Kühnemann was tried in the regional court of Duisberg from 1991 to 1993, with Rudi once again summoned to the witness box. But the SS man would not serve time in jail, or even receive a sentence. The trial was stopped in 1993 on medical grounds: the tormentor of Kanada was too sick.
Rudi was on the other side of the world. He had a young wife to whom he had insisted that he found the subject of Auschwitz a bore. And yet Auschwitz would not let him go. As the decades went by, his scientific work slowed down. In those years in Prague and Carshalton, he had been prolific, publishing twenty-three full papers in scholarly journals in little more than fifteen years. In Vancouver, he would write just eight more in three decades. Appointed as an associate professor in 1967, he was never promoted. He held that same rank until his retirement.
But his war against the old enemy never flagged, even if he waged it now from his office in British Columbia. He was in touch with the Viennese Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, especially about those war criminals who had made it to Canada, among them Josef Nemsila, a former officer of Slovakia’s fascist Hlinka Guard who died before he could be tried for commanding a unit that had deported Jews to Auschwitz and killed Slovak civilians. Rudi and Wiesenthal were in touch too about Mikulás Polhora-Pomfy, whom Wiesenthal believed had been the commander of Rudi’s first place of detention, the transit camp at Nováky.
One target Rudi pursued with particular intensity was Joseph Kirschbaum, who had entered Canada in the 1960s despite his past service as secretary general of the Hlinka People’s Party. Happily living in Toronto, where he worked as an historian and leading light in the Canadian Slovak League, Kirschbaum had been one of the officials who met Adolf Eichmann in Bratislava in November 1938 to discuss solving Slovakia’s ‘Jewish problem’ . Rudi tracked both his wartime record in Europe and his new life in North America, gathering enough material to fill four thick files.
In Auschwitz, Rudi had understood, perhaps more swiftly than others, that an essential part of the Nazis’ method, one that made the process of mass murder possible, was their denial that they were engaged in any such activity. Deception was integral to the operation: the lie that Jews were not being killed at all but merely resettled helped the killing proceed. At the heart of the crime, from the start, was a confidence trick.
In the decades after the war, Rudi came to realise that the denial had not stopped. It just presented itself differently. He had seen it in a mild form in communist Czechoslovakia, where it was taboo to mention that the Nazis had singled out Jews for elimination or even that Czech Jewish children had been murdered in gas chambers. But now, in Vancouver, he saw it florid and unabashed.
He had already been in contact with everyone from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the Office of Special Investigations of the US Justice Department in the 1970s to discuss the burgeoning phenomenon of Holocaust denial. He kept tabs on Robert Faurisson in France, Wilhelm St?glich in Germany and Arthur Butz in the US, but his most direct encounter was with the German-born Ernst Zündel, who had made his home in Toronto. In 1985, Zündel was tried under the criminal code for spreading false news by publishing a tract called Did Six Million Really Die? Though Zündel was in the dock, in reality it was the truth of the Holocaust that was on trial. Rudolf Vrba would be one of the central witnesses.
He was questioned for hour after hour. With the exception of his memoir, those several days in a Toronto courtroom represented the fullest chance Rudi would ever get to bear witness to what he had seen and what he had done. He was given the floor to describe in detail his spell in Buna, the typhus outbreak, his work in Kanada and on the Judenrampe , the selections, the barracks and the roll calls, as well as his escape and the report he co-wrote. ‘I escaped and warned the world ,’ he told the court.
Once again, the atmosphere was testy. Rudi’s antagonist this time was not the judge but the lawyer for the accused, Doug Christie. His approach was to poke and probe Rudi’s account, starting with his autobiography: if he could prove that this text, authored by a vocal Auschwitz survivor, was unreliable, well, then surely the Holocaust itself could no longer be regarded as the truth. Christie pressed and pressed at what he thought were inconsistencies in the narrative. He was sceptical about the escape. Once out of the woodpile, could it really be true that Fred and Rudi had navigated their way out of the camp, just like that?
‘That’s right,’ said Rudi.
‘Without a compass.’
‘That’s right.’
‘In the dark.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Over territory you had never been.’
‘That’s right.’
When under fire, in that courtroom or elsewhere, Rudi often resorted to sarcasm. Christie challenged Vrba on his conviction that, since he had seen thousands enter the gas chambers, they had all been killed. How could he be so sure? ‘A quarter million people go in and I never saw one civilian come out,’ Rudi replied. ‘So it is possible that they are still there, or that there is a tunnel and they are now in China; otherwise they were gassed .’ If Christie got the geography or timeline of Auschwitz wrong, Rudi would pounce. ‘You would help me if you would do your homework,’ he told him, a college professor admonishing a dull student .
There were setbacks. Rudi had to admit that his 1963 memoir had allowed itself some ‘artistic ’ licence, that it was more akin to a court reporter’s sketch than a photograph, more a set of recollections than a work of scholarly, footnoted history. Perhaps he was too proud to suggest what was surely obvious to any reader of the book: that while the story was faithfully Rudi’s, the prose was the work of Alan Bestic, a supremely skilled Fleet Street journalist of the old school.
Overall though, Rudi kept remarkably controlled. He was a commanding presence in the courtroom, repeatedly leaving the witness box to stand at an overhead projector, pointer in hand, as he guided the jury around diagrams and sketches he had made of the death camp. His recall was exceptional and consistent. When urged to return to the topic in hand by the judge, he was unfailingly polite and, just as often, charming. For Rudi was doing what he had itched to do when he was a teenager. He was standing up and telling the world the truth of Auschwitz.
At the trial’s end, Zündel was pronounced guilty .
28
I Know a Way Out
S OME OF THE foremost chroniclers of the Holocaust sought out Rudi, understanding that he was perhaps uniquely well placed to testify to the modus operandi of Auschwitz-Birkenau. He became a cherished source of Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill, whose 1981 book Auschwitz and the Allies had the Vrba–Wetzler Report at last revealing to Washington and London the true function of the death factory, triggering the fateful debate in both capitals over the rights and wrongs of bombing the railway tracks that led to the camp. In the previous decade, Rudi was interviewed for two acclaimed, though very different, documentaries. First came the British-made television series The World at War , which devoted one episode to the Nazis’ attempted annihilation of the Jews and in which Rudi gave off a brooding, movie-star charisma. Next came Shoah , the nine-and-a-half-hour epic by Claude Lanzmann. The French director interviewed Rudi for nearly four hours in November 1978 – though the film would not be released for another seven years – much of it outdoors, on the streets of New York, with Rudi in a tan-leather overcoat. On screen, Vrba is, once again, a striking presence. With his thick dark hair and heavy eyebrows, he could pass for Al Pacino in Scarface . In one sequence, Lanzmann asks Vrba about the mechanics of Auschwitz, how the Jews were unloaded off the trains and on to the trucks that would take them to the gas chambers. In a central European accent unaltered by a decade in North America, Rudi gives detailed, evocative answers. But he also makes what for him was always the crucial point: ‘The whole murder machinery could work on one principle: that the people came to Auschwitz and didn’t know where they were going and for what purpose. The new arrivals were supposed to be kept orderly and, without panic , marching into the gas chambers.’