A review of “The Escape Artist” by Jonathan Freedland

A Jewish Book Festival book being presented and discussed March 7

Reviewed by Carole J Greene

Most Jewish Book Festival attendees are readers. We’ve probably each read a dozen or more books about the Holocaust, trying somehow to make our minds absorb the idea that all the horrors described really happened. We’ve watched movies, listened to lectures, talked with Holocaust survivors … anything to make sense of the unimaginable inhumanity.

You may believe you know the Holocaust. Reading “The Escape Artist” by Jonathan Freedland, the unfathomable story of Walter Rosenberg, you may come to understand that you knew only a portion of the tragedy. His phenomenal deeds tell the rest of the story. At age 19, this intrepid young Jewish man escaped from Auschwitz with the singular goal to warn the world of what really happened in that death camp.

He was the first Jewish prisoner known to escape the tight security of Auschwitz. Once he accomplished this “impossible” feat, many people could not believe what he told them. But he persisted because he knew he could save lives only if Jews who had not yet been rounded up would learn of their fate and fight it. For security reasons, he wrote his report as Rudolf Vrba, and was known thereafter by that name.

Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, authors live with their main characters throughout the months or years they work on a book. Their heartaches are the author’s. Their triumphs are the author’s. How Freedland kept his sanity while detailing the tortured life of Walter Rosenberg, I cannot comprehend. As I read about the numerous ways the Nazis humiliated and debased their captives, I could stand it only in small doses. I had to put the book down and do something life-affirming before I could read more. However, do not for a moment think I regretted reading this book. It is compelling.

Freedland pulls no punches in this narrative history. Almost every page describes new horrors the Auschwitz prisoners must endure, as their captors relish finding new ways to dehumanize them. They pretend to offer hope to Jews from every European country under Nazi control. They promise new jobs, new homes, new beginnings, only to destroy those hopes in the gas chambers that annihilated millions.

But during his two years in Auschwitz, Rosenberg committed to his astonishing memory every transport that arrived at the camp, where it came from, how many people it disgorged into the trap. He understood that only if his report — after his death-defying escape — could provide accurate numbers would it be accepted and widely distributed by the authorities who offered the best chance to keep some Jews safe from disaster.

His post-war career as a biologist gave him a good living, but he never escaped emotionally from the horrors he endured as a teenager. Jewish tradition teaches that to save one life is to save the whole world. Rudi Vrba could take heart in the knowledge that his report saved hundreds of thousands who otherwise would have boarded cattle cars and been transported to their extermination.

This book makes a good argument for including this young man in the short list of Holocaust rescuers. Freedland emphasizes that Vrba understood that his miraculous work saved thousands of lives.

But he was affected more by all those he did not save. Thus, although he escaped the death camp, his country, even his name, he never drew breath outside of the shadow that Auschwitz cast on his life.

Freedland will be the Jewish Book Festival’s presenter at 3:30 p.m. on March 7. He will appear “Live from London.” Tickets are available for $25 each at jewishnaples.org.