Message from the Holocaust

The Escape Artist: The Man who Broke out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

Author: Jonathan Freedland

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 376 

Price: Rs 799

As a genocidal project designed and organised on a mammoth industrial scale, the Holocaust has been the subject of considerable scrutiny. Countless academics, writers and film-makers have left few aspects of this monstrous crime unexamined. Such gifted writers as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi have provided us with intimate knowledge of Auschwitz, the labour and death camp in southern Poland, which has become a universal grim monument to that tragedy (literally: It is now a museum). So Jonathan Freedland does not break new ground in the The Escape Artist, his biography of Walter Rosenberg/ Rudolf Vrba, a prisoner who broke out of Auschwitz and sought to warn the world of the genocide against the Jews. But Mr Freedland is a gifted writer as his thrillers under the Sam Bourne pseudonym attest. Even if your mind is numbed by this unrelentingly dark history, Mr Freedland keeps you turning the pages, reminding us at this critical phase in global history of the depths to which humanity can sink when encouraged by politically sanctioned social discrimination.

The Escape Artist tells the story of a sharp, cocky Slovakian teenage boy who faced everything the European anti-Semitic playbook had to offer after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939 (later he was one of the principal participants of Shoah, the nine-hour landmark documentary on the Holocaust). He was dismissed from school for being Jewish. Captured while trying to escape the round-ups, he was loaded on to one of those packed cattle wagons that transported Jews to concentration camps. Rosenberg — he acquired his second name only after his escape — travelled to Majdanek. Arriving in 1942, just months after the Final Solution took shape in an idyllic Berlin suburb, Rosenberg quickly understood that these camps were sources of expendable Jewish slave labour. Being young, he withstood the regime of beatings, backbreaking work and watery soup well enough to be considered for transport to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. This camp provided labour to build the nearby synthetic rubber facility — a critical element of war production — being set up by the chemical giant I G Farben (this is where Levi, a chemist by profession, worked during his captivity). Later, as the Nazis perfected their extermination techniques, Auschwitz was expanded to accommodate gas chambers and crematoria for the destruction of Europe’s Jews.

Rosenberg gained a ringside view of this programme when he was assigned to a detail that sorted through the luggage of Jews arriving on the transports — a workplace that was ironically named Canada because it was less gruelling than other camp jobs. Later, he did duty on the station ramp where the Jewish transports disembarked and people sorted for death or work — a scene evocatively recreated in Schindler’s List. His job was to unload the luggage and clean the wagons of the vomit, faeces and corpses of those who had died during the inhuman journey. Slowly, he began to draw conclusions from the passive and orderly manner in which the arrivals followed orders barked out by Nazi staff, including trooping unsuspectingly to their death in the gas chambers (collecting the clothes and shoes they left in orderly piles outside the “shower” chambers was one of this tasks).

Rosenberg came to understand that the Nazis were playing a huge confidence trick on the Jews, leading them to believe they were being resettled somewhere out east — hence the instruction to carry one suitcase. This narrative allowed them to maximise the number of Jews ensnared for extermination, not just at Auschwitz but at death camps such as Treblinka, Chelmno and Sobibor. His experience on the ramp strengthened Rosenberg’s resolve to escape and warn the world of the massive crime against humanity.

Rosenberg’s escape with another inmate named Fred Wetzler in 1944 — he is only one of four Jews to escape Auschwitz — was made possible only by exploiting the Nazi’s penchant for following rules. Yet, it took much strenuous effort to get Jewish underground associations in Slovakia and Hungary to believe them; the dimensions of the crime were simply too horrific to be credible. Later, after their account was presented in a report, complete with statistics and sketches (thanks to Rosenberg’s head for numbers) and circulated — up to and including Churchill and Roosevelt — it was mostly ignored. An allied plan to bomb the new rail tracks that were laid at Auschwitz to accommodate intakes of Hungarian Jews — the result of information from the report — was shelved for other plans.

Rosenberg Vrba spent the rest of his life regretting that his report didn’t gain enough traction to save more Jews, especially those from Hungary. Mr Freedland puts this failure in context, reminding us that the Allies were well aware of the Final Solution and the death camps long before the Rosenberg-Wetzler report but cynically chose not to act, a reflection of the reflexive anti-Semitism that ruled Europe. This story, at once uplifting and depressing, reflects the vein of wilful inhumanity that underlies the apparent sophistication of modern civilisation, which chooses to raise electric fences against refugees, cloister them on islands or consider plans to send them to Rwanda.