But there was one objection which struck with greater force, partly because of its source. Not long after the release of Shoah , Rudi met a man who had seen him in the Lanzmann film and who travelled to Vancouver all the way from his home in Sweden to thank him personally. This man believed Rudolf Vrba had saved his life. His name was Georg Klein. More than forty years earlier he had been Gy?rgy Klein, working as a junior secretary for the Jewish Council in Budapest.
A turning point had come in late May or early June 1944, when Klein’s boss, a rabbi member of the Judenrat , had told him of a ‘highly secret document’ that the council had received. It was a report written by young Slovak Jews who had escaped from one of the annihilation camps in Poland. The rabbi would show it to Gy?rgy, on condition that his young aide tell no one but his closest friends and family what it contained. He then handed Gy?rgy a copy, in Hungarian and on carbon paper, of the Vrba–Wetzler Report.
As he read it, Klein felt a mixture of nausea and intellectual satisfaction. The former because he now knew the fate of his grandmother and uncles who had been deported, and the latter because he knew that what he was reading was the truth. ‘The dry, factual, nearly scientific language, the dates, the numbers, the maps and the logic of the narrative,’ Klein would write later, ‘it made sense. Nothing else made sense .’
Klein went immediately to see his uncle, a rheumatologist whose practice was just across the street. Klein, who was still a teenager, told him what he had read. His uncle’s reaction astonished him. The older man became so angry, he came close to hitting his nephew. ‘His face got red; he shook his head and raised his voice.’ How could Gy?rgy believe such nonsense? It was unthinkable, impossible.
Gy?rgy visited other relatives and friends, passing on what he had read in the Auschwitz Report. Soon a pattern emerged. Those who were young believed it and began to make plans to evade the deportations. But the middle aged, those who, like his uncle, had dependants, careers and property – those who had much to lose – refused to believe what they were hearing. The idea of abandoning all they had, of going underground, of living on false papers or making for the border in the dead of night – the very idea of it seemed to prevent them from believing. Gy?rgy himself only finally made his escape when he was taken to a railway station and could see the cattle trucks waiting for him . He remembered the words he had read on those sheets of carbon paper and, even at the risk of being shot, he made a run for it.
More than four decades later, Klein was sitting in the faculty club of the University of British Columbia with his unknowing saviour. Georg told Rudi that he, Georg, was proof that, even if the Vrba–Wetzler Report had been distributed as Rudi had wanted, it would not have brought the result he craved. Of the dozen or so middle-aged people Klein had warned, not one had believed him .
The two men argued the point back and forth. Rudi insisted that Georg had been disbelieved because he was young: it would have been different if the Auschwitz Report had been circulated by the trusted Jewish leadership. Georg countered that those who were not young would never have taken action, no matter who had given the warning. They were used to obeying the law. To disobey meant exposing their children, in the critical moment on the railway platform, to the certainty of being gunned down. No parent would risk that, even if they had been told that death awaited them at the end of the line. ‘Denial was the most natural escape .’
Round and round they went. Rudi never retreated from his view that those Jews who boarded the trains at least had the right to make an informed decision, a right they were denied by those who kept them in darkness, those who hid the evidence he had given everything to reveal. Georg stuck to his position that very few would have acted any differently, even if their right to know had been honoured.
As it happened, the argument made by Georg Klein was not wholly new to Rudi. He had had reason before to contemplate this difficult but stubborn fact: that human beings find it almost impossible to conceive of their own death.
After all, one of Rudi’s fellow Auschwitz escapees had encountered this phenomenon directly and within months of his escape. In a desperate turn of events, Czes?aw Mordowicz was caught by the Gestapo in late 1944 and put on a transport that would send him back to Auschwitz. Inside the cattle truck, he told his fellow deportees that he knew what awaited them. ‘Listen,’ he pleaded, ‘you are going to your death .’ Czes?aw urged the people jammed into the wagon to join him and jump off the moving train. They refused. Instead they began shouting, banging on the doors and calling the German guards. They attacked Mordowicz and beat him so badly, he was all but incapacitated. He never did leap off that train, but ended up back in Birkenau. All because he had given a warning that the warned could not believe and did not want to hear.
Even among the prisoners inside Auschwitz, where the air was choked with the smoke of incinerating human flesh, there were those who refused to believe what they could see and smell. A former slave to Josef Mengele described how prisoners who knew only too well what happened in the gas chambers repressed that knowledge when the hour came to line up for their own execution. Even the young Walter Rosenberg had done it, when he first handled the suitcases and clothes of the dead in Kanada, pushing out of his mind his ‘vague suspicions’ about the owners of those stolen goods and their fate.
A horror is especially hard to comprehend if no one has ever witnessed anything like it before. When Jan Karski, the undercover operative, visited Washington to brief President Roosevelt on the Nazis’ assault upon the Jews, he also met Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter. Karski told the judge what he had seen in Poland. Frankfurter listened for twenty minutes before finally saying, ‘I do not believe you.’ A diplomat in the room began to defend Karski’s credibility, prompting the judge to explain himself. ‘I did not say that he is lying . I said that I don’t believe him. These are different things. My mind and my heart are made in such a way that I cannot accept it. No. No. No.’
After the war, Hannah Arendt admitted that when she read the New York Times despatch from Geneva, revealing the key facts of the Vrba–Wetzler Report, she and her husband ‘didn’t believe it’。 Her husband thought it ‘could not be true because killing civilians did not make any military sense ’。
Walter’s escape had been built on his initial conviction that facts could save lives, that information would be the weapon with which he would thwart the Nazi plan to eliminate the Jews. Witnessing the fate of the Czech family camp, and its residents’ immovable faith, despite the evidence all around them, that they would somehow be spared, had led him to understand a more complicated truth: that information is necessary, to be sure, but it is never sufficient. Information must also be believed , especially when it comes to mortal threats. On this, if nothing else, he and Yehuda Bauer might eventually have found common ground: only when information is combined with belief does it become knowledge. And only knowledge leads to action.
The French-Jewish philosopher Raymond Aron would say, when asked about the Holocaust, ‘I knew, but I didn ’t believe it. And because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.’
All this Rudolf Vrba understood, and yet he was not ground down by it. He discussed it with Georg Klein during those few days they spent together in Vancouver, the pair of them taking long walks in Stanley Park, Klein staying as a guest in Robin and Rudi’s home, where he astonished the couple with his 5 a.m. starts. The dialogue between the two men continued: not long afterwards, this time in Paris, they would share a long lunch that turned into dinner with two fellow scientists. Nothing in what Klein said broke Rudi’s spirit.