Yet others saw a very different man. Despite all that he had witnessed and all that he had endured, Rudolf Vrba had not lost the lust for life, and adventure, that had marked him out as a young teenager. Even when he had next to no money in his pocket, he thought life was to be enjoyed. Leaving London for Vancouver in 1967, he did not take a plane but sailed across the Atlantic to Montreal, then travelled by train from one end of Canada to the other, just for the fun of it.
He loved travel and restaurants, coffee shops and hotels, exploring a new city and an occasional three-hour lunch in the faculty club, and derived an almost childlike pleasure from things others might take for granted: international phone calls, radio and television, antibiotics and painkillers, French wine and Scotch whisky . A ride in a punt down the River Cam, one of his English grandchildren on his lap and a cigarette in his hand, would uncork a broad smile. During a rainstorm, Rudi might look out of the window and exult in his good fortune. ‘Ah, isn’t that beautiful?’ he would say. ‘And we’re inside’ – the voice of a man who had known nakedness in the bitterest Polish winter.
He could be vain about his appearance. He had always liked to look his best and so he might change clothes several times in the course of a single day, even when there was no one around to impress but his own family.
His sense of humour could be goofy. He liked practical jokes. Thanks to his accent and his looks, he could hoodwink strangers into believing he was anything he wanted them to believe. He once told a gaggle of attractive women surrounding him on a cruise ship that he was from Iran, a cousin of a Persian prince: they were intrigued. In Vienna, a German man, on hearing Rudi was from Canada, assumed he must have been indigenous, an ‘Indian’。 Rudi played along and, asked how he came to have such good German, explained that the tradition of his tribe was that the firstborn son of a chief , like him, would always learn the language of Goethe. The German thought that was a most admirable custom.
Those whom he allowed in saw that Rudolf Vrba had not been defeated by life. On the contrary, he savoured it. And yet his resilience would soon be tested once more, by the event that Rudi considered the worst experience he ever endured. It did not take place in Auschwitz nor in the 1940s. It happened on the other side of the world.
29
Flowers of Emptiness
F OR MOST OF their lives, Rudolf Vrba had been a long-distance father to his daughters, Helena and Zuza. He would see them on trips to England, or on return visits to Vancouver, but most of the relationship was conducted via holiday postcards, letters and the occasional phone call. They would write to him – Dear Tata, GRRREAT!! to hear you are coming over – and he would write back, encouraging them in their studies or dispensing fatherly advice. Once Helena reached her mid-twenties, the relationship with Rudi hit a rough patch. The letters became more infrequent until, for a three-year period, they stopped altogether. Rudi had a string of grievances: Helena had not thanked him for a birthday present, merely banking the cheque he had sent ‘as if I were a rich and foolish American uncle ’; she had stayed in closer touch with Gillian , an ex-girlfriend of Rudi’s, than she had with him; he had been the last to know that Helena had qualified as a doctor, apparently because he was not ‘considered worthy ’ of being informed. For her part, Helena had become a strong feminist and regarded her father as an unabashed male chauvinist . Rudi suspected that his elder daughter had absorbed much of the hostility her mother still harboured towards him.
Things turned especially sour in 1979, when Helena, whose physical resemblance to Rudi was by then uncanny, announced her intention to pursue her interest in tropical health research by relocating to Papua New Guinea to study malaria . Rudi was adamantly opposed to the move. His ‘6th sense ’ told him it would be trouble and he conveyed his worry to his daughter directly and graphically. He was a little drunk when he wrote to tell her: ‘This is not a good idea, you’re not a strong enough person. You’re going to come back in a box .’
Helena ignored his advice and headed to the Pacific anyway. She worked in a clinic in the tiny village of Yagaum, and soon fell in love with a colleague, Jim. The trouble was, Jim had a wife back in Australia. In the first days of May 1982, Helena wrote to her sister Zuza, telling her that Jim was about to return home: ‘Right now I’m oscillating between ultra-low and euphoric （？ why）， by Sunday afternoon I expect to reach a pretty stable rock bottom .’ In fact, by 2 p.m. on Sunday 9 May 1982, less than a fortnight away from her thirtieth birthday, Helena Vrbova was dead.
The death certificate recorded the cause as ‘Suspected self-poisoning with drugs’。 She had taken an overdose of the anti-malarial medication chloroquine. Near her body they found a bottle of wine, a third of which had been drunk , and a note. In pale-blue ink, on a lined piece of A4 paper and spaced out like a poem, it was addressed to Jim. ‘Even strong things break ,’ Helena had written. ‘I’ve been grappling with it for some time – hear my fear and cries of despair … I’m not afraid now, only afraid of failing.’ There was a book by her side. It was called Flowers of Emptiness .
Rudi was quite clear that ‘Helena’s death was the worst experience in my life .’ Yes, he explained in a letter to his surviving daughter, whom he would address as Zuzinka, he had faced death, starvation and torture in Auschwitz and, yes, he had witnessed the murder of more than a million people. But the suicide of his firstborn child hit him harder. Because now he was ‘facing a horrible catastrophe without any possibility to fight back’。 Even against the Nazis, he did not feel as powerless as he felt at that moment.
He plunged into a terrible despair. There would be what he called ‘crying fits ’ every day. He found it hard to work and he slept and slept. He would send Zuza long, sometimes rambling letters – one ran to forty-two pages – asking himself the same questions over and over again. Why had Helena done it? Was he somehow to blame? And why had Helena all but severed ties with him in the preceding three years? ‘What did I do wrong ?’ he wrote. ‘Should I have given Helena more from my strength, resilience and love of life? The question nags at me.’
He wondered if he should never have confessed his fears about her decision to head to the Pacific three years earlier. But he could not help himself. ‘When I was in Auschwitz, I had the “illogical” but clearly perceived premonition that I will come out of there alive and I shall have the privilege to do damage to the worst enemy of mankind, to the Nazis,’ he wrote to Zuza. ‘I had a premonition that Helena’s fate is to die in Papua New Guinea, and I cried out loudly at that time.’
He lashed out in all directions. Sometimes at the authorities in Papua New Guinea, sometimes at his ex-wife Gerta – whom he accused of stealing Helena’s letters and papers and spinning ‘a web of shit’ – sometimes at Zuza, who he believed was exhibiting a ‘pathological sentimentality ’ by holding on to Helena’s things. And sometimes he would lambast Helena herself, for being nearly as ‘unscrupulous’ as her mother, as he put it, and for dropping him ‘like an old rag’。
He tried to regain control over his emotions by using the equipment that had served him so well in the past: reason and a scientific mind. Just as he had once made himself a student of escape, so now he would make himself expert in the field of suicide. He bombarded Zuza with research papers from scholarly journals, as he examined the case of Helena in the light of the academic literature. It seemed to boil down to the same key question: was it free will that made a person take their own life, or the biochemistry of their brain? He did a line-by-line textual analysis of the suicide note, running to several pages. He came across research that showed higher suicide rates among those with roots in the former Austro-Hungarian empire and among those qualified in medicine. Since Helena, born in Prague, belonged in both those categories, he wondered if his daughter had been doubly doomed.