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

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They relied on strict Nazi routine: in cases of escape, the camp was put on full alert for precisely 72 hours before security in the outer areas was relaxed, on the assumption that the prisoners must have got away.

The last part of the book deals with Vrba’s somewhat troubled post war life as a biochemist and estranged father of 2 daughters. Viktor Pestek [ cs, de] ( ( 1924-04-18)18 April 1924 – ( 1944-10-08)8 October 1944) was born in Czernowitz, Bukovina, then part of Romania, to a devoutly Catholic ethnic German family.The work here was less dangerous, and the prisoners better fed: They could steal food while the guards were busy beating others. A brilliant and heart-wrenching book, with universal and timely lessons about the power of information— and misinformation. Be warned, this is not for the faint of heart and JF has done a superhuman job of bringing one man’s story to life in a visceral and surreal way.

There were at least 3 other Jews that escaped from Auschwitz before, historians and experts on the Holocaust can probably tell better than I how many they were. Why Macaire did that is one grain of sand in this hourglass of upturned cascading events, and a reason his father made the change.Memoirs of the Holocaust are very hard to read, reliving the horrors and sharing them with us has to be mentally agonizing. Kárný, who felt that Lederer's actions needed no embellishment, found that Lederer and the Czech journalist Eduard Kotora, who publicized the former's actions, exaggerated them. Pestek accompanied Lederer out of the camp, and the two men traveled together to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to obtain false documents for Neumann and her mother.

That he should also have taken part in one of the few successful escapes makes his gripping narrative rare indeed.Author Jonathan Freedland wrote this astounding, riveting story because Vrba’s life deserves the same attention as other Holocaust celebrities. Allied policy was inhibited by inertia and antisemitism (“In my opinion a disproportionate amount of time of the Office is wasted on dealing with these wailing Jews”, wrote someone in the Foreign Office in London). Having learnt from the failed attempts of others, Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz, walking across Poland to reach Slovakia. For a time he hung out with fellow teenagers forced to wear the yellow star, including Gerta Sidonova, whom he would eventually marry. It is the way of people who have lived through violent absurdity; if you survive it, you develop a shell over the hurt and when talking to civilians, you might be sarcastic, because there is no possibility that they can grasp the reality you’ve lived through.

One influential, [note 6] although discredited, [note 7] account of the escape was Erich Kulka's semi-fictional 1966 book Escape from Auschwitz. note 4] Lederer went to the nearby village of Travčice, where he met with Václav Veselý, a barber who regularly went into the ghetto to shave the Czech guards; he knew Lederer and had helped the Jews in the past. On 8 March 1944, exactly six months from their arrival, the Jews from the family camp who had arrived in September were all gassed without a selection to find those able to work. Even after escaping from the camp, the two men had many dangerous encounters and strokes of luck as they threaded their way back to their native Slovakia, relying only on a brief glimpse of a children’s atlas Vrba had come across in “Kanada”.Steiner, a German bank clerk named Ludwig Wallner whose Jewish sister-in-law had been deported to Auschwitz, and three others were indicted by the Nazi authorities for hiding Pestek and Lederer, and providing false papers for them.