Did Rudi detect a reminder of his past life as he peered at a microscope slide or checked cell culture dishes on the outskirts of south London? The research he had begun in Prague and now continued in Carshalton was concerned chiefly with what happened to cell tissue when the host creature was subjected to stress: what exertion, for instance, did to the brain or the heart, and how the cell metabolised glucose and oxygen to do all that was required of it. In his papers for the scientific journal Nature , which were appearing with some regularity now, Rudi described the experiments he had performed, using what were at the time standard laboratory practices, with rats as his captives and himself as their captor. For one study, he had divided the animals into two groups of six and forced them to swim for four and a half hours. Then, after ‘cessation of swimming, the rats were thrown into liquid air and frozen in vivo. The frozen brains were taken out, homogenized at low temperature by crushing into fine powder …’ For another, ‘the animals were killed by decapitation , and the blood （1 ml.） was immediately collected … Brain （whole, except for cerebellum）， heart, liver and a sample of the gastrocnemius muscle were rapidly removed and frozen in liquid nitrogen …’ By 1964, he was working with mice, injecting them before killing them at fifteen-minute intervals, once more dropping them into liquid nitrogen . Each time, he was asking the same question, one that he had himself faced long before he ever set foot in a laboratory: what happens to a living creature when confronted with extreme, mortal stress?
From the start, Rudi was aware that he was but one part of an international effort that had preceded, and would outlive, his own career. Under way was a global campaign to understand the cell and how it works that involved evolutionary biologists, embryologists, biochemists, geneticists, pharmacists, chemists, engineers and physicists, a campaign that would span both the earth and the century. Just as he had been when he fought under Captain Uher, Rudolf Vrba was but one foot soldier.
And yet England was not only the site of a laboratory. It was home to his children. Gerta and the girls were now living in London suburbia, in Kenton, with Sidney Hilton as husband and stepfather. But, even if they were no longer under the same roof, Rudi and Gerta still managed to provoke each other – and to make things complicated.
For one thing, Rudi started seeing Sidney’s ex-wife Beth. Sometimes she would be with him in his home in Sutton, sometimes they would stay at her place in Highgate and, at weekends, they would have the children with them. Back in Prague Rudi would infuriate Gerta by playing with his daughters in the middle of the night. Now, in London, he was in the habit of having the girls with him for the weekend, but forgetting to take them home on Sunday evening. They would wake up on Monday morning in Highgate or Surrey, when they needed to be back at school in Kenton.
Rudi found Gerta no less enraging. Immediately after his arrival in England, he had gone to see his children, a reunion after eighteen months apart. The way he told it, he turned up unannounced at the house to find the girls playing in the garden. He went up to the fence and the younger child eyed him nervously. Eight-year-old Helena spoke first. ‘Zuza, that’s Tata,’ she said, using the Czech word for Daddy that Rudi and his daughters would always hold on to. The little girl looked at her father and said, ‘They told me you were dead .’ Rudi could not forgive that easily.
The former couple drove each other to distraction. Rudi accused Gerta and Sidney of trying to have him deported from Britain, and of once hiding Helena from him, refusing to say where she was. Gerta insisted that her ex-husband was consumed with paranoia.
Eventually Gerta decided that, yet again, she needed to resort to the law. She went to a firm of family solicitors, Theodore Goddard, where she sat across from a woman famed as one of London’s most distinguished matrimonial lawyers . Her name was Blanche Lucas. Gerta began to fill in some of the background, mentioning her ex-husband’s extraordinary past. As she spoke, Lucas seemed to be remembering something. Finally she made the connection. Twenty years earlier, while working in Zurich as a secretary for British journalist Walter Garrett, she had produced the English translation of the Vrba–Wetzler Report, a distilled version of which had been wired around the globe. And now she would act against one of that report’s two authors, successfully as it turned out: Gerta won total legal custody over the children, with Rudi granted only limited visitation rights .
One way or another, Auschwitz was never far away. Rudi had not been in England long when, for perhaps the first time, the death camp became a subject of public conversation. Adolf Eichmann had been snatched off the streets of Argentina in May 1960 and was on trial in Jerusalem eleven months later. After fifteen years of incurious silence, the world was suddenly interested in the Nazis’ murder of the Jews. A friend suggested Rudi should approach a British newspaper and tell his story.
The result was a five-part series that ran Monday to Friday in the Daily Herald on the eve of the trial, with the first instalment headlined, not wholly accurately: ‘I STOPPED EICHMANN KILLING 600,000 MORE JEWS ’。 TV and radio appearances followed, as the articles, each one a thousand words long and written with reporter Alan Bestic, saw a lift in the Herald ’s daily sale. As a gesture of gratitude, the paper handed Rudi a cheque: it equalled his annual salary as a scientist.
Soon that led to a book. The prompt was a conversation between Rudi and his Sutton milkman. The man had read the Herald series and confessed that he did not like it. He believed Dr Vrba was spreading lies about the Germans and that it was not right. Of course, the man knew that Hitler was a menace: he himself had lost a leg fighting in the war. But the stories Rudi had told in the paper could not possibly be true. The Jews were clever people , the milkman said: it beggared belief to imagine they would take their children by the hand and board trains that would deliver them to the gas chambers. Such a thing was inconceivable. Rudi understood then that he would have to do much more to explain how the Nazis had pulled off perhaps the greatest crime in human history.
Over eighteen days in August 1963, he sat down again with Bestic, this time telling the whole story as fast as the reporter’s shorthand could get it down. The result was I Cannot Forgive , published that same year. The assumption – of the publishers, and perhaps of the readers – was that the object of that title sentence was Adolf Hitler and the Nazis: it was they whom Rudolf Vrba could not forgive. But his ex-wife Gerta harboured a different thought. She had seen how the more time passed and the more Rudi learned of the events of wartime, the angrier he became, his fury directed especially at those who had failed to pass on the word that he and Fred Wetzler had smuggled out of Auschwitz. Gerta looked at the book written by her ex-husband and reckoned that high on the list among those whom he would never forgive was Rezs? Kasztner.
The Eichmann trial saw some of that anger erupt. It happened in the courtroom in Jerusalem, where Hungarian survivors of the deportations interrupted the testimony of a former member of the Budapest Jewish Council, screaming at him in Hungarian and Yiddish from the public gallery. But it reached Britain too. Rudi had wanted to testify at the Eichmann trial. One of the judges voted in favour, the same judge who in 1955 had condemned Kasztner for selling ‘his soul to the devil’。 But the other two said no. Rudi had to make do with giving a sworn deposition at the Israeli embassy in London. Still, when Hannah Arendt, who had covered the trial for the New Yorker , published some of her conclusions in London’s Observer newspaper, Rudi had a chance to weigh in. On the letters page, he defended Arendt from an Israeli scholar who had been appalled by the writer’s focus on the role of the Jewish councils or Judenr?te . Rudi described how he and Fred had escaped, compiled their detailed report and got it into the right hands, motivated by the desire to warn the Jews of Hungary that they would be next. ‘Did the Judenrat in Hungary tell their Jews what was awaiting them? No, they remained silent and for this silence some of their leaders – for instance, Dr R. Kasztner – bartered their own lives and the lives of 1,684 other “prominent” Jews directly from Eichmann.’