That place was never far away. On a sweltering July day in New York in 1978, Rudi was in a restaurant when he noticed that his waiter, wearing short sleeves, had a tattooed number on his arm. Instantly, Rudi told the man that he must have been a Jew from B? dzin, Poland who had arrived in Auschwitz in the summer of 1943. The astonished waiter confirmed that Rudi was right in every particular. For Rudi had memorised the details of each and every transport and that knowledge, seared into his memory so that he might smuggle it out of Auschwitz, had never left him.
To his young wife, Rudi was parentally gentle and sweet, calling her his ‘Robchek’。 His tread was soft when he walked and he grinned easily. But his temper was fierce. Once provoked, especially if he felt Robin had behaved unkindly or unjustly, he could be harsh and biting. He would run rings around her in arguments, until, by the end, she was confused and found herself apologising, even when he was in the wrong. He was a skilled debater, and she was, in her own estimation, young and simple . He would argue her into submission, including on the most delicate of questions.
They never had children, chiefly because he talked her out of it, to the point of intimidation. In their conversations on the topic, his objections steamrollered over her wishes. He was adamant that he wanted no more. He told Robin that he had survived the war in part because he had no children. He saw now that the presence of Helena and Zuza in his life had made him vulnerable. It had weakened him ; he felt too much. He could not risk becoming weaker still.
And, for all his protestations of boredom with the subject and despite the 5,000 miles that separated Vancouver from Auschwitz, he could not keep away from it. The pattern had been set a few years earlier when, prompted by the Daily Herald series, the office of the public prosecutor in Frankfurt had got in touch, asking Rudi to help in the preparations for the upcoming trial of a dozen or so SS men who had served at Auschwitz. Rudi travelled to Germany in 1962, long before many, perhaps most, Holocaust survivors felt able to set foot in the country. So began a relationship with the German prosecuting authorities that would stretch over many decades, with Rudi repeatedly called as a witness in the trials of Nazi war criminals. He was a prosecutor’s dream. Not only was he fluent in multiple languages, but he also had an exceptional body of memories to draw upon with an unusually panoramic perspective on the camp. The Nazis had taken great pains to ensure next to no one glimpsed the entire process of mass murder from beginning to end. Admittedly, Rudi had never been in the Sonderkommando , he had never worked inside the crematoria, but he had seen for himself almost every other stage of the sequence that led to that final moment.
And so he testified in the trials of, among others, Hermann Krumey and Otto Hunsche, henchmen to Adolf Eichmann in Budapest. In the course of one of those trials, Rudi’s relations with the presiding judge grew testy. Several times, the judge interrupted his testimony to correct his grammar. Eventually, Rudi had had enough. He declared that if his German was not intelligible on account of his incorrect use of the ‘German version of the conjunctivum cum accusativo ’， then the court was welcome to bring in a Slovak–German translator and they could start again. After that, Rudi reckoned the judge cooled down a bit . In the event, in August 1969, once the trials and subsequent appeals were finally over, Hunsche was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment and Krumey to life.
Sometimes Rudi was not merely a witness, but the initiator of legal proceedings. That pattern too was set a few years earlier. After the war, Rudi had received an extraordinary job offer. The Auschwitz sub-camp known as Buna had become a major industrial centre, just as Himmler dreamed it would, though now under the management of the Polish state rather than the SS. Rudi was invited to take up a post there as an industrial chemist. Though he had travelled to both Poland and Germany, where many of his peers feared to tread, that was too much, even for him. He could not forget the blood that had been shed to build that place. Indeed, far from forgetting, Rudi joined a group of fellow survivors who in 1961 sued the German conglomerate IG Farben, then still trading despite its documented exploitation of slave labour. Rudi and the others demanded backpay for their work constructing the site. A West German court awarded each of them 2,500 Deutschmarks, equivalent at the time to $625, but it issued no demand that the company compensate the families of the slaves who had lost their lives. For IG Farben, the judgment was a great bargain. As Rudi would put it, the corporation had got 90 per cent of the labour they had used for only ‘the pennies they paid’ the Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf H?ss.
In 1963, Rudi set in train proceedings of a different sort, this time against the last SS man he ever spoke to in Auschwitz and one of the brutal trio that oversaw Kanada. Rudi had heard that SS-Unterscharführer Otto Graf was alive and well and, just like the young Adolf Hitler, working as a house painter in Vienna. So unafraid of justice was he, that Graf had seen no need even to change his name. The post-war Austrian desire to hold Nazis to account was not urgent, and it took until 1971, by which time Rudi was in Vancouver, for Graf finally to be arrested and tried on thirty criminal charges. Once again, Rudolf Vrba testified for the prosecution, both as a victim of the accused and, in effect, as an expert witness. Graf was found guilty, but on a charge that had exceeded the statute of limitations .
The prosecution of Graf’s comrade, the man Rudi and the others had known as ‘K?nig’， the King of Kanada, looked to have made similarly little headway. It arose out of the Auschwitz trials that took place in Frankfurt in the mid-1960s, but did not reach a courtroom until 1987. The central charge against Ernst-August K?nig was that in 1943 and 1944 he had been involved in the gassing of more than 21,000 inmates of the so-called Gypsy camp, Camp E, which was just a short walk away from Rudi’s section of Birkenau, Camp A. The charges had been brought against K?nig by a group representing Sinti and Roma people in Germany and they summoned three Auschwitz survivors from Canada to support their case. One of them was Rudolf Vrba.
But when Rudi reached the courthouse in Siegen he saw instantly that the man in the dock was not the vicious overseer he had known in the storehouse of stolen goods of the dead. As he put it, the accused had ‘killed untold numbers of Gypsies but he wasn’t the Kanada K?nig of the SS ’。 The man in the dock, a retired forester who referred to himself as an ‘angel of Auschwitz’， swearing that he had never hurt a soul, was sentenced in 1991 to life imprisonment for killing three Sinti prisoners with his own hands and for aiding in two mass gassings that killed 3,258 others.
And yet the Kanada K?nig who had brutalised the lives of Rudi and the other slaves of the clearing Kommando would not evade the justice system entirely. The trial of his apparent namesake ensnared him too, and in a remarkable way.
One day in court, the prosecution called as a witness against Ernst-August K?nig a man who had become an admired opera singer in the latter’s hometown of Essen. His name was Heinrich-Johannes Kühnemann. Rudi had only to see him take the oath to know that this Kühnemann, happily pointing the finger at the accused, was in fact the K?nig of Kanada. He had been so certain that justice would never find him, he had been prepared to walk into a war crimes trial and testify for the prosecution. He told the court that he had been a guard at Auschwitz, but one who had had nothing to do with killing. On the contrary, he said, he had been popular with the inmates. The judge warned him that he did not have to testify, but Kühnemann was adamant : he had nothing to hide. He did not count on the presence of Rudolf Vrba, the man who had committed to his extraordinary memory every building, every transport and every face he saw in Auschwitz.