A few years after the release of Shoah , the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation asked Rudi to return to Auschwitz to be filmed for a new documentary. It was 1990, the Berlin Wall had come down, Poland was opening up, but Auschwitz was not yet the well-tended museum and memorial site it would become. Birkenau in particular was all but unsecured; it looked like an abandoned wasteland.
Rudi, Robin, the director and a Polish crew had completed a day’s filming, including an unauthorised shoot in Birkenau, when they realised that someone had shut the gates. They were locked into Birkenau. Everyone involved was terrified by the very idea of it, but one man kept calm. With no irony, Rudi said, ‘Don’t worry. I know another way out .’
Throughout these years, whether corresponding with historians or speaking to documentary filmmakers, Vrba was always at pains to mention his fellow escapee, Alfréd Wetzler. But the distance between them had grown since the initial cooling over Fred’s marriage to an Auschwitz survivor.
Politics played a part. Rudi found it astonishing that his old friend could still live in a totalitarian system. He took Fred’s continuing presence in Czechoslovakia to be a form of implicit approval for oppressive communism. He wanted to help him; he even sent money when he could. But the way Rudi saw it, if Fred Wetzler truly loathed life there, he had an option: he could escape. He had done it before.
The Iron Curtain that separated them seemed to have another effect too. Their recollections of the extraordinary deed they had performed together began to diverge. Fred had not set down his story directly, but rather in the form of a novel published under a pseudonym, the same false name he had been given when Walter become Rudolf Vrba: Jozef Lánik. The book was called ?o Dante Nevidel （‘What Dante Didn’t See’） and in it Rudi is recast as Val, a young man who is full of courage, but also hot-headed, even heedless of the consequences of his actions. Fred also gave a couple of interviews, with scholars rather than filmmakers, and it’s through those that the gap in the accounts of the two escapees became most visible.
The former comrades disagreed over details large and small , but the most significant dispute centred, perhaps predictably, on who deserved the credit for devising their scheme. Fred Wetzler felt he had not been given his due, a sentiment echoed to this day by the remnant Jewish community of Slovakia, those who, like him, stayed put. （Some of them like to refer to the ‘Wetzler–Vrba Report’， to give Fred what they believe is the appropriate seniority.） ‘I feel sad about the fact that most of the people turn to Vrba to get essential as well as minor details about our escape,’ he wrote to one historian in 1984. ‘I have never tried to benefit either from the escape or from my participation in the resistance. They live in the west,’ he added, referring to Rudi and other former Auschwitz inmates. ‘They have profited and still profit from the past and put on paper whatever they can. Vrba’s book aroused much outrage among certain prisoners, because he posed as an initiator and leader of the escape. Well, in the west they might believe it.’ Their fellow Auschwitz escapee Arno?t Rosin shared some of Fred’s anger towards Rudi. ‘Vrba writes in his book as though he took Wetzler with him like a suitcase , not as a partner,’ he told a fellow survivor.
And yet, in truth, Fred and Rudi were two men fighting over scraps. Neither of them was famous. Rudi had featured in a handful of documentaries, but considering the feat they had achieved together, they were hardly well known. Even in Israel, the nation that stops once a year to pause and remember the Shoah in silence, Vrba and Wetzler were barely recalled at all. Their story was not taught in schools and Rudi’s memoir was not translated into Hebrew until 1998, and only then thanks to a tireless campaign fought by the Haifa academic Ruth Linn. Even at Yad Vashem, the country’s official Holocaust archive, museum and memorial in Jerusalem, the Auschwitz Report was filed away without the names of its authors. When historians referred to the report, they tended to speak of ‘two young escapees’ or ‘two Slovak escapees ’ as if the identities of the men who had performed this remarkable deed were incidental.
What might explain this relative lack of recognition? It certainly did not help Wetzler that he was out of sight of western writers and historians and, therefore, mostly out of mind. As for Rudi, while he was accessible, and a model interviewee, he was not an easy sell in Israel or in the mainstream Jewish diaspora. Those audiences would have thrilled to hear the story of his escape and his mission to tell the world of Auschwitz, but he never left it at that. He would not serve up a morally comfortable narrative in which the only villains were the Nazis. Instead he always insisted on hitting out at Kasztner and the Hungarian Jewish leadership, as well as the Jewish council in Slovakia. He faulted them for failing to pass on his report and, in the Slovak case, for compiling the lists that had put him on a deportation train in the first place.
What made Rudi a more awkward witness still was his tendency to refer to the Jews whom he blamed as ‘Zionists’。 As it happened, Rudolf Vrba was a supporter of Israel and rooted for it : he believed that the existence of the state of Israel was a good thing for Jews and for the world. But he could not contain his anger against those Zionists who he felt had betrayed the Jewish people, starting with Kasztner and, in his view, the early Israeli leaders who had stood by him.
It was quite true that Kasztner was a Zionist, as were some of the Working Group who took down Fred and Rudi’s account in ?ilina and whom Rudi castigated for failing immediately to inform the remaining Jews of Slovakia. But so too were several of the heroes in the men’s story. George Mantello, the unlikely envoy for El Salvador who helped get the report to the world’s press, was a Zionist. So was Moshe Krausz, the head of the Palestine office in the Hungarian capital who passed on the copy that eventually reached Mantello and who later played a pivotal role alongside Raoul Wallenberg in the ‘protective passport’ scheme that saved tens of thousands of Budapest Jews. Rudi’s fellow escapee Arno?t Rosin was a Zionist, as was Josef Weiss, the friend who helped make samizdat copies of the report in Bratislava. It was also the case that several of those who were deceived, misinformed or betrayed by Kasztner were the Hungarian leader’s comrades in Zionism. Meanwhile, some of those Jews who, in Rudi’s estimation, made selfish or immoral choices were either non-or anti-Zionists. Rudi was hugely critical of Fül?p Freudiger, for example, a Jewish leader who, like Kasztner, negotiated his own exit from Hungary. He was an orthodox Jew with no ties to Zionism. In other words, the Zionist movement, like every other, produced both saints and sinners while under the Nazi jackboot. The human responses to the horror of the Third Reich were varied and seldom ran on ideological lines.
Nevertheless, Rudi tended to use the word ‘Zionism’ sweepingly, as shorthand for those Jews in authority who he believed had done him, and Jews like him, wrong. He never advanced a substantial argument for why Zionist ideology might have led the likes of Kasztner to act the way they did, beyond a hinted suggestion that Zionism was prepared to sacrifice the mass of European Jewry in order to salvage a remnant that would then establish a Jewish state in Palestine. It would have been hard to make such an argument, given that plenty of Zionists had stretched every sinew to thwart the Nazis and save Jewish lives, most notably the young Zionists who led the armed resistance in the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos and elsewhere. But given how toxic a case Kasztner’s became, seized upon decades later by the most unbending anti-Zionists in Europe and the US as evidence of the supposedly inherent evils of Jewish nationalism, handing a platform to Rudolf Vrba may have come to seem like a risk.