Nor was Rudi much minded to soften his message to make it more palatable. On the contrary, he often used venomous language. In private correspondence, he alleged that one widely admired leader of the Slovak Working Group, a woman who was eventually murdered in Auschwitz, ‘participated in treason and conspiracy against the unfortunate Jewish victims. This she did in the service of the Nazis, possibly in cooperation with the Nazi-dominated Zionist and rabbinical clique.’ He speculated that Kasztner, like Hitler, believed in ‘a master race’。 An otherwise sympathetic student interviewer for the Harvard Crimson in 1974 concluded that Rudi not only harboured a ‘deep bitterness’ but was ‘anti-Zionist, anti-communist, and even somewhat anti-Semitic , particularly with respect to American Jews’。
The problem was sharpest in Israel. When Ruth Linn sought to twin the belated publication of Rudi’s memoirs in Hebrew with the award of an honorary doctorate at Haifa University, she encountered trenchant opposition. At the conference ahead of the award ceremony, with Rudi in attendance preparing to be honoured, one scholar read out a letter of protest. Several historians wrote to the Israeli press, praising the heroism of the 1944 escape but setting out their misgivings about Vrba （as well as suggesting that if garlands were being handed out, then Fred Wetzler’s contribution should be recognised too）。 Some of Vrba’s antagonists were motivated by the belief that there was still a case to make for Kasztner’s defence. Others, especially Israeli historians of Slovak Jewish origin, took exception to Rudi’s attacks on the Jewish leadership in Bratislava, which they believed had done all it could in the face of a morally hideous predicament.
Rudi’s best-known critic was the doyen of Israeli Holocaust historians, Yehuda Bauer. Though he would later describe Vrba as ‘a genuine hero of the Holocaust ’， Bauer also found him ‘arrogant ’ and believed Rudi’s ‘deep hatred for the Jewish leadership, Zionism, etc.’ coloured his judgement. He strongly objected to Rudi’s insistence, maintained over many decades, that the leadership in Budapest could have made all the difference if they had only passed on what they knew to the ordinary Jews in the Hungarian provinces who, being uninformed, climbed aboard trains that took them to their deaths. Bauer’s view was that those Jews in the Hungarian countryside were not uninformed: even without sight of the Vrba–Wetzler Report, there were enough fragments of information around, including via soldiers returning from the front, for them to have worked out that deportation meant death. The problem, he argued, was not inadequate publication of information so much as inadequate absorption of it. Hungary’s Jews had not internalised the information they had received in such a way that it became converted into knowledge . They had not turned it into a conviction that might be a spur to action.
Rudi did not reject that quasi-philosophical argument about the nature of knowledge on theoretical grounds. He simply believed that in this particular case it rested on a flawed factual premise: in his view, the Jews of Hungary had simply not had enough information to go on. They had been denied the facts.
Rudi got his honorary doctorate and the belated translation of his memoirs. But those many years in which Israel’s pre-eminent scholars kept their distance took their toll. They played a part in preventing him from entering the pantheon of revered survivors of the Holocaust. He corresponded with the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, and in The World at War TV documentary his contribution appeared straight after a clip of Primo Levi. But he did not have their fame. Some of that is because they were writers and he was not. But some of it is down to something subtler. Rudolf Vrba refused to conform to what the world expects of a Holocaust survivor.
You can see it in the Lanzmann film, Shoah . The other speakers look like old men, bent and broken by experience. They speak in soft voices, as if awed by what they have witnessed. But Rudi is tanned, fit and vigorous. His voice is loud and confident. He seems a generation younger than all the others; it is hard to believe he had lived through the same events thirty-five years earlier. He deploys sardonic, sarcastic humour. And he smiles, as if amused by the lunatic absurdity of what he is describing, even when speaking about the unspeakable. Lanzmann, as interviewer, remarks upon it. ‘Why do you smile so often when you talk about this?’ he asks. ‘What should I do?’ Rudi says in reply. ‘Should I cry ?’
Rudi knew that he was refusing to fit what he called ‘the survivor clichés manufactured for the taste of a certain type of public’： he would offer no uplifting aphorisms, reassuring his audience that, ultimately, human beings were good. He was unforgiving and he was angry. The result was to make Rudolf Vrba, for the best part of three decades, a peripheral figure even in the small world of Holocaust remembrance in Vancouver.
His message was awkward and he was a discomfiting messenger. For years, he had nothing to do with collective Jewish life in the city that had become his home, and not only because he had severed all ties with religious practice and almost never set foot inside a synagogue. He also carried an automatic suspicion of those in charge. At a ceremony to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, he lambasted the Vancouver Jewish community so vehemently, those present wondered if he was speaking about them or the wartime leaders in Budapest that he felt had betrayed him .
When the organisers of an annual symposium on the Holocaust for high-school students, held at Rudi’s own university, put together a panel of survivors, they did not invite Rudi. They did not trust him to speak to 500 sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds without serving up the familiar brew of ‘accusations and rage ’。 The way the organisers saw it, the other survivors could be relied on to tell their stories without any political comment; they would not use their talks as a means to assuage their anger. Those in charge could not say the same about Rudolf Vrba.
And yet Rudi would turn up at the symposium all the same. He would stand outside the lecture hall – dapper in leather coat and fedora, a feather in its band – peeking in, watching the proceedings from a distance. He would linger for a while, and then quietly leave. And he did that year after year.
It meant that many of those who worked closely with Rudolf Vrba did not know the central fact of his life. One of his colleagues became very upset after chancing upon Rudi in Shoah when the film was screened on Canadian television. He asked if all the terrible things Vrba had described in the film were true. ‘I don’t know,’ Rudi said, adding acidly, ‘I was only an actor reciting my lines .’
He was guarded about discussing his past, and highly selective about those with whom he would do it. Once a conversation on the topic had begun, there was no guarantee it would be easy. When discussing the Holocaust, Rudi would often let loose a torrent of words, a monologue that brooked no interruption , repeatedly returning to the same theme: the betrayal committed by Kasztner and those who had failed to spread the word. Colleagues found that Rudi could be abrasive, aggressive and arrogant and, when on his territory, insistent on being in charge. When talking, he might grab your arm, intensifying the point he was making. Some speculated that Rudolf Vrba had never been promoted above the rank of associate professor not because his field of research was no longer at the cutting edge, but because his behaviour could be insufferably difficult. Others wondered if Rudi was shy or even anxious. They noted how he steered clear of big gatherings, that he did not seem to socialise much, that while he had colleagues he seemed to have few close friends.