The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The man who escaped Auschwitz to tell the world
In 1944, Rudolf Vrba gave the Allies an eyewitness report of the concentration camp’s horrors. What happened next was shameful
400pp, John Murray, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £10.99
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The blurb for The Escape Artist claims that its subject, Rudolf Vrba, “remains all but unknown”. This is quite a stretch as Vrba’s autobiography I Escaped from Auschwitz is still in print and he appeared in Shoah, World at War and other historical documentaries. Not only that, but last year a dramatic film, The Auschwitz Escape, was released about his exploits. Anyone with knowledge of the history of Auschwitz ought already to be aware of the bare bones of Vrba’s story. So it’s a testament to the skill of the author, Jonathan Freedland, that this book is nonetheless a compelling piece of work.
Vrba, a Slovakian Jew, arrived in Auschwitz in June 1942 at the age of 17. By dint of his powerful personality – and a series of lucky breaks – he not only survived selections for the gas chamber but managed to become a prominent member of the prisoner hierarchy, working as a clerk and later on the “ramp”, helping to unload transports of terrified Jewish arrivals. Just how “lucky” Vrba was is expressed by Freedland in one telling statistic: “More than 600 Jewish men from Trnava had been deported to Auschwitz from Slovakia in 1942 – by the spring of 1944, only two were still alive.” And those two were Rudolph Vrba and his friend Alfred Wetzler.
Horrified by the events they witnessed in Auschwitz, Vrba and Wetzler resolved to break out of the camp and tell the world the true nature of the horror. This, of course, was easier said than done. The fact that in April 1944 they did manage to escape was the result of a combination of courage, careful planning and good fortune.
They hid beneath a pile of timber in an outer section of AuschwitzBirkenau for three days until the SS gave up the search, convinced Vrba and Wetzler had already broken through the perimeter of the camp. After many adventures, and yet more lucky breaks, they found their way back to Slovakia and told their story to a Jewish resistance group. Copies of what became famous as the Vrba/Wetzler report were soon circulating among Allied governments. Vrba and Wetzler had succeeded in their goal of bringing detailed knowledge about Auschwitz to the world.
The story of Vrba’s time in Auschwitz and his escape takes up about half the book, and not surprisingly it’s the most gripping part. Freedland, an award-winning journalist and author of a series of thrillers under the pseudonym Sam Bourne, does everything he can to hold the interest of the general reader. The chapters are short and punchy and he uses thrilleresque language – Vrba was a “coiled spring”, Nazi plans were “cookedup”, “trust was a fool’s game”, the SS dogs were “slavering” and so on. Which is not to say that he isn’t also capable of conveying genuine insight. “It had been easy to cast Jews as parasites when they had wealth,” he writes perceptively. “It was easier still to cast them as parasites now they had nothing.”
The final sections of the book detail the world’s response to the Vrba/ Wetzler report. Inevitably this is a more complex and difficult history than the derring-do tale of the escape. On the one hand, it is certainly the case, as Freedland documents, that even after learning the detail of the mass killings both the British and Americans decided not to bomb the Auschwitz gas chambers or the railway lines leading to the camp, and that – shamefully – there is evidence of a strong element of anti-Semitism in their decision-making. One Foreign Office official even wrote: “In my opinion a disproportionate amount of the time of the Office is wasted on dealing with these wailing Jews.”
On the other hand, there remains the key question – would it have made any difference if the Allies had attempted to bomb the gas chambers or the transport links to Auschwitz? Disappointingly, Freedland does not attempt to dis
‘A disproportionate amount of time is wasted on these wailing Jews’
cuss this crucial issue in detail, but he does write that “the inmates of Auschwitz would keep looking up at the sky, praying for a deliverance that would never come”. This implies that lives would have been saved if the Auschwitz gas chambers or railway lines to the camp had been bombed. But while to the general reader who doesn’t know much of the history this might seem like common sense, it is actually a deeply problematic statement.
We can’t, of course, know for certain what would have happened if the Allies had bombed either the transport links to Auschwitz or the camp itself, but it is very strange indeed to claim that such an attack would have provided “deliverance” for the inmates of the camp. The unfortunate truth is that the Nazis and their collaborators had already demonstrated they needed neither trains nor gas chambers to kill Jews in vast numbers. In the occupied Soviet Union they had been shooting Jews en masse close to their own homes since 1941, and it’s often forgotten that the Nazis shot more than 40,000 Jews over the course of just two days in November 1943 in the so-called “Harvest Festival” killings in occupied Poland.
None of this takes anything away from the bravery of Vrba and Wetzler. It is also undoubtedly the case, as Freedland points out, that their report did save many lives. That’s because Admiral Horthy, the ruler of Hungary, stopped transports of Jews to Auschwitz in July 1944 in response to pressure from the Allies, imposed after they had learnt the contents of the Vrba/ Wetzler report. Tragically, a number of the Hungarian Jews who escaped deportation to Auschwitz subsequently died in the autumn of 1944, after Horthy was removed from power in a coup. They were shot in Budapest or died on death marches. Once again, gas chambers were not needed to murder them.
After the war, Vrba gained a degree in chemistry and became an academic. He eventually settled in Canada and died in March 2006 at the age of 81. Vrba was a difficult man who “could be abrasive, aggressive and arrogant”. Nonetheless, the fact he saved so many lives means he remains a hero – one who is commemorated in The Escape Artist with considerable panache.