So Rudi saw nothing to shift his conviction that the Jews of Europe did not know what the Nazis had in store for them. But as the years went by, he would discover that the rest of the world was not nearly as ignorant as he and Fred had assumed when they held their breath in that hole in the ground.
Of course, the Nazi ambition to rid the world of Jews was scarcely a secret. The front-page headline of the Los Angeles Examiner on 23 November 1938, a fortnight after Kristallnacht, had proclaimed: ‘Nazis Warn World Jews Will Be Wiped Out Unless Evacuated by Democracies’。 Adolf Hitler himself had all but announced it on 30 January 1942 when he declared that ‘the result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews ’。 Over the next year, the Allies saw and heard enough evidence to know that this was no mere aspiration. By December 1942, as Rudi and the other prisoners were forced to sing ‘Stille Nacht’ to their SS captors, the Polish government in exile had published an address to the embryonic United Nations titled, ‘The Mass Extermination of Jews in German-Occupied Poland’。
The most powerful Allied leaders had received direct, eyewitness testimony of the Nazis’ war on the Jews. By 1943 both Anthony Eden and Franklin Roosevelt had sat with Jan Karski, a non-Jewish Pole of aristocratic bearing who had gone undercover into the Warsaw Ghetto （twice） as well as into the Izbica transit camp, and whose reports had formed the basis for that address to the UN. Karski described mass shootings, as well as the loading of Jews on to goods trucks which were then sent to ‘special camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor’， purportedly for the sake of resettlement. ‘Once there, the so-called “settlers” are mass murdered,’ Karski wrote. In December 1942, Eden took to the floor of the House of Commons to read a declaration agreed by all twelve Allied nations, condemning the ‘bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination’ pursued by the Nazis, one that had now been confirmed by ‘numerous reports’。 Members of parliament stood in silence to show their support. Soon afterwards, in 1943, the Vatican learned that the toll of Jewish victims of the Nazis was running into the millions: Rome had been kept informed by its apostolic nuncio in Istanbul, Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII.
All of this Rudi would discover in the decades after the war, much of it set out by Martin Gilbert in Auschwitz and the Allies , for which Rudi had been a key interviewee. Gilbert laid bare the fact that London, Washington and others did, after all, know about the Nazi attempt to eliminate the Jews of Europe. But he went further, taking apart the second of the beliefs that had driven Fred and Rudi to escape: the notion that, once the Allies were informed of the Nazi slaughter of the Jews, they would act.
Naturally, Rudi was fully aware of the Allied failure to bomb Auschwitz or the railway tracks that led to the camp, even after he and Fred had smuggled out their report. But, thanks to Gilbert, Rudi began to understand what lay behind that inaction, and to see how wrong he had been to believe that it was only a lack of information that had stayed the Allies’ hand. Gilbert showed there were political and military considerations, of course, but part of the explanation was ‘scepticism and disbelief … and even prejudice’ . The latter fed the former. ‘Familiar stuff,’ read one Colonial Office memo, written in London on 7 December 1942, responding to reports of mass killing: ‘The Jews have spoilt their case by laying it on too thick for years past.’ The full text of the Vrba–Wetzler Report had itself elicited a similar response at the Foreign Office. ‘Although a usual Jewish exaggeration is to be taken into account,’ wrote Ian Henderson on 26 August 1944, ‘these statements are dreadful.’ Less than a fortnight later, a colleague in the same department would write, ‘In my opinion a disproportionate amount of the time of the Office is wasted on dealing with these wailing Jews .’ The nineteen-year-old Walter Rosenberg had not bargained on any of that.
As the twentieth century ended and the new century began, and as the archives opened up, there was to be another blow to what had been the driving faith of Fred and Rudi. In Gilbert’s account, whatever else was known about the wider Final Solution, Auschwitz itself had remained the ‘unknown destination’ or, almost as vague, ‘somewhere in the east’， closed with a watertight seal: no knowledge had seeped out. That was certainly true of the Jews shipped to the camp, who knew nothing, and of the global public, whether in Switzerland, Britain, the US or beyond, who had barely heard the word ‘Auschwitz’ until Fred and Rudi’s report surfaced in the newspapers in late June 1944.
But new research published some two decades after Gilbert’s book showed that, in the governing circles of London and Washington, the veil of ignorance was much thinner. Word of Auschwitz and its function had been reaching Polish exile groups since 1942, brought out via members of the Polish underground, including non-Jewish prisoners who had managed to escape from the camp: the likes of Stanis?aw Jaster, who in June 1942 smuggled out an account that referred to the killing of Jews, or the resistance fighter Witold Pilecki, who had sent out information mentioning the murder of Jews before his escape in April 1943. What’s more, that word had reached those with the power to make decisions.
Admittedly, the Polish government in exile, headquartered in London, did not do much to publicise what it knew. That was partly because of the influence of hardline nationalists who preferred to play down Jewish suffering, and partly because the exiled Poles took their cue from a British government which chose to push the Nazi slaughter of the Jews to the margins of its propaganda effort , lest it diminish public support for the war. （Whitehall wanted Britons to be in no doubt that they were fighting the war for their own sakes, not to save Jewish lives.） What appeared publicly of this Polish intelligence tended to be piecemeal and fragmentary. Even in their raw, unpublished form, the Polish accounts did not match the scope, detail or depth of the Vrba–Wetzler Report. They did not carry the same weight and none had anything like the impact. Nevertheless, they did exist and perhaps as many as thirty-five of them reached the west ahead of Fred and Rudi’s testimony; some of their findings occasionally made it into the newspapers. And yet the officials and others who were informed about Auschwitz did not act on what they knew, usually for the same reasons that Gilbert had already identified: the focus on other wartime goals, an impatience with the Jews, often shaped by bigotry, and a scepticism that such horrors could really be happening at all. When Churchill wrote to his deputy to ask, ‘What can we do? What can we say?’ it is at least conceivable that he was expressing not speechless horror, but rather a politician’s practical need for advice now that what was once secret knowledge was becoming public.
Late in life, then, Rudi had to confront the fact that his younger self had been wrong to believe that the Allies did not know, and wrong to believe that they would come to the rescue of the Jews if they had. But he could cling to one last conviction: that if the Jews of Hungary had only known what he and Fred knew and had written down in their report, then they would have refused to go to their deaths.
Rudi held fast to that belief, and yet in his later years that too would be challenged. Several historians argued that, even if Rezs? Kasztner and the others had not sat on the Vrba–Wetzler Report, it would have made little difference. Resistance would have been impossible given the absence of Jewish men of fighting age, the lack of weapons, a flat landscape that allowed few places to hide and a local population that was either indifferent or hostile to its Jewish neighbours. Rudi had an answer to all of that. Jews did not need to organise a formal resistance to thwart or slow the Nazi operation: even a chaotic, panicked refusal to go, a stampede on the railway platform, would have been enough. It would have forced the Nazis to hunt deer rather than sheep.