They were a family now, with stimulating professional lives and a relatively privileged position in the society taking shape around them. And yet things were not right. Rudi and Gerta would clash, even over apparently trivial things. In 1954, nearly a decade after the war’s end, food was still heavily rationed in Czechoslovakia. Children were entitled to an extra allocation of two eggs a week, along with some sugar and butter. Gerta put those rations aside, so that she could surprise the girls with a breakfast treat of pancakes. When the chosen morning arrived, Gerta looked for the ingredients, but the eggs had vanished . Just as he had done during those toddler raids on the family henhouse, Rudi had taken them. Gerta was furious with him for that. Only many years later did it strike her that Auschwitz had taught its inmates that if there was food available, you took it.
The two argued when they were together and spent more time apart. At night Rudi would go out drinking with his friends, coming home long after his wife and daughters were asleep. When he got back in the early hours, he would not tiptoe in but fling the door open, wake up the children and expect them to start playing with him. When he flagged an hour or so later, he left it to Gerta to resettle the girls and get them back to sleep, and to deal with their tired crankiness the next morning.
He was also having multiple affairs . Some of them were just sex. But even when he fell in love with another woman, he was adamant that he would not leave his wife – because of Helena and Zuza.
Eventually, it became too much for Gerta. She said she wanted a divorce: their home was tense and unhappy and it was not a good environment for the girls. Rudi would not hear of it. He loved his children and they loved him back. Gerta accepted that was true. They would try a separation, though with the housing shortage being what it was, they would have to separate within the same small apartment. She and the girls would live in the bedroom, Rudi would have use of the living room.
That too did not work out. One night, Gerta heard the front door open and two drunken voices. Rudi had brought a woman back to the flat. The pair went into the living room where they proceeded to have sex on the sofa, loud enough to wake the children. That night Gerta resolved that separation was not enough. She wanted a divorce. In time, Rudi agreed – on condition that Gerta paid the legal fees, he kept the flat and she and the girls moved out.
That hardly reduced the acrimony. In March 1956, Gerta was on board a plane heading to Paris for a conference, a rare chance to glimpse life on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Moments before take-off, an agent of the SNB, the Czech secret intelligence service, appeared at the door of the aircraft and escorted her off. He explained that the agency had received information suggesting she was about to defect to the west, along with her children. Only when the agent was persuaded that she had no such intention did he reveal who had denounced her : Rudolf Vrba.
Was this paranoia on her ex-husband’s part? Later Gerta would conclude that it was more likely a desire for revenge . Rudi was still angry that his wife had left him.
Each levelled grave accusations against the other, which later they would deny ever making. In Rudi’s recollection, Gerta had threatened to tell the authorities about friends of his who had criticised the communist regime and, worse, she had argued in court that divorce was necessary because Rudi was ‘not able to guarantee a socialist education’ for their children. Gerta would later insist she had done nothing of the kind . But she would also become forgiving, of both Rudi and her younger self. They were so young. And, she would come to understand, they were badly damaged . Both her parents had been murdered by the Nazis; he had spent two years inside the murder machine.
In post-war Czechoslovakia, politics barged into the most intimate corners of a life. But in the professional realm its elbows were especially sharp. His spell as a partisan had made Rudi initially sympathetic to the communist project. He remembered that, when others had been accommodating themselves to fascism, it was socialists who had been determined to resist and who had helped him in his first, doomed effort at escape. In the immediate afterglow of the victory against Nazism, he could even succumb to idealism about a new future of equality and brotherhood. That did not last long.
In 1947, he noticed that he was being followed. When he got back to his flat, he saw that his things had been interfered with. He spoke to friends, and discovered that some men had been sniffing around, asking questions about him. Rudi was determined to track down the man responsible for this unannounced investigation and eventually he found him. But all the official would say is that he ‘wished to help’ .
It would not be until February 1948, when the communists seized complete control of the Czechoslovak government, that Rudi understood. A poster had gone up at the university, and Rudi’s name was on it. He had been named as a ‘non-political’ member of the action committee that would now rule the institution. It was the first he had heard of it, but it explained why the men had been snooping around a year earlier: the communists had been checking Rudi out, to determine whether he was acceptable. Clearly, he had passed the test. Soon they asked him to fill in as chair of the action committee, leaving no doubt that it would be dangerous to refuse .
A few weeks later, he was told there were too many ‘unworthy’ students at the university. He was to work through the student roll, removing ‘bourgeois’ elements and active anti-communists, while retaining party members and those of working-class backgrounds. He refused. It would be discrimination, he said, at odds with the entire ethos of a scholarly institution. The committee told him that, if he did as he was asked, he would be committing no ‘moral offence’。 He could say he was simply obeying ‘higher orders’。 Rudi replied that that was the excuse used by the Nazis. He would not do it.
The committee asked for his resignation and a public confession of his ‘failures’。 He gave them what they wanted and retreated into his studies, gaining his doctorate in 1951. But when his grant ran out the following year, he learned the price of his political disgrace. He could not get a research job anywhere. He ended up as a chemist on the night shift in a penicillin factory. He was Dr Vrba now, but earning a technician’s wage.
When eventually he found a way out – offered a place in a friend’s lab to explore brain biochemistry – it came with a strict condition: he would have to work in the basement and remain as inconspicuous as possible.
That was wise advice even beyond the lab. The climate had become much colder in Prague, with the authorities cracking down on those who did not fit the new socialist paradise. Friends of Rudi’s had disappeared overnight, never to be seen again. A queasy feeling of déjà vu struck in 1952, when Rudolf Slánsk? and thirteen other senior officials of the Czechoslovak communist party were arrested and charged with ideological deviation. They were accused of straying into ‘Titoism and Zionism’。 Ten of them, including Slánsk?, were Jews. Eleven, including Slánsk?, were hanged.
Rudi was dispirited by this turn of events, but hardly shocked. In all the time he had lived in Prague after the war, no one had ever so much as asked him about Auschwitz. He could not decide if that was because the topic was taboo, or if it was simply of no interest to those around him, but the result was the same. Rudi went along to the annual Auschwitz commemorative evening organised by the Union of Anti-fascist Fighters in Prague, but even there nobody mentioned the fate of the Jews . He heard plenty about the heroism of the Czech communists and the suffering of other Czechs who had resisted the Nazis. But about the Jews, not a word. Not even about the Czech children of the family camp, gassed with their parents. Some of them had died singing the Czech national anthem , but their country did not want to know.