The Escape Artist The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz
to Warn the World
Jonathan Freedland (2022) John Murray,
London.
376 pages, £20. ISBN: 978 1 529 16904 5
I
uploaded this article on Saturday 27 January 2024,
Holocaust Memorial Day. That is befittingly apt.
If you have ever visited Auschwitz, this book will
be a heart-wrenching reminder of its Nazi horrors. And if
you have never visited Auschwitz, why not? Everyone should
visit this place once in a lifetime.
September 1986
As a young man, the author of this book, Jonathan Freedland, had
watched in London the 9-hour documentary film epic, Shoah,
the Hebrew word for Holocaust. He recalls, ‘The film left
a deep mark, but one of the interviewees stayed with me more
than any other. His name was Rudolf Vrba. And then
some thirty years after that night in the cinema in 1986, I
found myself returning to Rudolf Vrba. I began to look
into the life of Rudolf Vrba.’ This compelling book is the
result of Freedman’s research. It is the true story of an
unprecedented escape from perhaps the most famous of all Nazi
concentration camps. I first came to hear of Vrba in 2023
as Freedland’s account was serialised as Book of the Week
on BBC Radio 4 in the mornings as I drove to work. It
exposes the extremes of human nature – how cruel we can be to
each other, and yet also how kind-hearted.
6 June 2013
In June 2013, I was on an 11-day lecture tour of Poland.
On Monday 6 June, my wife and I were driven by our good friend
Dawid to Oświęcim, the city famous for being the site of the
Auschwitz concentration camp. We queued and bought tickets
for an official tour. Our guide, Dorothea, had a stark
message to deliver and she communicated it, forcefully. At
least 1.1 million prisoners died at Auschwitz – it is almost
incomprehensibly dreadful. Before our tour started members
of our little group were chattering away. Once we had
passed under the famous Arbeit macht frei arch, hardly
another word was spoken. We were all stunned to silence by
what we heard and saw. I have long been affected by the
history, ethics and practice of the Nazi Holocaust, indeed,
Chapter 11 of my 2002 book, The Edge of Life, contains
eight pages on these topics.
Some words of assessment The Escape Artist is an absorbing book. It is Boy’s
Own Paper derring-do stuff, except that its storyline is
non-fictional, it is horribly true. It contains a very
personal description of some of the anti-semitic brutalities of
the Holocaust as experienced first-hand. Its hero, Walter
Rosenberg, later known as Rudolf Vrba, was a determined Jewish
teenager, an escapee from the Auschwitz concentration camp, a
reasonable research scientist, a disconsolate husband and
father, and a man whose dream of warning the world about the
Nazi atrocities was only partially fulfilled. His life was
one of peaks and troughs, successes and failures. Though
such features form the backdrop to all our lives, his were way
beyond the humdrum – they were harsh and stark.
The author of The Escape Artist, Jonathan Freedland, is
a well-known Guardian journalist. He has an easy
writing style that melds historical fact and personal
emotion. Those qualities make for a book that is readable
and informative about a subject that is shudderingly
awful. Reading it may change your life.
Dear Reader, I started out with the intention of producing
a standard 1,000-word book review. That aim soon went
haywire – by page 65, I had already written over 1,500
words. At that rate it would take 7,500 words to
complete the task. Clearly, the proposed book review
had turned into a book synopsis. Why not simply
bowdlerise it? Yet the narrative was far too gripping
for me to abandon my abridgment. I needed to carefully
continue pursuing the story for my own education. So
the following are my thirty chapter synopses with
Freedland’s subheadings.
Star
The book is essentially about Walter Rosenberg, who later
changed his name to Rudolf Vrba. He was born on 11
September 1924 in Topoľčany, Slovakia to Ilona and Elias
Rosenberg. His mother had waited 10 years for a child and
when he arrived, she doted on him. When his father died,
the youngster went to live with his grandparents, who raised him
in a home of strictly orthodox Judaism. He was happy and
precociously clever at school and later at an orphanage in
Bratislava. One day the teenager decided to put God to the
test – he ate some pork to see if God would be especially
vengeful. Nothing. Of course not. God was
already so angry with Rudi that he needed a mediator, a Saviour,
to be reconciled to God. But Rudi rejected Jesus Christ
and settled as an atheist rather than as a Christian.
Stupid boy. Meanwhile, according to the Nazi legal
definition, he was still a Jew and hence he was expelled from
school and his formal education was terminated.
It got worse. Jews were attacked in the streets and in
their homes, their property was appropriated, their freedoms
curtailed, they were excluded, humiliated and ghettoed, and now
they had to wear the Star of David prominently. In
February 1942, the letter arrived. Walter was instructed
to present himself at a place and at a time with no more than 25
kilos of baggage. He and his fellow able-bodied Jews were
to be banished across the border into Poland and corralled in
reservations – not deported, just resettled. In defiance
of the order, Walter decided he would go to England. At
first, his mother opposed her son’s scheme, then she concurred.
Five Hundred Reichsmarks
And so one night in March 1942, he set off from Slovakia towards
the Hungarian border having first ripped off that Star of David
from his coat. As the snow fell, his teenage bravado began
to shrink but then he arrived in Hungary! Yet the
underground comrades insisted he retrace his steps to collect
false Aryan papers back in Slovakia. En route Hungarian
border guards found him, labelled him a spy and beat him
up. Eventually he struggled across the border back to the
country of his birth. But he was still a long way from
London.
The seventeen-year-old was captured by Slovak border guards and
put in a transit camp with almost 60,000 other Jews waiting to
be deported. The Slovaks were so keen to get rid of the
Jews that for each one transported, Bratislava paid Berlin 500
Reichsmarks. To which camp would Walter be
allocated? Perhaps some unknown camp, or perhaps even that
one on the Slovak border near the town of Oświęcim.
Whichever, Walter was convinced he could, and would, escape from
these current barbed-wire barracks. He started planning.
Meanwhile, he met Josef Knapp, the ideal co-escapee from
Walter’s hometown. In due course, the pair took their
chance and ran, dodged the guard, ducked under the wire, and
within ten minutes they were free. They split up and
Walter headed to collect his promised false documents.
Foolishly, he entered a café where a Slovak gendarme asked for
his papers. Walter ran again but was outpaced by the
official on his bike. Walter was locked up in the local
police station. The very next day he was transported back
to the barbed-wire barracks – a prisoner once more, moreover a
beaten-up prisoner.
Deported
Walter’s name was on the register of deportees, so, packed into
train wagons, each with 80 fearful others, including children,
he was on his way to somewhere. And, he was, of course,
thinking about escape. At the frontier of Slovakia and
Poland, the cattle trucks were emptied, the Jews were counted
and Nazi SS took over. from the Slovakian Hlinka Guard.
The train crawled on, water became scarce and the general
camaraderie of those first few hours descended into wilful
disorder. Yet they imagined that better was to come.
The train eventually stopped outside Lublin. The doors
were opened to reveal a welcoming party of well-armed SS
men. The chilling order was given: men aged between 15 and
50 and fit for work to line up on the platform, children and the
elderly to remain on board. The doors were shut. The
train moved off. The men were marched into Lublin and then
south-east out. They arrived at the courtyard of a
clothing factory where hundreds of Jews stood in uniforms of
dirty stripes. Walter’s mood sank. He then saw
watchtowers, barracks and barbed-wire fences, men with shaved
heads, bone-thin bodies and swollen feet. It was Majdanek,
a Konzentrationslager, a concentration camp.
Majdanek
The incomers were swiftly divided and categorised. Walter
was allocated to Working Section No. 2 with other Czech and
Slovak Jews. He was ordered to hand over his backpack at
the absurdly named Left Luggage counter. Then a wash like
sheep dipped in a disinfectant bath, all bodily hair was
sheared, finally he was given standard issue jacket, trousers,
clogs and cap. Disease, especially dysentery, was
rife. Food was poor and limited. Twice-daily
roll-calls were obligatory and exacting – even the dead were
counted. And, of course, there were long hours of
back-breaking work. Walter carried bricks and wood for the
construction of what nobody knew. This was how to
dehumanise men. Yet incredulously, Walter learned that his
brother Sammy was detained in a nearby fenced-off field.
Just once they briefly saluted each other but failed to
talk. They never saw one another again.
Twelve days later in late June, Walter was moved from
construction to farm work. Away from the camp it should
present opportunities for escape. The 400 volunteer farm
labourers were given regular clothes so the locals did not
regard them as ‘slaves’.
Enter Josef Erdelyi, another contemporary from Walter’s
hometown. He was apparently trustworthy and also mindful
to break out. They quickly plotted to make a hole in the
train wagon’s floor and escape after nightfall. The plan
was scotched after regular headcounts were made during the
journey. If one man escaped, ten would be shot. At
last, the journey was over. The men were marched into
another camp but this one was surrounded by trees and
bushes. The double gates bore a simple three-word slogan,
Arbeit Macht Frei, Work Makes You Free. It was 30 June
1942 and Walter was now a prisoner in Auschwitz.
We Were Slaves
Two days later, after his compulsory shower, came a new
experience. Walter lined up to be tattooed with his
Auschwitz number. The top of his left forearm was marked
with 44070. Clothed in prisoner’s stripes like a human
zebra his identity was indistinguishable from the others and
Walter found that a kind of living escape. Yet, some of
his compatriots were the living dead, unable to work, Muselmänner,
non-men. Death was all around. Corpses, beaten,
starved or diseased, were piled high onto carts for cremation,
somewhere, somehow.
And so it was that the daily routine was set. After
roll-call, Walter and hundreds of others were marched out of the
camp to the railway station and onto a factory destined to make
synthetic rubber, known as Buna, for the German war
effort. First, their slave labour had to build the
factory. Walter’s thoughts of escape were changing to
thoughts of survival. Who could live on a midday litre of
soup to be shared between five men?
Walter and Josef were soon reassigned to lighter work twisting
metal rods. Then, because of a typhus outbreak, they were
shifted to work in gravel pits, shovelling gravel onto
horse-drawn wagons. It was soaking work that caused feet
to be swollen – even Walter suffered immobility. But then
he was moved again, this time to a nearby factory making
clothing and equipment for the German army. Walter’s job
was to paint 110 skis per shift, an indoor task comparatively
relaxed.
During an extraordinary medical examination one nighttime, the
hunt was on for those suffering from typhus – it was overrunning
the camp. Prisoners were physically tested and allocated
to one of two groups. The infected were killed – on 29
August 1932, this was the destiny of 746 prisoners. Walter
and Josef found themselves among the group of rejects.
But, but, they had erroneously joined the wrong group!
They changed sides and lived.
Kanada
Being typhus-free was like a new escape and Walter was allocated
new labour. He would work elsewhere – known as Canada, not
that one, this one, Kanada, a special area within Auschwitz
where new arrivals’ luggage, blankets, pots and pan were sorted
and searched for valuables. The work was somewhat less
frenetic and the housing more comfortable, but, as the
eighteen-year-old Walter Rosenberg had slowly come to realise,
they were still prisoners in a death factory, built for its
proximity to the railway network, connecting Kraków and Katowice
and thus enabling the easy transport of Jews and others.
The Final Solution
In late 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, the town of Oświęcim
included a large number of empty barracks. Perhaps they
could be suitable for housing Polish political prisoners.
The new camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, built additional
structures, including an upgrade to the existing mortuary and
with added furnaces. It was the vision of the head of the
SS, Heinrich Himmler, to be a German powerhouse based in
south-east Poland with factories powered by slave labour.
But within a few months, Auschwitz had a new and terrifying role
– it was talked of as the Final Solution to the Jewish
Question. Already Jewish civilians were rounded up and
shot in the back of the head. By the end of 1941, some
600,000 Jews had so far been murdered across the region.
Another 50,000 had been herded into vans, sealed and gassed by
exhaust. Gas chambers on wheels were OK, but fixed,
purpose-built camps were better – consider Belzec, Sobibor and
Treblinka.
Auschwitz started experimenting in Block 11 during August 1941
with almost 1,000 non-Jews gassed by 4 September 1941.
Then the morgue was repurposed as a gas chamber with six holes
in the ceiling to drop in pellets of the deadly Zyklon B.
Up to 1,000 could be crammed in and locked in – the try-out,
naked Soviet prisoners thought they were going to be
deloused. Four minutes later it was all over – amid the
heavy coughing, chaos and terror, the prussic acid granules had
produced hydrogen cyanide which produced death.
Now the facilities were ready for Jews. Additional
amenities, including nearby Birkenau were adapted – the Final
Solution was approaching. Irregular gassing sessions
became regular with Jews imported from many European
countries. The crematoria could burn 1,440 bodies a day,
but that was not enough – gassed corpses were buried in deep
ditches in the neighbouring forests. The stench was
abominable.
Big Business
Alongside Auschwitz as a killing centre, was Auschwitz as a
business enterprise. The treasures of Kanada – cash, gold
fillings, diamonds, human hair, artificial limbs, anything of
value were collected – between 1942 and 1944 an estimated six
tons of dental gold were extracted. And trading was also
internal. Prisoners appropriated goods from Kanada and
used it as currency. Food was favourite. Walter
treasured a page from a child’s atlas – he studied it thinking
about a route of escape.
Meanwhile, Walter’s hard work was gaining him promotion within
the camp. He became a courier of goods for Bruno, a camp
guard. He was caught and lashed until unconscious and
dangerously unfit for work. Walter needed an operation on
a developing abscess. Bruno owed him and the traumatic
operation was both arranged and successful. He returned to
work.
The Ramp
Now he was employed unloading the ramp by the train track.
He had arrived here several months ago. Now he met the
doomed new arrivals in what was for them the final few hours of
their lives – tens of thousands of condemned faces, lined up in
neat Germanic rows of five. It was Walter’s job to clear
first, the abandoned luggage from the wagons, and second, the
dead bodies, perhaps 300 if the train had come over 10 days from
the bitter east, or only three or four if from the purportedly
civilized west a couple of days away – the dying and the dead
were regarded as one.
Meanwhile, the arrivals were allocated – to the right for life,
left for death, but in reality, it was either a later or an
immediate death. Amid the repeated cacophony, children
crying, the parting of husbands and wives, Walter was being
affected deeply and he wanted even more to escape. But now
he wanted to escape and sound the alarm. Someone had to.
The Memory Man
One night while Walter was working on the ramp, carrying two
pieces of luggage, he tripped and fell but saw through the
planks a ten-foot space beneath the ramp – a hiding place he
thought. And some planks were loose! And it was
outside the camp perimeters. So, enter the space, wait
until everyone had left, then emerge and run into the Polish
countryside.
But within days the ramp was reinforced with concrete. Oh
no! Yet because he has seen murder all around, he felt
more obligated to act, but not by a reckless move – for example,
killing one SS guard would only lead to the killing of one
hundred prisoners. He had to escape and warn the
world. In the meantime, he would count the atrocities and
store the data in his brain for later use. After all, now
he could not unsee or unremember the slaughter.
Birkenau
Of course, typhus came back – it never went away. And
Walter and Josef thought they might be sufferers, so they
decided to attempt to lie low in Kanada rather than be sent to
the hospital with its potentially deadly outcome. But
Josef could not wait, he made a dash for the fence and was
shot. In Kanda, Walter, hidden in a pile of old clothes,
recuperated, though now he weighed less than seven stone.
Auschwitz was taking its toll – Walter was dying. And yet
his resilience was so admired that he was admitted into
membership of the Auschwitz underground resistance.
Moreover, because he was an observer of the guards’ petty
crimes, such as bribery and blackmail, they owed him. He
got a ‘good’ job sorting spectacles. His work took him to
the insanitary Birkenau, previously used to stable military
horses, which now reeked of rotting flesh. There he saw
the unforgettable sight of eighteen-foot-deep craters with their
smouldering bodies.
By now a disillusioned Walter could see that the underground’s
primary purpose was merely comfort within the camps, not slowing
the organised murder of the Jews of Europe. Walter must
escape and warn.
‘It Has Been Wonderful’
Typhus was back and a camp reorganisation put Walter to work as
assistant to the registrar of the mortuary, Alfréd
Wetzler. They had first met in their hometown of
Trnava. Their task now was to deal with the dead bodies –
record the tattooed number, rip out any gold teeth and throw the
corpse onto a waiting truck. He was soon promoted to
registrar of Sub-section A, a new site, which gave him a measure
of free movement – good news for him and good news for the
underground.
He now had an intimate knowledge of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death
camp. In addition, Walter had found love – Alicia Munk, a
beautiful Czech Jewess, who met and talked with Walter every day
separated by the wire fence. But she and thousands of
other Czech Jews were due to be gassed on 8 March, six months
after their arrival. They were macabre showpieces, kept as
‘special families’ to show the International Red Cross and any
other observers that things were OK in Auschwitz.
Would there be a coordinated uprising in the camp? Yes
perhaps, but in reality, no. Only a few twins escaped the
gas as they were reassigned for medical experimentation, perhaps
with Dr Josef Mengele, the so-called ‘Angel of Death’. So
even knowledge of their certain fate was not enough.
Denial was easier than confrontation. Walter had to escape
and tell the truth.
Escape Was Lunacy
And yet, escape was lunacy. Trying to escape meant sure
death, a certain hanging. Others had made such
plans. For instance, Fero Langer, aka ‘Bullo’ openly
bragged about his plan. With four other prisoners and the help
of an SS friend, they would show forged permits, walk out of the
camp for essential work, get in a prearranged truck and drive to
the Slovak border. Simple!
In January 1944, the escape siren sounded and by 18.00, the five
shot bodies were on display – they had been betrayed by the SS
friend. And it happened more than once. Never trust
an SS friend was always the sober lesson. From 1940 to
1942, only fifty-five prisoners had attempted to escape.
In 1943, the number rose to154. However, no Jew got out
alive. But Walter had privileges of movement and
connection and he had learned the local geography. He knew
that just outside the camp was the river Soal and it ran
north-south to Slovakia. If he followed it heading south
against its flow, he would be free for ever.
Russian Lessons
Walter continued to use his status to keep up with the
news. Apparently, a million Jews from Hungary were coming
to Auschwitz and a new 1.25-mile railway line was to be built
straight to the gas chambers and crematoria. Walter needed
a mentor. He plumped for the Russian, Dimitri Volkov, a
bear of a man, a captain in the Red Army. Once trusted
friends, he gave Walter a crash course in escapology. Do
not carry money to avoid the temptation to shop and contact with
people. Do not carry meat because the SS Alsatians will
sniff you out. Carry a knife and a razor blade, in case of
capture, do not get taken alive thereby avoiding
interrogation. And use a watch for time keeping and as a
compass. Never walk doing the daylight. If you can
be seen, you can be shot. Trust no one. Tell your
plans to no one.
Yet Walter wanted a companion and partner and that had to be his
best friend, Alfréd Wetzler. More than 600 Jews from
Trnava had been deported from Slovakia to Auschwitz, two years
later there were only two alive – Walter and Alfréd. Both
had escape plans. Walter shared them with the underground,
who refused to back Walter’s youth and inexperience. He
was becoming more and more inpatient. He needed a credible
plan and soon.
The Hideout
Electric fences, watchtowers, armed guards and dogs had to be
overcome. Walter learned the various patterns of
Auschwitz’s day and night security. He also knew that the
SS would not deviate from such patterns unless a prisoner went
missing. Such an occurrence would give him an escape route
after the statutory 72-hour SS standdown of the guarded outer
perimeter. An escapee would first have to endure three
days of hiding in silence, then he could break free of the outer
cordon, perhaps.
Four others had similar ideas. They had spotted a crater,
which, if covered with planks could become an underground
shelter, a hideout. The four tried it. They
successfully hid there for 72 hours then carefully
emerged. They were out of Auschwitz. Alas, they were
spotted by a group of German foresters who saw the shaved heads
and tattooed arms and called the police. Days later,
prisoners were forced to watch two other failed escapees flogged
with 50 lashes and then hanged. Then the four were given
36 lashes each and entirely unexpectedly marched off to Block
11, the torture centre and released given hard labour.
Later, Walter approached one named Eisenback and asked softly,
‘Do they know?’ The reply was a grunted, ‘No.’ The
four had not broken. The hideout was intact, still usable.
Let My People Go
They set the day – Monday 3 April 1944. Coats, boots and
all that was needed were sourced from Kanada. The meeting
time was set for 14.00 at the outer camp and the woodpile with
two other helpers. The hour came, but no Fred – he had
been held up by a vigilant guard. So, it was rescheduled
for the next day – this time a helper was unavoidably held
up. Day three came and went – Fred was randomly stopped by
guards because of his long hair. Day four arrived but an
SS guard, Viktor Pestek, had fallen for a young Jewish woman,
Renée Neumann, and he wanted her freed. That would involve
a safe house for Renée and her mother on the outside. He
needed help from the Jewish resistance. After a tip off,
Pestek’s complex plan went wrong, he was arrested, interrogated
and shot. With SS activity heightened it was not a good
day for Fred and Walter to escape – they paused again.
On Friday 7 April, as Walter approached the woodpile suddenly
two guards grabbed him. They were new and unaccustomed to
Walter’s elaborate dress. Would they frisk him and find
incriminating items? They found cigarettes but not the
watch. Instead, they thrashed him with a bamboo stick,
which meant that he had been spared a more rigorous
search. Walter approached the hideout when another guard
stopped him for a chat. Eventually, Walter saw the others,
they removed several layers of wood and Walter and Fred slipped
in. All was dark and silent. It was Good Friday and
the start of Seder, the Jewish Passover, celebrating ancient
liberty from bondage. It was appropriate.
Underground
The next three days and nights were the longest in Walter’s
life. He heard the sirens, dogs and the roll-calls.
They had a full eighty hours to hide. In due course,
though painfully thirsty and hungry, they started to lift the
planks, now extra heavy because of their atrophied muscles, yet
now was the time to move because the outer perimeter was
unmanned. With enormous effort the planks began to move
and they pulled themselves out of the hole. Crawling
command style they reached the small forest. Walter
stretched out to touch an expected surface of a road or water of
a river – it was sand, perhaps to hide mines or record the
footprints of escapees. They crossed it. They were
at the inner ditch at the perimeter of the camp. They hit
a surprise fence. They lifted it and crawled
through. They walked on across marshy, open
moorland. It was 10 April 1944 and the duo had achieved
what no other Jew had done before – they had broken out of
Auschwitz.
On the Run
They were now heading south on their way to the land of their
birth, Slovakia. There they expected nothing, and no one
expected them. They had no contacts, no documents, no map,
no compass. Dawn was coming and they were still too near
the Auschwitz camp. Suddenly an SS escort passed by some
500 yards away. They held tight, then crawled and ran to a
thick group of fir trees. A group of Hitler Youth members
sat and ate their sandwiches within a stone’s throw. It
began to rain and then pour enough to scare off the Youth.
Walter and Fred marched off, found a patch of bushes, and slept.
At night, they followed the Sola, then lost it, wandered too
close to a sub-camp of Auschwitz and generally strayed into
unfamiliar country. They found a sheltered, hidden spot,
but in daylight it turned out to be a public park, an SS family
playground. Then they discovered themselves in the streets
of Bielsko and dawn was on its way. They had to move
on. They kept getting lost – they needed help and contrary
to Volkov’s rules, made contact with a stranger. They
risked it and approached a random cottage and met a friendly
woman peasant. She fed them and allowed them to stay until
the next morning. They walked on and three hours later
reached the snow-capped mountains. It was an area teeming
with German soldiers. They hid, slept and strode on as
evening loomed.
Crossing the Border
They were resting when a gun discharged and a bullet whizzed
over Walter’s head. A patrol of a dozen German soldiers
had spotted them barely seventy yards away. Against all
the escapees’ rules, they ran. The air was cracking with
gunfire. They were paralysed with fear but pushed ahead as
the German dogs were closing in. The fugitives ran and
plunged across a wide stream that threatened to drown
them. Somehow, they reached the other side where the
ground was covered in deep snow. They reached a wood with
the soldiers still chasing, but the dogs gave up.
Walter and Fred were now safe, sort of. They continued to
walk by night and rest by day. It was now ten days since
they started their trek. They overlooked the Polish town
of Milówka. Walter recognised it from that page in the
atlas. By his reckoning they were within two towns of the
Slovak border. They pressed on and met a woman herding
some goats. There was a silent standoff – all parties knew
the risk. Then Walter stupidly blurted out that they were
escapees from Auschwitz. Although he wanted to tell the
world, at least one person had now heard. The woman
promised them food and off she went. Was it a trick, was
she an informant? They waited and a frightened boy arrived
with a food parcel. The old woman returned that evening
with a man carrying a gun. He was friendly and housed the
two overnight and promised to lead them over the border the next
day.
After two days walking with the man, he pointed to a forest and
said those long-anticipated words, ‘That’s Slovakia.’ They
crossed in broad daylight at 09.00. Yet care was needed
because Slovakia was still led by home-grown fascists led by
Father Jozef Tiso. To get in touch with the Jewish
community they were booked to see a Dr Pollack, the local doctor
whom Walter had known back in Nováky. When they met, Dr
Pollack began to tremble at the news. Walter was the first
of the 60,000 Jews deported from Slovakia to return. And
he had at last revealed the terrible truth concerning the
murderous activities occurring in the Auschwitz camp.
In Black and White
That truth began to be told more widely as Walter and Fred spoke
separately first to Erwin Steiner, a member of the Jewish
organisation, ÚŽ, and then to more senior Jewish leaders.
Walter drew maps of the Auschwitz complex with its factories and
crematoria, gas chamber and ovens. And then the pair told
of the ramps, selection process, tattooing, numbers, hangings,
typhus, gas, shootings, the lot. The listeners were
looking for inconsistencies in their stories – none was found.
Throughout these events, Walter had become enraged. Why
had not the ÚŽ organisation sent an envoy to Auschwitz to
discover the truth? Why had so many believed the untruth
about the much-lauded, so-called ‘resettlement’ scheme? In
the meantime, Mrs Steiner typed and merged the testimonies of
the pair. The outcome was thirty-two, single-spaced pages
of rather dispassionate facts and figures. This Auschwitz
Report had flaws, perhaps the greatest was that it made no
mention of the imminent threat to the Jews of Hungary – the
prime purpose behind Walter’s and Fred ‘s escape. But the
document’s foreword insisted that it told of events that had
already happened, not prophesies of possibilities. OK, but
Walter wanted action and he stormily criticised the Jewish
leaders for their inertia. Nevertheless, the two accepted
the Auschwitz Report – better something than nothing. It
was copied and distributed. And its sources were given
false Aryan papers and new names. Fred was now Josef Lánik
and Walter became Rudolf Vrba.
Men of God
Hungarian Jewry was already under threat. Its government
had a long history as an anti-Jewish administration, so it was
unlikely to be sympathetic to the Auschwitz Report. The
best option was to look to the so-called men of God. Men,
such as Dr Géza Soós, a Calvinist activist who worked in
Hungary’s Foreign Ministry. He had a young pastor friend,
József Eliás, who he arranged to meet to show him the Report and
ask for a Hungarian translation and six copies. The origin
of the copies must not be traceable by government
officials. This work was completed by Mária Székely, a
volunteer at the Good Shepherd Mission. It was sent to the
Protestant and Roman Catholic hierarchies who, alas, did not see
the urgency or size of the issue before them. They feared
a governmental backlash and thus missed the opportunity – they
said little and did virtually nothing.
What Can I Do?
Back at Auschwitz, the Germans were outraged. They demoted
and flogged all Jewish registrars and assigned them to hard
labour. Other potential escapees followed the Walter and
Fred model, but they were not so well planned and so were
unsuccessful. For instance, Czeslaw Mordowicz and Arnošt
Rosin escaped for a few days only to drop their guard while back
in Hungary where they celebrated their escape in a local tavern
– they were reported and arrested and sentenced to eight days in
jail. Their experiences and testimonies were used as a
seven-page addendum to the Auschwitz Report.
Though the word was out, it seemed to be doing no good.
The future victims, the Jews of Hungary, had apparently received
no warning – they kept coming in the trains. At last, a
papal envoy in Switzerland, Mario Martilotti, asked to meet the
escapees – Vrba and Mordowicz made the journey. The
meeting was initially delayed but finally they spoke for six
hours, yet their presentation seemed to be politely accepted but
with no urgency. However, when Martilotti was told that
Catholic priests were arriving at Auschwitz already dead, his
mood changed, and he fainted. When he came round he asked,
‘What can I do?’ Rudi replied, ‘Sound the alarm with all
and any means.’ They hoped that sending the Report to the
USA, the UK, the International Red Cross and, of course, the
pope would have an instant effect. It did not. A few
days later, close to 12,500 Hungarians arrived in a single
day. Almost all of them were gassed on arrival.
London Has Been Informed
The Auschwitz Report was being slowly circulated. However,
its thirty-two pages were far too long for newspaper headlines
and so various shortened version were produced. Sure, the
truth was emerging, and people were shocked by its content, but
it was making little headway in changing international
attitudes, let alone stopping the death camps’ activities.
For example, for the hundreds of thousands of Jews of Hungary,
it was too little too late. Even when broadcast by the BBC
and American radio it got buried, and was often simply passed
onto others saying, ‘Seems more in your line.’ Take
Roswell McClelland, a US bureaucrat based in Switzerland.
He received a copy of the Report but did not send it to
Washington until October, nearly four months after he first saw
it. The Report needed both publication and distribution –
both were sluggish. Meanwhile, the murdering
continued.
The US policy was that the best hope for the victims of Nazism
was that Nazism be defeated. Any diversion from that goal
would be counterproductive. In other words, count the US
out. Indeed, US bombers were operating within five miles
of Auschwitz – so why not bomb the gas chambers and
crematoria? ‘Why not?’ some asked. The UK response
was better. In the hands of prime minister, Winston
Churchill, and Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, the Report
was read and they agreed that bombing of certain railway tracks,
plus Auschwitz and other death camps should commence.
Nevertheless, their idea was rejected by Archibald Sinclair, the
minister in charge of the Royal Air Force. The Auschwitz
Report reached the very heart of command of the Allies, but
Auschwitz was never bombed, except once accidentally.
Hungarian Salami
Rudi would, of course, have been disappointed by the inaction of
the Allies. But his chief aim was to warn his fellow
Jews. He wanted them, above all, to have advance
knowledge. It was difficult. On one occasion, he
presented the Report to the members of the Jewish Council in
Budapest urging them to save themselves. They said and did
nothing. Was the Report unbelievable and its readers
incredulous? Had bribery produced inaction.
Moreover, there was evidence that some Jews were known to have
negotiated and bargained with the Nazis. One example
involved the man charged with solving ‘the Jewish question’,
Adolf Eichmann. It was often a case of cash in exchange
for Jewish lives. The four escapees decided they would
have to publish the Report themselves, so they headed to
Bratislava and set up a clandestine publishing house.
Once in Bratislava, Rudi was reintroduced to Gerta Sidonová, a
girlfriend of years ago from Trnava. He was different now,
still short but his eyes were filled with sadness and even
suspicion. She was glad to type up the extra copies of the
Report as Rudi asked. One such copy found its way into the
hands of the Hungarian regent’s daughter-in-law and eventually
into those of her father-in-law, Miklós Horthy. As head of
the Hungarian state he now knew the truth, but the deportation
of Hungarians and the trains arriving at Auschwitz continued –
the fate of the 200,000 Jews of Budapest remained
uncertain. By now, even the pope and president Roosevelt
had made some conciliatory remarks. Indeed, the US warned
that war criminals would be held to account. It was that
statement that unnerved the Hungarian leadership rather than any
sympathy for the Jews. However, the trains from Budapest
did eventually stop and it could be said that Rudolf Vrba and
Fred Wetzler had saved 200,000 lives.
A Wedding with Guns
Rudi and Gerta were getting on well. Yet all around them
were changes due to invasions, governments, deportations and so
on. It was unstable everywhere, even in Slovakia.
Then Gerta and her mother had the knock on the door, ‘Open up,
this is the Gestapo.’ They were interrogated for a
week. Gerta knew escape was imperative so one day she
jumped out of the window of the Gestapo building and ran and
ran. Meanwhile, Rudi and a group of partisans were
fighting, and winning, battles against the SS. Within
weeks, the war was over – Hitler was dead, the Nazis had
surrendered. Rudi was awarded various medals and he
enrolled at a school for military veterans. He signed up
at the Czech Technical University in Prague to train as a
chemical technician. It was there that he was surprisingly
reunited with Ilona Rosenberg, his mother. And there in
Prague too was Gerta Sidonová, as a medical student. One
Sunday afternoon, Rudi asked Gerta to marry him and so they were
on 16 April 1949.
They were immersed in their careers – Rudi signed up for a PhD
in biochemistry of the brain while Gerta researched the
physiology of the nervous system. They should have been
happy. Lamentably, Rudi would get drunk on vodka and would
fly into unexpected jealous rages. Auschwitz was still
affecting him, damaging him greatly and it was hard for Gerta to
live with him. Their first child, Helena, was born in
1952. Two years later, Zuzana was born. The family
was overjoyed with life for a while, but the parents would clash
and they began to drift apart while Rudi had numerous
affairs. It was too much for Gerta, she wanted a divorce.
In February, the communists seized the government of
Czechoslovakia. His marriage was over and Rudi was
lonely. He was appointed to a university office and told
to weed out students who were anti-communists or
bourgeois. He refused and was forced to resign. He
retreated into his biochemistry research. Eventually his
scholarship was recognised and the communists gave him some
well-equipped laboratory space. But he still did not feel
a free man in 1950’s Prague. He wanted to escape again.
A New Nation, A New England
He wanted to break out of communist Czechoslovakia. His
notable scientific research led the way. He was rewarded
by the granting of a passport so he could attend conferences and
lecture abroad. Meanwhile, Gerta was planning similarly to
attend a European conference but using an illegal flight to
Copenhagen and freedom. Rudi was illegally heading to
Israel where citizenship would be automatic. And both were
escaping on the very same day!
A few weeks later Rudi was offered a job in the USA but was not
granted the necessary visa. He disliked Israel saying it
was too clannish and there were even Nazi collaborators and
those who failed to circulate the Auschwitz Report prospering
there. It was certainly not ‘a land of milk and
honey.’ He stayed eighteen months and then arrived in
London, his dream destination as a teenager.
He was gainfully employed by the UK’s Medical Research
Council. In some ways it was an extension of his previous
work and Auschwitz experience – what happens to a living
creature when confronted with extreme, mortal stress?’
More locally, Rudi and Gerta still enraged one another whenever
they met with their girls. They went to court and Gerta
won custody of the children with Rudi granted limited visitation
rights. The trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 brought some
fame to Rudi – he told his story in a five-part serial in the
Daily Herald. Interviews and media appearances
followed plus a book entitled, I Cannot Forgive.
The object of the title was apparently not Hitler and the Nazis,
but it was more likely that Rudi still harboured a fury against
those who failed to circulate and act upon his Auschwitz
Report. The future looked good – and then it slowly began
to fall apart. He found access to his girls harder and his
research contract was not renewed.
Canada
The forty-three-year-old’s life was looking like a dead end, but
the ingenious Rudi, as usual, had an escape plan. This
time, in 1967, it was to move again to yet another country,
Canada, more precisely to the faculty of medicine at UBC,
Vancouver. In 1972, he was granted Canadian citizenship
and a year later he was awarded a two-year lectureship at
Harvard and a research fellowship at Boston.
Things were indeed looking up – he soon met the young Robin
Lipson and they soon hit it off. On 13 September 1975,
they were married. They never had children but Rudi seemed
to mellow and he enjoyed cooking, mainly dishes from the old
country – goulash, chicken paprikash and schnitzel. Yet
his temper could still rage. Rudi also spent several
years as an expert witness in trials involving the wicked men of
Auschwitz and at times he helped Simon Wiesenthal, the famous
Nazi hunter. And he was at the forefront of prosecuting
those who were Holocaust deniers. I Know a Way Out
And he was a star of two of the foremost Holocaust films, The
World at War and Shoah. Though Rudi
mentioned Fred on every suitable occasion, the rift between them
was growing. The principal cause? Fred’s marriage to
an Auschwitz survivor. And he did not endorse Fred’s tacit
approval of oppressive communism by his continued residence in
Czechoslovakia. They were separated by the Iron Curtain
and as time went on, their accounts of the escape from Auschwitz
diverged.
The truth was that neither were famous, their names were seldom
heard. Even at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust
memorial in Jerusalem, the Auschwitz Report was filed, but not
under their names. They disagreed over the ideology and
actions of Zionism, whereas the leaders and supporters of this
nationalist movement were many and varied, both their friends
and foes. It was not helpful that Rudi tended to use the
word Zionism as shorthand for Jews in authority.
Moreover, Rudi had been variously described as anti-Zionist,
anti-communist, and somewhat anti-semitic. He was not the
hero of everyone, especially among Holocaust historians.
Neither was he the archetypical old Jewish man – Rudi was
tanned, fit and vigorous and seemed to come from a different age
of Auschwitz survivors. He even smiled when interviewed –
his retort was, ‘Should I cry?’
He shunned collective Jewish life in Vancouver. He almost
never set foot in a synagogue. He was awkward and angry
and sometimes insufferably difficult. His theme was always
the same – the Jews of Hungary had been betrayed by those,
especially Rezső Kasztner, who refused to tell the truth as
found in the Auschwitz Report. Yet others saw him
differently, as a man who, despite his sufferings, had not lost
his lust for life. He was a practical joker, vain about
his appearance, yet not defeated by life. What a
labyrinthian he was.
Flowers of Emptiness
Yet his life was soon to take a terrible turn. He had
always enjoyed and maintained a closeness, writing and phoning,
with his daughters in England. When Helena reached her
mid-twenties, they hit a rough patch. After three years,
correspondence stopped. She had become a staunch feminist
and regarded him as a chauvinist. He vehemently opposed
her proposed career move to Papua New Guinea. In truth, it
all went terribly wrong.
She had fallen in love with a married man, who later returned to
his wife. Within a few days in 1982, Helena Vrbova was
dead, a book by her side was entitled Flowers of Emptiness.
It was suicide and Rudi was utterly distraught at the loss of
his firstborn. Was Helena a second-generation victim of
Hitler and the Nazis? He was prone to blame himself – it
obsessed him. Such were the negative effects that Rudi
returned to religion. He talked about ‘my Creator’ and he
began to pray. In 1990, eight years after Helena’s death,
Rudi moved back to his homeland. He walked the streets and
meditated. That somehow brought him a sense of peace and
deliverance.
Too Many to Count
The 1980s and 1990s were kinder to Rudi because he was given
more of a platform for speaking on Holocaust affairs, though
still less than he expected. In 1988, Fred Wetzler died as
a bitter, drunk and forgotten man. Meanwhile, Rudi was
forever convinced that, despite the publication of the Auschwitz
Report, the Jews knew nothing about the atrocities awaiting them
as they boarded the deportation trains. This was peculiar,
even unbelievable. After all, Hitler had declared that,
‘the result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the
Jews.’
Alas, Rudi was wrong in thinking that once the Allies knew the
facts, they would act. Some cautioned against interference
because the proposed case of ‘the wailing Jews’ was overegged by
‘usual Jewish exaggeration’. Whatever, the name and
function of Auschwitz had remained largely unknown and
apparently uncared about. And an unhelpful generational
split was evident – the young believed the Report, the
middle-aged did not. The latter were in effect Holocaust
deniers.
Rudi remained steadfast – information alone is
insufficient. It must be believed. Then that
knowledge would lead to action. As if that load was not
enough, Rudi was suffering from bladder cancer. For the
eighty-two-year-old, the outlook after removal by surgery was
hopeful. But it returned and formed metastases in his
legs. His health declined but his greatest comfort was a
renewed relationship with his daughter. Zuza moved to
Vancouver to be with her Tata every day until his death on 27
March 2006. He had stubbornly refused to discuss funeral
arrangements. The bleak service was on a Saturday, a
sabbath, nine months later a memorial event was attended by
about forty people. It was not a thanksgiving for a
hero. Was he more like a Jewish prophet delivering a
warning only to grieve when it was not heeded? Yet
together, Rudi and Fred had enabled 200,000 Budapest Jews to
escape. His own life had been marked by great
escapes. Indeed, Rudi was a great escape artist who
enabled countless others also to escape.
