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.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue