Ilona Rosenberg embraced her son, wiped a tear from her cheek, then swiftly scolded him for disappearing for two years without so much as a letter home. Rudi explained where he had been, skipping the bloodiest details, and she listened without asking too many questions. He thought she sensed in him a reluctance to say more, and if she did, she was not wrong .
But her husband had a different reaction. Back in 1942, he and Ilona were not yet married. His exemption had allowed him to nominate a single relative to be spared from deportation: he could choose either his sister or Ilona, if she became his wife. He chose Ilona, and so the two were married. His sister was deported.
Now, thanks to Rudi, he knew what that decision of his two years earlier had meant. He was so devastated that when the deportations resumed a few months after Rudi’s return, in September 1944, he quietly lined up to board one of the trains. He wanted to share the fate of his sister; he gave himself up to it. Rudi described it as suicide by deportation . Eventually Ilona herself would be deported. She was not shipped to Auschwitz, but to Theresienstadt in what she still thought of as her home country – and she, like her son, survived.
The other person of influence was the woman whose life Rudi had saved. Gerta Sidonová and Rudi were now an item, she a medical student in Prague, both of them rushing through an accelerated version of the education they had been denied. They would meet in his undergraduate room and make awkward, faltering love. They were free; they could have been together every night if they had wanted to be. But they were not. For Gerta at least, there was something missing . She wondered if it was her fault. Rudi would say that she lacked both passion and experience, but she wondered if she simply did not love him enough . Whatever the reason, their lovemaking lacked the tenderness, the gentleness, she craved. Instead she felt it carried a trace of violence . Maybe if they were married, that problem would disappear.
In the summers, they would take holidays but not always together. In that first vacation, in the summer of 1946, Rudi went back to Bratislava to join up with Wetzler , Mordowicz and Rosin: they were a band of brothers now, bound by an experience only they shared. They were the only four Jews on earth who had broken out of Auschwitz.
Many survivors of that camp, and of the event that would gradually become known as the Holocaust, would vow never to set foot in Poland again. For them, that country would forever be associated with the mass murder of their fellow Jews; they could not bear to tread on soil they imagined to be drenched in blood. Others managed it, but only after an interval of many decades. Yet Rudi went back cheerfully and within just four years of his escape. What’s more, he boarded a train to get there. In the summer of 1948, he and Gerta travelled to Poland on holiday.
They were part of a group of students. Voluntarily, they gathered at Prague station and headed east, steaming towards the country where Rudi had been enslaved and where Rudi and Gerta’s fellow Jews had been murdered in their millions. They reached Kraków and then Warsaw, walking around a city of rubble and ruins. A student guide pointed out the sights. ‘This was the ghetto,’ he said at one point, ‘where the Warsaw Jews were killed by the Germans during their uprising. The only good thing Hitler did .’
The group stood in silence. Gerta feared Rudi would attack the guide. But Rudi kept silent and the group headed away. Both of them badly wanted to be back in Prague.
The years went by, Rudi and Gerta walking along the riverbank, pausing at their favourite stop, a little island under the Charles Bridge called Kampa , sitting on a bench they considered their own. One late Sunday afternoon, over tea and cake, Rudi asked Gerta to marry him. It was what Rudi’s mother, known to her future daughter-in-law as Ilonka, had been urging for ages: she believed Gerta was smart and good-looking and, besides, she was an orphan. It was Rudi’s duty to marry her . Their friends were just as enthusiastic. Everyone considered them the perfect couple: clever, attractive, strong. If the pair harboured misgivings, they kept them quiet, hoping they would be dissolved in the fizz of wedding champagne.
The couple married on 16 April 1949, not in synagogue but in Bratislava’s town hall, the vows in Slovak rather than Hebrew. The bride wore dark navy rather than white . Whatever hold tradition might once have exerted was gone.
The night before the wedding, Gerta had slept badly. She was worried that she was making a mistake. The ceremony, and the party afterwards in Ilonka’s flat, did not help. The alcohol flowed, Rudi got drunk and tried to kiss the bride’s best friend, Inge. The band of Auschwitz brothers was in attendance – Fred Wetzler was a witness to the marriage, Arno?t Rosin was best man – but that only made things worse. Czes?aw Mordowicz had brought a couple of guns, which the men were taking apart and reassembling. Gerta found it distressing .
Still, marriage, not the wedding, was the thing. Soon they would have their own home. In newly communist Czechoslovakia, it was not easy to get a flat but Rudi’s status as a former partisan put him at the front of the queue. He was allocated a one-bedroom apartment in the Dejvice neighbourhood of Prague, close to the castle and the city centre. Perhaps now their new lives could begin.
They immersed themselves in their work, Rudi completing his degree in organic chemistry and signing on for a PhD that would see him specialise in the emerging field of biochemistry of the brain. Gerta, meanwhile, graduated from medical school and moved on to studying the physiology of the nervous system. Their labs were near to each other and to their flat. They should have been happy.
And yet the gap that existed between Rudi and his wife remained. The boy who had grown up in Trnava had become a very different man. Sometimes Gerta would come home and find him drinking vodka alone. Or he would get possessive and fly into a jealous rage. Once they were on a tram heading home from a production of The Cherry Orchard . Gerta smiled as she showed her ticket to the conductor. Rudi started shouting: ‘You’re flirting with the conductor, you slut.’ The rest of the passengers could hear, but she said nothing . When an injury to her arm necessitated physiotherapy, Rudi accused his wife of having a lesbian affair with the therapist.
The paranoia was not only directed at her. He would complain that his colleagues in the lab were trying to sabotage him. ‘They hid all the scissors , so I couldn’t cut the filter paper to the right size and do my experiment,’ he would say. There was an explanation, obvious and ready: Auschwitz had left him that way, stripping him of all trust.And yet Gerta wondered if it might not be the other way around: that it was not that Rudi had become paranoid because he survived Auschwitz, but rather that he had survived Auschwitz in part because by then he had already learned to be paranoid , trusting almost no one. Maybe the behaviour she was witnessing was not the effect of Rudi’s survival, but its cause.
Whatever the explanation, and though to Gerta he remained the handsome, sharp heroic man who had saved her life, Rudi was hard to live with. Marriage had not eased that, nor had sharing a home together. Perhaps children would make the difference. And so, on 26 May 1952, a baby girl arrived: they called her Helena, partly in deference to Rudi’s mother, and partly because they both thought she was the most gorgeous creature they had ever seen, her thick black hair and beauty making her a match for Helen of Troy . When Rudi held Helena for the first time, he told his wife that all the pain he had endured in Auschwitz had been worth it, just to know the joy of this moment. He had never guessed he could be so happy. Two years later, on 3 May 1954, another daughter arrived. She had delicate white skin and fluffy blonde hair . They named her Zuzana, but she was always Zuzka or Zuza.