weeks earlier. He talked of transports and cattle trucks and Kanada and gas chambers and crematoria and his determination to tell the world the truth about Auschwitz. He saw the incredulity on her face. Don’t worry, he said. Most people had reacted the same way, unable to believe what they were hearing.
He then reached into his bag and brought out a few sheets of paper: the Auschwitz Report. He explained that he wanted extra copies, so that he, Fred and the others could distribute them themselves. It was vital to get the word to Hungary. Gerta took the pages and, in the office where she worked, she would later do as she was asked. She did not know exactly what Rudi did with the copies she typed up: he was secretive, even with her.
Eventually, they left their shady spot on the beach, walking hand in hand, in silence. And yet that tension she had felt at the start, that distance between them, never fully disappeared. Eventually she would conclude that, somewhere in Auschwitz, the Walter she had known had lost the ability to trust anyone .
Every path the report had taken had seemed to end in a wall of solid brick, Rudi and Fred’s testimony either suppressed or leading to no firm action. The escapees were doing what they could, hand-copying their own report, but the trains were still rolling out of the Hungarian countryside, still rolling into Auschwitz.
And yet, invisible to them, there was another route the report was following. Slowly, and by twists and turns, it was finding its way into the hands of the one person who might stop the deportation of the 200,000 Jews of Budapest: Miklós Horthy, regent of Hungary.
Its path began with Sándor T?r?k, a journalist who had been interned by the Germans in May only to escape. It was T?r?k who had taken one of the six copies of the Auschwitz Report to Cardinal Serédi, who, throwing his biretta to the ground, had sighed that he could do nothing unless the pope acted first. Now T?r?k was given another addressee for the document. The Hungarian opposition had held back one of Mária Székely’s copies, expressly for this purpose. They tasked T?r?k with getting Fred and Rudi’s evidence inside the royal residence. The conduit would be someone sympathetic to their aims, likely to be moved by the plight of the Jews and with the ear of the man in charge: the regent’s daughter-in-law, the widow of his son István, who had served as Horthy’s deputy. Her name was Countess Ilona Edelsheim Gyulai.
A small group of conspirators would gather often in her private rooms, piecing together what news she brought from the regent’s circle with the fragments of information they could glean from the outside world. T?r?k got himself an introduction to the countess, and became part of her secret circle. But access was not easy. The Nazis had located their headquarters right next to the residence. A German tank and a line of German guards stood directly across from the guards of the Hungarian court, staring right at them and watching everyone who came in and went out. And, however exalted her position, the countess could not speak freely. T?r?k was to phone her each day, posing as a bookbinder by the name of Bardócz. He would ask the countess if she had any work for him. If she said yes, there was a bookbinding job to be done, that was the signal for him to make his way to the palace . Those meetings proved crucial. By the latter half of May 1944, the report had smuggled its way inside the royal walls.
Its pages filled the young widow with both compassion and shame , but another consideration pressed on her and her group. If the Allies won the war, what would they make of those eminent Hungarians who had enabled this Nazi slaughter, handing over several hundred thousand Jews to be murdered? The countess agreed to present the report to her father-in-law.
It seemed to work. The countess told T?r?k that the regent had read the document and accepted all of it as the truth . There was now no doubt in the mind of Hungary’s head of state regarding the fate of his country’s Jews. He even discussed the report with one of his senior police commanders. ‘These gangsters !’ Horthy said of the SS. ‘I read it and saw it in black and white – that they put children into gas chambers!’