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

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Only seventeen in February 1942,

All he cares to present to the reader is bombing as the real and only solution, screw facts and timelines and logistics, and to present both US and UK commands as antisemitic by implication because their first goal was to win the war first and foremost. According to Austrian historian and Auschwitz survivor Hermann Langbein, his actions in particular indicate the limits of the absolute totalitarian hierarchy imposed by SS leaders. For example, Kulka's account of the trip to Switzerland was denied by all witnesses, and not supported by the documentary evidence.Hulda, her mother Gisela and daughter Ilse, all born into a Viennese Jewish family, were caught up in the tragedy of Hitler's Europe. The ruling wasn't as black and white and exonerating as Freedland presents it here, but he didn't bother to add in the complexities of the ruling, which was to be expected given that he does appear to be sympathetic to the Hungarian Jewish leadership's inaction. But at trials and in interviews, he continued fighting to bring Nazis and their collaborators to justice. This will leave you inspired in a way you’ve never before felt as such through discovering the mission of a man brutalised beyond all belief, carried forward only by a will and ambition to share the horrors of Auschwitz to the outside world in the veiled hope of saving the lives of thousands more of his people.

The book describes how Vrba, when detailed to sift through the belongings of new prisoners, came to realize that those prisoners would never need those belongings because they had been executed immediately upon reaching Auschwitz. Previously, an SS man named Dobrovolný—an ethnic German from Slovakia—had met a Jewish childhood friend at Auschwitz. And yet too few heeded the warning that Vrba—then just nineteen years old—had risked everything to deliver. Photograph: Keystone Press/Alamy View image in fullscreen Rudolf Vrba, centre, prepares to testify against former Auschwitz guards in Frankfurt, 1964.I consider myself to know quite a lot about this period, (The Nazi treatment of prisoner side of things rather than military) but this book provided me with details of things that I never had an idea of. It was around 2016, “in the age of post-truth and fake news”, that Freedland began reflecting on the man who had risked everything so that the world should know the truth.