The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

“The Jews in the wagon were not only being degraded in front of each other, they were being rejected by the outside world. That driver could see and hear sick children begging to drink and he could not even look in their direction. Bastards, he had called them, while he stared into the middle distance.”

Despite the deplorable conditions on the train, this moment shook Walter the most. For the first time, Walter realized that the outside world had turned their backs on his people. The train conductor refused to help even the children. At the time, Walter did not realize that the SS officers killed people and their families for harboring or helping Jewish people. The train conductor knew this and perhaps had even seen a fellow colleague murdered. Fear was one mechanism the Nazis used to ensure complicity with their genocide plan against the Jewish people. Freedland reproduces harsh language in the text, such as “bastard,” to evoke a reaction and express blunt truth.

“Eventually, the train slowed down for the last time as it arrived at its destination. Walter peeked through a gap in the wagon doors. He saw watchtowers, which were familiar enough, but also buildings made of brick, so different from the primitive wooden shacks of Majdanek. The doors opened and the SS corralled the prisoners off the train and into line. Once their masters were satisfied, they were ordered to march. Walter noticed another difference. He was walking on a proper, paved road, not one of the dirt tracks of Majdanek. Most striking of all, he saw bushes and trees—such a welcome sight after the desolate blankness of the camp outside Lublin. Something like optimism entered his heart that summer evening, as he approached this mysterious place.”

This passage shows Freedland’s writing in the thriller form (he writes thrillers under the pseudonym Sam Bourne) as well as his journalistic eye for detail. One of the key elements of a thriller is that the author reveals key details through the character’s eyes. Here, the text reveals Walter’s initial thoughts on this mysterious place. Due to the paved roads and brick buildings, he believed that conditions at this mysterious place would be better than at Majdanek. However, the book reveals that Walter ended up in Auschwitz and that he was very wrong. Auschwitz was far worse than Majdanek. Freedland does not imagine Walter’s initial feelings on Auschwitz. Instead, he knows exactly what Walter felt through his forensic review of Walter’s writings and photos and his family members’ memories.

“Walter noticed that once the suitcases and knapsacks had been shaken out and emptied in the storehouse, another group of prisoners would rush to take them off to be burned, along with any identifying documents. It seemed important to the Nazis that the people who had come here, whose most intimate property was stacking up in the Effektenlager, should leave no trace.”

While Walter had some inkling that this was happening, his time working in Kanada confirmed his suspicions. At 18 years old, Walter faced something previously unimaginable: the eradication of his people by Nazi Germany. Freedland uses dramatic irony to portray this slow realization: He reports Walter shaking out suitcases and feeling confused by the burning, the reason for which is already explained by Walter’s escape in the Prologue, and only then does he report Walter’s realization.

“The SS had taken great pains to keep this operation hidden, even from those who were living at the scene of the crime.”

Here, Freedland highlights that the SS men tried to hide their plan to commit genocide against the Jewish people, even from other prisoners. Camps, like Auschwitz, housed both concentration/labor camps and death camps. Prisoners worked alongside the gas chambers and crematoriums. SS officers placed the gas chambers away from the main camp. This passage uses language associated with the thriller or mystery genre (connecting the text to Freedland’s literary background) to highlight this tension: “the scene of the crime.”

“Between 1942 and 1944, an estimated six tons of dental gold were deposited in the vaults of the Reichsbank.”

Nazi Germany not only murdered millions of Jewish people but also profited from their deaths. To show the magnitude of wealth that Nazi Germany gained from Jewish people, Freedland presents several statistics. Above is one such data point. SS officers forced prisoners to remove gold teeth from dead bodies. Over a two-year period, this totaled six tons. The wealth went back to SS headquarters in Berlin. Nazi Germany used this wealth to fuel its war machine.

“Slowly at first, he realised that Nazis were engaged in a great and devastating trick, that the crime unfolding before him rested on a single, essential act that made the entire enterprise possible: deception.”

A critical character development point for Walter occurred around September 1942 as he turned 18 years old. After working on the ramp for several months, Walter made the grim discovery that the Nazis hid their genocide plans against the Jewish people behind deception and misinformation. This discovery did not break Walter’s spirit. Instead, it filled him with determination to escape Auschwitz. He firmly believed that by warning his fellow Jewish people that Auschwitz meant death, it would shatter the Nazis’ web of lies and Jewish people’s ignorance. Doing so would save lives.

“If he could live long enough to escape and warn the Jews of their fate in this accursed place, might that not justify the fact that he had stood by impotently as mass murder was committed in front of him? If he were able not merely to observe this horror, but eventually to testify to what he had seen, might that not justify his own survival?”

This passage shows how Walter struggled with his own feelings of complicity regarding the Nazis’ crimes. The interrogative tone of the passage emphasizes Walter’s uncertainty that it was morally justified for him to continue his work in the camp rather than directly and overtly resisting.

“Granting a few privileges here and there, loosening the leash by which it held its inmates, was surely a small price for the Nazis to pay if, in return, their Auschwitz killing centre was buttressed by the presence of a settled, orderly concentration camp behind it.”

The underground resistance helped improve life inside the concentration camp, including reducing the level of violence against prisoners. Walter struggled with the dealings of the resistance because their decision to look out for their members instead of seeking more subversive ends ultimately bolstered the Nazi system of terror. The Nazis gave concessions to the prisoners because an orderly concentration camp helped ensure the continuation of the death factory.

“‘It’ll be wonderful,’ she [Alicia Munk] said, before pausing. ‘But if we don’t…’ She hesitated again. ‘It has been wonderful.’”

Alicia Munk was part of the family camp and Walter’s first love. Like many members of the family camp, she did not believe the Nazis would murder them after six months. They were all wrong. The murder of the family camp taught Walter that knowledge about the death factories was not enough. Instead, people needed to believe they were being sent to their doom and that there was a way for them to escape.

“More than 600 Jewish men from Trnava had been deported to Auschwitz from Slovakia in 1942. By the spring of 1944, only two were still alive: Walter Rosenberg and Alfréd Wetzler.”

This statistic demonstrates the impact the Nazis’ Final Solution had on generations of Jewish families. Nazis murdered entire families, which included several different generations. As of the end of 2020, the world Jewish population still has not recovered. Compared to the eve of the Holocaust in 1939, there remains nearly 1.5 million fewer Jewish people (Oli, Swikar. “Global Population of Jews Still Not Recovered From the Holocaust, Demographic Study Finds.” National Post, 21 April 2021).

“Using his registrar’s unofficial license to roam, he found his way there and to Eisenbach. The two did not make eye contact as he asked the older man the only question that counted. ‘Do they know?’ Eisenbach was digging a ditch with his bare hands and he did not change his movement even slightly, grunting only ‘No.’”

This event represents a key moment in Walter and Fred’s escape plan. While SS officers caught Eisenbach and the other three escapees, the men had time to get their story straight. By doing so, the men all pointed to the same spot in Birkenau when their torturers asked them about their hiding spot. The men did not point to the underground bunker. Thus, Walter and Fred could keep their original escape plan. If the two had to come up with a new plan, they likely would not have been able to escape Auschwitz, at least with enough time to warn the Hungarian Jewish people about their doomed fate.

“Given all he had seen, it was hardly a surprise to be saved by the whim of one of his captors. In a way, every Jew still breathing in Auschwitz-Birkenau had been saved the same way.”

When Walter was nearly caught trying to escape, the men conducting a search of Walter's person—during which they would have found a watch incriminating him—became distracted and stopped unexpectedly, likely the only reason that Walter was not caught. This scene shows how fickle life and death was at Auschwitz and how everyone who survived could be said to have done so merely by chance.

“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.”

Walter and Fred’s successful escape from Auschwitz to Slovakia was remarkable considering the men no longer had a support network. While in Auschwitz, both men had fairly high standing in the camp’s inmate hierarchy. This standing meant nothing to the outside world. Moreover, the men no longer knew whether family and friends were still alive. Thus, they trekked the 50-mile route mostly on their own, occasionally asking strangers for help. This social vacuum was also a blessing because it meant no one could betray Walter and Fred to the Nazis.

“At one point, their guide signalled for them to stop. A German patrol passed through this area every ten minutes, he warned. They would hide, watch it pass, and then they would have a nine-minute interval to get clear. This, he explained, was the Nazis’ great flaw: they stuck to routine so faithfully, their movements were predictable.”

To escape Auschwitz and reach Slovakia, Walter and Fred relied on the Nazis’ greatest flaw: their routine. The Nazis followed a routine both at Auschwitz and on their patrols to broadcast their supposed morality and superiority to the outside world. Yet this routine represented a giant weakness. By learning the routine, Walter and Fred exploited it, enabling their escape. The Nazis ultimately played a role, albeit unintentionally, in the two men’s successful escape.

“Instead, the papers verified the identity of two new men. Fred was to be ‘Jozef Lánik,’ while Walter Rosenberg would be reborn as ‘Rudolf Vrba.’ For Fred, the move would prove temporary: he would revert back to his original name as soon as he could. But for his friend, this was a change for good.”

This passage represents an important point in the life of Walter/Rudi. Walter’s time at Auschwitz undeniably left a mark on his soul (as it did for many other prisoners who survived). Walter made his name change permanent for two reasons. First, he wanted to reclaim his individuality, which the Nazis stripped him of at Auschwitz. Second, Rudi desired to sever all ties with Auschwitz (he was less successful here). For the rest of his life, he went by Rudolf (Rudi) Vrba.

“At first, the operation made great headway. The leading Protestant bishop responded immediately, writing to the prime minister on 17 May, urging the government to stop the deportations which were, he now knew thanks to the Auschwitz Report, the first step to mass slaughter. But in the same letter he threw away what could have been the church’s most powerful weapon: he vowed that he would not make the plights of the Jews public.”

A key theme of the book is Complicity in the Holocaust: Why Different Groups Failed to Decisively Act to Prevent Genocide. Freedland explores several groups who were complicit with the Nazis’ genocide plan against the Jewish people, including Hungary’s Christian church leaders. Many of these leaders espoused antisemitic viewpoints to protect their own positions of power. Hungarian resistance leaders thought they had identified several church leaders who still had a conscience. None of these leaders acted on the information found within the Auschwitz Report. While they asked the government to stop the deportations, they refused to tell the public about the Hungarian Jewish people’s doomed fate. Even when the deportations continued, the church leaders still did not act. This reaction suggests that the church leaders cared more about easing their own consciences rather than saving the Jewish people.

“Mordowicz thought Vrba was being unforgivably childish, bafflingly so given the import of the moment.”

A point raised by Freedland in the book is that Holocaust survivors did not all handle their grief and trauma in the same manner. Many people, including Mordowicz, found Rudi’s behavior when describing Auschwitz horrifying. They could not understand how Rudi could laugh or smile when discussing such evil acts. Freedland defends Rudi’s behavior. While he was not an easy person to like, Freedland believes Rudi’s reactions were legitimate. Rudi lived through the Holocaust during his teenage years, which robbed him of his innocence and ability to believe in humanity’s good. Freedland proposes that people should not expect all Holocaust survivors to be spiritually uplifting individuals.

“The inaction came from the very top.”

Freedland explores the failure of the Allied powers, including US President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, to stop the mass murders of Jewish people at Auschwitz as part of the theme of Complicity in the Holocaust: Why Different Groups Failed to Decisively Act to Prevent Genocide. Government and military officials within the Allied powers knew about the horrors taking place at Auschwitz before the publication of the Vrba-Wetzler Report. Some officials tried to get their respective governments to act after reading the report, including by informing Roosevelt and Churchill, but they were often thwarted by other officials. Roosvelt and Churchill also failed to act, including by refusing to bomb the railway lines leading to Auschwitz or the camp itself. Bureaucracy, antisemitism, and the inability to believe such evils explain some of the inaction.

“Instead, he [Rezscő Kasztner] would give Eichmann and the SS the one thing they deemed indispensable for their work, the one thing whose importance the teenage Walter Rosenberg has grasped as he stood on the Judenrampe through those long days and nights: order and quiet. The Jews of Hungary would board those trains calmly, even obediently, because they never heard the word that Fred and Rudi had fought so hard to bring them. They remained in the dark. They were led into the charnel house blindfolded.”

Another dimension of the theme of Complicity in the Holocaust: Why Different Groups Failed to Decisively Act to Prevent Genocide is that Jewish leadership also failed the Jewish people. Rezscő Kasztner represents the greatest example. Despite having read the Vrba-Wetzler Report, he did not make it public to the Hungarian Jewish people. This group represented the last of the Jewish community in Europe not yet touched by the Nazis’ genocide plan. Rather than saving as many people as possible, he negotiated a controversial deal with Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann. In exchange for his silence, Eichmann issued export permits for Kasztner’s family and friends. Rudi maintained a life-long loathing for Kasztner. He held Kasztner responsible for the Hungarian Jewish people’s ignorance of their doomed fate. He firmly believed that if Kasztner helped shatter this ignorance, more Hungarian Jewish people might have been saved.

“In 1954, nearly a decade after the war’s end, food was still heavily rationed in Czechoslovakia. Children were entitled to an extra allocation of two eggs a week, along with some sugar and butter. Gerta put those rations aside, so that she could surprise the girls with a breakfast treat of pancakes. When the chosen morning arrived, Gerta looked for the ingredients, but the eggs had vanished. Just as he had done during those toddler raids on the family henhouse, Rudi had taken them. Gerta was furious with him for that.”

Rudi could sometimes be a difficult man to like, something that Freedland does not shy away from in the story. In Chapter 25, Freedland highlights how Rudi did not treat Gerta very well (especially compared to his second wife). His time at Auschwitz damaged and shaped the adult Rudi became. He found it hard to let go of behaviors that helped him survive in Auschwitz, including mistrust of other people (including people he supposedly loved like Gerta) and stealing food for survival (as the passage above highlights).

“The new Israel wanted the Nazi destruction of the Jews to be in the past, the province of historians. Except for Rudolf Vrba, still in his early thirties, the past was not dead. It was not even the past.”

In Israel, there were fierce debates about the extent of Jewish leadership collaboration with Nazis during the Holocaust. Kasztner stood at the center of these debates. Rudi loathed him. Rudi staunchly believed that Kasztner’s silence led to more Hungarian Jewish people’s deaths since many complacently boarded the deportation trains rather than revolting. Rudi was very vocal about his feelings toward Kasztner and other Jewish leaders he felt betrayed the Jewish people. Rudi alienated many Jewish people, including those in the Israeli Supreme Court and government, who did not want Jewish leaders to be viewed as villains. Freedland believes that Rudi’s loathing of Kasztner prevented him from being recognized as a hero.

“Rudi’s best-known critic was the doyen of Israeli Holocaust historians, Yehuda Bauer […] Bauer’s view was that those Jews in the Hungarian countryside were not uninformed: even without sight of the Vrba-Wetzler Report, there were enough fragments of information around including via soldiers returning from the front, for them to have worked out deportation meant death. The problem, he argued was not inadequate publication of information so much as inadequate absorption of it.”

Throughout his life, Rudi adamantly believed that the Hungarian Jewish leadership betrayed their people by not telling them about the fate that awaited them at Auschwitz. Without his knowledge, the Hungarian Jewish people who obediently boarded the deportation trains believed the Nazi propaganda about resettlement, rather than revolting. Many people have disagreed with Rudi’s belief, including Holocaust survivors and historians. Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer is one such person. He argued that the Hungarian Jewish people knew deportation meant death from rumors. However, they were unable to turn this knowledge into action because they did not really believe that the Nazis were capable of such evil. Rudi found Bauer’s premise flawed. He disagreed that the Hungarian Jewish people had enough information to turn knowledge into action since their leaders denied them that information.

“But the suicide of his firstborn child hit him harder. Because now he was ‘facing a horrible catastrophe without any possibility to fight back.’ Even against the Nazis, he did not feel as powerless as he felt at the moment.”

Rudi reiterated over and over that Helena’s death was worse than anything he experienced at Auschwitz. Part of what explains his feelings is that his daughter’s death shook Rudi’s core convictions. Rudi survived Auschwitz because he desired to live. Suicide clashes with this perspective. Rudi eventually found peace, but it took many years.