For four years, Rudi worked in that basement and in time it brought a professional breakthrough. A senior scientist at Moscow University noticed a paper he had written and, before long, that stamp of implicit Soviet approval meant Rudi was moved out of the cellar and into a well-appointed lab, his status as a non-person revoked. But he was living under a regime whose antisemitism was now naked and undeniable. His marriage was over. And he was lonely. He could not turn to his escape partner, because he and Fred Wetzler had lost touch, their friendship souring once Fred married. Etela Wetzlerová had been a prisoner in Auschwitz. But instead of that common experience cementing a connection between Fred’s bride and his escape partner, it made Rudi suspicious : what, he could not help but wonder, had Etela done in that camp to buy her survival? Had she been a Kapo ?
Rudolf Vrba, whose greatest hunger had been for freedom, did not feel like a free man in the Prague of the 1950s. And so, once again, his mind turned to escape.
26
A New Nation, a New England
H E HAD LEARNED in Auschwitz that escape was a science whose disciplines could not be rushed. They required time and patient study. If he was to break out of communist Czechoslovakia, he would have to get it right first time. If he tried and failed, he would make his situation much worse.
Once again, it was his job that made the difference. The interest his scientific paper had sparked in Moscow led to publication in the USSR’s pre-eminent journal in the field: Progress of Modern Soviet Biology . He was the first Czechoslovak biologist to have won such recognition. His reward came in the form of a passport and the right to attend conferences or give lectures abroad. In the next couple of years, he travelled to Denmark, Ukraine and Russia – and came back each time. One of those scientific gatherings, in 1954, was in Poland. The hosts organised a bus tour to Auschwitz. Ten years after his escape, Rudi climbed on board the bus and went to take a look. As his colleagues moved around the site, full of questions, Rudi did not let on that he had been there before. What would have been the use? As far as Rudi was concerned, no one who had not experienced it could understand it .
In 1958, an invitation arrived to attend back-to-back conferences in Strasbourg and Vienna. Once again, he applied for permission. He would follow the usual drill. If he received official consent, he would travel to the airport where his passport, which was kept at the Ministry of Science, would be handed to him, allowing him to make an authorised exit. Since he had travelled to the west before without incident, the permission came through. Everything was going to plan.
Except Rudi was not the teenager Walter Rosenberg had been. In Auschwitz, he had had no one to look out for but himself; he had had nothing to lose but his own life. Now, though, he had two children whom he loved. They were no longer living under the same roof, but they often stayed in Rudi’s apartment. They kept some of their toys there. Somehow he could not bear to imagine his children being parted from their playthings for ever.
And so, perhaps a week before he was due to leave for Strasbourg, he visited his ex-wife. He said he was going to teach in the Soviet Union for a year and wanted to drop off the girls’ toys. Gerta took them from him, but she was suspicious. She asked around and learned that while he had made no mention to friends or colleagues of a Moscow sabbatical, Rudi had been invited to the Fourth International Congress of Biochemistry in Vienna. The gathering was scheduled to last for only a few days, which meant there was no reason for Rudi to have returned the children’s things. Unless he was not planning on coming back.
Rudi did not know it, but Gerta had also been dreaming of escape. She had met and fallen in love with a British scientist, Sidney Hilton, who was a regular visitor to Prague. But if she was the ex-wife of a defector to the west, Gerta would come under intense state scrutiny: she would never be able to leave. She and her daughters would be trapped. Yet she had learned from the master, her former husband. She now plotted an escape of her own.
She too had a scientific conference to attend, this one in Poland. With a visa that included permission to return to Czechoslovakia via any country in Europe, she devised an elaborate, and audacious, plan. She would go to the meeting in Poland, steal back, undetected and on foot, into Czechoslovakia via the Krkono?e Mountains, return to Prague, scoop up Helena and Zuzka, then aged just six and four, before making the same mountain trek, on foot and still undetected, with the children back into Poland. From there, and by forging the required documentation for the girls with her own hand, the three would fly to Copenhagen – and to freedom.
Which is how it came to be that Rudi and Gerta, the childhood sweethearts from Trnava, tore through the Iron Curtain to start a new life on the very same day. They had not co-ordinated it. On the contrary, each would later say they were prompted to act by fear that the other would get away first. But, as fate would have it, while his infant daughters and ex-wife were scrambling up Mount Sně ?ka in the mist and rain, before making a slippery, six-hour hike downhill to reach Poland, Rudi entered Vienna airport. On that day, the Vrbas became a family troupe of escape artists. For when Rudi bought a ticket, it was not for a short flight back home to Prague. He was heading instead to a country not much older than his children. His destination was Israel.
This was no journey of Zionist homecoming. For Rudi, it was more pragmatic than that: he had chosen Israel chiefly as a gateway to the west, a country outside the communist bloc where he could be guaranteed entry. As a Jew under the law of return, Israeli citizenship would be automatic.
Within six weeks of his arrival in Israel, he was offered a position in the United States. He was thrilled and applied for a visa right away. But he did not get it. The US authorities of 1958 were not well disposed to former members of the Czechoslovak communist party, whatever explanation they might offer. Rudi got a post instead in the biochemistry department of the Veterinary Research Institute, an arm of Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture, in Beit Dagan, a small, unglamorous town south of Tel Aviv.
Rudi did not take to Israel. Partly he found it too clannish. The country’s rhetoric talked of Jewish unity, but the reality he saw were groups of people clustered in tribes : German Jews over here, Hungarian Jews over there. He had no great desire to be defined once more by the category of Slovak Jew. Nor was he much moved by the romance of a perennially persecuted nation at last capable of defending itself. As far as he was concerned, he had already defended himself .
But there was something more painful. He looked around this new state and, often in high places, he saw the very individuals he believed had failed the historic test that had confronted them all less than fifteen years earlier. Among them were the Slovak Jewish leaders – the likes of Krasň ansk? and Neumann – who he believed had failed twice over: first by making the Nazi deportations possible through drawing up the very lists that had sent Rudi to Auschwitz, and then, after Fred and Rudi had escaped, failing to spread word of their report when it still might have saved more lives. These men were now comfortable and settled in a new land. They were alive when so many others were dead.
The wartime behaviour of those Jewish leaders was a radioactive issue in the Israel that Rudolf Vrba had just landed in. In August 1952 , Malkiel Gruenwald, a pamphleteer in the cause of right-wing ‘Revisionist’ Zionism, had published a denunciation of the man who now styled himself as Israel Rudolf Kasztner. Gruenwald was an elderly Hungarian Jew who had lost fifty-two of his relatives to the Nazis and he pointed the finger at Kasztner, now an official of the state, a spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce and Industry and a would-be member of Israel’s parliament for the ruling Mapai party. Gruenwald’s philippic accused Kasztner of collaborating with the Nazis to save his own skin, along with a handpicked group of nearly 1,700 others, at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives.