1
RUDI WOULD FIND A WAY to fight Adolf Hitler. It can be said, without risk of exaggeration, that he would go on to be—while still a teenager—one of the great heroes of the entire Second World War.
But not in a way he ever could have imagined.
Growing up in the Central European country of Czechoslovakia, Rudolf Vrba’s life was pretty good. Pretty normal. He liked school, especially science. He and his friends—some Jewish, some Christian—went to movies and soccer matches.
Sure, Rudi was aware of Europe’s long history of prejudice against Jews. He’d hear the occasional antisemitic joke in the market—someone would be bargaining with a merchant, and they’d say, “What are you? A Jew or a human?”
It was ignorant and cruel. But this too was normal. All part of life for a Jewish kid.
Rudi was aware of Adolf Hitler, of course. No one could avoid hearing about Hitler, the fascist leader in Germany with the little square mustache, ranting and raving about Jews, vowing to make Germany a great power again, demanding territory from neighbors, constantly threatening war. But this seemed far off. It didn’t directly impact Rudi’s world.
Until suddenly it did.
* * *
Born in Austria in 1889, Adolf Hitler fought for Germany in the First World War before jumping into extreme right-wing politics in his early thirties. Hitler and his Nazi Party competed in German elections throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s. Even with Nazi thugs stalking the streets, intimidating voters and journalists, beating up political rivals, Hitler never won a majority of the national vote. But in a country badly divided between rival parties, he had one of the largest blocs of voters. He became chancellor of Germany in 1933, and from there moved quickly to seize the powers of a dictator.
Hitler banned other political parties. He shut down opposition newspapers. Less than two months after taking power, the Nazis established their first concentration camp, Dachau, in an old factory outside of Munich. Other camps followed: Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Ravensbrück, where women were imprisoned. The Nazis used these camps to terrorize anyone deemed an “enemy of the state,” anyone who didn’t fit Hitler’s vision of German society—a long list that included union leaders, communists, gay men, and Jews.
The camp system was run by Hitler’s Schutzstaffel, or “protection squad”—known as the SS. The SS began as Hitler’s private guard and expanded to a 250,000-member armed force that obeyed no rule of law other than the orders of the German dictator.
All the while, Hitler hammered away at what he called the “Jewish question” and the “Jewish problem.” He relentlessly attacked Jews as “subhuman,” comparing them to a contagious disease, labeling them an inferior race with no place in Germany’s future. He blamed Jews for Germany’s loss in the First World War, for its economic hardships, for everything.
This was plainly preposterous. Jewish Germans, who made up less than 1 percent of the country’s population, had fought and died in World War I at the same rate as non-Jews. Jewish scientists, including Albert Einstein, had brought ten Nobel Prizes home to Germany in the quarter century before Hitler took power.
But Hitler’s rants were never meant to be logical. The goal was to unite a large group of people by turning them against a smaller, more vulnerable group. A typical tactic of tyrants.
With absolute power in his hands, Hitler stripped German Jews of their citizenship and rights. Jewish professors were banned from teaching. German universities started teaching absurd “racial science,” which conveniently concluded that Germans were a “master race” and destined to build an empire in Europe.
In the late 1930s, Adolf Hitler began following through on his vow to expand Germany’s borders. Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, then demanded that a huge part of Czechoslovakia come under German rule. France and Great Britain had the military strength to stop Hitler. But this was just twenty years after the end of the First World War, which had devastated an entire generation of young men. Unwilling to face the horrors of another European war, French and British leaders caved in to Hitler’s demands. In early 1939, Hitler seized the Czech side of what had been Czechoslovakia.
Rudi’s home, Slovakia, became an independent state. In theory. In reality, the small country was dominated by Germany and led by a pro-Hitler president, Jozef Tiso.
This is when Rudi and his Jewish friends knew their world had changed.
* * *
Rudi’s friend Gerta Sidonová was twelve in the summer of 1939. Gerta—or Gerti to her friends, but never Gertrúda, which she hated—was a thin girl with wavy blond hair and blue eyes. She loved to write and perform plays with her friends and dreamed of becoming a filmmaker.
One warm morning that summer, Gerta and a non-Jewish friend named Marushka rode their bicycles out of Trnava and along dirt roads between fields of ripening corn. After about an hour, they stopped to sit in the shade. They were talking about fishing later, about catching some of the flies buzzing around them for bait, when Marushka blurted out: “My father said I shouldn’t have come out with you today.”
Gerta was stunned. Marushka’s father worked in Gerta’s family’s butcher shop. He’d always seemed like a nice man.
“Why not?” she asked.
Her friend blushed before answering. “He said that because you are Jews, you will soon be taken away, and then he will be able to take over your father’s shop and we will move into your house.” Until all that happened, Marushka explained, her family had to be careful not to be seen mixing too much with Jewish people.
Gerta didn’t know what to say. She’d never thought of friends in terms of their religion.
Finally she asked, “And what do you think about this?”
“I don’t know,” Marushka said, looking out at the fields, avoiding her friend’s eyes. “I’m confused and will miss you, but if it’s going to make it difficult for my family that I have a Jewish friend, I’ll have to stop seeing you.”
“That isn’t really what I meant,” Gerta said. She wanted to know what Marushka thought of the idea that Jewish families should be thrown out of their homes and sent away.
Marushka launched into a recital of tired old stereotypes about Jews being obsessed with money and needing to learn the value of hard work. Gerta had heard this garbage before but had no idea her friend believed it. Marushka knew Gerta’s mother woke at 5:00 a.m. to work in the family shop before heading off to a second job. Their friend Rudi’s mother was a seamstress who made dresses in her living room. How could anyone say they needed to “learn” hard work?
Was Marushka just repeating things she heard her father say?
Was she tempted by the opportunity to move into Gerta’s house?
To Gerta, the strangest part of the whole conversation happened when she grabbed her bicycle and was about to ride off. Marushka called out, “But today we could have enjoyed ourselves.”
Too furious to respond, Gerta got on her bike and pedaled toward home.
2
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, HITLER launched an invasion of Poland, igniting World War II.
Britain and France were bound by treaty to fight alongside their Polish allies—but they were unprepared for a major war. Hitler’s forces overran the Polish capital of Warsaw by the end of the month.
In Slovakia, following Hitler’s lead, the government enacted a series of anti-Jewish laws. Signs warned Jews not to enter movie theaters or sports stadiums. Jewish citizens had to be off the streets by eight at night. Laws restricted where they could live, where they could work, how far they could travel without special permission. The government assigned non-Jewish “advisers” to work in—and prepare to take over—Jewish-owned shops. Another law required Jews to wear a yellow Star of David in public, six inches in diameter, sewn onto their clothes with a specific number of stiches.
When they showed up for the first day of school, Jewish students were not allowed inside.
Gerta walked up to her school building—and found the gate locked. She stood outside with a small group of Jewish students, wondering what to do. They’d been attending classes here for years. They knew all the teachers. But when they banged on the gate, the only response came from children shouting:
“Jews out!”
Gerta was shocked to hear this from students. Friends, or so she’d thought.
“As our anger mounted, we felt that we just couldn’t leave without some action,” Gerta later recalled. She went around to the back of the building, where students left their bicycles, and stuck sharp pebbles between the metal rims and rubber tires of the bike wheels.
This was not very satisfying, Gerta admitted.
“But it was something,” she said. “It was a gesture to show that we would not accept without resistance what they did to us.”
* * *
Jewish students were even ordered to turn in their school books. This was particularly painful for Rudi. He dropped off his textbooks and walked away, “glum and empty-handed,” as he’d later say.
A friend of his, Erwin Eisler, came up beside him and whispered: “Don’t worry. I’ve still got that chemistry book.”
Rudi was impressed by this act of defiance. Grateful too; chemistry was his favorite subject. The two friends studied together when they could, sharing the forbidden text in the privacy of their homes.
Rudi turned fifteen that September. He kept himself busy by building a chemistry lab in a shed in his mother’s garden. Gerta was among the friends who came over to visit Rudi’s lab. He took contagious pleasure in explaining his experiments, describing why different substances changed color or texture when combined.
When he could find jobs, Rudi worked as a laborer. At night he studied at home, teaching himself Russian in the family living room. He had a knack for languages and a prodigious memory—he already spoke Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, and German. Rudi’s mother teased him about his studies. What was a Jewish boy from Slovakia going to do with Russian?
She could never have guessed how it was going to help him.
* * *
On warm evenings, before curfew, Rudi, Gerta, and their friends met in a meadow outside of town. They’d sit together in the tall grass and talk about books and politics, about the terrifying state of the world and what they’d do if they were in charge.
Gerta found herself falling for Rudi. “He had a round, friendly face and a winning smile,” she’d recall. Rudi was always happy to tutor Gerta in math and science, but he didn’t seem to return the crush. She’d later find out that he was embarrassed by a hat she sometimes wore, which had a pom-pom and made her look, he thought, like a little kid.
“It is strange,” she’d reflect. “Faced with all the really serious problems we had, we could nevertheless be affected by the same emotions as normal teenagers.”
The teens’ parents seemed to think Slovakia’s surge of antisemitism would blow over. But to Rudi and Gerta’s group of friends, this felt like more than a passing storm. Their Christian friends, kids they’d joked around with for years, wouldn’t even look at them anymore. People threw bricks through their windows, scrawled “Jew” on the walls of their homes. Members of the Hlinka Guard—modeled on Hitler’s dreaded SS—marched around in black uniforms and shiny boots, beating anyone they felt like beating.
Gerta told the group about the non-Jewish “adviser” assigned to her parents’ butcher shop—Mr. Šimončič, the father of her former friend Marushka. The man openly robbed them. Far more chilling to Gerta was his utter lack of the slightest hint of shame.
As if all of this was perfectly normal.
“It will not be long now,” he said to her, “and all of you will be gone.”
* * *
Adolf Hitler’s forces invaded western Europe in the spring of 1940, quickly overrunning Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France. Hitler turned east in June 1941, launching a massive attack on the Soviet Union. Millions of German troops drove deep into Soviet territory.
About 9.5 million Jewish people lived in Europe at this time—just under 2 percent of the continent’s population. By the summer of 1941, nearly the entire Jewish population of Europe lived in territory under Hitler’s control.
Throughout his years in power, Hitler had often declared his desire to expel Jews from Germany. Now he decided on a very different course of action.
Hitler issued his orders directly to Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. A longtime member of Hitler’s inner circle, Himmler was a rabid antisemite, with a square mustache like his idol’s. “For him I could do anything,” Himmler said of his boss. “Believe me, if Hitler were to say I should shoot my mother, I would do it and be proud of his confidence.”
As German troops tore through Europe, Himmler’s SS established new concentration camps in occupied territory. One of the largest was Auschwitz, built on the grounds of a former army base in southern Poland. The first prisoners at Auschwitz were Polish political opponents of Hitler.
That would change as the war continued to expand.
Copyright © 2023 by Steve Sheinkin
