What the Auschwitz escape artist can teach us about fake news

MICHAEL VISONTAY talks to JONATHAN FREEDLAND about his best-selling book on a remarkable attempt to break the news of the Holocaust, and its frightening contemporary implications.

How do you make people believe information that overturns the world as they know it? And how do you make them accept that information can be the difference between life and death?

These huge questions are at the heart of Jonathan Freedland’s just published book, The Escape Artist (Hachette), the story of Rudolf Vrba, the Slovakian Jew who escaped from Auschwitz and told the world about the monstrosity of what was happening there.

These questions are also painfully relevant to the turmoil engulfing the world today, which is one of the reasons the prominent columnist for The Guardian was drawn to writing the book, he told The Jewish Independent in an exclusive interview in London.

The Escape Artist chronicles Vrba’s two years inside Auschwitz as a teenager, the barbaric detail of everything that took place, his repeated attempts to escape and his campaign to convince Allied leaders of the truth of what lay inside the gates of “Arbeit Macht Frei”.

Vrba’s story is not new; it has been written about and retold many times since he and a fellow Slovak prisoner, Alfréd Wetzler, got out of the camp in 1944 and wrote a sober, detailed report which they hoped would make Roosevelt and Churchill act to save the lives of the one million Hungarian Jews who were about to be deported there.

But Freedland’s  book has raced to the top of the British bestseller lists since its release in the UK in June because it is not just about the Holocaust, it is a reflection on the life-and-death importance of truth-telling.

“We're now in the age of Trump. We’re now in this new era where you can almost show contempt for the whole category of truth. I found myself writing columns in 2016 denouncing fake news or post-truth,” he explains.

“But people couldn't see why it really mattered. They could see why intellectually it mattered, but it was as an abstract thing, a problem. They didn’t really feel it.

“Then the pandemic happened; when Trump started talking about injecting bleach into your veins, or some people said, ‘don't wear a mask’, I couldn't help but think about this man, Rudi Vrba, who had seen that truth isn’t just a luxury, an optional extra, something just for the intellectual elite. He had actually seen in the most extreme, most direct way possible that the difference between truth and lies is the difference between life and death. He is the ultimate witness.”

Freedland was wary of writing another Holocaust book in view of claims that The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, The Tattooist of Auschwitz and others were somehow cheapening the Holocaust. But after considering other subjects for his first non-fiction book in 17 years, he kept returning to Vrba’s story (which he first heard when he saw the documentary Shoah) because of its contemporary relevance. The Escape Artist tells several stories at once. It acts as a testament to Vrba’s experiences in the camp, where he was put to a broad range of tasks, including the Judenrampe, where the fate of incoming deportees was decided. It describes how he “escaped” death several times through sheer chance, and how an underground cell led by communist prisoners within the camp was the engine behind his and Wetzler’s eventual escape.

The book is also a de facto history of Auschwitz itself, revealing granular detail of how the Nazis gradually industrialised the extermination process of Jews. There is an astonishing depiction of the notorious storage barracks known as Kanada, where the valuables of dead prisoners were taken for sorting, allowing those working there to live with money, warm clothing and provisions, often in guilty comfort. Even for those who have read widely about the Nazis’ barbarism, this book is an eye-opener.

Freedland also chronicles the compromised responses by resistance and Allied leaders when they read the Vrba-Wetzler report. In particular, he lays out the raft of political, pragmatic and morally evasive arguments that were invoked by leaders and bureaucrats to not bomb Auschwitz, as Vrba and Wetzler urged, to save the Hungarian Jews who were deported en masse in 1944.

“Prejudice absolutely pays a part; old-school antisemitism was alive and well in the Whitehall (British Foreign Office) of the 1940s,” he says. “And they do literally say these ‘wailing Jews have taken up too much of our time, we have to allow for some degree of Jewish exaggeration’.

“I went out of my way as well to mention that there was a similar kind of antisemitism at work in Washington with a magazine that says ‘this is too semitic; we want a less Jewish account of Nazi war crimes’.”

Freedland points to the influence of mundane practical issues: the Allies agreed the British would carry out air raids at night and the Americans by day. Any bombing of Auschwitz would need to be carried out in daylight for accuracy, so the British told Vrba that “we can’t do it; talk to the Americans.”

He points to the lumbering decision-making of bureaucracies, and “how people in the middle of an emergency don't really see the wood from the trees.”

There were other political considerations, he adds. “The logic of Roosevelt and Churchill was ‘the best thing you could do for the Jews is win the war’. They won the war and therefore it is difficult for somebody in my position to argue with that.”

Although Vrba was intensely frustrated by their reticence and avoidance arguments, he saved his enduring anger for Resző Kasztner, the Hungarian Jewish community leader who has become a divisive figure over whether he was a collaborator or hero for negotiating with Adolf Eichmann to save the lives of 1684 Hungarian Jews on what became known as “Kasztner’s train”.

Vrba accused him of something worse: saving 1684 Hungarian Jews but condemning up to one million to the gas chambers. He believed that if his message could get to Jewish leaders in Budapest in time, Freedland explains, they could send word to the Hungarian provinces, giving them time to act and prevent the deportation. “And [Vrba] had no illusions, incidentally, that there would be a revolt, an armed resistance. They were kids, they were old people. He thought ‘if they just panicked, stampeded on the ropes. That's something’.”

But Kasztner saw his report and kept it to himself and his inner circle. Freedland quotes Vrba in the book: “Did the Judenrat in Hungary tell their Jews what was awaiting them? No, they remained silent and for this silence some of their leaders – for instance, Dr R. Kasztner – bartered their own lives and the lives of 1684 other ‘prominent’ Jews directly from Eichmann.”

For his efforts in telling the world about the horrors of Auschwitz, Freedland maintains that Rudi Vrba’s efforts should place him in the same rank of iconic Holocaust witnesses as Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler, Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. He is not mentioned in the same breath, according to Freedland, because “Rudolf Vrba refused to conform to what the world expects of a Holocaust survivor."

“He would not serve up a morally comfortable narrative in which the only villains were the Nazis. Instead, he always insisted on hitting out at Kasztner and the Hungarian Jewish leadership, as well as the Jewish Council in Slovakia. He faulted them for failing to pass on his report and, in the Slovak case, for compiling the lists that had put him on a deportation train in the first place.”

The problem was sharpest in Israel, says Freedland. When an Israeli academic sought to twin the belated publication of his memoirs in Hebrew (in 1998) with an honorary doctorate at Haifa University, one scholar read out a letter of protest at a conference ahead of the ceremony, with Vrba in attendance.

Other historians wrote to the Israeli press, praising Vrba’s heroism but setting out their misgivings about him. Some were motivated by a sympathy for Kasztner’s actions. “Those many years in which Israel’s pre-eminent scholars kept their distance took their toll,” Freedland writes. “They played a part in preventing him from entering the pantheon of revered survivors of the Holocaust.”

The ups and downs of his personal life didn’t help. The book follows Vrba’s full trajectory, from his early years when he was born Walter Rosenberg in Slovakia, through to his troubled post-war existence, during which he moved countries several times, was married and divorced, estranged from his two daughters but then remarried and found some degree of stability and happiness. Freedland says it was from interviews with his second wife, Robin Vrba, during Covid lockdown, that he gained access to precious information about Vrba’s early life in Slovakia.

In the end, Vrba’s life and campaigning are a testament to the fragile status of truth. There is a powerful observation in the book from the doyen of Holocaust historians, Yehuda Bauer. “Only when information is combined with belief does it become knowledge. And only knowledge leads to action.”

So, back to the opening question: how do you get people to accept and then believe information that seems too extreme or overblown to be true – atrocities against ethnic minorities, climate change, mandated vaccination – and then get them to do something about it?

Freedland pauses to organise his thoughts before he answers. “First, I would say the person who speaks about it has to be trusted and credible. Vrba was wise enough to realize that he couldn't be himself the face of his report. He had to make contact with the Slovak Jewish leadership; they would be credible messengers.

“But the second thing you realise is that people have got to believe they can do something with that information.” Freedland cites the example of a group of Czech deportees who had been held in a “Family Lager” within Birkenau, a bizarre show village where for six months they enjoyed a decent, well-fed life, with concerts, a choir and other cultural activities, that Red Cross inspectors would be directed to inspect if they showed up.

These inmates could see the crematoria a few hundred metres away, Freedland writes, and knew this fate awaited them at some point – but refused to believe it. Vrba concluded that even incontrovertible knowledge of one’s fate was not enough. If people were to act, there had to be a possibility, even a slim one, of escaping that fate. Otherwise, it was easier to deny what was right in front of you than to confront the reality of your own imminent destruction.

“They went into a kind of psychologically rational denial for their own wellbeing. If you want people to believe, you have to say to them, ‘here's what you can do’,” Freedland says.

“And then the third thing, I think, is you must show the evidence where it's already happening. The Vrba-Wetzler report was describing something that had already occurred. There were no projections or predictions – which is very important in the case of climate change. There is enough that’s happened already for people to see and understand it.”

None of this, however, wholly explains the book’s immediate popularity with the public, which has pleased Freedland but taken him by complete surprise. “I’m kind of astonished because I didn't think there would be this degree of interest in the Holocaust.”

He puts it down to a combination of factors. “I think partly it was the idea of telling a nonfiction story like a thriller. On one level I wanted this to be a book that would work as a thrilling story for people who just wanted a wartime adventure story. (The emphasis on “thriller” is no accident; Freedland has for several years pursued a parallel career, writing crime thrillers under the pseudonym of Sam Bourne.) So, I think people, by word of mouth, have been saying it's a good read. It's not scary forbidding history, in the sense of an academic, scholarly book that is indigestible.

“In addition, Vrba is an intriguing character, and I also think the story does speak to these wider current issues.”

He pauses again to reflect. “On some level, I remember feeling, when I was writing the book, that ‘now is the right time to tell the story’.”

The Escape Artist is published by Hachette

Illustration: Avi Katz