Klein marvelled at it, amazed that, despite all he had endured, Rudi was able to live life, encouraging students one moment or making small talk with waiters the next. Faced with such irrecoverable losses – of his people, of his daughter – a man might be expected either to go into denial or depression. But Rudi had done neither. Instead, he was doing something much harder and more admirable. He was carrying the losses he had endured, and living all the same.
Indeed, he loved life and was hungry for more of it. In May 2005, he called Robert Krell, a leader of the Vancouver Jewish community and a professor in the university medical school. Rudi had regarded Krell warily at first – he was a Jewish community leader, after all – but that resistance had steadily broken down. Krell was a Dutch Jew born in 1940, who had spent his first years in hiding. Eventually the hidden child and the Auschwitz escapee became friends. And now Rudi was on the phone. ‘Robert, I need to talk to you .’
Rudi told Krell that he had had bladder cancer for about ten years: he had not mentioned it until then. Other than his wife, Rudi had hardly told anyone; his daughter Zuza had no idea. The last check-up had shown that the cancer had penetrated to a deeper layer.
But Rudi was not calling Robert for gloomy talk of an imminent end. Rather, he did not like the way his urologist was dealing with him and he wondered if Robert could have a word. Krell promptly called the doctor and explained something of his patient’s history. Given where Rudolf Vrba had been, he would have good reason to view medical personnel with suspicion.
Surgery followed, removing Rudi’s entire bladder and some other tissue and the outlook was hopeful. The tumour appeared to have gone and Rudi looked closer to seventy than a man approaching eighty-two. He had studied the survival rates for bladder cancer, as he had studied everything else about the disease, and he would joke that if he could reach the age of ninety-two, he would be content. It would fall short of the record set by his once seemingly indestructible mother who had died in 1991 at the age of ninety-six, but it would do. He was not ready to let go; he wanted to live.
Except that his cancer cells had learned from their host: they had escaped. They had broken out from the bladder and formed metastases in his legs. Rudi’s doctors now switched their focus away from treatment and towards the alleviation of pain. He had suffered enough pain in his life; Krell told him there was no need to endure any more.
Friends were adamant that it had not needed to be this way. They believed that if Rudi had put himself in the hands of specialist doctors earlier, rather than trying to research and organise his own treatment, his cancer could have been cured. But Rudi had always been determined that one should never show weakness – What are you, a Muselmann? – that he should never seem vulnerable, to Robin, to himself, to the world. That very determination proved his greatest vulnerability.
His health went into a steady decline. But that period also brought a comfort he had not known for many decades. For the first time since the 1950s, he saw his daughter every day. Zuza, by then an editor of children’s books in London, dropped everything to be at her father’s side in Vancouver in his final months. Sometimes they would talk philosophy; sometimes they would talk of Helena, his firstborn. Their relationship had not always been smooth, but those last months were tender between them. Ever the scientist, Rudi said that he loved Zuza ‘on a cellular level ’： that was how deep it went. She was his only living child, and he was her Tata.
Rudolf Vrba died at 7.25 p.m. on 27 March 2006. In the weeks before his death, Rudi had been reluctant to discuss funeral arrangements. ‘He was in denial ,’ his wife would say later, ‘and I kept up the denial.’ He did not want to know.
Vrba was buried in the Boundary Bay cemetery in the small town of Tsawwassen, on the Canadian–US border. There was only one eulogy, from Dr Stephan Horny, a nephew of Rudi’s who lived in Montreal. There were not enough Jewish men present to make a minyan , the traditional quorum, and in a departure from Jewish practice the ceremony was on a Saturday, the sabbath. But Robin’s father said kaddish , the prayer of mourning. Nine months later there was a memorial event in Vancouver. About forty people turned up.
In life, Rudi was glad whenever his attempt to alert the world to the reality of Auschwitz was recognised, but he would hardly have expected a hero’s send-off. He did not consider himself a hero, if a hero is defined by success in his chosen mission. Perhaps Rudolf Vrba saw himself instead in the tradition of the Jewish prophet, who comes to deliver a warning, only to grieve when that warning is not heeded.
During that long talk when they first met, a conversation that lasted ten hours, Georg Klein asked Rudi why he was still so angry about all that had not happened in Hungary, rather than feeling proud of all that had happened, thanks to his escape. ‘Should you not be satisfied that you managed to save two hundred thousand?’
No, Vrba was not satisfied. Like many of the best-known rescuers of the period, he thought less about those he had saved than about all those he had not saved.
But Georg Klein did not see it the same way. He knew that he owed his life to what Fred and Rudi had done all those years earlier. He had gone on to become an eminent scientist, one who made breakthroughs in the study of tumours leading to great advances in immunotherapy against cancer, advances that would soon help many millions. None of that would have been possible without Rudi. Klein had had three children and seven grandchildren, who between them would go on to have twelve children of their own. None of those lives would have been possible without Rudi. None of those children would be alive today if it were not for Rudi.
Jewish tradition says that to save one life is to save the whole world. By their report, Fred and Rudi saved 200,000 Budapest Jews from immediate deportation to Auschwitz. Some would die a few months later at the hands of the Arrow Cross, but many more would not. And each one of those lives, and the lives of their descendants, would not have been possible without Rudolf Vrba.
Fifty years before Walter Rosenberg was born, and no more than a hundred miles away, a boy came into the world by the name of Erik Weisz. He was a Hungarian Jew, the son of a rabbi, and within a few years he had moved to the United States. There he began a career on the stage, first on the trapeze, then performing magic tricks and finally as an escape artist. He called himself Harry Houdini.
Rosenberg too was an escape artist. He escaped from Auschwitz, from his past, even from his own name. He escaped his home country, his adopted country and the country after that. He escaped and escaped and escaped – but he could never fully break free from the horror he had witnessed and which he had laid bare before the world.
When he lived in England in the 1960s, driving into central London from his home in Sutton, all he could see when he passed the belching chimneys of Battersea Power Station were the crematoria of Birkenau. When he was handled roughly by an X-ray technician in Vancouver, he thought the medic had something of ‘the SS’ about him . When his cancer spread inoperably, he sighed to a friend, ‘the Gestapo has finally gotten to me .’
His life was defined by what he had endured as a teenager. But he was not crushed by it. When his daughter Zuza turned forty-four, he sent her birthday wishes reminding her that forty-four was his ‘lucky number ’。 In parenthesis, and by way of explanation, he set down ‘44070’， the Auschwitz number that had been tattooed on his arm, with the emphasis on the first two digits. He did not consider that number a curse; he believed it had brought him great fortune. After all, he had survived and he had escaped. ‘I hope it will bring you luck too,’ he told his daughter .