At times he doubted that it had been a suicide at all. The coroner had delivered an open verdict and Rudi – and Gerta, for that matter – thought there were some loose ends. Rudi wanted the note found by Helena’s body to be submitted for handwriting analysis, just to be sure the words were hers. And he was frustrated that the post-mortem samples were lost, which meant there was no chance of having a pathologist in London establish the cause of death. He asked Zuza to look back through Helena’s letters, searching for ‘hidden clues’。 He also spotted what he regarded as ‘irregularities’ in Helena’s bank statements. ‘Did she have any particular enemies in PNG ?’ he asked her former colleagues in Papua New Guinea.
Perhaps others would have been less questioning of that verdict, especially in light of a fact that had been withheld from Rudi until now: Helena had made a suicide attempt, or something close to it, more than a decade earlier. Aged sixteen, she had cut her wrists. An older man was involved and it happened in, of all places, Germany. But no one had told Rudi, which only added to his fury.
Still, Rudolf Vrba struggled to accept as the truth what others regarded as obvious. Two elements of his past created an additional dread of what it would mean to conclude that his daughter had taken her own life. The most obvious was Auschwitz.
‘Now what’s going to happen’， he told his wife, ‘is they’re going to say, “Because her father was a Holocaust survivor, that’s why she committed suicide .”’ He did not want Helena to be seen as a delayed victim of the Nazis, Hitler reaching into the second generation. He thought it was a nonsense.
But there might have been another, even earlier fear at work. At least two Vrba relatives told Robin that Rudi’s father had not died of a viral infection, as he had always been led to believe. Elias Rosenberg had, they said, killed himself, driven to despair by an economic depression that saw him lose his sawmill . It would make a cruel kind of sense of a remark a group of local villagers had called out to the infant Walter as he headed home on that fateful day and which he had never forgotten: ‘Hey, Jew! Your father’s risen from the dead,’ they had said. Did that mean Elias had seemingly survived a failed suicide attempt when the neighbours taunted his son, only to die a few hours later? Rudi refused to believe it.
Perhaps he shrank from both those explanations because they would have made him somehow responsible for the fate of his daughter, if not through his experience then through his genes. He wanted nothing to do with the nihilism that suicide represented, and which clashed with his own determination to live life and live it fully. He described suicide as a ‘ricocheting bullet’ : it did not take only one life, but hit anybody who was close.
For month after month, year after year, he turned it over and over. It obsessed him. He told himself that he put on a good front. He felt sure colleagues had no idea what he was going through. But it would not have taken much to guess. When he was tasked with interviewing would-be medical students for admission to the University of British Columbia, the subject he chose to grill them on was suicide. One applicant was reduced to tears.
His daughter’s death shook what had been core convictions. Rudi had broken from religion as a child, but now he was invoking ‘my Creator’， whose ‘incredible mercy … brought me out of a hell where many better ones than I perished in a horrible death’， and writing that he had received a ‘message’ that Helena had been summoned by a ‘Higher Call’。 He told Zuza that he was praying and said that they both needed to return to normality because their pain and grief was disturbing Helena’s ‘soul’ .
The usually matter-of-fact scientist, the man who had catalogued mass murder in the coolly detached language of the statistician, could now not bring himself even to use the vocabulary of death. He would speak instead of Helena’s ‘departure’。 As he entered his sixties, everything that had once seemed solid was melting.
And yet he was not beaten. In 1990, eight years after Helena’s death and following the fall of communism, Rudi returned at last to the land of his birth. He was not sure how safe it was – he covered up his Auschwitz tattoo with a plaster, just in case – but he could walk around the streets and neighbourhoods that had once been home. During one of those walks, he seemed to have a moment of clarity. Robin and Rudi were about to discuss the perennial topic yet again, the same circular conversation – did she or did she not commit suicide? – when he suddenly stepped out of the circle. He stopped the discussion, just like that. He did not want to do it any more. Finally, thought Robin, the healing had begun.
Not for the first time in his life, Rudolf Vrba had been knocked to the ground, felled by a blow that would have destroyed many, if not most, others. And, not for the first time, he had found the strength to get back up again. He had survived – and he wanted to live.
30
Too Many to Count
T HE 1980S AND 1990s brought slightly more recognition than Rudi had had before, whether from his appearance in Shoah or in the witness box at the Zündel trial or the gradual thawing in relations with those who had previously kept a chilly distance. Haifa University awarded him that honorary doctorate in 1998; a year earlier the Vancouver Jewish community invited him to be the guest speaker at a major event to remember Kristallnacht, the ‘night of broken glass’ in November 1938 when Nazis and their supporters ran riot, smashing the shop windows of Jewish-owned businesses and torching hundreds of synagogues. Rudi spoke about what, for him, was a shamefully neglected aspect of Nazism’s war on the Jews: its function as a money-earner, stealing from the Jews everything they owned – their cash, their property, the hair on their heads, the gold in their teeth.
There was satisfaction to be drawn from that invitation and others, but it was still clear that the unimaginable achievement Rudi and his old friend from Trnava had pulled off was only faintly recognised. In 1988, Fred Wetzler had died in Bratislava, ‘bitter, drunk and forgotten’ , as Vrba’s Israeli defender Ruth Linn put it. In his last years, Fred worked in a local library. Occasionally, a reader might pick up C? o Dante Nevidel by ‘Jozef Lánik’， marvelling at the heroism of the story within. The librarian would never let on that Lánik was him , that it was he who had escaped from Auschwitz.
Now it was Rudi alone who carried the memory of their mission. The escape had been predicated on three assumptions. First came the belief that the outside world had no knowledge of the horrors of the Final Solution, that Planet Auschwitz was in a permanent state of eclipse, with those who lived on earth always in the dark. Second was the related conviction that, since the only reason the Allies had not acted to halt the killing was their ignorance of it, the instant they knew of the slaughter they would surely move to end it. Third, and most important for Rudi especially, was an iron faith that once Jews themselves understood what Auschwitz meant, they would refuse to board the deportation trains and, by that refusal, they would gum up the Nazi machinery of death that had, until then, been lubricated by deception and secrecy.
In the last decades of his life, all three of those certainties would be shaken.
To be sure, Rudi never found reason to waver in his view that one part of the outside world – the Jews – knew nothing of Auschwitz. Rudi had seen that for himself. Talking to the new arrivals who were selected for slave labour as he registered them in the quarantine camp, he never once met a prisoner who knew anything about the gas chambers of Auschwitz before their train pulled in. And that position was repeatedly confirmed in the post-war years. Yehuda Bauer might argue that ‘Large numbers of Hungarian Jews were aware of the mass murder in Poland,’ that they had picked up the essential facts from rumour or reports, but Elie Wiesel spoke for many survivors, and for many more victims, when he wrote plainly, ‘We had no inkling of what awaited us at Auschwitz.’ The name of the place did not ‘stir any memories or evoke any fear ’。 Wiesel was one of those Hungarian Jews kept forever uninformed, even after Fred and Rudi escaped and wrote their report. As Wiesel put it, ‘Nobody cared enough to tell us: Don’t go.’