The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Man Who Escaped from Auschwitz to Warn the World

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

Rudolf Vrba was sent to Auschwitz at the age of seventeen, and, because he was young and in good health, he was not killed immediately but put to labor in the camp. Vrba (originally named Walter Rosenberg) quickly discovered that the scale of the killing was greater than anyone on the outside knew or could imagine, and Jewish communities were being deported without understanding their fate. Jonathan Freedland chronicles Vrba’s story in his new book, “The Escape Artist.” The young Vrba had a “crucial realization, which is [that] the only way this machine is going to be stopped—this death machine—is if somebody gets the word out,” Freedland told David Remnick. Freedland recounts how, against terrible odds, Vrba managed to escape the camp, and provided direct testimony of the Holocaust that reached Allied governments. This interview was recorded at a live event at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In 1986, I went to see Shoah, Claude Lonsman's film about the Holocaust. And to this day, I'm pretty certain that it's not only a masterwork, but the greatest achievement in documentary film. Lonsman got remarkable interviews, an SS officer who was at Treblinka, a barber at the same camp, a Polish railway worker who under duress helped drive the locomotive pulling box cars filled with Jews to the death camps.

And then there was Rudolph Verba. Verba was sent to Auschwitz when he was just 17 years old. And when he appears in the documentary show, a verba is still in middle age. He's immensely alive. He's handsome, oddly cheerful, and absolutely unwilling to talk in cliche. He told his story with startling clarity,

how despite the odds he had decided to escape and tell the world of the horrors of Auschwitz. This astonishing story is told in a new biography by the British journalist Jonathan Friedland. Its title is The Escape Artist, and I spoke with Friedland at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. I'd like to know to begin how you found your story and why you found it to be so essential that you were going to give all your time to. it for a while. The answer comes almost in two parts about when did it come to me as a subject. On one level, it came to me age 19, which is relevant because the man we're talking about is Rudolf Verber and he escaped from Auschwitz when he was 19. I was 19 and I was in a room like this one,

a darkened auditorium, a movie theatre in London, to see the film Shoah, Claude Lansman's epic nine and a half hour film about the shower. And then suddenly, onto the screen, explodes this figure who is utterly unlike all the others. He is charismatic. He's handsome. He's wearing this tan leather coat. He could be Al Pacino in Scarface. I mean, he exudes charisma.

And immediately, in the cinema, I sort of looked up and who's that? You know, I want to know more about him. And almost as an aside, Lansman just mentions that this man escaped from Auschwitz. And even though I was 19, I was old enough to know. then that Jews just didn't escape from Auschwitz. It was my intention to escape from the first moment when I have seen where I am. But at that time, it was particularly urgent

because I knew that all was prepared for the murder of one million Jews from Hungary. And because it was close to Slovakia, I thought that it would be possible to give the warning. and naturally I was interested in surviving myself. I then left the cinema, age 19, transfixed by this figure, and never forgot him, never forgot his name, never forgot the story. And then around 2016, I would say,

and then certainly afterwards, new words started entering the language. People were talking about post-truth, and they were talking about fake news. And I found myself going back to the story of Rudolf Berber, because he was somebody who had taken the biggest risk imaginable to take in escaping from Auschwitz, very deliberately to tell the world. In other words, to get the truth out from under a mountain of lies. This is the essence of the story that somebody 19 years old conceives the idea that if only people would know,

if only the Jews of this country or that, particularly will get to it in a second, but Hungary, specifically, would have known they would have done what? They would have escaped. They may not have rebelled. He can't quite articulate it, but something would have happened if Jews were to know, if the world were to know. Well, this is what is so extraordinary about the story, because he was only a teenager. He arrives at age 17. He's there working on this railway platform, the Alta Uden ramp, the old Jew ramp.

His job, he's bounced around different jobs as a slave. as a prisoner. But he has this job unloading the transports, and he comes to this huge and important realisation, which is, it seems so simple, but none of them know. He realizes that every person getting off that train has no idea of the meaning of the place they've been brought to.

Many of them are relieved to be in Auschwitz because they believe these elaborate lies that Jews are told at every stage of the journey, including that they are, the big lie, is that they are being deported to the east to be resettled and to have new lives. Tell me a little bit about, Rudolph, as a person as he comes to Auschwitz, is he a worker, is he an intellectual, is he a pre-professional? What was his life going to be? What did it seem to be headed toward? He arrives as a 17-year-old, as I say, from provincial Slovakia.

He'd been at school, actually, in the capital. He'd been at one of the elite schools in Prattislava until the day where he turned up for the academic year 1938-39 and was told there's no place for you here because you're a Jew. Very movingly, there are classroom photos of him. You can see for the year 35-36. He's there. 36-37 he's there. Then he's not. He's not there. He's not there. He had been exceptionally bright. He had a gift, particularly for languages. So by the time age 17 he gets to Auschwitz, he speaks obviously Czech and Slovak, but also German. Russian, Hungarian, teaching himself some English. This was interesting to me.

Why does he get such a privileged position? Because that's what he had. Inside the cane. Yes. He was given an opportunity not only survive and have a life, however unbelievably constricted, but a life with these other... I hate to use the word privilege, but, you know, privileged by survival.

One of the revelations of the whole process of researching this for me, And I consider myself somebody quite well read in the story of the Holocaust or in Auschwitz. I think there are things about it that people think they know but they don't know. What do you mean? Well, for example, that there was a permanent Jewish bureaucracy inside Auschwitz. I mean, I didn't know that. There was two or 300 people who were used as registrars and bureaucrats and penpushers and so on. Right.

And there was also a resistance and underground in Auschwitz after a fashion. And the two are linked because it was because, because of... he had been spotted as a talent by the Auschwitz underground that they arranged for him. Explain the map of that. In other words, who are the Capos? What is the underground? What is going on there that, you know, we're not normally hearing about or not normally see. Well, so obviously the people who police the camp at the highest level are the SS. It's their camp. They are the ones who are in total charge. Then they have as henchmen, these prisoners, green triangle prisoners very often,

who were petty or not so petty, hardened criminals often, German or Austrian, who would be used as their enforcers. So they would, although Nazis had semi-automatic weapons, they would have clubs and sticks, and they were brutal people.

They would impose order at a day-to-day level. And slowly over time, the Green Triangle, brutish capos are sidelined, and the jobs of sort of pen-pushers and registriles are taken by the resistance and the underground.

What were the ambitions of the underground? Well, they're mainly in the business, he concludes, of improving their own life and conditions in the camp. And their concern is not to halt the death machine, but to get life to be a less brutal in the camp. That penny drops for Rudolf Berber, and he begins to think, the underground, good people, though they are, are actually enabling what we would come to call the Holocaust. And it was quite clear to me then that the resistance in the camp is not geared for an uprising, but for survival. For the survivors of the members of the resistance movement, I then decided to act what was called by the members of resistance as anarchic and individualistic activity, like an escape and leaving the community for which I'm responsible by that time.

and so he begins, he comes to that crucial realization, which is the only way this machine is going to be stopped, this death machine, is if somebody gets the word out. Because the thing that is enabling it above all is the ignorance of the victims. They're arriving here with no clue and therefore they are getting on those trains in the first place and they are lining up in orderly fashion. I should say, because I think you asked this early, what does he think they're going to do? He has no illusions. He doesn't think the Jews are. going to stage an armed revolt. They have no weapons. They often include children, the sick, the elderly. He doesn't have some mad fantasy about a kind of armed resistance. All he thinks is if they know, they might at the very least panic. Even that would be something. If there is chaos on the platform, if there's a stampede, if some run off that direction, some run off the other direction. The Germans were so sure that no resistance is possible that they became cocky. I mean, it wasn't so difficult to hit back.

They would have been probably very surprised if there would be a resistance. But even if there wouldn't be a resistance, but only a panic, you see, it is a big difference to slaughter pigs or to hunt deer. If you have to hunt each one separately, hunt him down, it never goes so fast. His view was that the Nazis wanted the Jews effectively to be sheep that you could organize in a column, whereas if they knew, they might run off in different directions, and then it would be like hunting deer, where you'd have to pick off one after another with a gun. And that would be tight.

They would do it. And chaotic. But it would be chaotic. And then who knows, if that transport was chaos, then the one behind would be delayed. And then word was, you would throw sand in the gears of the Nazi machine. So, Jonathan, he finds a friend. finds a comrade in this incredibly improbable plan. Tell me about the friend and how they conceive this plan to escape Auschwitz.

How did they think they're going to do this? Because the map of Auschwitz, as we've seen in countless books, just seems impossible to penetrate. You're right. He always knew he would have to have an escape partner. You couldn't possibly do it alone. Why is that? That's interesting. why is that? The physical business of escaping, just the, I mean, you would need two pairs of hands

often just to get through, you know, if you're going to, under a fence. But I think the other thing is that you would have, if they were due to escape Auschwitz, you would be aware that you would have nobody on the outside to help you. There were escapes from Auschwitz before. Soviet prisoners of war escaped. The biggest group was Polish political prisoners. They escaped in scores of them in the Soviet prisoners of war dozens. Jews, basically none. The difference being what? Well, the others had support on the outside. If you were a pole and you escaped, there was a Polish resistance that was set up. But the Jews were basically cut off from the rest of the world. So it was harder. And I think it's not a coincidence. His escape partner was someone from the same

Slovak town that he was from. Alfred Vetzler was his escape partner. And they had both been in Ternova. And therefore, this was somebody who you knew before you'd been in the inverted universe of Auschwitz, where you could, you never knew is somebody, if good was bad, black was white, day was night. So they trusted each other. And the key insight they realized was that there was, that they came to was that there was a gap in the Nazi defences. The Nazi defences, by the way, again, we should make clear of how severe this was. I mean, we're talking about a 12, 15-foot-high electrified fence. If you cleared that one, then there was another one.

There were two to three thousand SS men at any time. There were 200 trained hunting dogs that would sniff you out. There were search towers, watch towers every 80 yards. Nautis developed a very ingenious system for checking, say, among 30,000 prisoners if somebody is missing or not. I mean, within one hour they would know if somebody is missing, and who is missing, and who are his friends? France, etc. It was well-organized.

The key Nazi flaw in a way was the SS's own predictability. They stuck to their routines. Their timing. And they did everything to the same timing. And one thing they did was if they noticed a prisoner was missing, which they would at roll call, when prisoners would come at the start of the day and at the end of the day, if the same number of prisoners,

by the way, dead or alive, did not come back from work at the end of the day, they would then sound a siren and think somebody may have escaped. they would search for that person for three days and three nights, scouring every inch of the camp. And during that time, they would maintain the sort of outer perimeter, which was normally taken down at night. They would keep it up so that they could continue the search, the outer ring.

But if after three days and three nights there was no sign of those prisoners, they would assume that they had got away and handed over to the Gestapo, and that outer ring would come down at night and then it would just, they would only be guarding the inner camp where prisoners were kept when they were in the night. So the key thing was, their key thought was,

if somebody could hide in that outer camp, not be found for three days and three nights, then when that outer ring came down, you would, and you then came out of your hiding place, you would come out into an area that was unguarded and you could effectively walk out of the camp. That was the theory. Again, I think it took an extraordinary mind to see that.

That was their theory, and they acted on it. And the sheer degree of physical resilience required to hide essentially in a hole in the ground for three days and three nights. There was a part of the camp that was a construction site. There were piles of timbers, door frames. They realized, if you were to dig a hole, really no bigger than a grave, double grave, under some timbers and hid in there, you could theoretically not be found, and you'd have to somehow elude detection from those sniffer dogs.

And so they had this ingenious thing that they'd been told by a Soviet prisoner of Ukrainian, actually, that a certain type of cheap Russian tobacco, soaked in gasoline and then dried, generated a smell that was repellent to the dogs. And so if you sprinkled some of this tobacco around, the dogs would come near and then recoil. And they had heard that, and they did it. That was their first move in the escape.

I'm speaking with the journalist Jonathan Friedland about Rudolf Verba, one of the few Jews ever to escape Auschwitz. We'll continue with Verba's astonishing escape in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. been speaking today with the British journalist Jonathan Friedland. He writes a column for the Guardian newspaper and he presents a history program on the BBC. He's just written a book called The Escape Artist.

I was surprised to learn that it's the only major book written about Rudolf Verba, who escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp, one of the very few people ever to do so. And he fled not just to save himself. He'd formed a singular goal of letting the world know what was happening in the death camps. The Nazis did everything they could. to prevent knowledge of the mass killings from ever reaching the outside world, and Rudolf Verbe had memorized an enormous wealth of information that he wanted to convey to the right people. Well, obviously, to give it a meaning to the two years which I spend in Auschwitz

and to escape only for my own sake would be ridiculous. Before the break, author Jonathan Friedland was explaining, how Verba and a fellow prisoner, Alfred Wetzler, hidden a hole in an outside portion of the camp for three long days until the search was finally called off. And then they were able to escape. Getting out was the easy part in a way. I mean, of course it wasn't.

It was impossible. But after then, there are in Nazi-occupied Poland. As Rudy wrote in a letter later on in his life, said with no map, no compass, no friends, they would have to cross marshlands and forests and mountains and rivers. And the date now is what? We're now in 1944.

So it's April 1944. The night of their escape, incidentally, not that they had any idea, was the night of the Seder. It was the festival of freedom when they were beginning their escape. Something Rudy himself didn't know until 50 years later.

They get out, they make contact with the remnant, tiny, Jewish community of Slovakia, the people who are clinging on. And they're in a basement, in hiding in the Slovak town of Gillesina outpours this data that they'd been accumulating. I should say something about this, that Rudy had, when he worked on that railway platform, seeing in these transports every night, once he was determined to escape,

he then engaged in this extraordinary feat of memory. He memorized every transport that came in. He would count the number of cattle cars, estimate the number of Jews per car, memorize the point of origin, link it up with the numbers, the numbers that would of course then be tattooed on the arms of the prisoners who were selected to survive. To such a degree that when he, much, much later, he's at a restaurant and a waiter exposes the tattoo on his own arm.

He knows exactly where he is from because he remembers when that group of Jews was brought. That knocked me flat. Yeah. It has the same effect on me, that story. In the mid-70s, it was a sweltering hot day. In this city, in New York City, a waiter comes up with his sleeve rolled up, and he said, looks at him and goes, Benzinn, May 1943, and the waiter looks at him and says, how did you know?

And he said, because you've got the number there. And he had memorized every number. It seems to be difficult today to believe that I could memorize all this, but it was by no means so difficult. We know by now that some people, while they were in prison, memorized whole books and could reproduce them after that. And it was nothing special to memorize statistics which was not figures for me, but behind each transport, there was a picture in my mind, a particular circumstance. And I can say that I saw practically every transport.

So they do this report. So it's the dictator report essentially. Yeah. 30 odd pages. 32 pages, single space, a lawyer, a Slovak lawyer, takes it down in very, in sort of bald, factual, unstylish writing is just fact, fact, fact, dates, numbers, names. By the end of it, it is the fullest account ever written at that point of Auschwitz. So maybe, Jonathan, it's hard to say what's the most outrageous part of this book. Auschwitz, of course, itself is that. But after that, this report gets into the hands of a stunning number of very important people high up in the Catholic Church and in Hungary and elsewhere. It essentially reaches Franklin Roosevelt and Alan Dulles. It reaches Winston Churchill, it reaches...

The Pope. The Pope. And we should say the biggest goal that Verba has at this point, the greatest goal in his heart, is that the Hungarian Jews is the last group of Jews to not have been scooped up in mass and killed in Auschwitz and other camps. And his hope is that first the Jews of Hungarian countryside and later the Jews of Budapest will be saved. Yeah.

His driving, animating purpose was warn the Jews of Hungary. Let them, the last Jewish community not yet dragged into the Nazi inferno. Let them have what we and everyone else didn't have, which is knowledge. Don't forget, compassion, display of confession was dangerous. And we were not interested at all in compassion. We were interested in what can be done for those people and not for pitying them. The report does reach London and Washington. And there it runs into these obstacles.

You know, attached to it by now, the Jewish leadership, the Jewish agency in Jerusalem, other Jewish leaders have attached a note to it, effectively, pleading for the Allies to bomb the railway tracks. You know, if this is a factory, then take out the conveyor belt that is bringing Jews in, bomb the railway tracks. I mean, the hero of all the liberal community, myself included, Franklin Roosevelt. What did he do about this? So it goes all the way up through the bureaucracy, and there's evidence that Roosevelt himself, discussed it, he thought, he was reacting to the proposal to bomb the railways. This was a bad business, he thought.

And he thought that if American bombs bombed the railway tracks and therefore killed some Jews, then we will be caught up in, meaning associated with, blamed this whole horrid business. This time, in the summer of 1944, 12,000 Jews were being brought to the camp every day to be murdered. The Jews of Hungary were murdered at a rate that had never been matched to any other stage of the war. So even as D-Day has already happened, and the war is being won, it is the worst hour for the Jews of Europe. Do you, in a sense, do you think that Roosevelt and Churchill are culpable? It's a hard question to ask. And in a way, I'm going to hide behind Verber himself in his view when he was asked about this kind of.

of thing. The crucial thing about him, I think, as a witness, was that he would resist the narrative, I think a lot of people want for the Second World War and for the Holocaust, which is there are villains, the Nazis, and everyone else is on the side of good. Heroic, noble. The argument that Roosevelt and Churchill made was we cannot do anything that diverts from the war effort. Our first, the best thing we can do for the Jews is to defeat Nazism. And look, look, as a Jew, you've got to say, thank God they defeated Nazism. That had to be the paramount goal I see that. But we should get on to the Hungarian Jews because I think it's the morally most vexed

part of the story, which is the report did reach, as Rudy wanted desperately. It reached the Hungarian Jewish community, the de facto leader, Reju Kassner, was handed a copy. And for a whole variety of reasons, which I chart in the book, Kassner did not pass on that warning. What was Kastner's thinking and how do we know? Kastner's main thinking was he was in a dialogue and negotiation with Adolf Eichmann and the Nazis himself. Now, the question that historians will debate is, was he doing that to save the Jews of Hungary? Or realistically, by the time he was having that negotiation, did he know he was only going to be allowed to save the number he did eventually save, which is 1,684 Jews who were put on the train that became known as the Kassner train, which included.

notables and friends and family of Rézou Kasner, people from his hometown. Was he just looking out for himself? Because by then he knew there was no hope for the Jews of Hungary. And was his price or the price that the Nazis exacted from him, his silence, and very specifically that he would agree to not distribute the Verber Vetsler report and not warn the Jews of Hungary? And the evidence, I'm afraid, is pretty compelling against Kastos. So when we say, and when you say in the book,

that Rudolf Verber is responsible for the saving of 200,000 Jews, who were they, who was saved, and how did the report do that? Funny enough, this part of the story of the saving of 200,000 lives, Verbi himself hardly talked about that. He was obsessed, I think, with the ones he hadn't saved when he talked because of other people's in action. And maintained a fury against Kastner to the end of his life. Fury.

I mean unbridled. Despite that, once it was out there in the press, those government leaders who had been able to be inactive without anyone knowing they weren't doing much were now shamed into action because it was now public. And so the Pope writes to the leader of Hungary, who, by the way, he has not written to before. I will say the Pius' statement on this

that was supposedly so brave, doesn't even mention the word Jew or Jewish. These unfortunate souls is what he said. I'll say. He doesn't say Jew and he doesn't let the note that he writes to Miklos Horti, the Regent of Hungary, he doesn't let that note become public, which would have also made a difference. The horrible irony of all this is, it's all the drama is happening too late.

It's too late. It's too late. The war's going to be. Auschwitz runs out of Jews to kill. Of Jews to kill. The war is over. fairly soon thereafter. But this is where we have to say this.

437,000 Jews have been killed from the Hungarian provinces. The last ones left are the 200,000 Jews of Budapest, when because of Verber and Vetsler's report, the Pope and Roosevelt intervene. One train is on its way to Auschwitz. It literally turns around. Those are lives saved because of the Verbo-Vetzer report. the 200,000 Jews of Budapest are spared deportation on the 6th of July, 1994,

as through a series of diplomatic moves that started with Verber and Vetzler's report, which is why I believe Rudolf Verba, together with Fred Vetzler, is responsible for the saving of 200,000 lives, which makes him a towering figure of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Not to make a comparison, this is not a numbers game, but everyone knows the name of Oscar Schindler, who is credited with 3,000 Jewish lives being saved. If it wasn't for Rudolf Berber and Fred Vetzler,

there are 200,000 Jewish people who would never have lived. And their children, and their grandchildren. And their great-grandchildren. There are millions, perhaps, of people alive in the world today because of him. It's so moving to me to read about the, as it were, the afterlife of Rudolf Berber in this book. He does not live easily in this world. He is tortured by his experiences you would expect, and in very specific ways,

his family life is not easy, particularly his first marriage, his relations with his kids is very difficult. And he is unable in any way to be what you and I would call diplomatic or polite. When he has asked about this subject, he doesn't go to a moral black and white.

Germans over here Jews. He's very critical of certain Jews, and this is particularly what God Hana aren't in trouble. Speak to that, until the end of his days, his critique of certain people in the Jewish community and the way they behaved. It's very relevant to... It's very painful.

It's relevant to why he isn't as well known. I mean, I say in the book that I think his story should be as well known as Anne Frank, Primo Levi, Oscar Schindler. It's in that rank of story of the book. But he's not... In all due respect, Hale, Viseel, he does not comport himself like that. No, that's the explanation. So first to your point about his life, afterwards, it's quite true that the first marriage he makes is not a good one.

He makes a very good second marriage and lives very happily with her. And I'm not just saying that now because she is actually in the room with us tonight. Robin Verber is here. Everywhere I've spoken about this book, I've made that point, that he and was able to be, Robin, told me that he was able to be playful, you know, enjoyed practical jokes. He could enjoy sitting in a restaurant and a cafe. He wasn't somebody who couldn't live. But yes, he had had all those difficulties, including those escapes that I talked about. Why wasn't he more famous is related to this point about him being an awkward, difficult witness. I found a document, a letter.

He wrote to a BBC TV producer who wanted him to come on a documentary. And he said, I must warn you, I am not the cliched Holocaust survivor. Meaning. Meaning, I'm not going to give you, and I now think this is what a lot of us want from Holocaust survivors. I'm not going to give you this healing, consoling, wisdom that says ultimately everyone is good, and that we all did everything we could. We are on the side of good. I'm not going to serve up this comforting and pleasing narrative in which all evil resided in Hitler and the Nazis and everyone else

was blameless. Instead, I'm going to tell you as I saw it. And that's not what people want to hear. A final question. We are having this conversation in 2022. Very few Holocaust survivors are still alive. It will no longer be a matter of living memory very soon. And at the same time, we are having a historical reckoning on any number of other catastrophes of history, the slave trade among them. and yet we still refer to the Holocaust as unique. How is it unique or is it not unique in your sense of history? And why were you so driven in a sense to write this particular story? The singularity of it, I think, remains even with all the horrors that we've witnessed since.

And yet the two things that to me make the Holocaust unique are, the ambition to eradicate an entire people, coupled with purpose-built, industrialised method, that to me is still the singular aspect of it. And the reason why I think it's of value and why Jews are right to insist on its singularity is because it is of use as a kind of moral terminus case. This is the ultimate case. and there has tremendous warning, cautionary power that we forego at our peril, I think. We need its presence and urgency and sort of applicability to guide us even now.

He understood the reason why these people were vulnerable to murder was because they didn't have knowledge. They'd been fed lies, this realization that truth is all we have, and it stands between us and tyranny. and he understood that as a teenage boy and was ready to risk absolutely everything for him. Jonathan Friedland. His book about Rudolf Verba is called The Escape Artist, the man who broke out of Auschwitz to warn the world.

We spoke at a public event at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Rudolph Verba died in 2006. You heard excerpts from an interview with him recorded by Claude Lonsman during the filming of his documentary, Shoah. Those excerpts were used by permission. of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Next week with the World Cup about to begin, I'll talk with investigative journalist Heidi Blake,

who's recently joined the New Yorker staff. She co-wrote a remarkable book called The Ugly Game. It's a deep look at how Cutter came to host the World Cup this year and all the corruptions surrounding it. I hope you'll join us. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of two new Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell.

This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Breda Green, Calliola, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gophane and Putabwelle, along with Adam Howard, Jeffrey Masters, Will Coley, Jenny Lawton, and Michael May. And we had assistance from Harrison Keithline, Meher Batia, and James Napoli. Special thanks this week to Gabriel Sanders, Michael Costa, and George Wellington. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina and DeN. Dowman Fund.