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

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland is the story of Rudolf Vrba, who along with Alfréd Wetzler, managed to do the unbelievable by escaping from Auschwitz in April 1944.

Freedland starting by writing about the anti-Semitism in Slovakia and the deportation of Jews to places that they believed were resettlement camps. Vrba, seventeen at the time and living under his birth name of Walter Rosenberg, knew that there was a more sinister plan behind the idea of resettling his country’s fellow Jews and devised a plan to flee to England. He was apprehended and then deported to the Majdanek death camp, then after two weeks was moved to Auschwitz.

Vrba was a fit young man and survived the flick-of-a-finger assessment that saw three-quarters of new arrivals sent immediately to the gas chambers. He described the horrors of the camp and his time there, barely surviving on the limited food while being forced to work in the gravel pits. For lack of a better word, Vrba was “promoted” to a position that was easier on the body and worked sorting the suitcases and possessions of the newest arrivals. He used his access to the money and valuables he found to curry favour with the guards. They turned a blind eye while Vrba secretly scoped out the place, all the while planning a way to escape.

The author portrayed Vrba as a master of memory, being able to recall the layout of Auschwitz and every fence and guard post. With his life at stake and no paper or pencil to draw a map, he had to rely on his memory in order to save his life. He memorized the guards’ schedules and knew when and how often they would be in certain areas. Any escape attempt had to be a successful one, for failure meant instant death.

Without the means to record facts and figures, Vrba, because he worked on the ramps which saw the arrivals of trains to Auschwitz, committed to memory the number of cars and people who disembarked. He could tell their country of origin. He could also distinguish from all the identification numbers, seen on tattoos, when they arrived.

Freedland wrote a suspenseful account of Vrba and Wetzler’s escape and their three days of hiding before they could make their breakthrough. While on the run they had to watch every step, as they were now wanted men who put anyone at risk if they tried to seek help. Fortunately some sympathetic people opened their homes and gave them food.

After the escape Vrba and Wetzler set out to tell the world about the horrors of Auschwitz. In a series of independent interviews they laid the foundation for the Vrba-Wetzler Report. Vrba was understandably manic in his urgency to get this information out in order to stop the deportations. He could not comprehend why world governments did not immediately come to the aid of Hungarian Jewry, who were being sent to Auschwitz at that time. Freedland wrote about the state of the war at that particular moment, and how much the American and British governments knew about the genocide, yet Vrba grew increasingly frustrated that no one was heeding his report’s call for help. I can imagine Vrba, knowing that he possessed the knowledge to possibly save countless thousands, running around in circles pulling his hair out, desperate for someone to do something. That is not an inaccurate description of him, for Freedland does paint a picture of a man lashing out over apparent international inaction. Vrba and Wetzler’s efforts were not in vain, for in July of 1944 two hundred thousand Jews from Budapest were saved when the Hungarian government ordered the deportations to stop.

Vrba did not live a happy life after the war. Post-traumatic stress ruined his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, and the author had a strained relationship with his two daughters, the older of whom committed suicide. He spent the rest of his life regretting that more Jews couldn’t be saved. He wasn’t satisfied that his work had saved two hundred thousand; he wanted no more Jews to die once his report was released. He had the statistics committed to memory and knew how many would perish as each new train pulled in to Auschwitz. To delay a day meant the loss of thousands, and he probably felt responsible for not being powerful or influential enough with governments to stop it.

Freedland wrote what might have blown up into a career-ending piece on how the Jewish community shunned Vrba. He wrote about the unthinkable, that Jews themselves didn’t appreciate Vrba because his media appearances were so unflattering. Every interview or TV appearance was filled with accusations against others, blaming them for inaction or complicity. What was worse, Vrba exposed Jews as well as Hungarian Jewish Councils whom he believed were collaborators with Nazi Germany, as the possible reasons that his report was not acted upon. Vrba lived as a pariah among Holocaust survivors:

“Rudolf Vrba refused to conform to what the world expects of a Holocaust survivor.
…
“Rudi knew that he was refusing to fit what he called ‘the survivor clichés manufactured for the taste of a certain type of public’: he would offer no uplifting aphorisms, reassuring his audience that, ultimately, human beings were good. He was unforgiving and he was angry. The result was to make Rudolf Vrba, for the best part of three decades, a peripheral figure even in the small world of Holocaust remembrance in Vancouver.”

The last word in the quotation above indicates that Vrba eventually moved to Canada and settled in Vancouver, and died there in 2006.

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Life on Svalbard: Finding Home on a Remote Island Near the North Pole

 

Life on Svalbard: Finding Home on a Remote Island Near the North Pole by Cecilia Blomdahl was a stunning collection of photos and stories about the author’s life in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago high above the Arctic Circle. Within its 258 pages Blomdahl tracks the sun through the calendar and orders her chapters accordingly. We start off with Polar Night, then move on to Pastel Winter, then Sunny Winter, then we have the midnight sun during Polar Day, and then the return of the setting sun ends the book with Golden Autumn. Whole text does not fill the pages with the exception of reproductions of Blomdahl’s diary entries. For the most part, the photos take precedence and the text is relegated to half a page. The pages were very thick and I always had to ensure I was not turning more than one page at a time. I was glad that the book was printed on matte paper as glossy pages would catch the glare of the light. I need to have a light shining down on each page as I read and would have had to constantly move the rather large book around to take in the beauty of the photos while avoiding the lamp’s glare.

Blomdahl’s photos of the glaciers and of her walks within them left me in awe. Sometimes openings in the ice enabled a person to walk underneath the enormous hulky cover to see what it looked like from the inside of a glacier. It looked organic, like exploring the body during an operation, yet not in red fleshy tones. While living on Svalbard she had numerous stories to tell of hearing mysterious rumbling sounds, and realized that it was caused by the thundering glaciers, sometimes heard when two were pushing against one another. Imagine the sounds of glaciers as they were moving across the North American continent millennia ago. I wonder how loud they would be as they advanced and retreated. While sitting across from the Nansen Glacier, Blomdahl wrote:

“There was a stillness that spread out across the bay, interrupted only by the eerie creaks and cracks of the thousand-year-old glacier ice. It stands as one of nature’s most breathtaking landscapes.”

I spent two days with this beautiful book, which I wouldn’t mind having on my own bookshelves. I know I could have finished it in a single sitting but with such gorgeous photos of the Svalbard landscape, the northern lights, glaciers and her dog Grim, I took my time with it. In spite of my praise I did notice a couple errors. For one, the map Blomdahl provides at the beginning of the book shows the Arctic Circle passing through Iceland and Southampton Island. It does not pass through either island, and is located to the north of each. She also misspelled Philippines as Phillipines. As a reader with a degree of low vision I could not read the text when it was white on yellow, yellow on white, or white on light blue without a viewing aid.

Blomdahl is an avid adventurer and a skilled photographer whose respect for nature will ensure that the Svalbard environment remains pristine. As she explored the archipelago she stressed the need to leave things as they were and to pick up after oneself.

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The Bullet: Stories from the Newfoundland Railway

The Bullet: Stories from the Newfoundland Railway by Robert Hunt was a collection of homey personal reminiscences of the author’s time as a teen working the summers on the Newfoundland Railway in the 1960’s. Hunt came from a family where the men were long-time employees of the railway, which crossed Newfoundland from St. John’s to Port aux Basques. Hunt’s father, brother and uncle all worked various jobs on the rails. Hunt shared not only his own but also his late father’s stories on the railroad.

The title of the book is the nickname used for the train. It was used ironically, as throughout the book Hunt related how slowly the train travelled. It used a narrow gauge which meant that not only was its speed compromised, but that it faced delays when receiving cargo from mainland trains, as the latter could not ride on the island’s tracks and the cargo had to be off- then onloaded. I had to laugh at Hunt’s remark:

“The train was called ‘the Bullet’ or ‘the Caribou’ by all who worked there and by many of the Newfoundlanders who travelled on them. People said that it was named the Bullet by the Americans because it was the slowest train they had ever ridden.”

Prior to every one of Hunt’s shifts he would visit the pharmacy across the street from the train station and pick up some snacks. He befriended the pharmacist who was none other than genuine World War One hero Sgt. Tommy Ricketts. Hunt shared his conversations with Ricketts. He always treated him with respect, calling him Mr. Ricketts and never Tommy, as his father forbade him to. Even as an adult recalling these stories from over a half century ago, Hunt maintains the utmost respect for this war hero, a Victoria Cross recipient.

Hunt wrote about railway history on the island, from the creation of the Reid and Newfoundland Railways to the amalgamation into the Canadian National Railway after Confederation. In addition to his personal stories about washing dishes all day, serving customers and exploring areas he shouldn’t, Hunt wrote chapters on the exemplary service the CNR provided and the kind men he worked with. He also wrote a chapter on the train tragedies of Newfoundland where trains derailed or sometimes collided. Thus in one chapter at least, the railway stories were not always feel-good.

When the Trans-Canada Highway officially opened in 1966 it signalled the imminent end to passenger rail service. Although 1966 was also a Come Home Year, where expat Newfoundlanders were encouraged to come back home to visit, the increase in rail passengers did not help the industry and passenger service ceased in 1969.

Hunt supplemented the book with many personal photos of his own family, plus archive shots of the former railway, its staff and railroad paraphernalia.

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The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

 

How could I resist the subject matter in The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss? Bookstores are my favourite places to shop, although I am drawn to secondhand and antiquarian shops over retail outlets. Friss covered both, as well as bookshops on wheels, sidewalk stalls and the mass murderer of all kinds of bricks-and-mortar stores: Amazon. After 312 pages of text, Friss supplied an incredible 67 pages of endnotes. Almost all of these notes provided bibliographic references only and could be ignored. Therefore the heft of the book is thinner than what appears between the covers.

We read about the first American bookstores, and those that were pioneers in their fields (though not necessarily the first) such as stores dealing exclusively with queer content, or black-focussed or feminist bookstores. Friss profiled some of the most beloved and famous bookstore owners, not all (but must) of them a bit quirky, and how each one seemed to live and breathe a life of all things books.

Bookstores have managed to survive amidst changing technologies, and I don’t believe the paper medium for reading is doomed:

“Nineteenth-century booksellers worried that public libraries would destroy them. In the twentieth century, the bogeyman was the radio, then the movies, then TV, then mass-market paperbacks, and then the superstores. In the twenty-first century, ebooks and Amazon have been the existential threats. The fear that the book business is imperiled–near death, even–has always been an industry staple.”

Yet the number of my favourite bookstores continues to shrink. On my latest visit to Helsinki, I wrote about the disappearance of one (Antikvariaatti Korkeavuori) and the downsizing of another (Akateeminen Kirjakauppa). Everything boils down to the bottom line, and as one New York vendor explained:

“Booksellers needed profits, of course, but they didn’t need much profit to keep the doors open. ‘If I wanted to make money, I’d sell herring,’ one Fourth Avenue seller claimed. It was a business and a passion.”

In the 1940’s and 50’s I would have loved browsing amidst the booksellers along New York’s Fourth Avenue, known as Book Row. One of the stores, the Strand Bookstore, is the sole survivor today, yet now located at 828 Broadway.

I liked the profile of bibliophile Burt Britton, a bookseller at the Strand:

“He also invited herds of librarians to browse in person. When they did, he didn’t hesitate to correct their pronunciation of Nabokov’s name–or their taste. ‘It’s just as easy to read something good,’ he would say, replacing the book in their hands with another. He was grumpy and charming. When one customer asked him for a book recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, adding, ‘I don’t know the name of it, and it’s got a subtitle, but I don’t know that either,’ Britton let him have it: ‘Jesus Christ! … Get outta here!’ But as the customer walked away, Britton told him exactly where to find it. (FSG had published just one book with a subtitle in the previous week.)”

The Bookshop was a delight to read which I could not put down. How I wished I could travel back in time to visit some of these stores, and I often reminisced about the favourite stores of my past, sorrowfully no longer in business or transformed into establishments I no longer recognize.

Friss employed the nominal lexicalization of the virgule, i.e. slash, throughout the book. It grew annoying after the second example. These examples occurred near the end of the book, when I realized I needed a couple citations:

“Borders began in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as a small used bookshop in 1971. It had grown tremendously by the time Kmart acquired it in 1992, at which point Kmart already owned Waldenbooks, which already owned Brentano’s. Borders-slash-Waldenbooks-slash-Brentano’s-slash-Kmart was a powerhouse.” (p. 237)

and:

“And then there was author-slash-actor-slash-playwright-slash-hiphopper Lin-Manuel Miranda.” (p.298)

In a chapter on the Aryan Book Store, which operated in Los Angeles in 1933, Friss alternated between Adolph Hitler (p. 159) and Adolf (p. 170).

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