screaming at him : Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem , p. 124.
sworn deposition at the Israeli embassy : Linn, Escaping Auschwitz , p. 13.
‘bartered their own lives’ : Rudolf Vrba, Letter to the Editor, Observer , 22 September 1963.
access to Helena and Zuza : Vrbová, Betrayed , p. 254.
Chapter 27: Canada
he looked adorable : Author interview with Robin Vrba, 16 November 2020.
monthly rent : Vrba to Zuza Vrbová, 14 February 1983, p. 9, shared with the author by Gerta Vrbová.
run the household : Author interview with Gerta Vrbová, 15 September 2020.
one half of 1 per cent : Author interview with Chris Friedrichs, 13 December 2020.
invaded this striking man’s privacy : Author interview with Robin Vrba, 16 November 2020.
‘What are you, a Muselmann ?’ : Author interview with Robin Vrba, 30 November 2020.
‘that one would be a Kapo …’ : Author interview with Robin Vrba, 16 November 2020.
The astonished waiter : Vrba to Martin Gilbert, 12 August 1980, FDRPL, Vrba collection, box 2.
young and simple : Author interview with Robin Vrba, 16 November 2020.
It had weakened him : Author interview with Robin Vrba, 30 November 2020.
German prosecuting authorities : Vrba, I Escaped , p. xviii.
cooled down a bit : Vrba to Benno Müller-Hill, 25 June 1997, FDRPL, Vrba collection, box 4.
‘the pennies they paid’ : Vrba, I Escaped , p. 128n.
statute of limitations : Fulbrook, Legacies , p. 301. See also Kuretsidis-Haider, ‘？sterreichische KZ-Prozesse: Eine ?bersicht’， p. 20.
‘the Kanada K?nig of the SS’ : ‘Life Sentence Given to Ex-Nazi for Killing Gypsies at Auschwitz’， JTA Daily News Bulletin , 29 January 1991.
Kühnemann was adamant : Recalling the trial, Rudi told an interviewer, ‘The judge warned him that he did not have to testify, but he said he had nothing to hide.’ Dole?al, Cesty Bo?ím , p. 112.
trial was stopped : Vrba, I Escaped , p. 140n.
commanding a unit : Purves, War Criminals , F.2.b.
solving Slovakia’s ‘Jewish problem’ : FDRPL, Vrba collection, box 12; see also ‘Kirschbaum, Slovakia’s Aide of Eichmann in Toronto, Is Charged with War Crimes’， Canadian Jewish News , 27 July 1962, p. 1.
‘I escaped and warned the world’ : Vrba, Testimony, p. 1542.
‘otherwise they were gassed’ : Ibid., p. 1528.
a dull student : Ibid., p. 1461.
‘artistic’ licence : Ibid., pp. 1389–90.
was pronounced guilty : That 1985 verdict was overturned on a legal technicality, prompting a second trial in 1988 where Zündel was again found guilty. He was finally acquitted by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1992 on the grounds that the false-news law was an unreasonable limit on free expression. See https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/904/index.do
Chapter 28: I Know a Way Out
‘without panic’ : Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History , p. 123.
‘I know another way out’ : Author interview with Robin Vrba, 2 February 2021.
sent money : Author interview with Robin Vrba, 22 October 2021. Getting money to communist Czechoslovakia was not easy. It had to go via Switzerland and be converted into so-called Tuzex vouchers.
details large and small : One of the starkest disputes between Vrba and Wetzler was over the question of whether they had escaped Auschwitz with documentary evidence. In his novel-cum-memoir, Wetzler had the pair attempting to take out two tubes stuffed with lists of transports, sketches, even a label from a Zyklon B canister, evidence gathered with the help of several other prisoners. In this telling, one of the tubes was lost during the skirmish at Por? bka. Vrba was adamant that nothing of the sort had happened or could have happened. Any prisoner found in possession of a pencil or paper would have been punished for conspiracy. See Vrba, Testimony, p. 1353.
Both accounts have their defenders, but one crucial fact counts heavily towards Vrba’s version. When he spoke after the war of his role in taking down the Vrba–Wetzler Report, Oskar Krasň ansk? went out of his way to praise the escapees’ ‘wonderful memory’。 He made no mention of any documentary proof. Had the two men presented documentation, Krasň ansk? would surely have mentioned it, not least in his foreword to the Auschwitz Report. But he never did. The episode with the New York waiter, recounted in Chapter 27, suggests Krasň ansk? was hardly overstating Vrba’s powers of recall.
deserved the credit : In Wetzler’s telling, the idea of an escape to inform the world originated with the communist-led underground inside Auschwitz. Fred was tasked with gathering as much information as he could, which he was to deliver into the hands of the mainly communist resistance fighters in Slovakia. As for his choice of escape partner, Wetzler held that that too was a decision taken by the underground leadership: they picked Walter for the mission, doubtless because they thought it required a brave fellow Slovak whom Fred knew and trusted.
Rudi rejected that account entirely. He insisted that, on the contrary, the decision to escape and tell the world was a mutual one taken by him and Fred, the last two male survivors of Trnava, and by nobody else. To be sure, he conceded in his memoir, ‘Long before I thought of the idea, the underground had been concentrating on the problem of exposing Auschwitz, revealing its secrets and warning Europe’s Jews of what deportation really meant,’ waiting only for ‘the right plan, the right moment and the right man’ （Vrba, I Escaped , p. 256）。
But when Walter had approached them with his scheme for escape, the resistance leaders had rejected him for all the reasons Szmulewski had given at the time: that he was too impetuous, too inexperienced and too young to be believed. As a result, and although they got crucial help from individuals – whether from Sonderkommando Filip Müller giving them the details of the gassing process, or the two Polish Jews, Adamek and Bolek, who covered over the hideout once Fred and Walter had dropped inside – this, Walter was adamant, was their own initiative. That was especially true of the specific mission of warning the Jews of Hungary which, Rudi stressed, was ‘dictated exclusively by my conscience’， and certainly not by ‘a mythical committee in Auschwitz or elsewhere’ （Vrba, ‘Preparations’， pp. 255–6）。 Proof that there was no plan for Fred and Rudi to hand their information to communist partisans in Slovakia comes from the fact that the pair did no such thing.
As for why Fred might tell such a different story to Rudi’s, one explanation swiftly suggested itself. Rudi composed his memoir in Britain; he spoke to historians and others once settled in Canada. He could speak freely. Fred Wetzler was in a Soviet satellite state where expression was sharply restricted. Rudi had seen for himself that it was not politic in the socialist republic of Czechoslovakia to mention that the Nazis’ prime victims had been Jews. Besides, Rudolf Vrba had defected to the west, turning himself instantly into a non-person in his home country: it would have been risky for Fred to have praised him as an equal comrade in an act of anti-fascist valour. Was it perhaps safer in communist Czechoslovakia to cast a group of communist prisoners as the heroes of the story? （See also, Zimring, ‘Men’， p. 43.） ‘I feel sad’ : Wetzler letter to Kárn?, 19 November 1984, NA, Kárn? collection, box 10; Zimring, ‘Men’， p. 43.