What Vrba realized, writes Jonathan Freedland, is that rationalized mass murder depended on “a basic principle: that the people who came to Auschwitz did not know where they were going or for what purpose,” since it is much easier to slaughter lambs. rather than chasing deer. ” His mission would be to “escape and ring the alarm bell”. As he was about to break out, Vrba, a very measured man who later became an organic chemist, “systematically collects[ed] industrial homicide data “ It took until April 10, 1944, but eventually Vrba and his fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler “achieved what no Jew had ever done before: they had broken out of Auschwitz. ‘ They remained motionless for three days in a pile of planks in a timber yard, scattering cheap Russian gasoline-soaked smoke all around to deter track dogs. It was based on a strict Nazi routine: in the event of an escape, the camp was put on full alert for exactly 72 hours before security in the outlying areas was relaxed, on the assumption that the prisoners should have left. As he prepares to break out, Friedland tells us, Vrba, a very measured man who later became an organic chemist, systematically “collects[ed] the data of industrialized murder “. He remembered the origin and the approximate number of each shipment to Auschwitz. (Decades later, he would spot a waiter at a New York restaurant with a number of tattoos on his arm and immediately tell him he must be a Jew from Będzin, Poland, who was sent to Auschwitz in the summer of 1943.) In addition, he was forced to to work in various roles and thus acquired what Freedland calls an “unusually integrated know-how at Auschwitz”: how it functioned as an “economic hub” as well as a death factory, the black markets, resistance groups, and even agreements between greedy SS officers and detainees who agreed to steal them in “Canada,” the store that housed the personal belongings of the murdered Jews. All this meant that the Vrba-Wetzler report, which was completed in late April 1944, provided a much more detailed picture of the Holocaust than the rumors and most fragmentary narratives that had emerged before. Even after escaping from the camp, the two men had many dangerous encounters and strokes of luck as they returned to their homeland of Slovakia, based only on a brief look at the children’s atlas that Vrba had encountered in “Canada”. There was a warrant for their arrest and they were surrounded by often hostile Polish farmers, but they eventually managed to tell their story to the world. It soon had an impact. When the first newspaper report on the report was published in a Swiss newspaper in June 1944, it led to 383 articles in the Swiss press alone, more than had been “published”. [in the UK] for the Final Solution throughout the war “. World leaders could no longer ignore the Holocaust. Leaving Auschwitz, above, Vrba and Wetzler “risked everything for people to learn the truth.” Photo: Mark Kanning / Alamy Even while still in Auschwitz, Vrba had heard rumors that the camp was expanding to accommodate the arrival of about one million Hungarian Jews, the last surviving large European community. The report seems to have been a major factor in pushing Pope Roosevelt and even his bride to pressure Admiral Horthi, the regent of Hungary, to stop deportations. The US president also made it clear that Horti would be responsible for his actions in the (then possible) event of an allied victory. As a result, he decided to defy the Germans – and thus save the lives of 200,000 Budapest Jews. Freedland also has a lot to say about the afterlife of the Vrba-Wetzler exhibition. There has been intense debate, in Israel and elsewhere, about how much Jewish wartime leaders, and in particular Rezső Kasztner in Hungary, helped facilitate the Nazi extermination program by encouraging compliance rather than rebellion. Others have asked heavy questions about why the Allies refused to bomb the camps or the railway lines that led to them. Vrba never escaped such controversy and sometimes alienated the Jewish public, according to Freedland, by refusing to “submit a morally comfortable narrative in which the only bad guys were the Nazis.” It was around 2016, “in the age of post-truth and false news,” that Friedland began to think of the man who had risked everything to get people to know the truth. Both of Vrba’s wives were still alive and eager to interview him about his rich but somewhat tortured post-war life in Czechoslovakia, England and Canada. Many of them are interesting, but at the heart of The Escape Artist is a completely fascinating narrative, which incorporates a subdued, albeit painful, picture of life at Auschwitz and a kind of heroic adventure story.
Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist: The Man Who Break Out of Auschwitz to Tell the World is released by John Murray (£ 20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
