An account of escaping Auschwitz with a sobering reflection on how deeply we repress knowledge of death: a Holocaust lesson for the post-truth world
The usual question the Holocaust raises is: ‘How could this happen, how could people act so inhumanely’. In fact, for many years, as the protagonist of The Escape Artist, Rudolf Vrba, saw very clearly, the routine of industrialised killing was just as much a part of normal life as an abattoir. If you view certain kinds of people as animals, and if you are happy to treat animals in this way, no further explanation is required. The questions that drive this book are: why didn’t people know the fate that lay in store for them? how could they be warned? and why didn’t they respond, even when they knew?
As the child of a refugee from the holocaust and the descendent of many people who died in it, these questions have a particular resonance for me. It’s hard to think of being in the position of the Nazis’ victims without imagining fighting back in some way, or making a plan to escape. You hear the same questions beneath the elegant prose of Jonathan Freedland, whose commentary on UK, US and Israeli politics is always so clear and so fluent. And they were the questions that drove Vrba and his companion to become the first Jews to escape Auschwitlz-Berkenau, the death factory in Southern Poland where, Vrba calculated, 1.8 million Jews were murdered by mid-1944.
The Escape
Vrba, born Walter Rosenberg, was a Slovak Jew imprisoned in Auschwitz who survived, thanks to his youthful strength – just 17 when he arrived – and considerable good fortune. Possessing a sharp mind and a memory for numbers, he became a registrar in the camp administration where he was able to gather accurate, detailed information about what was happening. He also realised that a crucial part of the process was that the ignorance of the people who were to be killed and incinerated immediately (90%), or selected for slave labour (10%). They were the victims of a massive deception that meant they went tamely to the slaughter like lambs, rather than bolting like deer. So vast was the mass murder on which the SS were embarked that it needed to run smoothly at every point.
Learning that huge numbers of Hungarian Jews were soon to be sent to Auschwitz, Vrba and his friend Alfréd Wetzler, a fellow Slovene who was privy to similar information, decided they had to escape and warn people. The deception had to be exposed, and the Jews’ ignorance had to be pierced. After careful preparations and help from the Camp’s underground, they devised a careful plan which Freedland turns into the book’s compelling opening scene. They made it out and eventually – helped by sympathetic Poles – found their way back to Slovakia where the country’s remaining Jews sheltered them. Their hosts interrogated the pair, debriefed them and composed a rigorously factual 40 page account of Auschwitz later known as the Wetzler-Vrba Report.
The account of Auschwitz makes grim reading, though it will be familiar to anyone who has read much of the remarkable books that some of Vrba’s fellow inmates eventually wrote – people like Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl. The logistical detail of the how the camp functioned is also familiar, in part because the Wetzler-Vrba Report influenced later historians so strongly. Less familiar are the book’s harder lessons, which – once we get past the excitement of the escape – are its real point.
The Escape Artist chronicles the ways in which the report was and was not effective. It was believed, translated and placed in the hands of statesmen and journalists, and probably saved the Budapest Jews from deportation. But some of those who could have spread the news declined to do so, preferring to make deals with their governments to help a small number, and the ignorance of many others. Vrba never forgave the people he blamed for this failure and resentment and paranoia were features of his life after the war.
Lessons in Denial
More troubling still are the accounts of those who heard the news about the camps but refused to believe them. Sometimes the news reached them in a whispered word on the path from the trucks depositing people at the Camp to the gas chambers. Sometimes it happened at home, before the deportation happened when people heard, through a rumour or even hard news, that their fate was to be killed. The act seemed so impossible, the lie so huge and the fact of one’s proximate murder so unassimilable that many people simply refused to listen. The young were sometimes open to the possibility, but older people were closed.
That reflection contains a grim truth about how deeply we repress knowledge of death, even in normal life when it comes by natural means; and the Nazis’ deception, or at least its capacity to run smoothly, depended on this capacity for denial. Vrba himself never accepted this, preferring to focus his energies on finding people to blame, but this is the lesson Freedland finally draws from his life.
Freedland’s journalism explores how politics works in a post truth world. This story describes an extraordinary attempt to puncture a lie, and the implacable forces that separate us from the truth. He draws fresh lessons from the holocaust story that are more timely than ever.
My book club will be reading this book. I would like to ask if there are discussion questions that are related to this book that would stimulate a great discussion