“I know Rudi didn’t love me, not in any way I understand. He didn’t love me. Period. So, shit happens. I loved a man. He didn’t love me. One gets over it. There are worse things than unrecognized love. Yes… and he’s better off without me. Because somehow I raised up demons, made him uncomfortable.”
– Diary entry, Betty Lambert, September, 1972

HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A WOMAN SCORNED — From 1971 to 1973, Rudolf Vrba had a tempestuous sexual relationship with feminist playwright Betty Lambert. Their combative love affair gave rise to Lambert’s play, Grasshopper Hill, about a writer who is attracted to, and repelled by, a domineering and demeaning Eastern European who had escaped from Auschwitz. Disenchantment with domineering men also gave rise to Crossings, Lambert’s only novel. Written concurrently with the aforementioned radio play, it describes a sado-masochistic relationship between a Lambert-like protagonist and a logger.

The male protagonists in Grasshopper Hill and Crossings are fictional; they are not Rudolf Vrba. They are refracted manifestations of men that the author had known, amplified for dramatic impact. That said, the man with whom Betty Lambert corresponded and wrote about in her journals and diaries throughout the 1970s absolutely was Rudolf Vrba.

When the non-fictional Rudolf Vrba sought to escape from her frequently amorous embraces—or clutches—Elizabeth “Betty” Lambert sounded sirens of alarm. Their schism bears resemblance to Vrba’s failed marriage to his first wife, Gerta, who turned vengeful and tried to have him deported from England. In both cases, an analogy to instinctual escape does not seem far-fetched.

Lambert’s heretofore unexamined and unpublished trove of intimate letters and journal entries, if viewed in conjunction with Grasshopper Hill and Crossings, inevitably leads one to conclude the obvious: nobody gets out of Auschwitz unscathed.

Prior to a 5,000-word article examining the volatile relationship between Rudolf Vrba and Betty Lambert, here is a mini-biography of Betty Lambert that has been prepared for this website.

BETTY LAMBERT, 1933 – 1983

“I was told that women don’t go to university and women don’t become writers. Only the rich could be writers. — Betty Lambert

Betty Lambert was born in Calgary, Alberta on August 23, 1933 as Elizabeth Minnie Lee. Her father Christopher Lee, a carpenter, died in a boating accident, in a sailboat he had built, in 1945. “My father died when I was twelve and I was no longer ‘working class,’ I was ‘welfare class’ and I was determined to get out of that class. Writing was a way out but soon it became more than that, it became a necessity.”

As a bookish child, at age 13, she was encouraged by a teacher to submit one of her poems to a writing contest. The die was cast as soon as her poem was published in a magazine and she received $2. Lambert became a socialist in her teens and later said she used her anger to fuel her art. Three years after her father’s death, she was afflicted with a severe case of polio, requiring her to stay at the Red Cross Crippled Children’s Hospital for eighteen months prior to her high school graduation in 1951. That year, and the next, she attended the summer writing program at the Banff School of Fine Arts

In 1951, Lambert (as Betty Lee) moved to Vancouver to attend the University of British Columbia where one of the English Department instructors was the self-avowed Communist firebrand Dorothy Livesay [who taught at U.B.C from 1951-1953], soon to become one of Canada’s best-known poets. More importantly, Lambert took higher level English courses taught by Earle Birney, the self-avowed Trotskyite who was British Columbia’s leading literary presence during the Fifties. [Birney is often credited with founding Canada’s first Creative Writing Department, at UBC, when, in fact, it was mainly formalized through the work of Jake Zilber and Roy Daniells; its first designated department head was a protégé of Birney, Robert Harlow.]

For Birney’s classes, Lambert submitted four of her approximately fifty short stories: Prairie Fire (1956), The Strange, the Foreign Faces (1956), The University Life (1956) and Don’t Bring Him in the House (1957). A collection of her short fiction has never been published, although there is no lack of material.

Lambert was a feminist who liked men. In a private journal made in the mid-1970s, she would list the names of approximately twenty male lovers, rating some of them. In 1952, as Elizabeth Lee, she had married Frank Lambert, another carpenter. They divorced in 1962. On a bus trip to San Francisco in 1963, Lambert met a doctoral student, resulting in a tryst. She had wanted a child; he did not. They agreed to part company. Her only child, Ruth Anne, was born in 1964, a “child of mixed blood” as it was called at the time. Ruth Anne grew up not knowing her father.

“All of my friends had moms and dads and sat down to meatloaf dinners,” Ruth Anne has recalled. “I was being serenaded by longhaired beauties in capes. It was magical. My mother wrote constantly. I awoke, most mornings, to the sound of typewriter keys clacking in her study above my bedroom. Today, when I see an old typewriter on one of my thrift store outings, it stirs that place of comfort in my heart.”

In Vancouver, to pay her way through university, Lambert took a variety of jobs that included managing a biochemistry lab at UBC; teaching calculus at B.C. Matric School and working as a clerk at the Hudson Bay department store. After she had paid off a $1,200 debt by marking papers for first year English classes at UBC, she bought a car and landed work as a copywriter for the CFUN radio station. She subsequently entered a writing contest for radio plays. Although she didn’t win, one of the judges, Gerald Newman, noted she had talent.

It was Gerald Newman, who encouraged her to submit radio plays to CBC radio. As a CBC arts producer, he directed her debut radio script “The Lady Upstairs” when Lambert was 22 and he produced Lambert’s The Best in the House on CBC Radio’s Wednesday Night program in December of 1959. As a commemorative volume, The West Coast Review, associated with SFU, would publish Three Radio Plays (Vol. 19, No.3: 1985) containing Grasshopper Hill, Falconer’s Island and The Best Room in the House.

While in her late 20s, Lambert became embroiled in feminist issues and some of these would permeate much of her best work for the stage—but she was by no means limited to women’s rights for her subject matter. Among her plays for children, written primarily in the 1950s and 1960s, The Riddle Machine (1966) was performed at Montreal’s Expo in 1967. “Told that the two taboo subjects in work for children were sex and violence,” wrote Malcolm Page in 1984, “she proceeded to write about both.”

12 N. Grosvenor St. Burnaby today.

In 1965, with only a BA in Philosophy and English from UBC, she became a part-time lecturer in English literature at Simon Fraser University in the year the university opened. Starting on the bottom rung of academe, she would eventually gain the status and salary of an Associate Professor teaching modern and Greek drama, Shakespeare and linguistics. A self-described “theoretical socialist, she was eventually able to live in her own home at 12 North Grosvenor in Burnaby “thanks to a bequest of the aunt who loved me more than I deserved.”

Simultaneously, Lambert persevered as a single mother who managed to create approximately 25 radio plays and a handful of adult plays for the stage. Some of her most notable works would be included in a posthumous anthology, The Betty Lambert Reader (Playwrights Canada 2006), edited by Cynthia Zimmerman. It excludes her satirical play about Simon Fraser University, Clouds of Glory.

Produced by the Arts Club in Vancouver, Sqrieux-de-Dieu (Talonbooks, 1975) gained renown as a witty and outlandish sex comedy about a ménage a trois. When a bourgeois wife and her husband’s long-time mistress finally meet, they quickly decide they want the life that the other one has. When they swiftly and amicably opt to switch roles and residences, the man has no say in the matter. The odd title Sqrieux-de-Dieu was a playful twist on the title of a Margaret Laurence novel, A Jest of God (1966).

Jennie’s Story

Jennie’s Story (1983), her most provocative work, was based on a true story from southern Alberta in the 1930s, when a priest had his 15-year-old housekeeper, whom he had seduced, taken to a mental institution and sterilized. She is told she has had an appendectomy. Later, married and unable to conceive, Jennie learns the truth and commits suicide by ingesting lye. If any of Lambert’s work is destined for posterity, it is likely this chillingly upsetting drama. It was adapted for the film Heart of the Sun (1999).

In a message to Pamela Hawthorne at the New Play Centre, Lambert wrote: “Jennie’s Story is a play about a woman whose life turns from love and joy and faith into betrayal and entrapment. It is not a polemical play, although the legal statute to which the play refers was in existence in Alberta from 1928 to 1971.

“Jenny finds herself caught in a trap which consists of legal, religious as well as personal springs. Jenny’s world the people who love her, are also caught, trapped. It is perhaps nothing new to say that each of us is trapped by our society, by our personal mythologies; what interests us is the ways is the ways that people accept, reject, survive, or accommodate their entrapment – the play is perhaps most concerned with a conflict of faiths.”

Never produced while Lambert was alive, Under the Skin (1985) only reached first draft form and is also based on a true story. In Port Moody, B.C., only a fifteen-minute drive from where Lambert lived in Burnaby with her daughter, a man kidnapped and sexually abused a twelve-year-old girl for six months in 1976. The kidnapper’s wife was unhappily compliant. Lambert’s own daughter was the same age as the victim. Director Pamela Hawthorn encouraged Lambert to explore those “181 days of hell” until the girl was rescued. “Under the Skin is like watching a car crash in slow motion,” wrote Christopher Hoile, reviewing a Toronto production in March of 2014. “It is painful to watch, but we can’t turn our eyes away.” Under the Skin” was published in Theatre and Autobiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice, edited by Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman (Talonbooks, 2006).

Lambert won ACTRA’s Nellie Award in 1980 for her last play written for radio, Grasshopper Hill, a drama about a Canadian woman having a turbulent affair with a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz. It was broadcast on CBC’s Festival Theatre in March of 1979, directed by Robert Chesterman, featuring Kate Reid and Henry Ramer, and it was written in the same year as Crossings, her only novel, also a penetrating study of female masochism. The extent to which the central male character in the radio play duplicates the central male character in Crossings has yet to be fully explored or ascertained. There is no mistaking the fact the Grasshopper Hill is a very direct product of her passionate, troubling and ultimately heart-wrenching relationship with Auschwitz escapee, Holocaust whistleblower and UBC professor Rudolf Vrba.

Crossings

Originally intended-to-be-titled Confessions, the novel Crossings recalls a different volatile relationship between a man and a woman who repeatedly “cross over” the Burrard Bridge from opposite worlds. Macho logger Mik O’Brien, a violent and virile ex-con, crosses over to Vicky’s rooming house at 2952 West 8th Avenue. Vicky Ferris, a CBC dramatist, crosses over to the coarse but truthful world of Mik and his cronies at the St. Helen’s Hotel (later called Theo’s) on Granville Street. It is a riveting account of female sufferings, mental and physical, arguably masochistic, with flashbacks to a failed marriage and an illegal abortion in East Vancouver. In Lambert’s private papers, there can be found a very detailed and alarming account of Lambert’s own abortion in East Vancouver after multiple, unsuccessful attempts, leading one to presume the abortion described in the novel is fiction derived from facts. Unable to extricate herself from Mik O’Brien’s influence, Vicky is raped, gets pregnant, demands marriage, discovers the pregnancy alarm was false, retreats to Berkeley, gets pregnant by a stranger and keeps the baby. The California pregnancy encounter also has basis in fact.

The skillful clarity of the writing convincingly evokes the protagonist’s passion and restlessness, but the subject matter upset some feminists. This book gained the disapproval of one Vancouver feminist bookstore, but its boldness impressed most critics, including the lesbian novelist Jane Rule who defended Lambert’s bravery.

“Maybe it’s one huge orgasm, this book,” commented Lambert. “Maybe I just want to remember it once more before I go menopausal. Maybe I just want to feel young again and real and alive. The Victorian era. Repressed lust. But to the girdle do the gods inherit. Down from the waist they are centaurs… Perhaps I shall go mad and run naked down the street at night, waving my bum behind me like a flag. Perhaps I shall leap on beautiful young men, a moustache on my lip. Oh god, it’s not fair to grow old. It’s not fair. I hate it. I really do.”

Crossings was published in the U.S. with limited success, under the title of Bring Down the Sun. It was later re-published with a new cover design by Pulp Press with minimal fanfare. It’s easy to argue now that Betty Lambert, like Betty Freidan, was simply ahead of her time.

The theatre critic for CHQM Radio told listeners in 1981: “Of the distinguished list of playwrights the New Play Centre has developed – a list that includes such names Sheldon Rosen, Christian Bruyere, Richard Ouzounian and Margaret Hollingsworth – Betty Lambert stands out as the singularly most important writer.”

The academic Cynthia Zimmerman has noted, “Dangerous attractions for naïve or easily victimized women up against manipulative, sexually aggressive men is at the core not only of early works like The Good of the Sun (1960), Falconer’s Island (1966), and Once Burnt, Twice Shy (1965), but of later works as well.” Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch appeared in 1970. Conversely, Betty Lambert died before her time. She fought a six-month battle with lung cancer in 1983, commencing in February.

“She lost her strength, she lost her hair, but she never lost her tremendous will to live or her incredible humour,” said her sister, Dorothy Beavington. “In April she got out of a hospital bed after chemotherapy to fly to Toronto for the opening of her play Jennie’s Story. I was there with her when the entire audience of 800 rose at the end of the play to give her a standing ovation. The only person seated was Betty because she was too weak to stand.”

Interviewed in the summer, Lambert said, “When this happens to you, you realize that life is just 24 hours a day. You become alive to people, pleasures, sights and sounds. Actually, we should be like that anyway. To be fully alive, we have to be aware that we are going to die.”

One week after Lambert’s 50th birthday party, it was discovered that cancer had spread to her brain. “Betty refused to give up,” recalled Beavington. “She took the radiation treatment but it was too late. It was a difficult time for all of us. Betty told us she wanted to die at home and we were determined to do this for her.

Joy Coghill, Canadian actress, director, and writer

While enduring severe pain, Lambert dismissed suicide on rational, philosophical and moral grounds. “In the manner of her death,” recalled friend and actor Joy Coghill, “she was absolutely extraordinary. It was one of her greatest gifts to us.” Lambert continued to write, frustrated by lack of time but also impressed with the urgency that the immediate prospect of death brought to her work.

“I have so much to do and no time to die,” she wrote to Coghill. She composed her own memorial service, requesting a reading of her favourite Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, ‘God’s Grandeur,’ to celebrate life. On August 9, she completed her final play, Under the Skin, later published in one volume with Jenny’s Story (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1990).

In her final days, blind and unable to speak, Lambert enjoyed playing Trivial Pursuit with her sister. Beavington recalls, “On the night she died she indicated she wanted her yellow writing pad and her pen. She wrote, with much effort, ‘Dot, one last trivia question.’ I asked Betty if she wanted me to ask her a question and she vigorously pointed to her own chest to indicate she was definitely asking me. Then she wrote, ‘What is the final demand in life?’ I said I didn’t know but I was sure that she did. She nodded. Then she slowly wrote her answer, which was, ‘More and more and more nostalgia.'”

Lambert was remembered by her colleagues and friends at a Simon Fraser University memorial service on November 21st, 1983, following her death at home on November 4, 1983 in Burnaby. SFU subsequently established a playwriting award for SFU students in her honour. Also in 1983, Lambert was the subject of an interview, conducted by Bonnie Worthington, for a special issue of Room of One’s Own devoted to women and theatre, Volume 8, Number 2, edited by Eleanor Wachtel and published by The Growing Room Collective.

Despite constant productivity and courage for more than thirty years as a freelance writer and playwright, Betty Lambert has remained under-appreciated in Canadian literature not only due to her relatively early death in 1983, but also because geopolitics are inescapable in the vast landscape for the arts in Canada. In essence, Vancouver is Vladivostok, Toronto is Moscow.*

UNRECOGNIZED LOVE, CONTINUED

Rudi Vrba and Betty Lambert became lovers in the first half of 1971. In August of 1971, Rudi Vrba sent Betty Lambert a letter announcing his planned trip to Europe. She then kept the eight postcards Rudi sent to her from Germany (Cologne), England and Scotland (Edinburgh) in September and October of 1971.

Clearly, Betty Lambert was hoping that someday, somebody, would find the them, among a vast array of private writing that she donated to Simon Fraser University where she taught. She did not place any privacy provisions on her materials. It is difficult not to presume that Lambert must have felt that her private drama off-stage was possibly her most extraordinarily original and alluring production.

They were not examined and shared with the public until they were uncovered for this website at the SFU Special Collections branch of the SFU Library, under the direction of Tony Power. Her frank and effusive diaries and journals were first examined for possible inclusion in this Vrba website project in 2023.

SHARON: SHOW SOME OR ALL OF THE POSTCARDS HERE?

It takes only minutes when examining the correspondence to realize that Vrba and Lambert could have served as the inspiration for that bestselling 1992 paperback, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. As far as Vrba was concerned, theirs was a friendship mainly for occasional sex between two consenting adults. He wanted to believe a mutually advantageous sexual relationship need not require romantic or domestic entanglements.

Lambert would beg to disagree. Intimacy, for a woman raising a daughter on her own, could never be carefree. As a divorced woman, she had met a man on a bus in California and their brief tryst had resulted in a precocious, bi-racial daughter who never knew her father and frequently voiced astute criticisms of her mother’s affair with Vrba—who took care to be charming with her.

Animosity arose when Vrba met and married his second wife in Boston without telling Lambert she was yesterday’s news. When she discovered the celebrated World War II hero had lacked the courage to tell her she was being forsaken, Lambert was appalled and resorted to some punitive actions. In Vrba’s archives in the FDR Library in New York, none of this is revealed.

Theirs was an unlikely match. She was a self-avowed socialist. He was strongly averse to any left wing agendae. Vrba was an accomplished scientific researcher who was teaching on the conservative, scenic campus of the University of British Columbia, dating back to 1925, perched atop cliffs at the entrance to Vancouver’s splendid harbour. With only a Bachelor of Arts degree,

Lambert was an aspiring playwright who courageously paid the bills as an under-qualified lecturer at Simon Fraser University, the upstart, rival university that had opened in 1964, perched atop Burnaby Mountain.

Whereas Vrba lived on the staid UBC campus, Lambert and her daughter Ruth Anne lived across town in a modest house she had inherited in lower class Burnaby. Windswept and icy in the winter, the fledgling SFU campus soon became a hotbed for leftist radicalism. Vrba’s friends were professors. Lambert’s friends were hippies.

In retrospect, it’s easy to characterize their amours and antipathies as a yin/yang clash of Old World chauvinism and New World idealism.

Lambert became the bane of Vrba’s existence upon his return to Vancouver in 1976.

Animosity between Vrba and Lambert arose when he returned to Vancouver from Boston with his vivacious, much younger bride. In his infrequent correspondence, Vrba had failed to mention he had met and married Robin Lipson in Boston. Here is a word-for-word transcription of that letter in which he neglects to tell her he got married and in which he uses the words reasonably and reasonable four times :

Boston, Dec. 15, 1975

Dear Beth,

Thanks for the newspaper cutting. No, this will not help me, professionally. I have to read other type (sic) of literature. Still, I believe they will possibly have reasonably good tests for non-manifest cancer within this decade. Hopefully….

I often think about the beautiful hours which I spent in your company and in your home. I feel enriched in many ways by this experience, mainly in beautiful ways, something nice to think about when alone.

Life treats me here reasonably well, I was reasonably successful in my work (au pair with others, not more not less, so everything is OK) and made some few friends.

Today I am taking up my first holiday since I am here. I am going to London for Xmas and new Year. I leave in 3 hours from now. I hope to be back mid-January.

How are things at your end? I do hope that life is reasonable at N. Grosvenor. Please give my love to Ruth Anne and Chrissie and same to you.

With very best wishes to you.

As ever,

Rudi

p.s. I hope to be back in September.

Similarly, Robin Vrba was unaware there was a lover that Rudi had left behind in Vancouver.

Lambert felt betrayed and crushed.

Not so, Robin. Wise beyond her years, she was able to imagine that Rudi could have been a philanderer and she was smart enough to know she was never going to change him. In fact, she did not want to change him.

As the woman that Rudi had rejected, it was impossible for Betty to be laissez faire about Rudi’s lack of disclosure to her about Robin. Obviously, as the woman that Rudi chose to wed, it was a lot easier for Robin to reconcile Vrba’s lack of disclosure to her about Betty.

Although she would show herself quite capable of concocting a comedy of manners [Sqrieux-de-Dieu 1975], Lambert did not set about crafting any late-century equivalent to George Bernard Shaw’s The Philanderer. Instead, she excavated her pain with her only published novel, Crossings, and wrote by far her most alarming radio play, Grasshopper Hill. Cynthia Zimmerman, who edited a representative volume of Lambert’s work, has stated: “Some of her works, like Crossings and Grasshopper Hill, draw more transparently from her own life than others (one of her lovers even accused her of plagiarism).”

That last sentence refers to Rudolf Vrba.

As Lambert’s ex-lover, Vrba believed he was transparently the catalyst for her largely accusatory drama, Grasshopper Hill, a very imperfect work seemingly dashed off in a fury. This evokes a tempestuous relationship between an Auschwitz survivor named Gustav and his lover Susan who he demeans. “You are a small possessive bitch,” he says. “You will make a big scandal.”

In her journal, Lambert once compared them to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, the volatile couple who were famous in the preceding decade for their starring roles in Edward Albee’s profanity-laden drama, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Released as a film in 1966, directed by Mike Nichols, this groundbreaking 1962 Albee play depicts a violent couple who are passionately attached, bitterly vituperative and chronically competitive.

Whereas the conceit of the feuding couple in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is to live without illusions, but as equals, the power struggle between Sarah and Gustav is not equal. Lambert seemingly takes revenge on Vrba by depicting the male character as both heartless and vicious, essentially making the case that Gustav’s experiences in Auschwitz have irrevocably tainted him.

Vrba’s second wife, Robin, would no doubt find such a depiction to be ridiculous. Yes, Rudi was prone to nightmares. But the Rudi Vrba she knew was mostly charming and funny.

In much the same way that Vrba’s escape partner Wetzler skewered and altered the truth to write a very misleading depiction their magnificent escape from Auschwitz as a novel, Lambert literally “played” with the truth to make a play. No doubt some of the best lines in this play first emanated from Vrba’s mouth—it’s reasonable to assume that Vrba’s unprosecuted plagiarism complaint was not entirely without merit—but it would be foolish to equate a fictional play with documentary realism.

Albee’s play seem tame is tame by comparison. Here is some typical dialogue from Grasshopper Hill.

SUSAN: You cover my face when we make love.
GUSTAV: I don’t “make” love. Americans “make” love. They make cars, they make refrigerators, they make love. A big production. I do not love you, Sushka. I have never loved you. You are not my type. I fuck you. Occasionally.

In Lambert’s concurrently created novel Crossings, we are introduced to a mean-spirited, working class lover named Mik O’Brien who plays strip poker with his lover in the same aggressive style that the Auschwitz escapee Gustav plays chess with Susan. [Vrba and Lambert had drunkenly played chess in the wee hours of the morning at her house prior to first having sex.]

Reduced to nakedness, shivering in the dawn, unable to stop her teeth chattering, Susan hears Mik’s mean laughter. The line that follows, from the perspective of Susan as narrator, could have autobiographical origins: “He throws my clothes at me, like a guard at Auschwitz.”

Susan dresses in front of him, getting into her panties and brassiere, defiantly not turning away. We are told she wishes she could strike him dead. She is crying with sheer rage. She opens the cabin door, she stands beside a ravine. It is a scene that harkens back to Connie and Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Lambert writes:

The birds are beginning to chitter. I am so ugly. My breath steams out or me. After a while he comes out, and stands a little ways off, watching.

I take off the ring and hold it out to him. He takes it and with a great curving arc of his arm, throws it into the ravine.

Lambert’s portrayals of domineering and harsh men, Gustav and Mik, could well be exaggerations drawn from Lambert’s associations with men. If revenge was part of Lambert’s motive for creating both works at the same time, the reader cannot be certain that Rudolf Vrba has not been victimized (and therefore defeated, on the page and stage) in a game of literary chess for posterity.

Although Lambert’s perplexing and provocative Grasshopper Hill is clearly fueled by sexual chemistry, we cannot consider its dialogue to be verbatim representations of their lives:

SUSAN: I knew you wouldn’t hurt me.
GUSTAV: I didn’t hurt you. I defended myself. You were like a crazy woman. I defended myself, that’s all.
SUSAN: It was good fight though. I enjoyed it.
GUSTAV: You’re a real savage. Nobody can trust you.
SUSAN: Oh, I didn’t walk out because you’d hurt me. I didn’t feel a thing. I was afraid I was going to kill you. [laughs]
GUSTAV: You are real animal. Well, when I’m away, don’t screw your head off.

This barrage of emotional brutalism in the guise of truthfulness is not the whole story. When SUSAN has conversations with a WOMAN FRIEND, there is a telling exchange when the friend suggests that surely breaking up with Gustav must be all for the best. Susan recoils:

SUSAN: Let me tell you something, this last year? This last year with Gustav? Let me tell you something you won’t understand in a million years. It was the best time of my life.

While it’s easy to deduce that the couple’s violence is born of the fact that one character was forever damaged by the Holocaust, an argument can made that Lambert was also irrevocably damaged by her own past. All the invective is not one-sided. Susan rails at him, “My father was right, Jews are cheap.”

Very few people on the planet (Gerta, Betty, Robin) would know that Grasshopper Hill also obliquely references an important event that occurred when Vrba was a partisan soldier. After his escape from Auschwitz, fighting in an anti-Nazi brigade in the forests, Vrba was called upon to execute a German prisoner-of-war. It was common practice for both sides to execute prisoners-of-war. Consequently, any German soldier captured by the partisans would have expected to be executed. After Vrba was appointed to the task of executioner for a Nazi soldier, two Russian comrades among the partisans walked with Vrba and the doomed man for about two miles from their camp. It was necessary to not allow any gunshot to alert the enemy to the location of their rebel camp.

They carried shovels. Lambert’s play obliquely references the poignant moment when that doomed German at the gravesite asks him send his dog tags (his soldier’s identification) back to Germany. Vrba promises to do so. He then shoots the man. He tosses the dog tags into the grave. It would have been impossible for rebel desperadoes to mail a package to Germany. Therefore, it was morally appropriate to lie at that moment rather than outright refuse that final request of the German captive.
The references to this true-life event in Lambert’s play are clumsy, vague, to the point of making the war story incomprehensible. Lambert’s inclusion of this event in Vrba’s life is nonetheless an important indicator of the extent to which their relationship was forged with respect. Rudolf Vrba would never have confided such a deeply personal story—in essence, murdering another man in cold blood—if he did not deeply respect and even trust Betty Lambert.

*

Anne Cowan-Buitenhuis

“She was a marvellous, funny person.”

For further information about Betty Lambert, one must gather information from those who knew her beyond family members, as well as examine private correspondence and private journals.

Lambert’s friend Ann Cowan-Buitenhuis had a 23-year stint at SFU where she served as Executive Director of the Vancouver campus and founded SFU’s Writing and Publishing Program and the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing.

She was also married to the SFU English department’s distinguished professor Peter Buitenhuis who served as Associate Director of SFU’s Centre for Canadian Studies (1987-1988). She recalls:

“I think Betty was deeply interested in resilience, survival, and the long-term effects of trauma. She wrote a poem for [Cowan and Buitenhuis’ daughter] Juliana’s baptism in 1980 and sent a gift but did not attend. She explained that her daughter had once again gone missing. And she felt she would be the bad fairy at the gathering, trailing sorrow. It seems Ruth Anne had fallen in with a group of Rastas who were getting her high as she searched for her roots.

Hendrick Hoekema

“A few months later we stopped by her home in Burnaby after work and found Hendrik Hoekema (who worked with Steve Duguid in the prison program) sitting there with a gun on his lap. He was protecting Betty as Ruth Anne had appeared earlier and told her she was instructed to kill her evil mother and she would be coming back with helpers.

“We were a bit alarmed to say the least, but left Betty in Henry’s care. At the time she thought she was having small heart attacks, which later were diagnosed as cancer. The happy ending to this story is that Ruth Anne recovered her senses and was at Betty’s side during her last months and Betty died knowing she would be okay.

“Betty was deeply compassionate and empathetic and sympathetic to students who struggled. One football player came to her office to plead for a grade change to a pass because otherwise he would lose his scholarship and not be able to continue if he failed. She passed him and then went to Peter’s office with an offer to resign or be fired. Peter had spent 1964-5 in Berkeley where the instructions were not to fail anyone as they would then be subject to the draft, so Peter was not too high-minded and went along with Betty’s decision.

“When Peter arrived in the department it was divided into several camps. There was a hate-on for former chair Gerald Newman who would have been identified with Betty. I don’t think she was ever part of the guy group of writers associated with the Black Mountain group, and not part of the fem group, either.

“She was a marvellous, funny person.”

Stephen Osborne

Stephen Osborne, founder of Arsenal Pulp Press (originally known as Pulp Press), is an award-winning writer who also co-founded and edited Geist magazine. After he had published Lambert’s only novel, he was helping her generate a script for a musical to be entitled Spare Change. “Much of the writing and brainstorming happened in my living room. Betty told us of the final diagnosis and we stopped work. From there it was a matter of getting things in order for her estate.”

Whereas their letters must be viewed as literary performances for an audience of one—an extenuation of their highly competitive and sexually-charged chess matches—Lambert’s private diaries and journals are deeply introspective attempts to unravel the truth without artifice.

The SFU archives contains Betty Lambert’s handwritten diary of approximately 220 pages from March of 1972 onwards, as well as their exchange of remarkable letters between 1971 and 1979.
We learn from Lambert’s diaries that the couple’s first tryst seemingly arose from a drunken evening in 1971. After attending some sort of university function—where they possibly met for the first time—neither were fit to drive. Vrba convinced Lambert to leave her car behind, then he decided with gentlemanly bravado and daring stupidity to drive her home to Burnaby.

In the wee hours of the night, at her place, seeing a chess set, Vrba challenged her to a game of chess; or else she challenged him. Either way, we know they were both accomplished players. We get some clues from Grasshopper Hill, written eight years later in 1979, that the chess match was sexualized. Before they go for the jugular in this revenge drama, the narrator intercedes.

NARRATOR: “He took out this phony cigarette holder and very carefully he inserted his cigarette into it. And I got out the chess set and there, on the kitchen table at three in the bloody morning, we played chess.

It wasn’t exactly strip poker but their chess competition, during an alcohol-sated equivalent to an unintentional first date, set the stage for a real-life drama. Later, Lambert’s daughter, Ruth Anne, born out of wedlock in 1964, would chide her mother for being foolish enough to sleep with a man on a first date. Lambert recorded this remark in one of her journals.
Sex, like chess, can be an emotional battlefield. It’s never a game of luck. In Grasshopper Hill, the contest between considerable intellects, between male and female, between black & white, ignites sparks. [Lambert also inserted a chess game in her story, “The Sea Wall”.]

Gustav: I’m white.
Susan: Oh well, women learn to play defensively.
Gustav: Yes, it comes by nature. You all think with your cunts.

Just as there are countless moves and terms in the sport of fencing [En garde,, Esquive, etc.], both players had studied the game of chess and were deft at strategies for attacks and defense.
This sense of competition would reappear in their correspondence—all of which Lambert kept. Whereas she sought to be sincere and confessional in her writing to him, Vrba frequently parried with condescension and sarcasm, maintaining an aloof and even impregnable exterior. In his memoir of Auschwitz, he mentions how those who telegraphed weakness or vulnerability were almost always the first to die.

As their extensive correspondence reveals, their abilities with language were often performative. They were lovers who were often opponents, almost as much as they were friends. Therefore, their letters, are a maze of contradictions, vacillating between tenderness and hostility.

We can safely conclude that the emotional upheaval that Rudolf Vrba incited for Betty Lambert exceeded the emotional impact that their intimacy had wrought on Rudolf Vrba.

This vast disparity in terms of their vulnerability becomes abundantly clear when one examines their correspondence. If combined with Lambert’s journal entries, their letters could easily comprise a viable book, featuring as stunning 40-page letter that Lambert wrote to Vrba—but possibly never sent. [Replicated further down this page.]

“Don’t be always angry with me and do write me whenever you feel for it.” Dec. 22, 1973

Lambert’s hitherto uninvestigated diaries and journals reveal not only how deeply she resented Vrba’s (alleged) Old World misogyny; they also show there was a genuine fondness between them. At some basic level, separate from their bouts of sexuality, these two exceedingly bright people were also friends.

Rancour is more attention-grabbing than camaraderie, so it’s easy to overlook the possibility that Betty Lambert could have served Vrba as a vital link, a bridge, between his womanizing past and his stable and respectful relationship with Robin.

Betty Lambert’s handwritten diary from March 26, 1972 to September, 1972, with its approximately 220 (unnumbered) pages, is much concerned with her sexual relationship with Rudolf Vrba.

Along the way, she reports a little-known fact: Rudi’s first wife Gerta had been trying to get hired at Simon Fraser University—where Lambert was teaching—and that Rudi was pleased by this. No doubt he was hoping to see more of his daughters.

Lambert’s overall theme is confusion. She fears and resents his severe judgementalism [“I thought if Rudi knows this he would think, ‘Good—now she has failed both as a writer & woman.’ ”] and yet she can be thrilled when he calls.

Are they friends first, and lovers second? Or vice versa? Lambert does have other options. Such as Jim. [“His is big and long. Women do come for such things. It isn’t all technique.”] Her overriding theme is confusion. Talking to herself, she is fascinated and repelled and discouraged by her peripatetic lover. She wonders about the effects of Auschwitz on his psyche, on his behavior, on his character. There is a consistent, confessional dialogue with herself. She gives voice to criticisms [“I think too often of how Rudi would never listen.”] and she tries to accept that Rudi is not good for or to her. [“My head aches. I am sad. I do not want to go on living with all this emptiness as the centre of my life… God help me.”] In essence, she is trying to be her own psychiatrist—and failing.

Having attempted to break up with Rudi on May 1, 1972, Lambert recorded her feelings during a ‘get-away-from-it-all’ Caribbean cruise aboard a freighter with her daughter and a friend. They stayed overnight in Kingston, Jamaica, in a nice resort, on May 4: “Early coffee on the verandah… of course started thinking of Rudi. Today is Friday and Monday I told him we were through.”

Travelling with her friend, Minnie, and daughter Ruth Anne, Lambert was frequently afflicted with lifelong asthma as well as troubled by self-esteem issues. Aboard the freighter bound for St. Kitts on May 6, she writes, “Actually got into my bikini and laid in the sun on the deck in a deck chair. My stomach is all flabby… I think of Rudi often.”

Such reflections are not in keeping with those of a ground-breaking feminist playwright who would fearlessly write Jennie’s Story towards the end of the decade. “I look at myself and think, yes, why would he not want young, firm flesh?… I’ve been feeling so old. And fat.”

There is a stopover at St. Kitts on May 9: “Felt so sad about Rudi. Loss of him. Wrote him a short, probably illegible letter.”

The next day she feels more adrift: “I feel no energy for anything. Masturbated this afternoon—thought of Jim—trying to fixate on him instead of Rudi. I am eating too much. Feel I look fat.”

The cruise would include brief stops at Dominica, St. Lucia, as well as a stay at the Holiday Inn in Grenada on May 13, where she muses about being disinterested in men: “If I can get back to quiet pleasures after Rudi… I remember the absolutely humiliating things he did, said—how he let me clean up his car after I’d been sick… What is it about men who find you filthy…? You want to prove something to them.”

Burton and Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Photo by Bob Willoughby

Lambert clearly realized the extent to which she and Rudi were a tempestuous pair, similarly to the fiery relationship depicted in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: “I think one reason people love Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor is partly because of the rows they are supposed to have—him calling her fat, she calling him impossible, and so on. They stay together because each fascinates the other.

“Rudi did/does fascinate me, so it’s hard to take that I don’t fascinate him anymore.”

She recalls that Rudi would “never listen” and writes to him in London, urging him to see Gerta and try to listen to her “for once, so she would be de-mythologized for you, finally.”

On May 15, as Vrba was flying to London, she had a dream in which Rudi was away somewhere with her daughter, Ruth Anne. In this dream, Rudi’s landlord accuses her of being a whore. When she sees Rudi and tells him that the landlord—in her dream—had accused her of having used Ruth Anne in orgies, Rudi just laughs.

Trying to be her own psychiatrist, she feels compelled to recount her disturbing dreams. “When I masturbate,” she writes, “I think of many men, being raped, being held down. Rudi looks on… While he watches, smokes a cigarette in his black holder.”

SHARON: INSERT MAY 16 ENTRY IN GREEN INK.

On May 31, 1972, she again records her sexual feelings and practices without inhibition.

As the ‘dream’ vacation with her daughter and a friend comes to an end at the end of May, she writes, “Came home dissatisfied with my impatient longing, grasping at life.” She continues to record masturbation fantasies in Vancouver, some of which involve Rudi watching her with other men. “How ironic that when Rudi asked me, would you do anything for me, I said I would make love to another man in front of him.”

Self-esteem issues continue to haunt her. On Ruth Anne’s birthday, June 8, she records: “I am fat again—up from 130.5 yesterday to 135 today!” A month later, on July 12, she is more buoyant. “I thought I should write now, when I am not unhappy. It seems I write only when I am miserable in this journal. Today I feel hopeful. I have done very little in the way of work. But I am well… The truth I feel is that Rudi loves me.”

I wish you could have heard my last play [Ed.: The play was called When the bough breaks. It was about the birth control pill and the power it gave to women]: it was about this problem: a women’s lib woman, denouncing all traditional roles, seeking for the beast-man-god in the labyrinth. For women now, you see, man is the god who died. And perhaps this is true for men as well.. women, with their contraceptive dials, women too are gods who have died. We have become so clever we have taken the heart out oof ourselves…and we turn, like hyenas, to eat our own entrails. Confronted with our own self-devised injunction to enjoy, to have fun, we wonder why we feel so lost. After all, we know the nerve endings are principally in the clitoris, why not become lesbians? After all, we know that the vaginal walls are relatively neuter; after all, we know that women can go on and on from orgasm to orgasm: well then, why are men necessary at all?

Well, they’re necessary because for one cataclysmic split second, they can zonk us right into the whole universal thrust, into reality, into knowledge, into humility, into bang crash wow into cosmic power.

Rudi wrote to her from Vienna. He came back to Vancouver. They made love again. The next day he denied he loved her. “What else is new?” she writes. “He looked so beautiful standing there in the doorway with his dark face and angry eyes & his one glove. And I felt, oh, I felt he loves me. He does—even when he said he did not.”

By August 5, this was a fantasy, and she was devastated once more. “It is over. I have phoned Rudi & said this because I love him & because he does not love me. I must not see him for a long time. Perhaps never.”

Rudolf Vrba advised Betty Lambert she should go and see her psychiatrist.

On August 21, her weight has risen to 140. She references psychiatrists named Lipinski and Lilli Chan. Her psychiatrist suggests that she might be in love with Rudi because she wants to save him, and that Vrba could feel guilty about having survived. At age twelve, she had not been able to save her father. “And then I was into the family myth on their tombstone: ‘Greater love hath no man than that he should give his life for his friend.”

The reverberations of her intimacy with Rudi are prevalent throughout 1972. On September 4: “I made it… Yes, I loved him, Rudi Vrba. There were things to love—his view of things—it’s like mine sometimes. I liked his honesty. It would have been worse if he had lied to me and said he loved me, said he’d be faithful. That would have been worse.

“He was an education in a way. I am old – 34 – but not too old to change. I’ll send Rudi a birthday card on the 10th… and mostly I think I didn’t save him but I somehow saved myself.

“I know Rudi didn’t love me, not in any way I understand. He didn’t love me. Period. So shit happens. I loved a man. He didn’t love me. One gets over it. There are worse things, Beth, than unrecognized love. Yes… and he’s better off without me. Because somehow I raised up demons, made him uncomfortable.”

[This journal ends in September of 1972. It is in the archives of Simon Fraser University Special Collections library.]

Women are Like Train Stations

Rudolf Vrba 1973

In April of 1973, according to her journal, Betty Lambert phoned Rudi and he was stiff, polite. “Putting down the phone, I congratulated myself on being able to do this.” Then Sunday night there was a knock on her door…Ruth Anne went to the door. “You’ll never guess who it is,” she called out.

Rudi stays, they talk, he has too much to drink, too much to drive. He is offering his friendship. She is relieved. They were friendly, laughing. “I do not think I am in love with him,” she thinks. It is unclear from the journal whether they slept together or not.

They resume friendship on more equal terms. She considers writing a play about them. His unusual candour remains a lure. “I don’t give presents,” he says, “but I find I like to get them.”

In April, she writes, “Rudi has a nice sexual imagination. We can play out together our ideas. Why not? I do see him clear[ly]. Selfish. Brave. Fighter.”

In May, she writes, “I am angry with Rudi—for not phoning… I am tired of being bullied.”

Such were the vicissitudes of their relationship. Rudi once told her, “Don’t understand so much. A man likes a woman to be cruel.” The extent to which the Holocaust and Auschwitz affected his psyche will forever be a matter of speculation.

He leaves for Boston in September of 1973. Almost a month goes by before she hears from him—once, on October 17, 1973. On November 1, 1973, she receives a “terrible letter from Rudi.” No details are recorded.

[In a much later journal entry to be made on November 4, 1978, Lambert will write: “Five years ago – November 4, 1973, last time I was in bed with a man.” Hence, the chilling letter she received from Vrba prompted her to try having one tryst on the proverbial rebound, before she would eventually decide to cease having consensual sex with a man altogether.]

On November 18, she records: “Strange, agitated time. Full of plans to go to Boston. To appear. To make Rudi love me. How like Marilyn [Monroe?] I am. Consulting Tarot cards.”

Betty mentions another man in her life, “Olaf,” and records she doesn’t love him or want him. She references the letter she has received from Rudi on November 1 in which he diplomatically states he is grateful for having known her—not mentioning that he has his sights on anyone else.

In her journal she references another woman named Marya: “So—making the same mistakes Marya made, am I?” Given that this name was very uncommon in Vancouver in the 1970s, it is impossible not to speculate as to whether or not this could be a reference to the UBC-based poet Marya Fiamengo. Such conjecture must not be misconstrued as fact.

[Born in Vancouver in October 24, 1926, the daughter of parents from the Croatian island of Vis, Marya Ekaterina Fiamengo was a Vancouver-based poet who earned a Master’s degree in English and Creative Writing from UBC under the direction of Earle Birney and Dorothy Livesay. She then taught in the English Department at UBC from 1962 to 1993. She retired in West Vancouver, then later moved to Gibsons, B.C. “My work is strongly influenced by my Slavic background which in no way dilutes but rather reinforces my sense of Canada,” she said.]

In her November journal, Lambert recalls that Rudi had “talked vaguely of marriage “in the abstract—this summer.” At the same time, Rudi had told her she was a “big train station. He doesn’t deny he loves me.” Whether wants to consider the significance of referring to woman as a train station or not—given the dark associations with trains that Vrba had as a Jew who was forced, for months, to clean out the filthy train cars at Auschwitz—this reference in the journal provides fascinating credence to Vrba’s subsequent but unpursued allegations of plagiarism.

In her play clearly inspired by their turbulent relationship, Grasshopper Hill, the Auschwitz survivor Gustav says, “Women, women are like train stations. You pass through them, stay overnight, on your way somewhere. Some are small train stations, and you don’t remember even their names. And then there are the other train stations. Big train stations. There are some train stations you don’t forget.”

In the play script, Lambert than leaves a blank space and adds a line that is extremely unlikely to have been uttered by Vrba: “They were the best years of my life. I enjoyed Auschwitz enormously.”

Having included a poetic and potentially damaging speech directly derived from Vrba—how many women, after all, will embrace the notion that they are only way stations, merely temporary refuges for a man on his way to greater pursuits further down the line?—Lambert’s inclusion of the preposterous line, “I enjoyed Auschwitz enormously” reveals a motive of revenge. Vrba could have uttered such an absurdist statement sardonically, for its shock value, taken out of context. He was sometimes amused by Canadians’ lack of knowledge of Holocaust. But repeating the line as declarative statement, without context, renders the line damaging, likely disguising its original intent.

Rudolf Vrba often preferred to make shocking comments, knowing that some fools would be keen to misinterpret his sardonic wit for the truth. There are websites made by Holocaust deniers wherein baldly sarcastic comments Vrba made have been gleefully reproduced to support idiotic and hateful antisemitism. As a jilted lover, Lambert, in Grasshopper Hill, was evidently not immune to taking advantage of similar opportunities to distort Vrba, inciting others to judge Vrba harshly.

In real life, in private, when Lambert recorded the train station analogy, she added, “He doesn’t deny he loves me.” In fiction, for the play, Lambert embellished the train station analogy but withdrew that statement, “He doesn’t deny he loves me. Hence, Grasshopper Hill should not be viewed as a fair depiction of Rudolf Vrba. Instead, it’s an unfair and even opportunistic depiction.

In the same journal, Lambert writes, “I say to him while I roam the house at night, Rudi we must marry. I never felt this about any man.” That perspective has evaporated for the radio play.

Still pining for Rudi, disturbed by his unwillingness to communicate from Boston, Lambert, wrote to Rudi to tell him she was planning to fly all the way to Boston for a weekend visit. She tried to reach him several times. In December, she recorded: “I wrote to Rudi asking him how he felt about my coming to Boston—the weekend, the 16th. I asked him to let me know. He has not done so. So I am not going…

“This has determined me. This is his last chance. I shall never write to him again, nor see him again, unless some good reason for such behaviour is offered. I must decide this way or [else] my life will be disgusting to myself. It’s funny, really—I can take almost anything—but not rudeness.”

Rebuffed by silence, by December 21, 1973, still unaware of Rudi’s love affair with Robin, Betty Lambert tells herself, “I seem to have dropped out of love.”

Such an avowal might well have been true, but the final sentence in her journal that ends on September 1, 1975, reveals that Vrba remained an important character in her life. “I’ve written Rudi,” she confides to herself, “telling him I won’t see him.”

By 1976, writes in her journal, “Oh, Rudi, why couldn’t you have loved me? Rudi, why did you take me on for so long if it meant nothing but the occasional fuck? Help me, God. Help me, somebody.”

Betty Lambert continued to be a harsh judge of herself [“Was I a bitch? Yes.”]. She remained confessional [“I am so damaged.”] but she never completely accepted that her former relationship with Rudolf Vrba was water under the bridge.

In Lambert’s diary from November 1977 to January 3, 1979, Rudi Vrba’s name rarely appears—but when she made an inventory of her lovers and she attached a few comments, her notation for Vrba was forthright and concise: “In love.” Unlike most of the other men in Lambert’s life, in the end, she felt she had loved him. Whether or not Betty Lambert, in the end, felt Rudolf Vrba was worthy of her love remains a mystery.

UNRECOGNIZED LOVE: AN ARCHIVAL SELECTION

Dec. 14, 1974

UNDATED