Teen who saved 200,000 from Nazis
The Escape Artist Jonathan Freedland John Murray £20 ★★★★★
Walter Rosenberg was only 19 when he and fellow inmate Fred Wetzler became the first Jews to break out of Auschwitz. It was 1944 and their escape was the culmination of months of meticulous observation and planning. The 80 excruciating hours they spent hidden in a wood pile, waiting for almost 2,000 SS men and their slavering dogs to call off the search, was just the beginning. Even having made it out of the extermination camp, their journey to safety would bring them within a hair’s-breadth of capture again and again.
Rosenberg had luck on his side as well as his youth, a keen mind and a gift for languages, but he was sustained by a determination to expose what was going on inside the ‘killing machine’ of Auschwitz. Secrecy and lies, he believed, were what enabled camp guards to continue incinerating thousands of men, women and children each day. He was convinced that if leaders only knew, the world would put a stop to the Nazis’ plan, and his fellow Jews would revolt instead of boarding trains that led not to resettlement, as promised, but to the gas chambers or else death by hard labour. To that end, he and
Wetzler took with them reams of facts and figures memorised during their time as prisoners – enough to fill a 32-page report that ultimately found its way to Churchill, Roosevelt and the Pope.
Combining immersive storytelling with unflinching rigour, Freedland’s book uses the men’s thrilling escape to frame an indelible picture of unimaginable suffering, and to explain something of how the Nazis were able to get away with their calculated genocidal savagery for so long. But it also seeks to answer the question of why such a tireless campaigner for truth, who went on to testify at war- crimes trials for decades, is not better known. Why, when he died in 2006, did only 40 people attend a memorial event for him?
While still a teenager, Rosenberg saw things that no person should ever have to witness. At the end of the war he chose to keep the alias he’d lived under as an escapee, Rudolf Vrba. He went on to become a distinguished chemist, a husband and a father, a man who delighted in snappy dressing and practical jokes. But his life featured broken relationships and tragedy as he moved from country to country, performing further acts of escape. Above all, he was angry. The document that came to be known as the VrbaWetzler Report saved 200,000 lives, but he always maintained that that number could, and should, have been greater.
As well as bureaucratic lethargy and criminal denial, what that report repeatedly came up against was incredulity. Many of its readers – among them Jewish community leaders as well as international officials – simply couldn’t believe the horror outlined by its dry, factual prose.
Freedland’s unforgettable book is a valiant, clear-eyed bid to set the difficult, determined man at its centre alongside the likes of Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler and Primo Levi as a figure whose story has come to define the Holocaust. It’s also a vivid reminder of how the ability to tell the difference between truth and lies can be the difference between life and death.