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

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After the Vrba-Wexler Report, Jewish leadership implored American officials to bomb Auschwitz. Yet the Americans denied the requests, citing several reasons: military resources couldn't be diverted because they were needed for non-Jewish Polish citizens; bombing Auschwitz might be ineffective, and bombing might provoke even more vindictive German action. The issue is still passionately debated to this day. The failure to bomb Auschwitz became synonymous with the world's indifference to Jewish genocide, Jewish suffering, and antisemitism. In a letter to a TV producer of Auschwitz and the Allies, based on Martin Gilbert’s book, Rudi Vrba wrote: “I’m not the clichéd Holocaust survivor.” Freedland’s book triumphantly proves that to be true. Faced daily with the threat of dying. Rudi had to be strong and his will to survive beyond any means. In his struggle all he could think of was to escape and warn others. He calculated that if the perscuted Jews rose and faught that the senseless murders would stop. Risking his own life, Rudi and his friend Wetzler. A struggle to get to safety both Vrba and Wetzler gave the accounts and numbers of those being murdered in cold blood in Auschwitz-Birkenau. There was only one exception to that rule. If an inmate was missing, presumed to have attempted an escape, the SS kept up the outer ring of armed sentry posts for 72 hours as they searched. After that, they would conclude that the escapee, or escapees, had got away: from then on, it would be the responsibility of the Gestapo to scour the wider region and find them. If a prisoner could somehow hide in the outer area, during those three days and nights after the alarm had been sounded – as Walter and Fred were doing now – then he would emerge on the fourth night into an outer camp that was unguarded. He could escape.

The Escape Artist is not one of those Holocaust books with endless imagined dialogue or feelings. Drawing forensically on Vrba’s own writings, court proceedings, family memoirs, Freedland can produce a source for everything, even down to a moment where Vrba, hidden in an underground wood and mud construction in Auschwitz, felt sweat running down his face.

Escapees from Auschwitz

Vrba testified against Robert Mulka of the SS at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, telling the court that he had seen Mulka on the Judenrampe at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The court found that Vrba "made an excellent and intelligent impression" and would have been particularly observant at the time because he was planning to escape. It ruled that Mulka had indeed been on the ramp, and sentenced him to 14 years in prison. [204] It concluded with a list, billed as a ‘Careful estimate of the number of Jews gassed in Birkenau between April 1942 and (according to countries of origin)’:

A huge chimney rises from the furnace room around which are grouped nine furnaces, each having four openings. Each opening can take three normal corpses at once and after an hour and a half the bodies are completely burned. This corresponds to a daily capacity of about 2,000 bodies. In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba became one of the very first Jews to escape from Auschwitz and make his way to freedom—among only a tiny handful who ever pulled off that near-impossible feat. He did it to reveal the truth of the death camp to the world—and to warn the last Jews of Europe what fate awaited them. Against all odds, Vrba and his fellow escapee, Fred Wetzler, climbed mountains, crossed rivers, and narrowly missed German bullets until they had smuggled out the first full account of Auschwitz the world had ever seen—a forensically detailed report that eventually reached Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the Pope. The woman looked not so much scared as affronted by this intrusion from a ghoulish man in pyjama stripes, his breath foul, his head shaved, a prisoner who was surely therefore some kind of criminal. Instantly, she approached a German officer as if she were the aggrieved patron of a Prague department store, demanding to see the manager. “Officer, one of the gangsters has told me that I and my children are to be killed,” she complained, in perfect German.

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The perimeter fence was not like the ones they had known from the inner camp. It did not have lights attached to each post; the wire was not electrified. Even so, the pair were taking no chances. They had fashioned in advance something that could function as a kind of clothes peg, protecting their hands as, working from the bottom, they lifted the wire above the ground. That made an opening big enough for them to crawl through. Wetzler encouraged Vrba to start describing conditions in Auschwitz. "He wants to speak like a witness," Wetzler wrote, "nothing but facts, but the terrible events sweep him along like a torrent, he relives them with his nerves, with every pore of his body, so that after an hour he is completely exhausted." [113] The group, in particular the Swiss journalist, seemed to have difficulty understanding. The journalist wondered why the International Red Cross had not intervened. "The more [Vrba] reports, the angrier and more embittered he becomes." [114] The journalist asked Vrba to tell them about "specific bestialities by the SS men". Vrba replied: "That is as if you wanted me to tell you of a specific day when there was water in the Danube." [115]

They also spent 15 harrowing days on the run from the Gestapo in Nazi-occupied Poland with no identity papers, no money, no food. They trekked through 85 miles of rugged terrain, moving only at night by the light of the moon, as armed patrols with dogs chased them. According to the historian Zoltán Tibori Szabó, the report was first published in Geneva in May 1944, in German, by Abraham Silberschein of the World Jewish Congress as Tatsachenbericht über Auschwitz und Birkenau, dated 17 May 1944. [130] Florian Manoliu of the Romanian Legation in Bern took the report to Switzerland and gave it to George Mantello, a Jewish businessman from Transylvania, who was working as the first secretary of the El Salvador consulate in Geneva. It was thanks to Mantello that the report received, in the Swiss press, its first wide coverage. [131] Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, May/June 1944 Before the Vrba-Wexler Report, Jewish leadership in Palestine was reluctant to press for military action because they were concerned that bombing the camps could kill more Jews, and they feared encouraging the misperception that World War II was a “Jewish war”. Antisemitism was a socially acceptable attitude in society and Jewish Leadership knew this all too well.Thank goodness the report still made it to Britian, America, The Vatican and other influential Allies. Thought approximately 400,000 Hungrian Jews were tortured and murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau Thanks to Vrba and Wetzler the over a million scheduled to be transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau over 600,000 lives were spared and saved. Walter stared at the phosphorescent hands of his watch. Time was crawling. He wanted to stand up, to stretch, but he could do no such thing. It was too risky to talk. At one point, Walter felt Fred, who at 25 was six years older than him – both of them from the same small Slovak town of Trnava – take his hand and squeeze it. Vrba agreed with Gruenwald's criticism of Kastner. In Attorney-General of the Government of Israel v. Malchiel Gruenwald, the Israeli government sued Gruenwald for libel on Kastner's behalf. In June 1955, Judge Benjamin Halevi decided mostly in Gruenwald's favour, ruling that Kastner had "sold his soul to the devil". [256] "Masses of ghetto Jews boarded the deportation trains in total obedience," Halevi wrote, "ignorant of the real destination and trusting the false declaration that they were being transferred to work camps in Hungary." The Kastner train had been a pay-off, the judge said, and the protection of certain Jews had been "an inseparable part of the maneuvers in the 'psychological war' to destroy the Jews". Kastner was assassinated in Tel Aviv in March 1957; the verdict was partly overturned by the Supreme Court of Israel in 1958. [257] Criticism of Jewish Councils [ edit ] Adolf Eichmann

Vrba's position that the Jewish leadership in Hungary and Slovakia betrayed their communities was supported by the Anglo-Canadian historian John S. Conway, a colleague of his at the University of British Columbia, who from 1979 wrote a series of papers in defence of Vrba's views. [261] In 1996 Vrba repeated the allegations in an article, "Die mißachtete Warnung: Betrachtungen über den Auschwitz-Bericht von 1944" ("The warning that was ignored: Considerations of an Auschwitz report from 1944") in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, [262] T]he unfortunate victims are brought into hall (B) where they are told to undress. To complete the fiction that they are going to bathe, each person receives a towel and a small piece of soap issued by two men clad in white coats. They are then crowded into the gas chamber (C) in such numbers that there is, of course, only standing room. To compress this crowd into the narrow space, shots are often fired to induce those already at the far end to huddle still closer together. The Czech historian Miroslav Kárný noted that there is no mention of Hungarian Jews in the Vrba–Wetzler report. [239] Randolph L. Braham also questioned Vrba's later recollections. [240] The Vrba–Wetzler report said only that Greek Jews were expected: "When we left on April 7, 1944 we heard that large convoys of Greek Jews were expected." [241] It also said: "Work is now proceeding on a still larger compound which is to be added later on to the already existing camp. The purpose of this extensive planning is not known to us." [242] Jews from Holland, the majority German emigrants. The rest of the convoy, about 2,500 persons, gassed. I have read many books on the holocaust. If I had to recommend one, it would be this one for several reasons.On 26 June the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that 100,000 Hungarian Jews had been executed in gas chambers in Auschwitz. The BBC repeated this on the same day but omitted the name of the camp. [160] The following day, as a result of the information from Walter Garrett, the Manchester Guardian published two articles. The first said that Polish Jews were being gassed in Auschwitz and the second: "Information that the Germans systematically exterminating Hungarian Jews has lately become more substantial." The report mentioned the arrival "of many thousands of Jews... at the concentration camp at Oswiecim". [161] On 28 June the newspaper reported that 100,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to Poland and gassed, but without mentioning Auschwitz. [162] April 7, 1944—This date marks the successful escape of two Slovak prisoners from one of the most heavily-guarded and notorious concentration camps of Nazi Germany. The escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, fled over one hundred miles to be the first to give the graphic and detailed descriptions of the atrocities of Auschwitz.