FRONTPAGE MAGAZINE - Danusha V. Goska - FEB 10, 2023
Meet the Escape Artist.
The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland was published by Harper in 2022. It is 376 pages and it includes twelve pages of black-and-white photographs and maps, as well as an index, end notes, and a bibliography.
In The Escape Artist, Jonathan Freedland, a British journalist, tells the story of Rudolf Vrba (1924-2006), who, the book claims, was “the first Jew ever known to break out of Auschwitz and make his way to freedom – one of only four who pulled off that near-impossible feat.”
The Escape Artist is one of the very best books I’ve ever read on any topic, and I recommend it without reservation to any reader with a high school or above reading level. The subject matter is, of course, important, but in lesser hands Vrba’s tale would be an overwhelmingly agonizing read. Freedland’s masterful skill performs the minor miracle of crafting a graphic record of the Holocaust that is also a page-turner. Freedland pulls no punches. He informs the reader of the exact nature of the hell the Nazis operated. But Freedland moves quickly, and brings the reader with him on a breathtaking ride. In any case, only a portion of the book takes place in Auschwitz. The rest records Vrba’s childhood, his heroic efforts to alert the world to the Nazi genocide of Jews, and his final days in Canada and the United States.
Freedland is a thriller author as well as a journalist, and Vrba’s story is over-the-top exciting, full of close calls, superhuman feats, matchless courage and not one but three star-crossed romances. Freedland loves Rudi Vrba, a complicated and at times difficult hero. The author’s affection for his protagonist propels the reader forward. The title of the book promises something of a happy ending – we know that Vrba will successfully escape hell and expose to the world the Nazis’ diabolical crimes.
Vrba’s name is not as familiar as that of Anne Frank, Primo Levi, or Elie Wiesel. Freedland guesses that that is because Vrba could never be what the world, or his fellow Jews, wanted in a concentration camp survivor; more on that, below. Freedland writes, “Maybe, through this book, Rudolf Vrba might perform one last act of escape: perhaps he might escape our forgetfulness and be remembered.”
“Rudolf Vrba” was a nomme de guerre underground resisters would eventually assign to the man born Walter Rosenberg. Like many folklore heroes, little Walter Rosenberg was the apple of his mother’s eye. She was a stepmother to her husband’s other children, but for ten years she had tried to have a child of her own. Finally she was blessed with a son. Vrba’s father owned a sawmill in Slovakia. His father died when he was four, and his mother went to work as a saleswoman.
Vrba’s grandfather raised him in Orthodox Judaism. Vrba visited a restaurant and sampled pork. When God did not strike him dead, he broke with Jewish faith. On identity papers, rather than identifying as “Jewish,” he identified as “Czechoslovak.”
Czechoslovakia was a new nation that had come into existence after World War I, in 1918. The territory had previously been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was a small, landlocked state in central Europe, with a population of 14.8 million people. Most industry was in the western, Czech part of the country, but much of that industry was controlled by ethnic Germans. Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, Czechoslovakia’s first president, was born to a poor family. His father was a carter and his mother was a cook. Edvard Benes, the second president, was the tenth child of a peasant family.
Slovaks, in the mountainous east, were majority agriculturalists. Slovaks owned a tiny percent of the nation’s industry. Wealthy aristocratic families, often German or Germanized Slavs, owned a disproportionate percentage of the land. Hungarians had suppressed education in Slovakia. “Although in 1937 Slovakia’s population, including its minorities, amounted to 24 percent of the republic’s total, its share of the country’s industrial production was only about 8 percent. The contribution of Slovak agriculture was only slightly more favorable.” Even after the creation of Czechoslovakia, Slovaks felt themselves to be the poor relations of the Czechs.
Jews occupied a middleman minority position. They were often merchants, shopkeepers, and tavern owners, and often differed linguistically and culturally from the surrounding population. They were more likely to be literate, urban, and white collar, and to speak German or Yiddish.
After having been dominated by Germans and Hungarians, some Czechs and Slovaks chose ethno-nationalism as the path to their desired future. Ethno-nationalists were often anti-Semites, as well as being opposed to Gypsies, aka Rom, and Hungarians. Anti-Jewish riots broke out in Czechoslovakia in the interwar period. Even so, Gerta Sidonova, the woman who would become Rudolf Vrba’s first wife, could report that, “Her early years were happy and peaceful. It was in 1939 that things changed, following the Nazi invasion.”