Rudolf Vrba isn’t remembered alongside Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, or Primo Levi as a legendary Holocaust figure. But he should and will be, at least if the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland has anything to say about it.
In The Escape Artist, Freedland’s riveting and meticulous retelling of Vrba’s courageous and successful escape from Auschwitz and his valiant but failed attempt to sound the alarm about it, we encounter an extraordinary character who illustrated both the remarkable ability of human beings to overcome the most inhuman obstacles imaginable and our inestimable capacity to willfully ignore the most obvious evidence of such evil.
As Freedland puts it, Vrba’s life story represents “how history can change a life, even down the generations; how the difference between truth and lies can be the difference between life and death; and how people can refuse to believe in the possibility of their own imminent destruction, even, perhaps especially, when that destruction is certain.” While Vrba’s story has partially been told before, including in Claude Lanzmann opus Shoah, it has not until now been developed with the kind of detailed, primary-source research Freedland has conducted.
Born Walter Rosenberg in western Slovakia in 1924, Vrba was forced out of Bratislava, where he had studied at an elite gymnasium, when the carved-up country fell under the fascist shadow. At age 15, Vrba and his family decamped to the town of Trnava, and a few years later, they received an official “resettlement notice” ordering them to appear with a single suitcase — and no gold. Rather than face what he feared would be internment across the Polish border, Vrba in early 1942 attempted an escape to Budapest, where he linked up with partisan fighters. But, unable to procure the necessary papers, Vrba had to return to Slovakia, where border guards caught him and accelerated his resettlement process.
He was then deported to a lightly guarded labor camp in Novaky, where he hatched and executed an escape plan that led him back home to Trnava. Unfortunately, he encountered an eagle-eyed Slovak gendarme in a milk bar who noticed Vrba’s two pairs of socks, demanded to see his papers, and returned him to Novaky. Vrba then endured another cattle-car transfer to Majdanek, a concentration camp outside of Lublin, Poland, and then yet another relocation to Auschwitz, where he arrived in June 1942.
In Auschwitz, Vrba initially labored at Buna, the synthetic rubber plant built by German conglomerate IG Farben, before transferring to Kanada, the section of the camp that plundered and sorted the belongings of condemned Jews emerging from the trains. It was there that he fully came to comprehend the deception employed by SS guards in convincing those Jews to enter the gas chambers calmly and peacefully for “disinfection.” It was there that he appreciated the critical importance of warning the world of these atrocities.
“If the Nazi plot to destroy the Jews relied on keeping the intended victims entirely ignorant of their fate,” Freedland surmises, “then the first step towards thwarting that murderous ambition was to shatter the ignorance, to inform the Jews of the capital sentence that the Nazis had passed on them.” To that end, Vrba began creating a mental map of the camp, deploying his capacious memory, aided by his appointment as a registrar of new inmates, which gave him access to a trove of information.
Armed with this “unusually comprehensive expertise in the workings of Auschwitz” and convinced that duly alerted Jews would no longer willingly walk to their slaughter, Vrba then began planning his third and by far most audacious escape. While a handful of Polish and Soviet prisoners had slipped from the camp, no Jew had ever made it out alive. Determined to become the first, Vrba absorbed lessons from a Red Army captain who’d previously escaped other enclosures: no meat (the Nazis’ German shepherds would sniff it out), no money (escapees would be tempted to use it and thereby interact with villagers who would betray them), and no SS accomplices (even, or especially, the corrupt guards who would inevitably turn on them).
After months of intricate planning, the moment of truth arrived on April 7, 1944, when Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, a childhood friend from Trnava, huddled in a makeshift bunker they had painstakingly fashioned underneath a pile of wood lavishly sprinkled with Soviet tobacco that had been soaked in petrol to ward off the dogs. Sirens sounded, announcing their disappearance and subsequent manhunt, and for more than three full days, the pair hunkered down, awaiting what they knew from past practice would be the guards’ abandonment of the search. After several near-exposures, they emerged from their cocoon, crawled on their bellies underneath the camp’s outer fence, and slithered into the wilderness, at least temporarily free.
Their fraught journey south along the Sola River included perilous encounters with Hitler Youth hikers, SS officers, families strolling through the woods, and a Nazi search party. But Vrba and Wetzler also received aid and comfort from two Polish families who, at unimaginable risk to themselves, fed, clothed, and guided the escapees toward the Slovak border. There, a Slovak villager helped them board a train to the town of Zilina, where they began to fulfill their mission of cautioning the remaining Jewish community.
Vrba and Wetzler began by submitting testimony to the Jewish Council, the official body that the fascist Slovak government designated to handle Jewish affairs. Over the course of 48 hours, they cataloged their experience in scrupulous detail, including by re-creating maps of the various camp structures and by listing from memory transports and death counts from various countries on a week-by-week basis from 1942-44, amounting to nearly two million gassings. Incredibly, just two months later, two more Auschwitz escapees bushwhacked their way to Slovakia and corroborated the Vrba-Wetzler report.
But tragically, and not through any fault of the authors, the report failed to stop the slaughter, most poignantly in Hungary, which the Nazis had recently occupied, readying massive transports to Auschwitz. The report was promptly translated into Hungarian and transmitted across the border to Rezso Kasztner, the de facto leader of Hungarian Jewry, as well as to Catholic authorities close to the Vatican. It also made its way to a British journalist writing for a Swiss paper, who published an exposé in late June, followed by a New York Times report in July. Yet by that point, in the months following Vrba’s escape, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews had already been slain.
Worse yet, it took seven months for the report to be translated in full into English, and Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy (perhaps reflecting guidance from President Franklin Roosevelt himself) declined to authorize U.S. aircraft to bomb the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz; the Royal Air Force also refused to act. It seemed Allied leaders simply couldn’t believe the level of depravity to which the Nazis has descended.
But perhaps worst of all was the reception their report received from Hungarian Jewish authorities. Kasztner himself was compromised by a spurious, highly secretive negotiation he was conducting with Adolf Eichmann intended to spare all of Hungary’s Jews in exchange for money and the suppression of the Vrba-Wetzler report. But in the end, Eichmann allowed only 1,700 Jews to escape to Switzerland at a cost of nearly $1.7 million, while Kastzner disappeared the report and publicly suggested that deported and doomed Hungarian Jews were safe and sound on a German farm — actions that would later lead to a finding by an Israeli court (posthumously reversed) that Kasztner was guilty of “collaboration in the fullest sense of the word” and to his assassination in Tel Aviv. Only in Budapest itself did the report ramify effectively, as its dissemination created international pressure on the puppet Hungarian government to prevent the deportation of the capital’s 200,000 Jews.
Vrba himself fought the Nazis as a Slovak partisan, became a chemistry professor in Iron Curtain Prague, and escaped one final time — in 1958, to Israel, via Vienna. Eighteen months later, he relocated to London, and thence to Boston and Vancouver, along the way marrying twice, publishing dozens of academic papers, testifying against Nazis, writing a memoir, and generally recording his experiences for posterity. He died in 2006, haunted by his inability to save more Jews despite his extraordinary efforts. As Freedland notes, “Vrba saw himself instead in the tradition of the Jewish prophet who comes to deliver a warning, only to grieve when that warning is not heeded.”
Ultimately, Vrba encountered what for him must have been an irreducible paradox: The more horrific the Auschwitz stories he (accurately) conveyed, the less believable his audience found them. Tragically, as Freedland notes, his heroic efforts foundered on a “difficult but stubborn fact: that human beings find it almost impossible to conceive of their own death.” One can only hope those efforts won’t be ignored again.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel and an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
