Letter: Rudolf Vrba

Hilary and Steven Rose write: We first met Rudolf "Rudi" Vrba (obituary, April 13) in the early 1960s when he was working as a biochemist in Carshalton, and Steven saw him a couple of years ago in Vancouver. It is difficult to find the words to describe someone who has confronted and escaped Auschwitz, followed by the experience of being systematically disbelieved. For good reason, Rudi held himself slightly apart. The only time we saw the guard down was during an exchange between him and our then 13-year-old son, who had read Rudi's account of his arrest by the Nazis at 15 and the Auschwitz escape. The boy's straightforward recognition of the hero and the truth-speaker was accepted and not held at a distance.

But Ruth Linn's courageous obituary, pointing out the challenge for Israel's preferred self-narrative of Rudi's life, still excludes some terrain that he would not wish to be forgotten. First, the role of the Communist party in Auschwitz, which selflessly helped create the circumstances for his and Alfred Wetzler's escape. It was with the CP that he ended the war as a machine-gunner, and it was the anti-semitic purges in Stalinist Czechoslovakia, culminating in the 1952 trial of Rudolph Slansky, the Czechoslovak Communist party secretary, that drove him to emigrate to Israel.

Rudi's mission, once he had escaped from Auschwitz, was to warn the surviving Jewish community of Budapest of the impending deportations, but he had not anticipated the collusion between sections of the Zionist leadership and the Nazis, especially their senior Budapest administrator, Adolph Eichmann, which ensured that nothing was to disturb the orderly deportation of some 400,000 of the Jewish population, while sparing many of the leaders, notably Rudolph Kastner, who survived to emigrate to the nascent Israeli state. The details of these secret dealings were published in Israel by Malkhiel Gruenevald, and in 1954-55 Kastner sued Gruenevald for libel. He lost, although the judgment was reversed on appeal. Vrba's accounts of his experiences, as in the Eichmann trial of 1961, were vital to exposing this collaborationist network.

So, as he told us, when he escaped from Prague for Israel, and found some of the same Zionist leaders in positions of power who had helped betray the Jews of Budapest, he left for England, and later for the tranquillity of Vancouver. How did he retain his equanimity? As he often told us: "If you cannot have what you want, you must want what you have." Rudi, we salute you.

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