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| Rudolf Vrba with daughters Zuza (left) and Helena (center) |
They didn’t know it, but it was the eve of the Passover seder. At 2:00 p.m. on April 7, 1944, 19-year-old Rudolf Vrba and 25-year-old Fred Wetzler began their epic and daring bid to bring the news of the horrors of Auschwitz to their fellow Jews and the wider world.
That bid began in a dark, cramped hole under a woodpile in the death camp. It ended with a report describing the Nazi machinery of slaughter which landed on desks in Allied capitals and, through a series of diplomatic maneuvers, helped to save the lives of up to 200,000 Jews in Budapest.
But, for more than seven decades, the story of Vrba and Wetzler’s astonishing escape — the first successful effort by Jewish prisoners to break out of Auschwitz — and their mission to sound the alarm and strip away the layers of deception under which the Final Solution was perpetrated has itself remained somewhat hidden. The recognition they rightly deserve has consequently been denied.
In his newly published book “The Escape Artist,” British writer and journalist Jonathan Freedland seeks to correct this historical injustice, painstakingly but grippingly reconstructing Vrba’s incredible life.
Freedland, a columnist for The Guardian newspaper and host of a popular BBC radio history program, tells The Times of Israel that his aim is to ensure that Vrba has, at last, “a place in the pantheon of heroes of the Holocaust.”
And, says Freedland, this is not simply a story about the past. Vrba’s belief about the potential power of shining a light onto Auschwitz’s dark secrets holds salutary lessons for our “post-truth age.”