Impossible Escape: A True Story of Survival and Heroism in Nazi Europe

As 1942 ends, the war rages on multiple fronts, but for the prisoners in Auschwitz, there is no end in sight. A typhus epidemic sweeps through the camp, and both Rudi and his friend, Josef Erdelyi, fall ill. When Josef is ordered to the hospital—a certain death sentence—he resists and is dragged away by kapos. Rudi’s attempt to bribe a hospital official to save him fails; he later learns Josef ran for the fence and was shot. As Rudi’s own illness worsens, Bruno abandons him, so Rudi desperately turns to Laco Fischer, the friend who first got him into Canada Command. Laco and another prisoner prop Rudi up, helping him march past SS inspectors and into the warehouse. There, the female prisoners, led by an overseer named Hermione who remembers Rudi’s loyalty, hide him atop a mountain of clothes and nurse him back to health. Once recovered, Rudi is assigned to burn papers from prisoners’ luggage. He finds a children’s atlas, tears out a map of Poland, and quickly memorizes the geography around Auschwitz, including the Sola River, which provides a potential escape route to his home in Slovakia. He realizes the intense security at the camp is not to guard prisoners, but to protect the secret crimes the Nazis have committed.

By early 1943, the tide of the war begins to turn with the German surrender at Stalingrad, so Heinrich Himmler accelerates the “Final Solution,” demanding more trains for deportations. Back on the ramp, Rudi is spotted by Wiegleb, the SS officer who nearly killed him. In a bizarre turn, Wiegleb lets Rudi live, an act that grants Rudi protection among the guards. Later, when camp authorities want to gas his entire prisoner crew, Wiegleb objects—not to save his prisoners, but because he did not want to disrupt his smooth-running system. As a compromise, the SS moves the prisoners to live in Birkenau, the newer section of the Auschwitz complex. Rudi finds himself in a vaster, muddier hell, dominated by the smoke and stench of four new crematoria on Birkenau’s western edge. Then, the narrative shifts to Filip Müller, who is forced to work inside Crematorium II in Birkenau. He details the Nazis’ meticulous deception, describing a huge underground chamber designed to look like a shower room, complete with numbered clothing hooks and fake shower heads, all intended to prevent panic before the victims are gassed. The building is a factory for mass murder.

In the spring of 1943, the narrative shifts to Gerta Sidonová, who has been hiding with her parents in Budapest for a year. Now 16, Gerta finds a small measure of normalcy in a private romance with a boy named András. This illusion is shattered when police raid their apartment, discover their forged identity papers, and arrest the family. They are sent east on trains loaded with other prisoners. 

In Birkenau, Rudi befriends Alfred “Fred” Wetzler, a Jewish prisoner from his hometown who works as a clerk in the camp morgue. Using his connections, Fred secures Rudi a privileged job as a barracks registrar. The position gives Rudi the freedom to move around the camp, allowing him to systematically gather information from new arrivals and to speak with Filip Müller about the inner workings of the crematoria. Rudi commits every detail to memory. Though his new job offers a better chance of survival, he focuses on his mission to escape and expose the truth.

Because Hungary’s government, led by Miklós Horthy, continues to resist German pressure to deport its Jewish citizens, Gerta and her family are sent to a detention camp for illegal immigrants, not a Nazi death camp. There, Gerta sees her father, Max, lose his will to fight, and she realizes she must learn to rely on herself. Meanwhile, in Birkenau, Rudi meets Dmitri Volkov, a captured Soviet. Dmitri provides Rudi with five lessons for escape: trust no one, do not fear the Germans, be invisible and travel only by night, carry no money, and travel light with only essential tools. As the Nazis dismantle other death camps like Treblinka and Sobibor following prisoner revolts, Himmler praises the genocide as a “page of glory” (131). Hitler’s Final Solution continues at Auschwitz where the job was to be finished.

Gerta and her parents are released from the detention camp after an uncle pays substantial bribes. They return to Budapest, and Gerta takes a job as a nanny. By January 1944, 19-year-old Rudi has survived in Auschwitz for over a year and a half. He notices a new construction project: a railway line being built to connect the main tracks directly to the Birkenau crematoria. A kapo confirms that SS guards are anticipating large new transports from Hungary. This, combined with information from Filip Müller about the digging of new mass graves, leads Rudi and Fred Wetzler to a terrifying conclusion: The Nazis are preparing for the mass extermination of Hungary’s Jews. The need to escape becomes urgent. Rudi’s resolve is tested when he witnesses a failed escape attempt by another Slovak prisoner, Fero Langer. Fero had gone to school with an SS guard named Dobrovolny—a childhood friend he trusted to help him and four others escape by assigning them to a work party that would slip away to a truck hidden in the woods. The guard betrayed them, leading them into an ambush. The SS displayed the five bodies in camp with a sign reading “Three cheers, we’ve come back again!” (135). Despite the warning, Rudi continues searching for a good escape plan.

Another prisoner named Charles “Charlo” Unglick, devises an escape plan and invites Rudi to join him. The plan relies on a bribed SS truck driver who, Charlo insists, can be trusted because he was raised by a Jewish family. They are to hide in a large tool chest in the back of his truck. Despite his misgivings and Dmitri’s warning to trust no one, Rudi agrees. On the appointed evening, Rudi waits anxiously, but the truck fails to appear. Eventually, still seeing no sign of Charlo or the truck, he returns to his barracks and eats soup. Moments after finishing, he learns the truck did arrive and has already left. He runs to Charlo’s room to find it empty, furious with himself for missing his chance. Later that night, the driver returns with Charlo’s dead body—the driver had gone to a garage, opened the tool chest, and shot him. Charlo’s body is put on display as another warning. Rudi, filled with a mixture of grief and relief, takes only his friend’s leather belt as a memento. Shortly after, in March 1944, Germany occupies Hungary, confirming Rudi’s fears. The time to act is now, and this time, Rudi has his own plan.