141. The Escape Artist

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz To Warn the World. Jonathan Freedland. 2022. [October] 400 pages. [Source: Library]

First sentence: FROM THE START he knew he was special. He was not yet Rudolf Vrba, that would come later. His name was Walter Rosenberg and he had only to look into his mother’s eyes to know he was a one-off. Ilona Rosenberg had waited so long for him, desperate for his arrival. She was already a stepmother – her husband, Elias, came with three children from a previous marriage – but that was not the same as holding a baby of her own. For ten years, she had yearned for a child; the doctors told her she should stop hoping. So when Walter arrived on 11 September 1924, she greeted him like a miracle.

Premise/plot: The Escape Artist is a biography of Walter Rosenberg/Rudolf Vrba. He and Fred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz--quite a feat--and tried their best to warn the world--especially, especially the Hungarian Jews who were the next target of the Nazis--about the "Final Solution." But that is only a fraction of his story. This is his life story, not only the story of those horrifying war years. Those chapters--which are considerable--are heart-shattering. But just because the contents are heart-shattering and horrifyingly tragic, doesn't mean that readers should look away. All voices should be heard. 

My thoughts: Words don't do this book justice. I know that. I found it an incredible read. Incredibly thought-provoking. Incredibly sad. Incredibly memorable. Sad seems an obvious description due to the subject, but, different kinds of sadness. His life after the war, for example, and how his early experiences effected his marriages (there were two) his children (there were two) and his overall health (mental and physical). The book never once uses the term PTSD, but, certainly I think that might explain so much. Another kind of sadness is that as heart-breaking, heart-shattering, horrifying, and haunting as the Holocaust was--and he witnessed so, so, so, so much, he didn't think that was the most tragic thing that ever happened to him. But I hesitate to spoil this one.

Quotes:

And yet Walter only really began to know of it that moment in Kanada where, in that pile of tiny shoes, the truth was staring him too hard in the face and he could not look away. Perhaps he could be forgiven for taking so long to understand what would eventually seem obvious, for failing to absorb the evidence that surrounded him, for failing to turn clear facts into knowledge. The SS had taken great pains to keep this operation hidden, even from those who were living at the scene of the crime.

The Nazis lied to their victims at every step of their journey towards destruction, step after step after step. Those people falling out of those stinking cattle trucks had boarded them believing they were being taken to new lives in a new place: ‘resettlement in the east’, they called it. Those Jews had packed up their belongings and held on tight to them because they thought they were building a new home, one that would need pots and pans, clothes for their backs and toys for their children. They believed that because that was what the Nazis had told them and it was what their own friends and families had told them, in the form of those postcards home that they did not realise had been written at gunpoint – those messages of forced cheer that Walter had heard read out on the train on the way to Majdanek – and which were designed to seal the lie.

 

For at eighteen years old Walter would witness events so harrowing they could change the life of the person who glimpsed them. He was witnessing such moments not once or twice, but day after day after day. He was in Auschwitz, a place where moral boundaries had dissolved long ago, where everything was permissible. This was a place where Dr Mengele once punished a Jewish woman by making a dog of her young son, because she had, in self-defence, killed an SS attack dog: he had the boy trained at the point of a whip to run on all fours, bark without pause and attack and bite Jews. Walter was in a place where one inmate might steal bread from another, even when that prisoner was dying and when the bread was covered in faeces. 

 

He had drawn a conclusion that would become an article of faith, an unshakeable creed that would drive every decision he took next. He now understood that the difference between knowledge and ignorance, between truth and lies, was the difference between life and death.

It was clear to him from then on that the Jews destined for destruction could defy their fate here only if they knew of it, incontrovertibly and before it was too late. Somehow Walter had to get out of this place and tell the world what was happening. He did not know it yet, but he was about to meet the people who could help.

 

If he had to be a spectator to horror, then he would make himself a witness. He would be a reporter. Christmas came and went, the SS forcing their Jewish captives to learn and sing ‘Stille Nacht’ – ‘Silent Night’ – perhaps to remind the Germans of home. Those who did not sing it properly were murdered. In Birkenau, the SS put up a huge Christmas tree and on Christmas Eve they brought out a group of prisoners. For their own entertainment, they gave the men a pointless task, ordering them to gather up soil in their coats, shooting any man who collected too little. Then they stacked the corpses in a heap under the tree, piled up like festive gifts.

 

The way Walter saw it, they had been written off by the world the day they stopped being Alfréd Wetzler and Walter Rosenberg and became prisoners 29162 and 44070, if not the day they stepped on to those deportation trains. True, they had become people of standing in the Auschwitz inmate hierarchy, but all that was lost now. The moment they crept out from under that fence they had entered a social vacuum. They knew no one; they had no one.

 

Rudolf Vrba was not an entirely new creation. There had been an influential Czech Catholic priest of that name who had died five years earlier, having built a reputation as an energetic antisemite: he had proposed a set of measures to secure the exclusion of Jews from Bohemian life. But the new Rudi, as he was to become, was not bothered by that association, if he was aware of it at all. (Nor, apparently, was he much fazed by sharing his new first name with the commandant of Auschwitz.) All that mattered was to be free of what, to him, was the Germanic taint of ‘Rosenberg’. He wanted to sever every connection with that supposedly ‘civilised’ nation. Walter Rosenberg was no more. From now on, and for the rest of his days, he would be Rudolf Vrba, with a name that was impeccably Czech, carrying no hint of German or, for that matter, Jew. The two men, reborn as Jozef and Rudi, headed for the mountains. Meanwhile, the work of their lives, the Auschwitz Report, was about to embark on a journey of its own.

 

Those audiences would have thrilled to hear the story of his escape and his mission to tell the world of Auschwitz, but he never left it at that. He would not serve up a morally comfortable narrative in which the only villains were the Nazis. Instead he always insisted on hitting out at Kasztner and the Hungarian Jewish leadership, as well as the Jewish council in Slovakia. He faulted them for failing to pass on his report and, in the Slovak case, for compiling the lists that had put him on a deportation train in the first place.

What made Rudi a more awkward witness still was his tendency to refer to the Jews whom he blamed as ‘Zionists’. As it happened, Rudolf Vrba was a supporter of Israel and rooted for it: he believed that the existence of the state of Israel was a good thing for Jews and for the world. But he could not contain his anger against those Zionists who he felt had betrayed the Jewish people, starting with Kasztner.

 

Rudolf Vrba refused to conform to what the world expects of a Holocaust survivor.

 

Rudi had to confront the fact that his younger self had been wrong to believe that the Allies did not know, and wrong to believe that they would come to the rescue of the Jews if they had. But he could cling to one last conviction: that if the Jews of Hungary had only known what he and Fred knew and had written down in their report, then they would have refused to go to their deaths.

Rudi held fast to that belief, and yet in his later years that too would be challenged.

 

© 2022 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews