Dan Snow's History Hit - The Man Who Escaped Auschwitz

Episode Date: June 28, 2022

In April 1944 nineteen-year-old Rudolf Vrba and fellow inmate, Fred Wetzler broke out of Auschwitz. Under electrified fences and past armed watchtowers, evading thousands of SS men and slavering dogs, they trekked across marshlands, mountains and rivers to freedom. Vrba's mission: to reveal to the world the truth of the Holocaust.Celebrated journalist and broadcaster Jonathan Freedland joins Dan on the podcast to tell this astonishing story which can be found in his new book 'The Escape Artist'.This episode does contain descriptions that some listeners may find distressing.Produced by Mariana Des ForgesMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Welcome everyone to Dan Snow's History Hit. We return to the Holocaust as we must and as we do a lot on this podcast. There's another extraordinary history that's just been written this time by the very, very great Guardian journalist Jonathan Friedland. He's a broadcaster, he's a comment writer, he's a fictional author, he's extraordinarily talented and he has come across a story that even after years of making these podcasts and hearing so many extraordinary stories of survival from Auschwitz and survival through the horrors of the Holocaust, this one shocked me. It's called The Escape Artist. It's about Rudolf Werber, who's a teenager. He's a teenage boy who went to Auschwitz. He survived. He almost died of typhus,

but he didn't. He survived. And he spent a huge amount of time at Auschwitz and got to know it better than anybody else, working in so many of its different compartments of that gigantic murder factory. He managed to escape. He managed to escape and tell the world, bringing the first report from Auschwitz to the outside world. Churchill got hold of his report, Roosevelt and others. It did have an impact on the Holocaust, on the course of the war, not as much as you'd have liked, but it did have, as you will hear. It's a very, very special story indeed, and we've got one of the best telling it. So here is Jonathan Friedland talking all about the escape artist. Enjoy. talking all about the escape artist. Enjoy.

Jonathan, thank you for coming on this podcast. It's an absolute pleasure, Dan, to be with you. I've got broadcast royalty here. I'm very, very excited. But also you bring me, you bring me quite the tale. Just when you think you've heard it all, the Holocaust just keeps providing these unbelievable tales. And this is another one. And each time you think that surely nothing could be more dramatic and remarkable than this. I mean, tell me about Rudolf Werber. So Rudolf Werber is the first and one of only four Jews who ever escaped or broke out of Auschwitz. And he did it to warn the world. He did it when he was 19 years old. He and Fred Wetzler, two prisoners in the concentration camp part of Auschwitz. Remember,

Auschwitz had this double function. It was simultaneously a slave labor camp, a concentration camp, and a death camp, which is why it is so notorious and infamous, because it was there that hundreds of thousands of Jews were led to their deaths in gas chambers. But simultaneously, there was this prison camp, and Rudolf Weber escaped from there, having witnessed what was going on at the death camp. And he did it in order to alert the world, and particularly his fellow Jews, as to what was happening inside Auschwitz, which was then unknown. Absolutely extraordinary story. Tell me about Werber's upbringing. Where was he from? So Rudolf Werber was from provincial Slovakia,

a Jew, the son of a sawmill owner. He was a kind of child prodigy. He showed exceptional promise very, very young and was sent off to an orphanage initially. His father died. His mother was a kind of child prodigy. He showed exceptional promise very, very young and was sent off to an orphanage initially. His father died. His mother was a traveling underwear saleswoman and maker. And he was sent to an orphanage and from there to really one of the very best high schools in Bratislava, the gymnasium there, until the day came in 1938-9 for that academic year when he was told, you're a Jew and therefore no more education for you when he was around 15. And he and his mother moved into a small town in Slovakia, no schooling allowed. And it was from there, after a series of escapes, I called the book The Escape Artist, partly because his escape from Auschwitz was not the only one. He was a serial escaper, both before and after the war, but it was eventually his attempts to evade

Nazi deportation. His luck ran out and he arrived on the last day of June 1942 in Auschwitz. Did he arrive, he was taken through that infamous, we've heard so much about the podcast from survivors, the infamous sort of spot check on the platform when they see if you're suitable for work or lined up to be murdered. He went through that process, did he? He didn't actually, because he arrived in a transport of people who'd been transferred from another camp, from Majdanek, where, as it were, that process of selection had in some ways already happened because he was from one of those who transported fit men who were deemed fit to work. So incredibly, he actually volunteered to go from Majdanek. They were looking for people, prisoners who would volunteer to be transferred somewhere else.

And he thought, well, nowhere can be as bad as this. Majdanek, anyway, it's got to be better than this dump. And so he put his hand up to be sent from Majdanek to Auschwitz, but as a worker. So he himself did not go through that to the left, to the right selection where those sent to the left were sent to the gas chambers, those to the right for work. He already arrived as a slave worker,

but he witnessed that selection night after night after night because his job for 10 months straight was working on the platform, on what was known as the ramp, the Alte Judenrampe, the old Jew ramp, where those selections happened. He was there unloading the trains, the transports, removing people's luggage, removing dead bodies from those cattle trucks. So he saw it up close and that would become tremendously important for what he would decide then to do. He's still a teenager. Yeah. I make a point of saying this all the time. He arrived age 17. When he escaped, he was 19. He's a boy. I mean, he's somewhere in between the ages of my two kids and he witnessed i was going to say he witnessed so much as if that would be true of all survivors and on some level it would but he was a kind of ultra holocaust survivor an auschwitz survivor because

he was there so long he was there from june 1942 all the way through till this extraordinary escape in April 1944. That is abnormally long. I mean, Jews arrived at Auschwitz, their life expectancy was measured in hours, and then even of the prisoners, it was usually weeks, maybe two or three months. He, for a whole series of lucky breaks and acts of random good luck and twists of fate, he was there for nearly two years. It meant he had a pretty well unique panoramic view of Auschwitz and of the killing process. He worked in all these different places. He had this 360 degree view of what happened in that camp. And that's what made his testimony when he was determined to tell the world

so comprehensive and forensic, because he saw more than almost anybody else ever did. All the survivors that come on have always talked about the bizarre luck, the kind of lightning strikes of luck. And they all say that's the only way. No one got through it without some deus ex machina moment of being sent to the clinic or being, there's always a weird story. But he did work. He didn't skip it. I mean, he saw it at its worst, as you say. Tell me about his experience unloading those trains, because you write so beautifully about that in the book. And how complicit did he feel, therefore, in the mass murder that was going on? Because he was unloading these trains. Yes. And there's evidence that I found that

Fred Vetzler, who would be his escape partner, really did worry for his sanity. And he said that others in the camp were worrying what this was doing to the teenage Rudolf Werber. His job was to be in the group that would receive these trains and these people would come off looking dazed and confused. Often they'd been in these fetid, cramped cattle trucks for days and days. It was physically terrible work because inside each cattle truck would be the dead and the dying, and you would have to carry them off to be incinerated, and you'd have to then remove these bags that were on the train. But the psychological damage was that he was witness to those selections night after night. He would see these columns of people,

families, mothers with their children, grandparents, fathers and sons, line up in these columns, and then somebody, a Nazi official would stand at the front, sometimes with a kind of shepherd's crook, like a walking stick, literally grabbing the people before them by the neck with the handle of the walking stick, to the left, to the right. And he knew what that meant, that any mother with a child, even if the mother herself was fit enough to work, if she had a child, she and the child would go to

the left, which means they would be gassed within an hour or two. And terrible scenes were played out. And what that would do to somebody's soul, I think would be impossible. It perhaps would have broken him. But for what struck him doing that which was he gained this great insight which was all of this that he was watching was only possible because of deception that the cardinal principle of the entire nazi killing process the core ingredient if you like was deception dishonesty lies that the jews who were there were proceeding and lining up in orderly fashion and indeed had got on those trains at all because of a lie they had been told they were going to be resettled in the east and they believed

it and i chart in the book how they were lied to at every possible stage often with really elaborate deceptions you know the nazis went to great lengths to pull off these deceptions. And he came to realize that the only way the killing machine could ever be broken would be if you broke through that deception, if you alerted the world, but particularly the Jews, to what going to Auschwitz meant. That would throw sand in the gears of the Nazi machine, because then those

Jews wouldn't queue up in orderly fashion. They might not mount an armed revolt. They didn't have the wherewithal for that. But they could panic. There could be chaos. There could be disruption. And he knew, having been party to it and watching it, that the Nazi system couldn't cope with that. And so that's why he decided somebody has to get the word out. It might as well be me. And I think that's what enabled him to sort of not feel complicit because I think he thought I'm gathering evidence. He committed it all to memory in a quite extraordinary fashion. I can say something about how he did that. And that got him through it, the belief that I will bear witness and incredibly he did.

There's something about those orderly lines of exhausted and completely discombobulated people at Auschwitz and how they didn't know, many of them, that they were minutes, seconds away from death that you just want to scream resist at that point don't you and as you say even chaos would have gummed up the works it's just it's too much. Talk to me about Auschwitz and how difficult it was to escape as a, rather than just a death camp, as a place where people were imprisoned. What would you have to overcome in order to get out and bear witness? So there were people who did manage to break out, but they tended to be Soviet prisoners of war or Polish prisoners in the camp. No Jew had ever broken out before. It was almost impossible. Security was

so tight. There were SS men all around with machine guns, automatic weapons. There were dogs, highly disciplined, highly trained dogs all around. At night, they were inside an inner camp with a double electrocuted fence, 15 foot high. If you got over one, which you wouldn't, electrified fence, you wouldn't then get over the next one. There were ditches, stretches of water you'd have to cross, giant arc lights, search lights that would illuminate anyone who was moving. It was impossible to get out. Everyone was guarded tightly, but Jews were guarded so closely.

It would be impossible to do that. And that was in the inner camp where Jews were at night. During the day where they worked, they worked in an area that was itself, every 80 yards or so, these wooden mobile watchtowers that people know from the iconic image we have of a concentration camp. And there would be an armed SS man with an automatic weapon and with clear space in front of them. So if anybody ran in front, they would be immediately visible. So there was really no obvious way out. And we talked earlier about the sort of the lucky breaks you had to get to survive. And he was made a registrar, which is sort of almost kind of administrative position which means you can meet people and get ideas but I want to pick you up on what you said earlier about committing things to memory because

he was getting a kind of universal sense what was going on at this camp was he secreting notes around his person what was going on no you were absolutely forbidden from writing anything down even as a um what he called himself a barracks bureaucrat, a pen pusher, as he was in the later part of his time there as a registrar keeping an eye on numbers. You absolutely were not allowed to keep a pen or paper. That would be an offence that would see you punished, and punishment almost always meant torture and death. So no way. Instead, he had to rely on his memory, and he had the most prodigious memory to the point where when I was reading the accounts of it, I thought, are we sure this really seems unlikely? But I found some amazing corroborating evidence of that. He had a very good head for maths and for numbers, but also for patterns.

And so what he would do, he would see each transport that came in. He would count the number of cattle trucks. He would estimate how many were on each cattle truck and then commit that number to memory. Each transport had a number. And the evidence of that number could be seen literally on the flesh of those handful of prisoners who were spared from a transport, not sent to the gas chambers, but sent instead to work. They, of course, famously were tattooed. The number would be in ink on their forearm and also on their uniform. And so Verber was able to remember the serial number of each transport by those numbers that would be on the prisoners walking around. And he said afterwards, he told one researcher years later, that he did it like a child's memory game, where he would remember what

he knew yesterday, and then add on the new fact today. Like, today I went to market and I took a pair of shoes, a dog collar, and a basket. And then he would add the next item the next day, restating to himself over and over again the entire inventory of transport. As I say, some people have been sceptical about this. A couple of things have happened, which I'll just mention to you, which are a reason why I'm not sceptical. When he eventually did make his escape and crossed Nazi-occupied Poland for 11 days across marshes and forests and mountains, an incredible escape story. He did reach the remnant community of Slovakia and there poured out this testimony to one of the officials of that tiny community that was left. In later testimony, the man who took the evidence

said he had never known a man with a memory like it. It was the most wonderful memory. But many years after that, years and years later, in Manhattan, Rudolf Werber was at a restaurant in the height of summer on a hot day in the 1970s, and his waiter had his sleeves rolled up, and there revealed was that tattoo Auschwitz number. Now remember, every transport had a corresponding number reflected in the tattoos on people's skin. And Rudolf Werber looked at the man and said, Bedzin, Poland, summer of 1943. And the waiter paled before him because yes, indeed, that was the town where he had been transported. That was the time he had been transported. Werber had never forgotten it. He'd memorised every transport

so he could even remember the number, recognise the number on the man's flesh 40 years later. That's wild. And that reminds me, we should do a podcast on why so many geniuses emerged in Central European Jewry in the 1930s. Like, what was in the water? It was unbelievable. Let's go on to the escape itself. It's an incredible process, which you lay out in a book, and everyone works together.

They steal clothes and even a torch and things. How does he manage it? What it rested on was, again, his brilliant ingenuity, which was that he spotted a gap in the Nazis' defences. Not a literal gap, but a kind of loophole that he and Wetzler and the other prisoners, Wetzler being the man he escaped with, they realised there was a flaw in the Nazi system. And if you had physical resilience of an extraordinary kind and bravery, there might just be a way through by exploiting that gap. Without revealing exactly what it was, it turned on the that and some part of the pattern that Verba, the future scientist, had spotted that he was able to realise so long as you could hide in the camp

for three days and three nights, there was then a way out. And that is what he and Wetzler did. There was a hole in the ground that had been sort of prepared by other prisoners, covered up with timbers in part of the camp that was a building site. And they hid there day and night for three days and three nights and were able, by doing that, to emerge at a time when they would then be able to escape. But I've given you most of it, but the actual brilliant insight is contained in the book. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about the man who escaped from Auschwitz and told the world. More coming up. Hello, everyone. James Rogers here, the host of the Warfare podcast by

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Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. They found actually a friendly locals and supporters as they did leave the camp in the local Polish peasants, you might call them. Yeah, I mean, the big fear once you got out of Auschwitz was that you were still in Nazi-occupied Poland. And there was dangers aplenty there because, for one thing,

ethnic Germans had moved in. There were SS men stood around living in some of these towns and villages in the area. But there were, of course, some German collaborators. They were in tremendous fear of that. And they only operated at night. They walked, trekked across marshes, rivers, and mountains through forests at night. They had no map. They had no compass. Of course, you couldn't have things like that. In Auschwitz, they just tried to navigate according to the route of the river, the river Soa. But you can't avoid human life indefinitely. And they did have to encounter local people. And again, they were lucky because the times they did, they came across Poles who were not collaborators, but instead were ready to help them.

And sometimes that meant food. Sometimes it meant guidance, where people acted once or twice as guides through the forests, taking them at night. They might give them a spare pair of shoes. There were two or three individuals who, at different points, could have turned them in, could have betrayed them in could have betrayed them but didn't and the random kindness of strangers the heroic kindness of strangers actually because these people were taking a mortal risk combined with just good luck is what you will find i think if

you ask most survivors how they survive they will talk about the random arbitrary good fortune and they will also occasionally talk about those acts of human kindness and decency from people whose names they often did not know and they would never see again that saved their lives. As you mentioned before, they get to Slovakia and they sort of manage to hook up with members of the community there. And there's a typewriter and he starts typing up or dictating his extraordinary knowledge that he's accumulated. How has that then got out to the rest of the world? So that's right.

He and Wetzler make it to Žilina in Slovakia, and there, hidden in a basement, they tell their story. And it is written up into a 32-page report. And in the book, at that point, the report begins its own journey. It becomes a kind of escape artist of its own because it has to cross borders hand to hand in secret in order to make it out of Nazi-occupied Europe and into the hands of the Allies.

It takes so many twists and turns, some remarkable adventures the report itself goes through to get it out. A woman in Hungary is translating it in a secret attic room. A page goes flying out of her grasp. It's caught by a Nazi who just doesn't read it. He hands it back to her. If he'd even glanced at it, he would have realised what it was. Churchman meeting in secret in an art gallery. One smuggles a copy of the report to, drops it in the other's briefcase. I mean, it's sort of le carré stuff about how they get it, but the stakes are so high. This document is so important. Remember, at this point, nobody knows the word Auschwitz. And somehow it gets across via neutral

Switzerland, an intrepid, ingenious British newspaper journalist, all kinds of other characters. But it does reach Winston Churchill in London, it reaches Franklin Roosevelt in Washington, and the Pope in Rome. And how those people then react to it becomes part of the story. Lots of us, I think, assumed that people didn't know what was going on in the Holocaust. And then we have recent books about Vas Pilecki, we have your book. We're having to really re-evaluate that now. What impact did this report have in the Allied nations? You're absolutely right about that. Rudolf Erb's own assumption was that nobody could possibly have known. And for him, the evidence of that was the fact that it was happening. The fact that

there was a death factory existing in Europe, and of course there were half a dozen of them, Auschwitz is just the most famous. but the fact that people were coming in their thousands to be processed, meaning murdered, was to him proof that the world could not possibly know about it because if they did they would have stopped it. That's what he believed when he was a prisoner, a slave in the camp. But it turns out there was knowledge. It had got to the highest level, to policymakers, to the likes of Churchill and Roosevelt. They certainly knew, you know, it was discussed publicly that there was a mass extermination of the Jews going on. In terms of Auschwitz itself, only fragments, bits of evidence were there, had reached the Polish government in exile in London,

and from there had reached policymakers in Whitehall. But the first time there was a full, detailed, granular account was with the Werber-Wetzlar report. And their reaction was to, you know, they talked about it, and Churchill consulted with Eden. He wrote in the margin of his version of the report, what can be done, what can be said. Those were Churchill's words on reading the evidence of this teenage boy who'd broken out. He did order. He says to Eden, get anything out of the Air Force you can. Invoke me if necessary, is what Churchill says to Anthony Eden. Eden goes to the Air Ministry.

But as we all know, there was no bombing of the railway tracks to Auschwitz or of the camp itself. Officials in London, officials in Washington decided it was not practical, it couldn't be done, and that the Jews' best hope was that the Allies win the war. And that was the sort of strategic policy decision that was taken. But it had a huge significance because it meant by not acting and waiting just for the end of the war, hundreds of thousands more Jews were murdered in the very late stages of the war. Werber's own deep driving goal was to get the warning to the Jews of Hungary. That's who he was most outraged by or most alerted by. He was desperate to get them to know what was happening.

And sure enough, you know, he got his report out at the end of April 1944, but through May and June of 1944, because in some ways of that inaction, 437,000 Jews were murdered in just 56 days because people didn't act. And I should say, among those who didn't act was the handful of people, just one or two individuals, but in the Hungarian Jewish leadership, they themselves did not pass on the Werber-Wetzler report. Partly they thought it would spread panic, some didn't believe it, but that was something that Rudolf Werber himself could never forgive. There is a sliver of good news.

His privations and bravery were not for nothing. Tell me about the Hungarian Jews and whether you think that the decision, what to do with Hungarian Jews, was impacted by this report. Well, so absolutely. As I said, on one level, it's the most terrible tragedy because of inaction. The Jews of the Hungarian provinces, some 437,000, were transported to Auschwitz and were gassed. But thanks to the Werber-Wetzler report and a series of diplomatic international moves that happened as a result, the deportations to Auschwitz were halted. And that is why I argue in this book, in the end, 200,000 Jews of Budapest,

the Hungarian capital, were not deported to Auschwitz. Many of them did survive afterwards. And that was because, I think squarely, because of the actions of Rudolf Werber and Fred Wetzler in getting this report out. And a series of diplomatic moves involving Roosevelt and the Pope and the Hungarian regent itself. It's an amazing story how that happened. But because he is responsible for saving of 200,000 lives, I mean, that is why it's my belief in this book that Rudolf Weber belongs alongside Oskar Schindler and Frank Primo Levi, these stories that define our understanding of the Holocaust, because through the bravery and brilliant ingenuity of a teenage boy and his fellow escaper, 200,000 lives were saved. As you say, he definitely deserves to be

in amongst that number in that company. He died in 2006, extraordinarily. That's right. At 81. But what was his life like after? How do you live a full professional family life after what you've been through? Well, that was one of the questions that really interested me, actually. And people who've been reading the book have said that to their great surprise, they love the thrilling escape bit of the story and the journey of the report.

But what has often stayed with them is exactly the question you've asked about what damage it does to a life. I mean, it continues to be exciting. I called the book The Escape Artist partly because he continued to escape. He was a serial escaper, and he carried on. He escapes from behind the Iron Curtain. He has a series of adventures from post-war Czechoslovakia through England, through Israel. He ends his life in Canada. There was a degree of personal turbulence there. And I interviewed, and this actually is an extraordinary thing too, I found his first wife, age 93, still living in North London, in Muswell Hill. I contacted her. I sent an email to an email address, assuming it would be sent back or somebody would say, I'm afraid she died a long

time ago. Instead, I got a reply about 20 minutes after I'd sent the email saying, I live in Muswell Hill in North London. Come and see me. It was during the COVID summer of 2020. We sat in her garden in two deck chairs while I interviewed her. The amazing thing about Goethe-Verbother was that she wasn't just his post-war first wife. She had known Rudolf Erber as a teenager before he went to Auschwitz. They were in the same small town of Ternove in Slovakia and had known him as a boy. She had a sort of teenage crush on him. And so as I sat in her garden, she was able to recall the man who was. And at one point, this amazing moment, she said, my grandson's here because there's something I want you to have that I can't get. And he went

up on a stepladder to the attic and brought down a red suitcase full of Rudy's letters. And she handed it to me. And that was that moment where, I mean, you know what that moment's like when you think I'm somehow meant to tell this story. It was she who said, look, what we all went through, we of course were damaged by what we went through and sort of don't expect in a way us to have lived normally after what we had both been through. Amazing. Yep, that red suitcase moment, that is very special. It's luck, but it's journalistic intrepidity that got you there. So well done, you. You deserve that.

Thank you. Do you think as they die, the final survivors, do you think our interest in it, our connection with it will wane? Or is it an event almost like no other that will continue to exercise great power over us for decades and centuries to come? I really wrestle with that myself. I wonder when it is like the Battle of Waterloo or Napoleon, will it be just out of reach? Is part of its power now that I can tell you something like I just told you about meeting Goethe and she handed me a red

suitcase? Does that, when we're talking about people's great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, does it lose some of that power? Because it's true that the actual survivors are dying out and there's very few left, but there are people like you or me who have met survivors. And so when there's no one around who even ever met a Holocaust survivor, I wonder whether it will I really hope it doesn't. I think there are huge lessons, well, in the whole story, but in this particular story, you know, he put out this warning and a lot of people could not bring themselves to believe it. And we look now at the war in Ukraine

and those stories of Ukrainians phoning their Russian relatives and their Russian relatives saying, I just don't believe it. I don't believe you're telling me the truth when you say you're under bombardment. There's something about those who come to bring us warnings.

The warned often cannot bear to hear it. And I think there's a real lesson in Rudi Werber's story. But I do wrestle with the question you ask a lot. I worry that maybe it will fade a bit and that books like mine are part of the project to at least delay, if not to prevent that day of coming. The book is wonderful. It's an extraordinary story. What's it called so everyone can buy it? The book is called The Escape Artist, The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World. Well, they certainly do. They certainly do. Jonathan Friedland, thank you very much for coming on. Thanks for being on, Dan. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of Dan history of our country, all work out and finish.

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