Gerta had only been back in Bratislava a few weeks when she saw Rudi, and when he gave her what amounted to her own private version of the Auschwitz Report, describing what he had witnessed, even handing her the pages of the text for retyping. That information proved critical.
In late August 1944, the Nazis invaded Slovakia and soon took direct charge of what they still called the Jewish question. Before long, the round-ups and deportations that had stopped two years earlier had resumed, the trains heading once more to Auschwitz. There was no refuge to be found by crossing the border back into Hungary. By the autumn Horthy had been toppled; power now lay in the hands of Hungary’s own Nazi party, the Arrow Cross, who once again set about the swift and brutal mass murder of Jews, deploying death squads and working with Adolf Eichmann to restart deportations, either in slave labour details or to death camps, killing tens of thousands. One way or another, the Nazi dragnet was still pulling in Jews across the continent, and now it was back in the place where it had all started: Slovakia.
Gerta and her mother had impeccably forged Aryan papers and held out for a while. But one night in November 1944 there came the knock on the door: ‘Open up, this is the Gestapo .’
They were detained and interrogated at the Gestapo’s Bratislava headquarters for a week. Gerta was in no doubt that they had to try to escape: the alternative was Auschwitz which she was convinced, thanks to Rudi, meant near-certain death. But her mother could not accept what she was hearing. She told Gerta, ‘Escape on your own .’ And so, when the chance came, Gerta took it alone. She jumped out of a window of the Gestapo building and ran and ran.
The decision haunted her. Even if she had won her blessing to do it, Gerta had abandoned her mother. She had only done it because she was certain what staying in the hands of the Gestapo would mean, knowledge she had been given by Rudi.
She could not tell him, because he had long left Bratislava. Following the Nazi invasion, the Slovak resistance was now engaged in a national uprising and Rudi was determined to be part of it. He headed to western Slovakia, where a Sergeant Milan Uher was leading a group of partisans, and there took an oath, pledging his allegiance to the Czechoslovak government in exile in London and vowing to fight until victory over the Germans or death.
Training was rudimentary and brief. Within twenty-four hours, Rudi had a gun in his hand and a mission. Some 700 SS men had taken over a school building in Stará Turá, charged with wiping out resistance in the area. Uher’s men would launch a pre-emptive strike.
And so Rudolf Vrba, only just out of his teens having turned twenty that September, found himself in the dead of night inching towards a schoolhouse in the Slovak countryside, until Uher finally gave the order to rush the building. They hurled grenades at its windows and eventually burst through the door to spray the room with bullets.
Rudi saw at least two of his comrades fall beside him, but that did not dilute the euphoria that coursed through him. He found himself laughing with the joy of it; he was weeping with happiness . He heard the screams of the SS men inside that building, he heard them die, and it delighted him. Volkov, the Soviet prisoner of war, had been right. The Germans were not superhuman, they were not invincible: they died like anyone else.
Rudi fought in at least nine more battles against SS units and took part in several raids on German artillery posts, in the destruction of railway bridges and in the sabotage of Nazi supply lines . At one point he and his comrades, ordered to stay behind enemy lines to disrupt the Germans’ communications and harass them by all available means, found themselves isolated. Partisan headquarters in the Soviet Union had to parachute in a new commander from the Red Army, who was soon killed in action. Uher returned, now promoted to captain, but he too was killed in action. By the time the Soviets entered Slovakia in April 1945, Rudi’s unit was severely depleted. But he was still standing.
Those who remained took on one last operation and were then sent to a military hospital to recuperate. Rudi assumed he would be returning to the front and to combat, but, while his body recovered its strength, word came that the war was over: Hitler was dead, the Nazis had surrendered. He was now a veteran of the Second Stalin Partisan Brigade and, as such, Rudi was awarded the Czechoslovak Medal for Bravery, the Order of the Slovak National Insurrection （Second Class） and the Medal of Honour of Czechoslovak Partisans – as well as membership of the communist party .
Only three years had passed since Rudi had climbed into that taxi, dreaming of his first escape. But he did not stop to take stock of what he had seen and what he had endured. He was in a hurry. He got himself discharged and, without pause for breath, he was soon back in Bratislava, thirsty for the elixir that had been snatched from his lips when he was barely fifteen years old: knowledge.
By May he was enrolled in a special school for military veterans, allowing them to catch up on the studies they had missed thanks to the war. In five months he made up at least three years of ground, passing the exam that secured him a place to study at the Czech Technical University in Prague, in the department of chemical technology. Not many years earlier, he had been forbidden so much as to read a chemistry textbook, sharing a hidden copy with his friend Erwin. Now Erwin was dead and he was about to study for a degree in the subject.
He had not hesitated in his choice. True, he had seen where technological progress could lead; he knew what science and scientists were capable of. From the chemistry of Zyklon B to the precision engineering of the crematoria, Auschwitz and the industrialisation of mass murder had been a monument to advanced technology: it operated at a speed and on a scale made possible only by the efficiency of science. And yet Rudolf Vrba, who had lost his faith in God as a child and in whom talk of ‘faith in one’s fellow man’ prompted an ironic smile, never lost his belief in the purity of the scientific ideal. He regarded the fraternity of scholars as his one, unshakeable affiliation .
As for where he would study, it had to be Prague, rather than Bratislava . Events had played out differently there. It had taken a German occupation for the Czechs to deport their Jews; the Slovaks had organised their transports early and eagerly, paying for the privilege, with no need for external, Nazi prompting. Prague felt the right place to make a fresh start.
It must have seemed as if the darkness had finally lifted, that the worst was over. And for many years that would be true. But what Rudi did not know in the bright dawn of 1945 was that the event he would come to describe as the greatest catastrophe of his life was not behind him, but ahead and in the future.
The decision to move to Prague was not Rudi’s alone. He had his own student lodgings and he was immersed in his studies, shuttling between his digs, the library and the lab , but there was someone else in his life. Two people to be precise.
While so many of his peers had seen their entire families wiped out, Rudi had returned to Trnava in the summer of 1944 to make an unexpected discovery. His mother was still alive and well. She was married to a man, one of three husbands she would have in the course of her life, who two years earlier had been deemed essential to the Slovak economy, thereby enabling her to evade that first round of deportations.
Rudi could not simply knock on her front door. There was still an international warrant out for his arrest; it was too risky. Instead he had engineered a reunion at the home of a friend in Trnava. He sat and watched as his mother walked in. She scoped the room, looking right past him. He had changed so much. It was the friend who finally pointed in Rudi’s direction: ‘There he is .’