Reder ran his own soap factory in Lemberg until 1910, according to the Bełżec Museum website. He married Feiga Felsenfeld. They had two children, daughter Freida born in 1908 and a son Boruch, in 1907. Historian Dariusz Libionka informs that until 1919 Reder was in the United States. He returned to Lwów in already sovereign Poland and resumed soap production with the newly acquired knowledge. During the Holocaust, he lost his first wife and both children. Reder, age 61, was deported to Bełżec on August 11, 1942, with one of the first transports of Jews from the Lwów Ghetto after the new big gas chambers were erected of brick and mortar. Because of his good knowledge of German he was not sent off to die, but assigned to the Sonderkommando with a handful of others. At the ramp he claimed to have been a machinist, and for the next three months performed maintenance on engine for the gas chambers among other tasks. At the end of November 1942, during the prisoner transport to Lviv for camp supplies and sheet metal, he escaped under cover of darkness. A Ukrainian woman, his former employee, helped him first, as did the Polish Righteous Joanna Borkowska whom Rudolf Reder married after the war and later emigrated with, settling in Toronto, Canada. He and his second wife, Joanna, are buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, in Toronto. It was previously believed, by all accounts, that he had died in 1968. This has proven to be false.
Reder's book
Soon after the Soviet takeover, whilst still in Poland, Reder testified in January 1946 in Kraków before the Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes. In the same year, he published his testimony in a book, with the help of the Jewish Historical Committee in Kraków. His monograph titled Bełżec was written in Polish with the Preface by his editor, Nella Rost, and illustrated with a map by Józef Bau, a Holocaust survivor who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. In the book, Reder wrote about what he saw as the motor-maintenance worker, and what he learned afterwards: Reder changed his name to Roman Robak in 1949 and left Poland for Israel in 1950. He emigrated with his second wife to Canada in 1953. In 1960 he submitted a deposition at the prosecutor’s office in Munich as part of the German preparations for the Belzec trial against eight former SS members of Bełżec extermination camp personnel. Further information on Reder is scant. His second daughter married Leonard Shenker and settled in Great Britain. Reder died in Toronto in 1968. His account of the Belzec camp imprisonment, published for the first time in 1946, was reprinted in 1999 by Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum with Fundacja Judaica in bilingual edition featuring an English translation by Margaret M. Rubel, then issued again as "Belzec" in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, and republished in the UK as part of a book titled I Survived a Secret Nazi Extermination Camp by Mark Forstater in 2013.
