The outlines of a possible life in England were taking shape. He was starting to develop a profile; his work was fulfilling and, even if he no longer had a wife, he was at least living in the same country as his two daughters. And then, bit by bit, things fell apart.
Whatever the legal position, the conflict with Gerta over the children had not eased. In 1964, access to Helena and Zuza became harder still when his ex-wife and her husband were relocated to the University of Birmingham. Things deteriorated professionally too. His manager at the institute in Carshalton had always been supportive but, in a re-run of the episode in Prague, Rudi became convinced that his boss was stealing his ideas. Instead of thrashing it out with the man directly, Rudi complained to the supervisory body, the Medical Research Council. It was only going to end one way, and Rudi was told his contract would not be renewed. Gerta always believed it was his paranoia that had kept him alive in Auschwitz. Now it had ruined him.
And yet Rudolf Vrba had not lost his talent for finding a way out. If he reached a dead end, he simply took another route.
27
Canada
I N THE LATE summer of 1967 he moved countries yet again, and for the last time. He still could not get a visa to live in the US, thanks to his past membership of the Czech communist party. But now that long-lapsed affiliation proved useful. A visiting scholar in Carshalton knew of a pharmacology department in Vancouver run by a couple of American communists who had fled north to escape McCarthyism. Rudi’s colleague made contact with the pair, letting them know of a Czech comrade, similarly barred from the US over his party card, for whom they might provide a haven. Moved by the spirit of international Marxist solidarity, they opened their door – unaware that Rudolf Vrba was now a strident anti-communist. He was appointed as an associate professor in the faculty of medicine at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, on the far west coast of Canada. He had made it to the land of impossible plenty that he and his fellow prisoners in the clearing Kommando had once imagined. He was forty-three years old and about as far away from Auschwitz as it was possible to be.
He settled into his department with an additional post as an associate of the Medical Research Council of Canada. He continued publishing papers – ‘Molecular Weights and Metabolism of Rat Brain Proteins’ appeared in 1970 – and soon there was to be some stability in his personal life too.
It came thanks to the fulfilment of an ambition that had been thwarted more than a decade earlier. In 1973, just a year after he was granted citizenship of Canada – the fifth state of which he had been a citizen – he was appointed to a two-year visiting lectureship at Harvard Medical School, alongside a research fellowship working on cancer markers in the gastroenterology department at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Perhaps it was the sponsorship of an elite institution such as Harvard that made the difference, but the US authorities were now prepared to look past his brief history as a communist. True, what with the money he was sending to his mother in Bratislava and his daughters in England, he barely had a penny to his name. But he would finally be in the US.
He had not been in Boston long when he saw her. It was at a party: everyone was talking about Nixon and Watergate, he was coming up to fifty, she was twenty-four. Her name was Robin Lipson and the instant she saw him, she thought he looked adorable . She was pretty striking herself. The youngest person in the room, she was working as a truck driver for L’eggs pantyhose. The company’s first gimmick was that their tights came packed into a little plastic egg, but their second was distribution via a fleet of female drivers, dressed in skimpy outfits. Robin was one of those. She was just two years older than Rudi’s daughter Helena. He was older than her mother and only a year younger than her father. Nevertheless, she and Rudi hit it off right away.
Their first date was a night at the opera. They went to see War and Peace . Soon afterwards they took a trip to Walden Pond, the spot beloved of Thoreau and Emerson. The pair sat on a rock, not saying much while Rudi brooded on a scientific puzzle that had eluded him in the lab. Suddenly he looked at Robin and said, ‘Oh yeah. I got it.’ She was enchanted.
On 13 September 1975 they were married – once they had persuaded a Boston judge that divorce papers issued by the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic were valid. Slowly the agitation and restlessness began to recede; Rudi seemed to mellow. Back in Prague, he had policed Gerta’s behaviour, wanting to know where she went and whom she saw, as well as insisting that she fulfil what he regarded as her wifely responsibilities in the home. But in Vancouver, Rudi accepted his young wife’s independence. He was happy for Robin to work – she eventually became a hugely successful real estate agent and the main breadwinner, so that for the first time in his adult life he did not have to worry about paying the monthly rent – leaving him to run the household , even to do the cooking that he had once seen as exclusively woman’s work. He specialised in dishes from the old country: goulash, chicken paprikash, schnitzel.
When his first wife heard word of her former husband’s new life, she would marvel at the change in him. She put the transformation down to Robin. It was clear to Gerta now that this was what Rudi had needed: a woman from a different generation and a different continent, entirely outside the orbit of planet Auschwitz.
Rudi told Robin that he found the subject of Auschwitz ‘boring’， just as he told colleagues that he spent no more than one half of 1 per cent of his time on the Holocaust: he did not like to talk about it if he could avoid it, he said. To learn his life story, Robin had to read his memoir in the Boston Public Library. （She looked up ‘Rudolf Vrba’ and there were two books under that name. The first was by a vehement Czech nationalist and it had been published in 1898.） She found I Cannot Forgive and read it in two sittings.
Of course, she had seen the tattoo on his arm early on, so she knew he was an Auschwitz survivor. But she had not wanted to probe further: she had been raised to believe that it was bad form, insensitive, to ask those who had come from the Holocaust about their experience. Rudi himself had never mentioned that he had written an autobiography: it was a mutual acquaintance who told her she had to read it. Outside, in the library’s courtyard Robin chain-smoked her way through those two sittings and once she was done, she felt guilty, as if she had invaded this striking man’s privacy .
And yet, even in Vancouver, where Canada ends and the Pacific Ocean begins, a place regularly anointed as the most habitable city in the world, Auschwitz would intrude. Robin and Rudi might be out walking, and if she struggled to keep up he would upbraid her with mock irritation: ‘What are you, a Muselmann ? ’ It was in jest, but Robin picked up the message all the same: Don’t be weak; the weak don’t survive.
Or they might meet people at a party or faculty event. Rudi would make an instant assessment of what fate this or that person would have met in the camp. ‘Oh, they would die right away,’ he might say. ‘They wouldn’t make it. Oh, and that one would be a Kapo … ’
Or there was his wardrobe, his fondness for safari suits, often in khaki – a reminder of the soldier he had been – and the bespoke tailoring adjustment he made to almost all his clothes. He would have multiple pockets added, always with zips. That way he would have no need to carry a bag. It was another Auschwitz lesson: anything of value was best kept on your body.