Some books you can settle down and enjoy in one sitting. Others, you need to get up and step away for a bit to process what it was that you just read.
“The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World,” part of the latter category, opens with the vivid and enrapturing account of Rudolph Vrba and Fred Wetzler’s carefully planned and self-engineered escape out of the concentration and death camp. Understanding from his first week in Auschwitz that trying, and failing, to escape meant death, Vrba, a “scholar of Auschwitz escapology,” diligently observed what made other escapees fail and prepared his plan to succeed. Armed with Russian tobacco soaked in petrol to warn off tracker dogs, a watch for timekeeping and bread and coffee for sustenance, Vrba and Wetzler’s three-day escape plan was a success.
Jonathan Freedland, the London-based journalist and author who wrote the book, first learned of Vrba’s story as a teenager while attending a screening of the nine-hour documentary “Shoah.” He was impressed by both Vrba’s on-screen demeanor and the details of his escape.
“For many years, I was mainly struck by it as an adventure story, as a kind of thrilling escape,” Freedland said. “I’ve now read many Second World War escape stories and I remain convinced that this is the most thrilling of all of them.”
Vrba’s escape from Auschwitz was driven by an urgency to warn the remaining Jewish communities in Hungary of what awaited them after deportation—death, not relocation as they had been told.
“He really was not just somebody who had pulled off an extraordinary heroic escape, which is an act of tremendous physical bravery and ingenuity, but also he was somebody dedicated to the business of fighting lies and bringing out truth,” Freedland said.
After he was assigned to work on an unloading ramp at Auschwitz, Vrba saw tens of thousands of people forced to go to either the concentration camp or the gas chamber. With each cattle truck that appeared, Vrba saw over and over how the people arriving were unaware of, or refusing to believe, their fate. He began to understand how the Nazis utilized deception and held to the belief that if Jews knew more of what was happening in the concentration camps, they could interrupt and resist the operation, even if only a little.
So, when Vrba escaped, it was with a mission: tell the world what the Nazis were doing.
New Voices sat down with Freedland to hear about the process of researching Vrba’s story, writing about the Holocaust and and what lessons the story can teach us about our reactions to human rights abuses and genocides occuring in the world today.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
New Voices: You were 19 years old when you first heard about Rudolf Vrba, the same age he was when he escaped. How has your perspective of his story changed since then?
Jonathan Freedland: When I was 19, I was just struck by what a charismatic, unusual figure he cut on the screen of the cinema where I saw this extraordinary documentary film “Shoah” by Claude Lanzmann. I was struck by how handsome this man was, how energetic and youthful he seemed. And I was struck by the extraordinary fact that he had escaped from Auschwitz aged 19. Even as a 19-year-old, I knew that most Jews didn’t escape from Auschwitz—it was almost unheard of.
As I got older, I realized there was much more to the story, mainly because I understood more deeply his motive. Obviously, everybody would want to escape from Auschwitz, but his motive was very particularly built on his understanding that central to the Nazi killing method was deception. He understood that the only way the Nazis were able to do what they were doing was that their victims were entirely in the dark as to their fate. Therefore, he became determined to tear down that veil of ignorance and let them know what fate awaited them.
NV: When did you first get the idea to write a book about him?
JF: It was after 2016 and there was the phenomenon of Donald Trump and Brexit and in 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary made “post-truth” its word of the year—we were suddenly in the age of post-truth.
Suddenly I was very struck by the fact that, in the back of my mind, was this story I’d carried around for 35 or more years, which was about somebody who had done everything and risked everything to bring out the truth from underneath a mountain of lies. That is why I found myself going back to the story. By about 2019/2020, I was thinking, ‘This should be a book.’
NV: What distinguished his escape from others?
JF: He was interestingly quite impatient with the underground resistance that existed in Auschwitz, which a lot of people have told me they found a revelation because they didn’t know there was an underground in Auschwitz. People don’t realize there were really two camps side by side—the death camp, where the life expectancy of Jews was measured in hours, and the concentration camp, a prison camp and slave labor camp where people would be kept alive and in effect worked to death, but over a period of months.
Within that second location, there was a resistance and an underground. Their commitment, as Rudolph Vrba concluded, was the betterment of their own conditions. He benefited from that slightly, but he did not regard that as good enough. For him, the only objective, given that there was this killing factory going on just there, had to be the halting of that killing factory.
Where I think Rudolph Vrba was so unusual was the intensity of his drive to tell the world, to the point where he memorized every transport that he witnessed coming into the camp, every trainload of Jews, estimating the numbers, committing to memory the point of origin and the date and storing them with a feat of memory that I think is unparalleled.
I think perhaps there were probably a handful of Jews who did dream of doing what he did—escaping in order to tell the world—but he was so unusual because he succeeded in escaping, and he had the ability to retain this data that would become essential in his informing the world.
NV: In the first chapter, you write about many little moments in Vrba’s childhood—stealing eggs from the chicken coop and eating them raw, choosing to go into a restaurant on his own and eat pork for the first time. How were you able to discover those stories and how did you decide which ones to use?
JF: I was so lucky that Rudolph Vrba was survived by both his first wife and his second wife. His first wife Gerta Vrbová died during the process of working on this book, aged 93, but his widow Robin Vrba is still alive and I spent hours and hours and hours speaking with them. Gerta knew Rudolph before Auschwitz so she was able to remember him as a child. Robin had spent a lot of time talking to Rudolph about his childhood and she had also spoken with many relatives of his who had survived. I was also so lucky because Gerta handed me a suitcase of letters. Rudolph wrote long letters to his two daughters. One letter ran to 42 handwritten pages full of details about his life, his memories and his thoughts.
Also, he was interviewed many times throughout his life. The transcripts of those interviews survived, and I found them in archives. They ran to sometimes hundreds of pages, and only fragments had ever been used.
What I tended to do was pick out story details or stories that I thought were telling, that somehow shed light on the man who was to come. For example, there’s a story in the book about him eating pork and having no faith; it’s tremendously important to understand him, I think, and also then the person or the challenges he would have later on in his life. When you see something that happens to someone in their 70s, an episode that happened in their teens makes sense.
NV: As a novelist, how did you approach writing this biography in a way that would be interesting to read?
JF: Thrillers, as a form, are all about the withholding of information. You as the writer often do know the significance of that detail or how the whole thing is going to end. The business of structuring a thriller is revealing important bits of information at different stages and before those bits are revealed, you have to inhabit the world as it was seen or as it seemed to the people in it at that time.
It was very important that Rudolph Vrba had no idea what Auschwitz meant or represented. In fact, I know from having looked at the documents, he was relieved to arrive at Auschwitz, which to us now seems incredible, because we know what Auschwitz was. He didn’t.
He saw a place where the buildings were made of brick and there were proper paved paths. It seemed as if this was a place of order and efficiency, and an improvement on Majdanek, the concentration camp where he’d been before, which was boggy and muddy with thin, wooden, flimsy structures that were freezing to sleep in. And he thought, “Okay, we’ve taken a step up, this is better.” The task is to write with no hindsight—you have to write in the moment.
NV: Many who read the Vrba-Wetzler report, the eyewitness account of Rudolph Vrba and Fred Wetzler, could or would not believe it. Government and intelligence officials took little action after reading it, if they read it at all. Do you see a lesson here for readers as groups of people around the world continue to face human rights abuses or genocide?
JF: The more forgivable reaction was incredulity—disbelief that human beings could do this. There were less forgivable reactions, including prejudice. I described the officials in London and Washington, who, through a form of antisemitism, were ready to discount what Jews were telling them.
I hope this book will make people check themselves. So when they read reports about Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar or Uyghur Muslims in China, they will think to themselves, ‘Am I now reacting like those people I read about in the story of Rudolph Vrba, where they have evidence set out in front of them, but something makes you go either it’s not true or maybe it is true, but there’s nothing I can do about it?’
I have been chastened by the experience of researching and writing the story. When I’m on Twitter, and my thumb is about to scroll past some terrible thing, I think to myself, ‘How different am I being from those people in the Vrba story who looked away?’ It’s a rebuke to myself and I hope in a way this story will work as a kind of challenge to us to look evil in the eye when we come across it, and to not think, ‘Well, it can wait.’ Or, ‘how can we be sure?’
The point of the story in some ways is to be armed now for a world in which lies, apathy, disinformation and inertia haunt us as much now as they did then.
NV: You wrote about how Vrba didn’t conform to what society expected of survivors. Can you say more about that?
JF: We place impossible and unfair expectations on people who have survived great trauma.
I can hear it when I hear journalists interview the tiny, dwindling number of remaining Holocaust survivors. There’s a mode that interviewers go into—very gentle, very respectful, but they expect the survivor to offer healing, consoling wisdom. The strange thing is we expect them to console us. We expect them to reassure us, to tell us that despite the hell they glimpsed, the world is OK.
It reveals something about our need, that we need survivors to tell us that and, therefore, we put great pressure on them. The manifestation of that was the impatience that was shown to Rudolph Vrba—that there was not sufficient respect or interest in his story because it did not fit the comforting narrative that I think we, the non-survivors, want, which is, ‘Hitler and the Nazis were evil and everyone else was on the side of good.’ It’s not as simple as that.
For one thing, the nations of Europe—many of them collaborated in order to make the Holocaust possible. This wasn’t just a German thing. It was also a Lithuanian thing, a Latvian thing, an Estonian thing, a Ukrainian thing, a Polish thing, a French thing, an Austrian thing and on and on. Everybody was involved and that’s not a comforting message.
NV: On page 109, there is a paragraph about how Dr. Mengele cruelly trained a young boy—as punishment to his Jewish mother—to run, bark, bite and attack like a dog at the command of a whip and how starving prisoners would rush to an executed body and eat what they could of the corpse. How did you cope with writing a whole book about a topic as difficult and upsetting as the Holocaust, specifically focusing so much on a death camp, without breaking down emotionally?
JF: I wouldn’t have realized this until now that I’ve done it, but I think it is perhaps easier to write about this subject than it is to read about it. I was looking deep into the abyss of human darkness, but I was doing it in order to metabolize it and process it into something else. If I had just been reading this thing and then letting it sit inside, I don’t know what it could have done to me. I was engaged in a process that was requiring me to process it.
I incidentally think that Rudolph Vrba himself possibly performed that same act of metabolism because he said afterwards that he was witnessing these transports every day and that watching that nearly broke him, Fred Wetzler observed. Once he had resolved to tell the world and once he had a reason to process this information, to absorb it and commit it to memory, it enabled him to get through because he now had a reason to be looking into the abyss. He was determined to get this information out.
The second thing I would say is because I’m a father of two children and a husband and because I maintained my day job doing this, I was constantly called back from the edge of the abyss into normal life. I think that was very valuable and psychologically probably quite helpful.
NV: Your book covers the topic of Jewish leaders themselves withholding information from the remaining Jewish communities in Europe, whether it was because they believed it was the right thing to do or they had self-serving reasons. Why was it important for you to write about that?
JF: This is very vexed territory. There was no way to avoid it as a topic because it gripped Rudolph Vrba himself. He had huge anger for the rest of his life that he and Fred Wetzler had gone to huge lengths to produce this report and get the word out and one particular leader, Rezső Kasztner, the de facto leader of Hungary’s Jews, had the report, saw it, and did not distribute it to the Jews of Hungary—the last Jewish community not yet called into the Nazi inferno.
He had huge resentment and anger of Kasztner, who he believed was responsible in some ways for the ignorance of those Jews in Hungary, and their ignorance, Vrba believed, is what prevented them at least having a chance to make a decision that might have saved some of their lives. All I thought I could do was to set out the facts.
There were other leaders in Hungary that could not believe what they were reading. This is one of the big themes of the book—that people can be passed information and facts, and still not believe. This is a really big warning for our own time. Rudolph Vrba came to understand that merely presenting the facts to people is necessary, but not sufficient. It’s not sufficient if people see the facts and do not turn those facts into knowledge, which is facts plus belief. I have this quote from the French philosopher Raymond Aron, that I quoted in the book, “I knew, but I didn’t believe it. And because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.” And that is a profound truth, and the one that I think has great resonance for our own time.
NV: Do you have any parting advice for young journalists who are interested in writing about difficult topics in history, such as this one?
JF: My advice would be not to shy away from it. Just because something is horrific and dark does not mean it has to be a chore to read, because then people won’t read it. I worked very hard to make sure this book was accurate and faithful to the story but in a gripping and riveting way. It’s meant to be a book you cannot put down because the temptation with this sort of material is to put it down because it’s so difficult to the heart.
I think whatever narrative tools you have in your toolkit, as a journalist, filmmaker, artist or photographer, use them to full effect because you need them all. It’s easy to tell a happy story because the material is already cheering up your reader. With something like this, you’ve really got to work hard to make it something that people don’t look away and don’t put down, but stick with.
The second bit of advice is I would take your lead from those who have gone through whatever trauma it is you’re describing. Take your lead from them—what do they say? How did they want to talk about it? Let them decide how they tell the story and what, to them, is important. Let them take the lead.
