In 1944, a young Slovakian man achieved the near impossible – he escaped the horrors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Walter Rosenberg, later known as Rudolf Vrba, was desperate to warn the world about Nazi camps and spur global leaders into action.
His poignant and important tale is told in new detail by journalist Jonathan Freedland in the new book The Escape Artist.
Photo: Supplied
The story begins in 1942 when teenager Walter Rosenberg receives a letter saying he is to be deported from his homeland of Slovakia, Freedland tells Nine to Noon.
“Slovakia at that time was not German-occupied but was under a Fascist government that almost prided itself on being more Nazi than the Nazis.
“[The country] was pursuing vicious anti-Jewish measures, and that culminated in 1942 with a letter dropped on the doormat telling the 17-year-old Walter Rosenberg to meet at a certain time on a certain day in order to be deported.”
Rosenberg, however, had other ideas and escaped before he was eventually rounded up by the Nazis and deported.
“He was a serial escape artist, but eventually the hand of Nazism caught up with him, and on the last day of June 1942 - 80 years ago this summer - he found himself arriving at the gates, those famous, iconic gates of Auschwitz.”
It's miraculous that Rosenberg even survived Auschwitz, let alone escaped the camp, Freedland says.
“For a Jew to arrive at Auschwitz, their life expectancy was usually measured in hours, they were taken off those trains and sent to the gas chambers.
“That's the overwhelming majority of Jews who arrived. Then a small percentage, between five and ten percent, that sort of number would be sent to work as slaves in the part of Auschwitz that was not a death camp, but a concentration camp, a labour camp. And those people used to have their life expectancy measured in weeks or months, not much more than that.”
Rosenberg survived there for two years doing various jobs in various parts of the camp, Freedland says.
“He worked as a slave in all kinds of different parts of this vast, sprawling metropolis of death.
“He had a vantage point through the successive roles and jobs he had, in the end, actually a kind of white-collar job as a clerk and registrar, a bureaucrat in one of the barracks, keeping tabs and keeping the list of numbers of how many prisoners there were. The Nazis, as you know, were very meticulous in keeping records and tallies and numbers.”
Over time, Rosenberg started to realise just what was going on at Auschwitz, Freedland says.
“His very first job was in a place they nicknamed 'Canada' because they associated Canada with a land of riches and plenty.
“It was a kind of vast complex of warehouses where all these goods, clothes, shoes, babies prams, pots, pans, blankets were stacked and sorted.
“And he looked at that, and after a day or two there thought, there is more stuff here than there are prisoners in the camp, I'm seeing children's clothes, and yet there are no children. I'm seeing the shoes of the elderly, there are no elderly. And the penny dropped and he realised I'm in a place that has never existed before in human history, which is a mass factory of death.”
“He had this almost unique perspective on what was going on in the camp and saw it with clarity. And I think this is partly to do with having been a teenager, he had this penetrating insight that he understood through one of the jobs what in some ways, the secret of the Nazi method was, and it was spotting that that made him decide he had to escape.”
Rosenberg was then given a different job working on the railway platforms, Freedland says.
“These cattle trucks come in. His job is to be part of a group who have to unload the new arrivals, these dazed, confused, new arrivals.
“And he sees them line up in orderly fashion where they are then selected, to the left those going to the gas chambers to the right, those who will be used as slave labourers.
“And he understands that the reason why they are going in orderly fashion and not running a mile is because they are deceived.”
Rosenberg came to understand that the secret ingredient of Nazi rule was deception, Freedland says.
“I chart in the book meticulously at every stage of their journey, through often ingenious ways, the Jews were lied to, they believe they were starting a new life. That's why they brought all those pots and pans and blankets, they thought they were going to be resettled in new homes.
“And he realised the only way to throw some sand in the gears of the Nazi killing machine is if its victims know before they get there, what fate awaits them.”
Rosenberg and a fellow inmate then planned their escape, Freedland says.
“His is the most extraordinary, the most ingenious escape and that's partly because Jews in Auschwitz were the closest guarded, most brutally guarded, prisoners, anywhere in Europe, if not in history, it was impossible to get out.
“They were held behind 15-foot barbed wire, electrified fences, first one, then another, there were watchtowers with SS men who just machine-gunned anybody who moved, searchlights and ditches and so on - impossible.”
The young Rosenberg had spotted a flaw in the Nazi defence, though.
“He sees something that others hadn't seen, which was there was a gap in the Nazi defences, not a physical gap, not a gap in the fence or anything like that, but rather a kind of loophole.
“I'm going to hold back exactly what that loophole was because obviously, I want people to read the book, but he saw there was a loophole in the Nazis’ procedure, that they had, in some ways a fatal flaw, the Nazi SS, and that was partly their predictability, that they did follow protocol strictly.”
Rosenberg and his friend escaped from one prison to another, Freedland says.
“As he would say in later life, they came out with no map, no compass, no friends, they had no contact in the outer world.
“They then had nine days or more, more than nine days, to cross rivers and mountains and marshlands and forests in the dead of night, they couldn't be seen in the daytime, they couldn't dare talk to another human being because it could be a Nazi collaborator. It could be, one of the ethnic Germans that had been settled in Nazi-occupied Poland.
“But somehow, and it's a death-defying story how they did it, it's a kind of an amazing adventure story really how these two young men did it. But they do cross into their native Slovakia. And they made contact with the remnant Jewish community, the tiny number of Jews that are still left in Slovakia.”
At that point, Rosenberg revealed another extraordinary talent, Freedland says, as he recounted the dark facts of what was happening in Auschwitz.
“He knew, though he was such a young man, he knew that the only way that would be convincing to the world if it was meticulously, rigorously factual.
“It couldn't just be that there's terrible things going on. He had to be able to say on this day, this number, and so using all kinds of memory tricks had memorised every transport that arrived every trainload of Jews, he could tell you the date, the number and the point of origin.
“And he had piled them up almost like a child's memory game, one fact then two, then one and two and three, then one and two, and three, and four. And he piled these up in his head, so he could just dictate these, essentially, stats about dates and times."
The people who first heard Rosenberg's descriptions were sceptical until they checked the dates he'd said trains had left Slovakia and found his evidence to be true, Freedland says.
A 32-page document based on Rosenberg's report then had to be smuggled out of occupied Europe.
“So then began in a way another adventure story where the report itself has to escape and I chart in the book, the journey of this report. It then has to cross occupied Europe, hand to hand, from person to person, essentially smuggled across borders.
“I don't think the journey of that report has ever been assembled before this book of mine which is the first account of how it got to the outer world, but it does, improbably, amazingly, reach the desk of no less than Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Pope Pius in Rome.”
Rosenberg, now living as Rudolf Vrba, assumed his report would spark action, Freedland says.
“It's a sobering tale, because, partly it runs into practical problems ... The report had attached a plea from Jewish leaders that the Allies take action and bomb at least the railway tracks to Auschwitz.
“The logic being that if this is a killing factory, well then at least take out the conveyor belt.”
But the buck was passed around, he says, and antisemitism among certain of the Allies reared its head, too.
“There are officials in both London and Washington who [complained]. 'Haven't we done enough “for these wailing Jews?” says one official in London, while another says “we have to allow for a certain degree of Jewish exaggeration”.
More disturbing still is the fact that the report was ignored by some Jewish leaders, Freedland says.
“The community [Rosenberg] most wanted to be warned by his report was the last Jewish community at that point not yet touched by the hand of Nazism, and that was the Jews of Hungary.
“There were close on 700,000 Jews in Hungary that he knew had not yet come to Auschwitz. He was certain they were about to be brought there. And that's who he wanted his report to get to.”
When Rosenberg's report made its way to the de facto leader of Hungary’s Jews, he essentially stuck it in a drawer and did not pass on any warning, Freedland says.
“And that is something that Vrba throughout the rest of his life could not forgive.”
Ignoring that warning led to catastrophic effects, he says.
“Once Roosevelt had [the report] and the Pope, and once it became public, because a copy found its way into the Swiss press which was neutral and had a relatively uncensored press, world leaders are shamed by the fact that now their publics know about this.”
Through a series of diplomatic moves, pressure was put on the then-ruler of Hungary, Freedland says, who called a halt to the deportations of the Jews of Budapest.
“At that point, the Jews of the provinces of Hungary have gone to their deaths, 437,000 of them, but there were 200,000 Jews in Budapest, and they had not yet been deported to Auschwitz and because of Rudy Vrba the leader of Hungary orders a halt to those deportations, which is why I believe Rudolf Vrba and his report saved 200,000 lives an achievement which means he stands as one of the towering figures of this period alongside Oscar Schindler, Anne Frank, or Primo Levy, the figures who define our understanding of the Holocaust.”
Vrba could never forgive those who ignored his warning, says Freedland.
“He was haunted by the 437,000 who were not saved, who he believed if they'd had his warning, could have at least had the chance to somehow act on the information which they never, ever got.
“And he was an angry man for decades because of that.”
Vrba died in Canada in 2006, barely acknowledged by the Jewish community, Freedland says.
“Even in the town where he lived for the rest of his life as a scientist - Vancouver, Canada - he would not be invited even to Holocaust memorial events. They would not invite him to speak because they could not trust that he would not, in their words, descend into, quote, accusations and rage, unquote.
“That's what [Vancouver's Jewish leaders] said about him when they didn't invite him, and so he died in 2006 in relative obscurity. He had a funeral and there weren't even enough Jews there for the traditional quorum of ten Jews to say the traditional Jewish burial prayers.
Only 40 or so people attended Vrba's memorial service in Vancouver, Freedland says.
“My book argues that he should be lionised as one of the titans of this period and a true hero.”
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist and former foreign correspondent, and the presenter of BBC Radio 4's history series The Long View.
