The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

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Other factors helped too: fitness, intelligence, adaptability, usefulness about the camp, sturdy footwear.

SS man Perry Broad said he heard kapos bragging about chasing and catching Pestek in woods around the camp. According to Lederer, he was then driven to Constance, alternately dressed as a civilian and an SS officer. Vrba helped save 200,000 Jewish lives—but he never stopped believing it could have been so many more. According to Baeck's testimony after the war, an unknown Mischling had been deported directly to Auschwitz and later transferred to a work detail, from which he escaped. Two words dominate Jonathan Freedland’s new book, THE ESCAPE ARTIST: THE MAN WHO BROKE OUT OF AUSCHWITZ; trust and escape.All this meant that the Vrba-Wetzler report, completed at the end of April 1944, provided a far more detailed picture of the Holocaust than the rumours and more fragmentary accounts that had emerged before. I started listening to the audio read by the author himself and as difficult as the subject is I found myself riveted. The SS treats these people civilly, plays with the little kids (who don’t exist in the rest of the camp because they are immediately murdered), constantly assures the families of their concern, and yet, because of his job in the camp, Walter knows these thousands of people are scheduled for murder in exactly six months. He told Pestek he was wealthy and that his contacts in the underground would help Pestek and Neumann. With the help of Vrba’s letters, his first wife, Gerta, his widow, Robin, and numerous scholars, Freedland expertly fills that and many other gaps.

They live on the other side of a wire fence from all the cadaverous Jewish slaves, none of whom can understand what’s going on. And this death was not certain for all—there was selection for slave labor; perhaps not all transports went to Auschwitz. According to Kárný, Lederer regarded fleeing to Switzerland as cowardice and desertion, even though Kárný notes that his testimony on Auschwitz would have been more credible if he had delivered it in person.Having learnt from the failed attempts of others, Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz, walking across Poland to reach Slovakia. According to Austrian historian and Auschwitz survivor Hermann Langbein, his actions in particular indicate the limits of the absolute totalitarian hierarchy imposed by SS leaders. This was a very well-written autobiography by a Russian POW who spent time in Auschwitz and was forced to help build parts of other nearby camps.

Then it all concludes with an unserious and Hollywood-baity epilogue in which Freedland draws a comparison between Rudolf Vrba and Harry Houdini, supposedly because having had to escape for his life from a transit camp and a concentration camp and the Iron Curtain likens him to Houdini's for-money spectacle escapes. Courage and a steely determination to do the right thing led Rudolf Vrba and his friend, Fred Wetzler, to make a daring escape from the heavily guarded concentration camp.After the Sudetenland was annexed to Germany in 1938, he moved to Plzeň and worked manual jobs, including agricultural work and a stint in a kaolin factory. Even while still in Auschwitz, Vrba had heard rumours that the camp was being expanded to cope with the arrival of about a million Hungarian Jews, the last surviving major European community. This could've been just a gaffe, an honest mistake, and quickly corrected, it shouldn't have been an issue. The last ambition was largely frustrated, though up to 200,000 Jews who would otherwise have died were spared.