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

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by award-winning British author and journalist Jonathan Freedland tells the story of how 19-year-old Rudolph Vrba and his childhood friend Fred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz, the concentration and death camp operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland. Rudi first arrived in Auschwitz on June 30, 1942, and immediately began plotting his escape. Rudi’s desire to escape was predicated on three beliefs. First, the outside world had no knowledge of Hitler’s death factory running at Auschwitz. Second, once the Allied powers knew about the death factory, they would act to stop the mass murders. Third, and most importantly, once the Jewish people knew the doomed fate that awaited them at Auschwitz, they would refuse to board the deportation trains. Rudi believed it was his mission to tell the world and his people about the horrors occurring at Auschwitz, shattering forever the deception and misinformation propagated by Nazi Germany. This intense desire to tell the world drove Rudi to meticulously commit to memory the number of Jewish people murdered during his time at Auschwitz. His escape was unprecedented (he and Fred were the first Jewish people to successfully escape), but he also had data he could use to inform the world. While Rudi’s escape did not immediately stop Auschwitz’s death factory, he still saved hundreds of thousands of lives.



Freedland combines the thriller form with journalistic detail. Freedland uses Rudi’s own writings and photos, transcripts from interviews with Rudi, family memoirs, court proceedings and testimonies, and historical accounts from other Holocaust survivors to not only ground the story in facts but also help tell a story about Auschwitz through Rudi’s eyes. The Escape Artist is a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Screenwriter Peter Mofatt is also adapting the book for a limited-run series.

This study guide refers to the 2022 HarperCollins Publishers edition. Following Freedland, this guide only uses the name Walter Rosenberg (Rudi’s given name) when discussing his childhood and time in Auschwitz as part of the unfolding story. Otherwise, the guide uses Walter’s alias, Rudolph (Rudi) Vrba.

Content Warning: This guide includes discussion of genocide; starvation; systematic, state-sponsored violence and persecution; and antisemitism perpetrated by Germany and its collaborators during the Holocaust. This guide also discusses suicide.

Summary

Freedland begins by recounting Walter and Fred’s escape from Auschwitz. By the end of the Prologue, the text has revealed that the two men evaded SS officers for 72 hours but not whether they were able to successfully make it to the camp and to the Slovak border. Freedland uses the escape to begin building tension and suspense, leaving open questions about the activities that led to the two men’s escape and whether they were successful. He slowly reveals these details in subsequent chapters.

Part 1 describes Rudi’s life prior to Auschwitz. Freedland writes about key moments in Rudi’s childhood. For Freedland, these details help shed light on the man Rudi would become. During Rudi’s childhood, the Catholic priest Father Jozef Tiso took over Slovakia. An ally of Adolf Hitler, Tiso allowed antisemitism to flourish in the country. Tiso’s policy became more restrictive against the Jewish community (of which there were around 80,000 in the country), culminating in his order that all able-bodied men report for resettlement. Rudi refused to comply, instead attempting to escape to England to join the Czechoslovak army in exile. His escape attempt failed. Rudi ended up at a transit/labor camp in Nováky, Slovakia, where he was then transferred to Majdanek, a concentration camp. Escape was never far from Rudi’s mind. He volunteered for farm labor at an unspecified location, believing escape might be easier there. Despite warnings from a fellow prisoner, Rudi boarded a train that took him to Auschwitz on June 30, 1942.

Part 2 focuses on Rudi’s time in Auschwitz. From the very beginning, Rudi plotted his escape. He learned within his first day at Auschwitz that trying and failing to escape meant death. Thus, he knew he needed a plan and an accomplice, which would later be Fred. During his time at Auschwitz, Rudi had unprecedented access to both the concentration and death camps. Rudi lived or worked at the main camp (Auschwitz) and subcamps (Birkenau and Buna). He also held several duties, including working in the gravel pits at the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke (DAW) factory, in Kanada, and on the ramp. He was also a member of the underground resistance. These experiences gave him a good idea of Auschwitz’s layout as well as the number of new arrivals, including those who became prisoners and those who were sent to their immediate deaths, all of which he memorized. Rudi initially believed that if Jewish people knew about the death camp, they would resist. However, his experience with the “family camp” in 1943-1944 taught Rudi that knowledge alone would not save his people. They needed to believe his data and facts.

Part 3 documents Walter and Fred’s escape from Auschwitz to Slovakia. Their escape turned out to be successful for three reasons. First, they learned from failed escape attempts by fellow prisoners. Second, Dmitri Volkov, a Russian prisoner of war, mentored Walter on escapology. Finally, human kindness helped them reach Slovakia, where they began to reveal the truth about Auschwitz to the remaining Jewish leaders on the Jewish council, or ÚŽ (Ústredňa Židov).

Part 4 begins with Walter and Fred’s testimonies to key Jewish leaders, including Oskar Krasňanský. After verifying the veracity of their stories, Krasňanský distilled their testimonies into a single, 32-page report with professional drawings of Auschwitz. The report became known as the Auschwitz Report. Two other fellow Jewish prisoners escaped Auschwitz: Czeslaw Mordowicz and Arnošt Rosin. From their testimonies, Krasňanský created a seven-page addendum to the original report. This addendum focuses on the time period after Walter and Fred’s escape, highlighting that the Nazis ramped up their factory of death due to the completion of the railway line to the gas chambers and crematoriums. Thousands of Jewish people arrived daily, mostly from Hungary. The SS officers selected the majority for immediate death. It took months for the deportations from Hungary to stop. Freedland explores how Jewish leadership, Hungarian Christian church leaders, and the Allied powers were all complicit in the mass murder of Jewish people. In this section, Walter also reinvents himself by taking on the name Rudolph (Rudi) Vrba.

Part 5 describes Rudi’s life after Auschwitz. He remained restless. Rudi was deeply unhappy in his first marriage to Gerta Sidonová, despite the couple having two daughters together (Helena and Zuza). He moved to several different locations, including Prague, Israel, and England, before settling in Canada. He mellowed after meeting his second wife, Robin Lipson. While Rudi lived a full life, he never fully escaped the shadows of Auschwitz. He remained deeply paranoid and mistrustful of people and angry at the failure of the Hungarian Jewish leadership to provide ordinary Jewish people with the facts about Auschwitz. But he also continued to tell the world about the horrors of Auschwitz.

Rudi Vrba represents a complicated character, a point that Freedland does not shy away from. He was often difficult to like because he did not fit people’s perception of how Holocaust survivors should act. Yet, in writing the book, Freedland suggests that humankind should not forget his story. Rudi and Fred saved the lives of 200,000 Hungarian Jewish people. Their lives, and their descendants’ lives, are due directly to Rudi’s desire to shatter the Nazis’ web of lies. The story of Rudi’s life as told by Freeland in the book invites reflection on modern-day challenges regarding misinformation and deception; it was Rudi’s belief that one person armed with facts, knowledge, and bravery can change the course of history.