In April 1944, the death factory in Auschwitz allowed two men to escape. Rudolf Vrba and Fred Wetzler were the first Jews to escape from the concentration camp. Together they outsmarted thousands of SS men, passed under electrified fences, traversed swamps, mountains and rivers. Freed, Vrba became an eyewitness to the Nazi genocide. He memorized every detail of his captivity, information he contextualized in the 32-page report that exposed the Final Solution to the world. Report that reached the hands of Roosevelt, Churchill and the Pope. The impact of the document did not initially have the effect Rudolf Vrba had estimated. In his eyes, the world didn’t seem to believe in the Nazi death machine. Jonathan Freedland, a British journalist, investigated the life of Rudi, as he affectionately calls the Auschwitz survivor. columnist for The protector and presenter of the BBC Radio 4 contemporary history series, The long viewFreedland took the book to the display cases The Escape Master – The man who escaped from Auschwitz to warn the world. We spoke to the author.
Your first contact with the story of Rudolf Vrba comes at the age of 19, in 1986. Would you like to tell us in what context and what impression this story left on you?
I first encountered the figure of Rudolf Vrba during a cinema session in London. watched the movie Shoah by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann and it was a strange experience, with that procession of grey, old, broken men. Suddenly a figure bursting with charisma appears on the scene. Sounds like Al Pacino to me Scarface. He wore a beige leather jacket and had thick, dark hair. And above all, he spoke the English language, while everyone else in the film spoke Polish, Russian or German. He looked more like a figure from our world, in that present, than a figure from the past. And then he mentions, almost aside, that he had escaped from Auschwitz. Turns out the filmmaker didn’t seem very interested in this story. But as a young man I was dominated by that image. I then realized that it was almost impossible for a Jewish prisoner to escape from Auschwitz. And yet here was this relatively young man who had escaped from the concentration camp. That’s why I’m fascinated by this story and in a way I think I always knew I’d investigate it more deeply.
Source: DN
