With the noteworthy exception of Vrba’s champion in Israel, Ruth Linn, the collective failure of the world’s accredited history experts to tell the world-at-large about Rudolf Vrba has been astonishingly complete. This left the door open for journalist and thriller writer Jonathan Freedland to do a re-write of Vrba’s memoir in 2022. Now he’s got a movie deal in the works. Even though the likes of Randolph L. Braham and Sir Martin Gilbert respected and liked Vrba, no academic saw fit to tell Vrba’s life story for the sake of history; therefore, none have had the gumption (or bad manners) to allege that Freedland had, in essence, ripped off Vrba’s story. Among journalists, only the left-wing, British, anti-Zionist critic Tony Greenstein has dared to trounce Freedland for artifice in an on-line editorial on August 22, 2024 entitled ‘Guardian’s Zionist gatekeeper rewrites Holocaust history.’

https://electronicintifada.net/content/guardians-zionist-gatekeeper-rewrites-holocaust-history/48441

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This initial book review [below] of Freedland’s bestseller was published by the Jewish Independent newspaper in Vancouver, Canada, on October 7, 2022, soon after Freedland’s book first appeared, by a non-Jewish journalist who knew Rudolf Vrba and has made this website. Its author erred on the side being polite. It turns out Freedland did not have considerable input from Vrba’s second wife, Robin, and the extent of research at the FDR Library cannot be fully determined but it appears to have been minimal when one considers how much material is there to examine.

Here is that aforementioned, overly polite review:

Anyone who knows more than a little bit about Holocaust hero Rudolf Vrba—a Vancouverite for 39 years—will approach Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World (London, UK: John Murray 2022) with delight and apprehension.

Will this Guardian journalist and thriller writer take the high road, encouraging everyone to seek out Vrba’s own fascinating, still-in-print memoir? Or will he be more like Elvis swinging his hips, simulating black-styled music, because, hey, most people won’t know the difference?

Rudolf Vrba’s name is nowhere to be found on the cover. Freedland’s name is front and centre. At the top of the jacket is an overlong subtitle. The main title implies 19-year-old Vrba was Houdini-like but, as Freedland well knows, Vrba and his co-escapee Alfred Wetzler took advantage of an escape plan and a hideout conceived and built by others. The pair’s report on Auschwitz was by far Vrba’s greater achievement—exposing the vast scale of murder at Auschwitz to the world-at-large, convincing everyone who read it. The pair is now credited with saving 200,000 lives.

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As someone who knew Vrba, I am sympathetic to Freedland’s undertaking. How do we get more people, including academics and even the Jewish community, to celebrate a complex malcontent who also qualifies as one of the greatest heroes of the 20th century?

Thankfully, The Escape Artist is clear and precise storytelling. With access to Vrba’s archival materials in New York’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, and input from both of Rudi’s wives, Freedland has also been able to add a good deal of fresh information to the public record.

It will be enlightening for most readers to learn four other men actually planned and built Vrba’s getaway hideout (where Vrba and his cohort Alfred Wetzler hid for three days). This seldom-cited quartet tested it for real, escaping for several days before being caught and tortured—but not killed.

1963

2020

Vrba’s own narrative—first entitled I Cannot Forgive and later changed to I Escaped From Auschwitz—omitted fully crediting the extreme courage of these men by name. Without them, Vrba would never have heroically reached Slovakia and co-written the Vrba-Wetzler Report intended to forewarn 800,000 Jews of Hungary not to get on those trains. From Freedland, not from Vrba, we also learn how one of the tortured members of that quartet was able to assure Vrba that he and his escapees had NOT divulged their undiscovered hideout in the “Mexico” section of the camp.

“Mexico” was so-named, Freedland tells us, because poor souls marooned in a construction zone with makeshift shelters were not given clothes; consequently, naked prisoners had to drape themselves in blankets and other prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau thought they looked like New Mexico Indians.

He provides an alternate explanation as to why the warehouse for goods stolen from the transports of Jewish prisoners was commonly referred to as Canada. Rather than accept the general assumption that the name Canada was applied to the warehouse facility because faraway Canada was viewed as a Land of Plenty, Jonathan Freedland suggests that while examining bodies and suitcases, German-speaking members of the Sonderkommando units could have often asked, “Kann er da nicht was drin’ haben?” meaning “Might there be something valuable inside?” This is odd because “Might there be something valuable inside?” translates as “Könnte etwas Wertvolles darin sein?” The phrase “Kann er da nicht was drin’ haben?” translates as “Can’t he have something in there?” [For Vrba’s explanation instead, see Lantzmann interviews, obtained by the BBC starting at 24:47 minutes in.]

Vrba did make clear, however, that in order to travel overland through hostile territory for a gruelling 14 days he and Wetzler had followed explicit directives that Vrba had received from a Russian prisoner named Dimitri Volkov. Hence, it was Volkov who was the master of escapology; Rudi was his disciple.

For virtually all of the people on the planet who have not sought out the two volumes of fascinating, self-published memoirs by Vrba’s first wife, Gerta, The Escape Artist will be welcomed for divulging details of Vrba’s first marriage. Gerta had to take her leave, penniless, with their two daughters, to escape from a philandering and distrustful husband who was clearly still in recovery after almost two years in Auschwitz.

The extent to which both his daughters felt estranged from him is touched upon. We also learn more about his eldest daughter Helena’s apparent suicide in Papua New Guinea in 1982 (allegedly due to an overdose of chloroquine in response to her love affair with a married man who left her) after she had all but severed ties with her father three years earlier.

Helena Vrbova aged 28

As well:

• Freedland notes there is a distinct possibility that Vrba’s father might have committed suicide as a failed businessman (when Vrba was aged 6).
• Rudi was his mother’s only child (he had two, much older step-brothers and a step-sister from his father’s previous marriage).
• After his father’s death, Rudi’s mother was a travelling saleswoman for much of his early childhood, absent for much of his formative years.
• Rudi’s penchant for science might have emerged after all Jewish children were told to return their textbooks but a friend named Erwin Eisler managed to keep his organic chemistry text by Czech scientist Emil Votocek.

Gerta’s books have already revealed that Rudi, as a youth, emerged as a leader in a self-teaching circle of friends, and that when Gerta was 13, she was enraptured by his precocious intelligence and confidence. Rudi was 15 and sometimes dismissed her as childish.

Gerta Vrbova and Rudi’s second wife, former Vancouver realtor Robin Vrba, were informants for Freedland but we have no idea who told him what. Their contributions to history are invisiblized, not unlike Vrba and Wetzler who were advised by Jewish elders in their native Slovakia not to have their names attached to their momentous reportage.

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One error must be cited: On page 8, Freedland states that Vrba and Wetzler were “the first Jews to break out of Auschwitz.”  Freedland later devotes three pages to Siegfried Lederer’s marvelous escape on April 5, 1944 when, as a Czech Jew, Lederer [tattoo # 170521], led by his accomplice, outwitted Nazi guards by donning an SS uniform provided by SS officer Viktor Pestek.

Siegfried Lederer, the first Jew to escape from Auschwitz-Birkenau, with Nazi Viktor Pestek.

Google will tell you Siegfried Lederer, aka Vítězslav Lederer (March 6, 1904 – April 5, 1972), was born to a Jewish family in Písařova Vesce in the Sudetenland. Czech sites convey he was a Resistance fighter who was transported from the Terezín ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau (arrival on December 18, 1943). He was forced to wear both yellow and red triangles, marking him as a Jew and as a political prisoner. After he escaped, he warned Judenrat elders at the Theresienstadt ghetto about the mass murder of Jews at Auschwitz—but he was both disbelieved and told to remain quiet.

If Freedland has some contradictory information to prove that Lederer is not Jewish, he might well have provided it. Certainly, for marketing purposes, it sounds better to imply Vrba and Wetzler were first. An uncredited review now permanently appears on the Guardian/Observer website and it baldly asserts for eternity: It took until 10 April 1944, but eventually Vrba and fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler “achieved what no Jew had ever done before: they had broken out of Auschwitz”.

One has to wonder who wrote that uncredited summary. On page 171 of his book, Freedland slyly covers himself by saying, “Fred Wetzler and Walter Rosenberg [Vrba’s birth name] were on their way to becoming “the first Jews to engineer their own escape from Auschwitz.” Trouble is, he has already told us that four prisoners named Citrin, Eisenbach, Gotzel and Balaban ought to be chiefly credited for building (ie. engineering) the hideout—not Vrba and Wetzler. Eisenbach did manage to escape, for several days, and he was a Jew.

We like to assume people who write for The Guardian must have higher standards, but, hmmm, maybe not. Now people all over the world can watch Freedland’s June 18th promotional video on YouTube in which he self-assuredly states, “I know, since I’ve nailed this down, that only four Jews ever escaped from Auschwitz, and Vrba and Wetzler were the first.” Either this is a lie or research standards at the Guardian have drastically plummeted.

Watch it here:

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Overall, The Escape Artist is an intelligent, valuable and easy-to-read account by someone who is bright enough to know some criticism of Rudi’s life [particularly from his bitter, first wife] is the best possible way to get the world interested. If Freedland treads lightly when it comes to defending Rudi and the foremost Vrba expert Ruth Linn in their battle with the Yad Vashem historian Yehuda Bauer, well, perhaps he can be excused for wanting as many readers as possible in Israel. Robert Krell, as the founding force behind the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, was interviewed but he appears on only one page.

Two other Vancouverites, Dr. Joseph Ragaz and Chris Friedrichs, were interviewed by Freedland but their input is not cited except in an acknowledgements section. The Israeli academic Ruth Linn, who was for eight years the only scholar that Vrba permitted to interview him [according to Linn], declined to be interviewed. Allegedly, Linn and Freedland both first became aware of Vrba’s existence by watching Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour documentary Shoah. Linn now wonders whether or not Freedland was asked or incentivized to produce The Escape Artist by a third party. Its title puts emphasis on the dramatic escape that Vrba himself did not conceive (in fact, he stymied the originators of the hideout and the escape plan); whereas Vrba’s decades-long criticism of the Zionist movement, and his disdain for the Judenrat councils that helped the Nazis facilitate the Holocaust, is given short shrift.

Freedland’s book has been translated into Hebrew.

I greatly appreciate the effort it took to fashion a potential bestseller for a new generation that knows increasingly less about the Holocaust. I am certain Vrba’s co-author Alan Bestic, who overcame different obstacles for his time, would likewise approve. Unfortunately, the bibliography omits any mention of Bestic’s original, co-written memoir I Cannot Forgive and it’s only mentioned once in the text on page 272. For that matter, Rudolf Vrba’s own book, with its current title, is cited precisely once in small print within the depths of a seven-page bibliography. [There it is, on page 358, included alongside a scientific paper Rudi published about his research on rat brains….]. If Freedland had wanted to take the high road, he would have made it clear to the reader that Robin Vrba had just re-released Vrba’s own memoir just two years previously. He chose not to do  so.

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As well, here are links to two Ruth Linn articles and one Israeli television program that dispute, correct and clarify some aspects of Jonathan Freedland’s accounts pertaining to Rudolf Vrba:

Linn, R. (2004).The Escape from Auschwitz: Why didn’t they teach us about it in school? Theory and Criticism, 24, 163-184 (Hebrew).https://www.daat.ac.il/daat/hungary/document/lin1.pdf

Linn, R. (2023).  Who’s afraid of the man who escaped Auschwitz? Studies in Education (22) 177-196.)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Fuv-qr5DFWIOIV6yAUzFh6hDCDX99fzg/view

In Hebrew: 2004 the Auschwitz Escape: Part A.  https://youtu.be/UDFzvbfreWA?t=34       Part  B.        https://youtu.be/UxY4gAwIfZM?t=8

If you are able to read Hebrew, here is a link to Ruth Linn’s 2004 article entitled, The Escape from Auschwitz: Why didn’t they teach us about it in school? Theory and Criticism, 24, 163-184 (Hebrew).https://www.daat.ac.il/daat/hungary/document/lin1.pdf It examines her “finding” of Vrba 25 years before Freedland, and some of Bauer’s obfuscations. You may also read it below.

London-based Bestic was a fantastic writer. Freedland is very fine, too. He can turn a phrase. He can step back and be invisible. He has poise and tact. It is unfortunate, therefore, that Bestic’s essential role as Vrba’s co-writer has been ignored and even somewhat denigrated (“a supremely skilled Fleet Street journalist of the old school”). We don’t learn anything about him. If Freedland has the means to undertake research in New York and Vancouver, why is there no apparent digging to tell us anything about the man who wrote much of the text upon which The Escape Artist itself is necessarily based?

As a writer, Freedland has a very cool, even calculating hand. That’s good for journalism; it might even be good for thriller writing. But the drama of Rudi’s story has been subdued in this modern version. The Escape Artist is nonetheless an essential and welcome work if it gets the world aware of one of the greatest whistleblowers of the 20th century. Ideally, The Escape Artist will lead more people to seek out the latest version of Vrba’s own narrative, I Escaped From Auschwitz: The Shocking True Story of the World War II Hero Who Escaped the Nazis and Helped Save Over 200,000 Jews, released in 2020, co-edited by Nikola Zimring and Robin Vrba, minus its original opening chapter.

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by Alan Twigg, author of Out of Hiding: Holocaust Literature of British Columbia (Ronsdale Press 2022).

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This website provides evidence that a sixth Jew successfully escaped from Auschwitz.

Ruth Linn has stated, “Finally, I have found Jonathan Freedland more similar to Yehuda Bauer than to Kasztner. In times of war, people are often forced to lie… but no one pointed a gun to the heads of Bauer or Freedland when they wrote their lies.  They deliberately chose to mislead the public.”