Freedland establishes that Kasztner saw the Vrba-Wetzler report, but did not pass the information on to save all of Hungarian Jewry, only a small number for whose lives he had negotiated with Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann. Vrba has been in Auschwitz for close to two years and has performed very different roles and tasks. He has lived in the main camp, and in Birkenau. He has been part of different commandos. So we get a very good view on many different parts of the camp.

After that, Krasňanský readied the document for dissemination. He got to work on a translation of the text into a language that would be comprehensible to the greatest number of people: it certainly would not go very far in Slovak. Krasňanský decided it would be most effective if it were written in German. Faced daily with the threat of dying. Rudi had to be strong and his will to survive beyond any means. In his struggle all he could think of was to escape and warn others. He calculated that if the perscuted Jews rose and faught that the senseless murders would stop. Risking his own life, Rudi and his friend Wetzler. A struggle to get to safety both Vrba and Wetzler gave the accounts and numbers of those being murdered in cold blood in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Rudolf Vrba beschrijft hoe hij opgepakt werd, hoe het transport verliep, zijn vele baantjes in Auschwitz, de epidemieën in het kamp, de mishandelingen, de dood die overal aanwezig was en het einde van miljoenen mensenlevens in de gaskamers en crematoria. The tenor of the questioning irritated Walter. He could see that these men were interested in what they were hearing, that they were deeply engaged in it, but they were hardly brimming with human sympathy. They were officials, bureaucrats, in the business of seeking precision rather than showing compassion. Of course,Walter affected not to care, but it needled him all the same.

The man who escaped from Auschwitz so he could warn Jews of what awaited them there

The Slovak Jewish leaders had arranged a safe house for them in the mountains, some fifty-five miles east of Žilina, in the town of Liptovský Svätý Mikuláš. Walter and Fred were given money to live on and, far more precious, false papers certifying them as pure Aryans of at least three generations standing. That status would give them complete freedom of movement around Slovakia. If they were on a train or in a restaurant that was raided by the police, there would be nothing to fear: these bogus documents were flawless. Vrba was born Walter Rosenberg on 11 September 1924 in Topoľčany, Czechoslovakia (part of Slovakia from 1993), one of the four children of Helena Rosenberg, née Gruenfeldová, and her husband, Elias. Vrba's mother was from Zbehy; [16] his maternal grandfather, Bernat Grünfeld, an Orthodox Jew from Nitra, was murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp. [17] Vrba took the name Rudolf Vrba after his escape from Auschwitz. [18] On 1 March, according to the Vrba–Wetzler report (5 March, according to Danuta Czech), the group was asked to write postcards to their relatives, telling them they were well and asking for parcels of provisions, and to postdate the cards to 25–27 March. [81] On 7 March, according to the report (8–9 March, according to Czech), the group of 3,791 was gassed. [82] The report stated that 11 twins had been kept alive for medical experiments. [83] On 20 December 1943, a second Czech family group of 3,000 arrived, according to the report (2,473, according to Czech). [84] Vrba assumed that this group would also be murdered after six months, i.e. around 20 June 1944. [85] Escape [ edit ] Alfréd Wetzler April 7, 1944—This date marks the successful escape of two Slovak prisoners from one of the most heavily-guarded and notorious concentration camps of Nazi Germany. The escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, fled over one hundred miles to be the first to give the graphic and detailed descriptions of the atrocities of Auschwitz.

Hmm. This is a difficult review to write. I gave this book 5 stars prior to reading anything else you can find out about Rudolf Vrba on the internet. In a letter to a TV producer of Auschwitz and the Allies, based on Martin Gilbert’s book, Rudi Vrba wrote: “I’m not the clichéd Holocaust survivor.” Freedland’s book triumphantly proves that to be true. The Vrba-Weltzer report is published in this book, along with some other interesting reads in the appendixes. A complex hero. A forgotten story. The first witness to reveal the full truth of the Holocaust . . .Wetzler encouraged Vrba to start describing conditions in Auschwitz. "He wants to speak like a witness," Wetzler wrote, "nothing but facts, but the terrible events sweep him along like a torrent, he relives them with his nerves, with every pore of his body, so that after an hour he is completely exhausted." [113] The group, in particular the Swiss journalist, seemed to have difficulty understanding. The journalist wondered why the International Red Cross had not intervened. "The more [Vrba] reports, the angrier and more embittered he becomes." [114] The journalist asked Vrba to tell them about "specific bestialities by the SS men". Vrba replied: "That is as if you wanted me to tell you of a specific day when there was water in the Danube." [115] From the very start of The Escape Artist — so called because Vrba didn’t just escape from concentration camps once, but several times — Freedland repeatedly reminds readers of Vrba’s age. Fourteen when his education was cut short by Nazi exclusions in Slovakia, 17 when he entered Auschwitz in 1942, just 19 when he and Fred Wetzler managed their near miraculous escape in April 1944. Their ultimate goal after their escape was to warn the world about Germany's death factories so Jews would stop passively boarding trains that took them to be gassed and staved at camps. At that time the SS was preparing to deport 1 Million Hungarian Jews to their deaths at Auschwitz. To get the word out, they co-authored the infamous Vrba-Wetzler Report, which provided incontrovertible evidence of the Nazi’s mass extermination of Jews at death camps. A huge chimney rises from the furnace room around which are grouped nine furnaces, each having four openings. Each opening can take three normal corpses at once and after an hour and a half the bodies are completely burned. This corresponds to a daily capacity of about 2,000 bodies.

It is very well written. Not every holocaust survivor is an author, so some books are not very well written. This one is. Before long, he had made himself a student of escapology, taking lessons from some of Auschwitz’s most battle-hardened inmates – chief among them a grizzled captain in the Red Army – and forging ties with the camp’s secret underground resistance, slowly acquiring the knowhow to attempt what no Jew had done before. This yearning to break out was rooted in more than a desire to save his own skin: his aim was much larger than that. For he had come to understand something essential about the death factory that was Auschwitz: that the crime unfolding before him rested on a great and devastating act of deception. Christie argued that Vrba's knowledge of the gas chambers was secondhand. [217] According to Vrba's deposition for Adolf Eichmann's trial in 1961, [203] he obtained information about the gas chambers from Sonderkommando Filip Müller and others who worked there, something that Müller confirmed in 1979. [127] Christie asked whether he had seen anyone gassed. Vrba replied that he had watched people being taken into the buildings and had seen SS officers throw in gas canisters after them: "Therefore, I concluded it was not a kitchen or a bakery, but it was a gas chamber. It is possible they are still there or that there is a tunnel and they are now in China. Otherwise, they were gassed." [218] The trial ended with Zündel's conviction for knowingly publishing false material about the Holocaust. [219] [214] In R v Zundel (1992), the Supreme Court of Canada upheld Zundel's appeal on free-speech grounds. [220] Meeting with George Klein [ edit ] George Klein

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Further information: §About Hungarian Jews Rough ground plan of Auschwitz II, showing the area under construction, from the Vrba–Wetzler report (1944) Another interesting note (and again, maybe because I've read countless memoirs and non-fiction about the Holocaust, I'm scrutinizing more than I should). Vrba mentions Hess and Himmler multiple times, but only Josef Mengele once. I find this odd, as Mengele was ultimately responsible for the decision about who died and who lived. On 7 April 1944, after days of delay, weeks of obsessive preparation, months of watching the failed attempts of others, and two years of seeing the depths to which human beings could sink, the moment had finally come. It was time to escape. Rudolf Vrba (born Walter Rosenberg; 11 September 1924– 27 March 2006) was a Slovak-Jewish biochemist who, as a teenager in 1942, was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. He escaped from the camp in April 1944, at the height of the Holocaust, and co-wrote the Vrba-Wetzler report, a detailed report about the mass murder taking place there. [2] Distribution of the report by George Mantello in Switzerland is credited with having halted the mass deportation of Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz in July 1944, saving more than 200,000 lives. After the war, Vrba trained as a biochemist, working mostly in England and Canada. [3] In addition to blaming Kastner and the Hungarian Aid and Rescue Committee for having failed to distribute the Vrba–Wetzler report, Vrba criticized the Slovakian Jewish Council for having failed to resist the deportation of Jews from Slovakia in 1942. When he was deported from Slovakia to the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland in June that year, the Jewish Council had known, he alleged, that Jews were being murdered in Poland, but they did nothing to warn the community and even assisted by drawing up lists of names. [258] He referred to Jewish leaders in Slovakia and Hungary as " quislings" who were essential to the smooth running of the deportations: "The creation of Quislings, voluntary or otherwise, was, in fact, an important feature of Nazi policy" in every occupied country, in his view. [259]

Nevertheless he went to see her straight away, and the two sat in her garden, sitting socially distanced, talking over five sessions. Vrba in Frankfurt to testify against accused former SS guards at Auschwitz, 1964. Photograph: Keystone Press/Alamy There has been a lot of controversy over the facts and the amount of people actually killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Vrba had a job at Auschwitz-Birkenau which gave him the upper hand in seeing just how many people were senslessly murdered. Between Vrba's account and Hoess, one of the head SS officers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the number both discussed was extremely similar. With that in mind, he decided to interview the two separately, getting each story down in detail and from the beginning, so that the evidence of one could not be said to have contaminated or influenced the other. In sessions lasting hours, Krasňanský asked questions, listened to the answers and wrote detailed shorthand notes. Whatever emotional reaction he had to what he was hearing—which was, after all, confirmation that his community had been methodically slaughtered—he hardly showed it. He kept on asking questions and scribbling down the answers. Fred tried to restrain him, but it was no good. Walter started pointing at individuals around the table, including the lawyer, accusing them of just standing there, like pillars of salt.The perimeter fence was not like the ones they had known from the inner camp. It did not have lights attached to each post; the wire was not electrified. Even so, the pair were taking no chances. They had fashioned in advance something that could function as a kind of clothes peg, protecting their hands as, working from the bottom, they lifted the wire above the ground. That made an opening big enough for them to crawl through.