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

Steve Sheinkin’s Impossible Escape: A True Story of Survival and Heroism in Nazi Europe is a work of narrative nonfiction for young adults. The book tells the parallel stories of two Jewish teenagers from Slovakia during the Holocaust. As 17-year-old Rudolf “Rudi” Vrba is captured and imprisoned in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, he resolves to escape and warn the world of the systematic mass murder he witnesses. Meanwhile, his friend Gerta Sidonová fights for survival by hiding in plain sight, using forged documents and her wits to navigate the constant threat of discovery in Nazi-allied Hungary. Together, their stories explore how genocide and survival develop the themes of Deception as a Tool of Fascist Control, The Role of Community in Survival, and The Power of Documented Truth. Acclaimed for his historical nonfiction, Sheinkin garnered the Sydney Taylor Book Award for Impossible Escape, an honor recognizing the best Jewish children’s literature.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of religious discrimination, graphic violence, physical abuse, emotional abuse, illness or death, and death by suicide.

Language Note: The source text includes several uses of slurs for Jewish people. This guide refers to “kapos” in the context it was used historically: as a title for prisoners who have authority over other prisoners at the concentration camps. It has since become a derogatory term within the Jewish community.

Summary

In March 1942, as Nazi Germany rounds up young Jewish men in Slovakia, 17-year-old Rudolf “Rudi” Vrba resolves to escape to Great Britain and join the fight against Hitler. He takes a taxi near the Hungarian border, tears the mandatory yellow Star of David from his jacket, and slips into Hungary under the cover of night. Meanwhile, his friend Gerta Sidonová experiences the tightening grip of anti-Semitism in their hometown of Trnava, Slovakia. After being barred from school, she watches her non-Jewish friend Marushka’s family eagerly anticipate taking over the Sidonovás’ home and business once they are “resettled.” 

Rudi’s initial escape attempt fails when he is captured by Hungarian border guards, severely beaten, and handed over to Slovak authorities. He is sent to the Nováky transit camp, from which he makes a second escape with a boy named Josef Knapp. After Knapp abandons him, Rudi is recaptured in the town of Topol’čany, Slovakia. Then, Rudi is herded onto a transport train bound for Poland. Once there, in Lublin, young men are separated from their families, and Rudi is sent to the Majdanek concentration camp. The horrific conditions convince him to volunteer for “farm work”, which turns out to be a transfer to the Auschwitz concentration camp. 

As Rudi is being deported, Gerta and her family escape Slovakia and go to Budapest, Hungary, where they obtain forged identity papers to pose as a Catholic family. While Gerta struggles with the constant fear of discovery and the difficulty of masking her Slovak accent, Rudi endures the horrors of Auschwitz. Early on, he is assigned to a less rigorous job in the “Canada” warehouse, sorting the plundered belongings of murdered Jews, under a somewhat humane kapo (a prisoner with authority) named Franz. When Franz is punished for giving jam to starving female prisoners, Rudi is reassigned to the Buna Command, a construction site where inmates are worked to death. He survives only through the help of his friend Josef Erdelyi. During this time, he meets Filip Müller, a prisoner in the Sonderkommando, the special unit forced to work in the gas chambers. Filip reveals the secret of the industrial-scale mass murder happening in the crematoria, the details of which Rudi commits to memory so he can share with the world later on.

Outside the camps, Gerta’s family is eventually denounced and arrested in Budapest. They spend a month in a Hungarian detention camp before an uncle bribes officials to secure their release, after which they return to the city. However, a condition of their release is that Gerta’s father report to the police, which becomes dangerous when Hungary starts deporting Jews. Consequently, Gerta and her mother go to live on the outskirts of Budapest and eventually take a train and a bus back into Slovakia. There, Gerta connects with the Jewish underground resistance. Using her secretarial skills, she gets an office job and forges identity papers for refugees at night. 

At Auschwitz, Rudi survives a bout of typhus and a “selection” where the weak are sent to death and gets a new job in the Canada Command warehouse. There, he is caught with contraband he was forced to carry for his kapo and is brutally beaten by an SS officer named Richard Wiegleb. He survives only because others help him hide while he recovers. Transferred to the railroad ramp, Rudi witnesses the selection process firsthand, watching as thousands of men, women, and children are sent directly from the trains to the gas chambers. He memorizes the numbers of victims and their countries of origin, determined to bear witness. His resolve hardens when he learns of a new rail line being built directly to the Birkenau crematoria, specifically for the deportation of Hungary’s large Jewish population. He knows he must escape and warn them.

On April 7, 1944, Rudi and fellow prisoner Alfred “Fred” Wetzler execute a brilliant and daring escape plan. They hide in a hollowed-out woodpile located between the camp’s inner and outer security perimeters. For three days and nights, they remain concealed, sprinkling gasoline-soaked tobacco to mask their scent as SS guards and dogs search directly over their heads. On the third night, after the search is called off and the outer guard towers are vacated, they emerge from the pile, crawl under the wire, and begin their perilous journey south. 

Rudi and Fred travel for two weeks through Nazi-occupied Poland, moving only at night and surviving on their wits and the kindness of strangers. They are nearly captured by a German patrol but are saved when they dive into an icy, fast-moving stream that the soldiers refuse to cross. They are eventually guided across the border into Slovakia by a Polish farmer. In the town of Žilina, Slovakia, they meet with leaders of the Jewish Council and dictate their detailed, eyewitness accounts of the extermination process at Auschwitz. This testimony becomes the Vrba-Wetzler Report. The report slowly makes its way to the Allies, and the resulting international pressure, including threats from President Franklin Roosevelt, forces Hungarian ruler Miklós Horthy to halt the deportations on July 7, 1944.Ultimately, the Vrba-Wetzler Report saves more than 200,000 Jews remaining in Budapest. 

Rudi finds his way to Bratislava and reunites with Gerta, who is shocked by how much he has changed. However, not long after, Gerta and her mother are captured by the Gestapo. After days of torture, Gerta’s mother loses the will to live. Knowing what Auschwitz means from Rudi’s testimony, Gerta makes the agonizing choice to save herself, jumping from a second-story window and escaping into the streets of Bratislava. She enlists the help of her former boss, Martin, returns to Budapest, and survives the final months of the war working for the underground in Hungary.

Meanwhile, Rudi joins the Slovak partisans and fights the Germans until the war ends, earning a medal for valor. After Germany’s surrender in May 1945, Filip Müller is liberated from a subcamp of Mauthausen, one of the few Sonderkommando members to survive. Gerta searches for her parents but learns they were murdered. She returns to her hometown, evicts the family who took her home, and gives the house to a kind neighbor. She and Rudi reunite in Bratislava, marry, and attend university. 

The epilogue follows their lives after the war: Rudi and Gerta divorce but remain friends, and both build successful careers as scientists. Gerta engineers another daring escape, this time from communist Czechoslovakia to Great Britain. Rudi eventually settles in Canada, where he testifies against Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, arguing that the only way to combat such monstrous lies is with the truth. For the rest of his life, he tells his story and hopes that listeners will understand what to do.