The Rest Is History - 291: The Man Who Escaped Auschwitz

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

Tom and Dominic are joined by Jonathan Freedland to discuss the incredible story of Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, who escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. 7th April 1944. After days of delay, weeks of obsessive preparation, months of watching the failed attempts of others and two years of seeing the depths to which human beings could sink, the moment had finally come. It was time to escape.

The two other prisoners were already there at the designated spot. Wordlessly, they gave the nod, do it now. Walter and Fred did not hesitate. They climbed on top of the timbers, found the opening, and one after the other, they dropped inside. A second later, their comrades moved the planks into place above their heads. One of them whispered, bon voyage, and then all was dark and silent. Dominic, that is the completely gripping opening to Jonathan Friedland's book, The Escape Artist, about Rudolf Verbe, the man who escaped Auschwitz.

And the Holocaust is a subject that we haven't yet really done in depth on. The rest is history. But if ever there was a way into that darkest of subjects, Jonathan Friedland's book is it. It is, absolutely. It is. Hello, everybody. Yes, I read this book last spring when it came out. And that opening scene unforgettable so the book's editor at the sunday time said to me would you like to review this book

which is about somebody who escaped from auschwitz and i have to say i'm ashamed to say i i didn't know that anybody had ever escaped um from auschwitz i thought it was a place you went and basically you didn't come back. So I didn't know this story at all. It is the most extraordinary story, partly because of the escape. So he does make it out, there's the spoiler, but also because what he compiled was the most haunting and incredibly detailed account of what life was like hour by hour, day by day inside the extermination camp. And I'd never read anything quite like it, I have to say. So we're hugely honoured to have Jonathan with us. Jonathan, Guardian columnist,

presenter of The Long View, a rival history on Radio 4, novelist. And Jonathan, this really, I guess, is your first work of history. You've written a memoir before, a family memoir, going through the 20th century, but this is the first book that you've written focused on a particular episode in history. And I guess the drama, the extraordinary character of the story is what persuaded you to start writing it. I think that's right. I was quite daunted by the idea of wading in to history. Even being on this show, quite daunting prospect. It's very good to be here though with both of you. But no, I was new to this. I'm a journalist as my day job and writing about the contemporary world. But something about this story has nagged at me for a very long time, actually. I mentioned in the book at the start that I had had this story

in there since I was 19 years old, because I had seen this extraordinary man, Rudolf Werber, appear in an extraordinary film, actually, the documentary film Shoah, Claude Lansman's nine and a half hour epic of the Holocaust. A film which actually is so unusual because there's no archive in it, there's only contemporary, as they were then, interviews with people who had witnessed the killing process. And one of the standout interviews interviews the man who sort of explodes onto the screen um is this man rudolf verba who to my 19 year old eyes looked a generation younger and in a way was than everyone else on this film this procession of old broken men as it seemed to me because he was what he was 18 when he goes there well he was 17 when he arrived he was 19 when he goes there? Well, he was 17 when he arrived. He was 19 when he escaped. So he was

really a generation younger. But it showed even years later when he's interviewed by Landsman, he has this full head of dark, lustrous, thick hair. He's speaking in English. He's in New York City. He's wearing this tan leather coat. He looks like Al Pacino in Scarface. Whereas all these other guys are sort of hunched. They're speaking in Polish or Russian or German. They looked like witnesses to something that had happened a long time ago. The point about Werber was he suddenly was somebody from our world, a completely contemporary figure to me in the mid-80s watching this film. And almost as an aside, Landsman mentions that Werber had escaped from Auschwitz.

And my reaction was like yours, actually, Dominic, when you said, when the book senator said, you know, somebody escaped from Auschwitz. Sitting there in the cinema, age 19, I thought, what? Stop. You know, even age 19. Tell us a story. Yeah. And I knew even then that, OK, some people escaped from Auschwitz, but Jews didn't escape from Auschwitz. You know, that just didn't happen. The degree of terror in which Jews were held in Auschwitz, how is that even possible? As it happens, Landsman is not particularly interested in that story and doesn't really talk about it much with Werber. He instead gets him to

talk about the fact that he had witnessed so much in Auschwitz because he was there so long. He was there the best part of two years. As you know, the life expectancy of a Jew in Auschwitz was measured in hours, and he had been in there for months and months and months. That's why Landsman wanted to speak to him. But it was this escape which intrigued me and always intrigued me. So Jonathan, we'll come to what it is that Werber sees in, what should we call him, Walter, Rudy, Werber? It's very difficult to know, isn't it? It is, because he was born Walter Rosenberg. He changed his name, but I think let's call him Rudy Rudolf Werber.

Okay, let's call him Rudy then. So we will absolutely come to what Rudy sees in Auschwitz. Incredible details of that. Horrific details, obviously. But first of all, can you tell us how it is that he ends up there? Because again, it's kind of paradigmatic, isn't it, for millions and millions of Jews across occupied Europe? Yes. I mean, when you asked me at the start about why this story, there is something paradigmatic about the Rudy story, which is so many of the big themes of the Holocaust somehow

come through this one person. And so, for example, one point that I and others are often keen to make is that the Holocaust is not only a German thing. It's a Europe-wide project, and that the first country to deport its Jews, certainly to Auschwitz, was Slovakia, of all places. Even before the Nazis are occupying Slovakia, you have a fascist allied government, meaning a government that's a sort of ally, almost vassal, of Berlin, of Hitler's Berlin, that decides to start, you know, outstripping almost the Nazis in its persecution of Jews. And so Rudolf Werber, then Walter Rosenberg, is a young man, a bright, you know, boy who's been brought up, in effect, by a single mother. His father dies when he's four.

He's in provincial Slovakia. He shows unusual promise. He's very bright. He's reading newspapers by the time he's two years old. And he's at one of the best elite schools in Bratislava. When he turns up for school in the beginning of the academic year, 1938-39, and he's told, there's no place for you. You're a Jew. You cannot go to school. And, you know, I have the photographs there of him in his sort of high school class in the preceding years. And then suddenly there's a gap. He's not there for that following academic year.

His name is sort of erased. And so he and his mother go away from the capital and into a small town where he and the other Jews of the town are barred from school. They have to sort of mooch around, teaching each other, educating each other. But eventually through the door, thudding onto the doormat,

comes an instruction to turn up at this place at this time with bags weighing no more than 25 kilograms where you are to be deported. And Rudy's reaction, a reaction that you have throughout his life, is a kind of defiance, which is, well, what the hell are you telling me to do that for? Obviously, I'm not going to do that. I'm Slovak born. I speak Slovak. I'm a Czechoslovak citizen then. No, I'm not going to do it. And he embarks on what would be the first escape. And the reason I partly called the book The Escape Artist is there are many escapes in his life. But even at that stage, there's the hint of a theme that comes through again and again,

which is that, of course, most people don't run away or try to escape, do they? Reading the book, it made me think a lot about that classic thing that you're encouraged to do from the moment you first studied this in school. What would you do in this circumstance? And the truth of the matter, I suppose, based on this book and everything we know, is that most of us would actually do nothing. If we got that letter, we would troop along, hoping somehow to telling ourselves that things were going to be all right. But there's something in his, is it in his temperament or just that he's more suspicious, more will be a very big theme, the question of trust and personal trust. He becomes extremely untrusting to the point of being, in the words of his first wife, who I interviewed for the book, found her in the last weeks of her life, age 93. She told me that he was paranoid. And she said, you know, people think Auschwitz made him paranoid. It was surviving

Auschwitz that made him paranoid. I think it was being paranoid that helped him survive Auschwitz. But at this stage, he's quite a trusting young man, but he is defiant. And I think the point of youth is something I emphasise a lot in the book, because the evidence of his own life and the other people he encountered was that once you are a bit older and you particularly have dependents, a partner, children, elderly parents look after, the idea of risking everything is unpalatable. You have too many people relying on you and therefore you comply with instructions because to not comply is such a spectacularly dangerous thing to do that people don't take that risk. So you're quite right in defying that instruction that comes through the door in April of 1942 was exceptional. A lot of the other people

around him were almost relieved by that because they thought, okay, at last things are about to be resolved and sort of clarified. We've had this daily ratchet of Nuremberg-style laws restricting what we can own, where we can travel, who we can talk to. We've prevented from going to school. We can't own a business. Now we're going to be taken somewhere else. And we can start again. And the yellow star.

Yeah. Exactly. Wearing the yellow star, that great symbol that is so potent in the imagination. All of those restrictions have come. There was a feeling that this has to come to a head at some point. And now, OK, we're going to have to start over somewhere else. There's something clarifying about that. I wouldn't say it's a relief.

But people did think, OK, now we know what's happening. And he was exceptional in that. And Jonathan, the reason why they could think that being deported to a Nazi-run concentration camp might in some way be a resolution is because what the Nazis are actually planning is so incomprehensible, right? I mean, Rudy, no matter how smart and paranoid and alert he is, it takes him a long time properly to grasp exactly what it is that Auschwitz is about. Absolutely. They didn't think at that stage in 1942 that nobody was talking about Nazi Iran concentration camps, right? No, there is no hindsight yet. They don't know about that.

They're being told they're going to be deported to new lives in the East. They think and are told, they don't think this because they are imagining this, they are told that they will be resettled in new communities where they will work, they will have schools, they will be able to live full Jewish lives as a Jewish community. They're advised to take the things they will need to begin new lives, not just pots and pans and blankets, but school books and exercise books for their children. Nobody's talking about camps, and certainly the notion of a Nazi camp is alien to them. No one knows of such a thing because it hasn't happened yet. You know, he doesn't know that. And jumping ahead, he does try this first

escape when the first deportation comes. He's taken to a detention camp, a transit camp in Slovakia. He escapes again. He's then taken from there to Majdanek, which will become a notorious death camp. He doesn't know that. He's only there 12 days. They look for volunteers to go somewhere else. The opportunity to work in the open farmland. He puts his hand up, says, yeah, I'll do that.

That's got to be better than this dump that he's in in Majdanek. And he finds himself on a train to Auschwitz. And even when he arrives in Auschwitz on the last day of June of 1942, again, he is relieved because he looks at these brick buildings, these paved paths and things, compared to the flimsy, thin, wooden barracks of Majdanek, where you could freeze to death. Well, this looks like something better. Well, I can work with this, you know. So at each stage, because nobody knows what the word Auschwitz means, he and the other people arriving there hope for the best. And it takes him some time for the penny to drop.

You know, he is used, as all those who weren't immediately sent to the gas chambers, he is used as a slave, as a slave worker in Auschwitz. And he's moved from place to place, backbreaking physical work, building the industrial factories, a plant that will be used by some of Germany's biggest conglomerates, you know, IG Farben and Siemens and so on. He's involved in building those for a while, but he eventually finds himself at this place, which is nicknamed Canada with a K by his fellow prisoners. Because Canada, I discover, in the European imagination of that period, particularly in Central Europe and Eastern Europe, was thought to be a place where the streets were paved with gold, a land flowing with milk and honey. And so Canada was known in the Auschwitz universe as the kind of Eldorado

of Auschwitz, a place where there was just plenty. There was food and drink, but there was also fine cognac, there were silks, there were diamonds, because this was the place where all that the Jews of Europe had brought with them to potentially bribe their way to survival was brought. This is where their clothes were piled up, where if they had smuggled a tiny diamond in the hem of their garment, that's where it was piled. And it was working in Canada that slowly the penny dropped for Rudy, that he began to realize, hang on, there is more stuff here than there are people. I can see piles of men's clothes and women's clothes and children's clothes, but there are no children. So what is exactly going on here? And he would be later on embarrassed by the fact that he had not realized this earlier, that it had taken him a while to clock that there are Jews being brought here who never become prisoners because they are killed within hours of their arrival. It takes him weeks to come to that conclusion, even as somebody inside Auschwitz. That's how intense and energetic the deception, the denial, in a way, of the Holocaust was,

even inside Auschwitz. You could be in there and not know. I was just going to ask a question about that. So you have an amazing scene which he sees. Prisoners are getting off a transport from Theresienstadt, and one of his fellow prisoners mutters to this well-dressed Czech Jewish mother, you'll be dead soon. Because that's right, isn't it? A lot of people are dead within, a huge amount of people are dead within hours of arrival.

And the woman, who clearly must have been from a sort of bourgeois family, goes up to an SS officer and says, well, what's all this? What's going on? And the SS officer says, oh, my dear lady, we're civilized people, which gangster said this to you? And then he sort of, she's led away. And then the bloke who said it is taken away and shot. So that again, was something that I, I'm embarrassed to admit, I hadn't really grasped. So that the people who arrive and are continuing to arrive every day on these transports, they're getting off the train, and they have no concept. I mean, there's not even rumours on the trains that this is what awaits them. That's exactly right. I mean, Elie Wiesel, famously the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor, said that the word Auschwitz didn't terrify them when he arrived

at Auschwitz in 1944, because nobody had ever, the way he put it, was nobody ever thought to tell us what it was. There was either complete ignorance, which again, I put the blame for that very squarely on the oppressors rather than on the victims. The Nazis were devoted to this deception. I mean, they were meticulous about it at every possible stage. You know, one thing meticulous about it at every possible stage. You know, one thing that I think is known, almost at the level of popular culture, is the notion that they were told, Jews were told they were going in to have a shower, that they were there to be disinfected, but actually instead of the shower heads were fake

and that gas emerged instead. That is known. I remember knowing that and thinking it was some kind of sick joke, that it was a sort of macabre twist. It was central to what was going on, that at every stage from beginning, when they were deported, they would be shown fake postcards or postcards that had been written under duress by their relatives and friends, saying, it's all fine here, it's wonderful, we're beginning a new life. Mother is particularly happy here, someone might write, to the recipient who would then think, that's odd. Our mother died 10 years ago. Why is she writing that? They would say,

you know, it's wonderful. We eat here as if every day is Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur, of course, a fast day. So what message is the person trying to send? But that was the most that could be done because the Nazi effort was to force the Jews to reassure their friends and relatives back home. They were told as they arrived at the deportation camp to get into orderly queues and particularly to say what trade they worked in so they might be allocated work after they'd been showered and disinfected. Right up to the threshold of the gas chamber itself, the deception continued. And Rudy, because his next job after working in Canada, in the warehouse of Canada, was working on the railway platform, the Alta Judenramp, the old Jew ramp, as the Nazis called it.

Watching these trains arrive, sometimes five a day, often in the dead of night, disgorged of these Jewish prisoners, you know, captives, who were clueless as they got off the train. He would see it with his own eyes that not one of them, in the whole two years he was there, he would say that not one person ever knew what Auschwitz meant or what fate awaited them there. And Jonathan, what your book, I mean, chillingly brings to life is another cliche that is often said about the Holocaust, which is that the process of genocide was industrial. And your description of four, five, six trainloads of deportees arriving every night. The reason why, and you make this, I mean, horribly clear, why they have to be told this, it's not just to increase the kind of sadism going on, but to ensure that they will be processed easily. Because it's clear

that if there was a riot broke out, it wouldn't just be a problem for the guards that they then have to shoot people, but it would also snarl up the process of genocide. This, I think, was Rudolf Weber's great insight. It struck him. He was a teenager. He's 18 by the time he works on the ramp. But this is exactly what he realises, that he is witnessing an industrialized industrial process, and that the key element of this machine, the key sort of cog in the machine is deception. It isn't an added extra. It is essential. Why? Because for the Nazi process to work, the throughput of people to work, it must move in a smooth, orderly fashion. Those Jews must get off those trains, they must allow themselves to be organized into columns, they must go through the process of

selection to the left. If you are old or too young or in any way weak or you are a mother with children, you go to the left where you will be taken to the gas chambers. Nobody knows that's what's going to happen. You'll become a prisoner tattooed with a number and forced to work as a slave. For that process to work, it has to proceed smoothly. And for it to proceed smoothly, the Jews themselves cannot possibly know what fate awaits them. If they do, Rudolf Erber realizes, he's not naive enough to think, oh, there'll be an uprising and an armed revolt. These people have no weapons, their children, their kids, of course not. But there might be panic. There could be a stampede. And that would be impossibly hard for the Nazis,

given the method they have devised. It would, as you say, snarl it up. And so in this quite chilling image, he would, Rudi would use when later talking about this, he would say, it is much easier to kill sheep than to hunt pigs or deer. And what he meant by that as a boy who'd grown up in the Slovak countryside was that a column of sheep marching into the abattoir can be handled, you can manage big numbers. But if you are a hunter picking off individual deer on the hillside, that takes time and you will miss a lot. And so what he envisaged was that if Jews arrived knowing they were being led to their deaths, they would then panic. Some would run off in this way. Some would run off in that way. Yes, most of them would be gunned down, but it would be chaos. And in that chaos, some might survive. And so that's why the Nazis, even at the moment when

the doors are locking of the gas chamber, they are being told by their captors, get yourself clean now, enjoy your shit, enjoy bathing, et cetera. They do not, even at the last moment, want the panic that could slow down, that could throw sand in the gears of the machine. And that is what leads Rudolf Weber to make the crucial decision, which is if deception is the central element of this killing machine, then the only way to throw some sand in the gears of the machine is to tear through that veil of ignorance that the Jews of Europe have. That means somebody has to get out and tell them what Auschwitz means because they clearly don't know. And he decides with that wonderful arrogance of youth, that person might as well be me. Just before we get to the escape, he's in a position to observe the workings of the machine because he's in Canada. He's an assistant registrar and then he's the camp clerk, isn't he? So Tom and I were actually talking about this earlier, weren't we,

between ourselves. So this is such a difficult question, isn't it? Those people who are in Canada are, I mean, it's the wrong word. So, you know, well, it is just the wrong word, but they are collaborating with the machine. They're helping it to work, aren't they? Do people like that have moral qualms about it? Or would Rudolf Seff said, listen, working as the camp clerk,

it was that or die. This is an impossible situation to be in. Or are most of them still ignorant? So they don't think it's a moral dilemma, as it were. You're right, this is a tough question. And it's your right to that, or it's interesting to that Rudy himself really thought about this a lot. I mean, in later life, Rudy would be very suspicious of fellow survivors of Auschwitz if he didn't already know them, because he would wonder what did they do to survive. You know, jumping ahead, Fred Wetzler, who is his partner in escape, married a survivor of Auschwitz

and relations between Fred and Rudy became very strained, in part because Rudy was very suspicious of Fred's wife, because she was an Auschwitz survivor. A very difficult thought to grapple with, but he thought, what did you do to survive? Now, by that logic, you would think he would have to judge himself. He didn't have moral qualms about that because survival was essential and the nature of the work he had to do did not involve him in having to collude in the process of killing Jews. I mean, there were. He's not a capo. No, I mean, so capos were guards who were used as sort of enforcers and henchmen by the SS. And many of them, some were Jews, many of them were not,

many of them were prisoners who had been moved from German jails, often common criminals with marked by a green triangle rather than the yellow star. In Auschwitz, you remember a whole colour coded system of triangles, pink triangles famously for gay prisoners, yellow star obviously for Jews, reds for political prisoners. Green triangle would put the fear of God into a prisoner like Rudy, because that was a common criminal, often murderers, who were the most brutal henchmen. The SS would police the camp with weapons. The capos, the Green Triangle crowd especially, would carry clubs and sticks.

And they would have, for sport competitions, could you kill a prisoner in a single blow? You know, Rudy witnessed that. To, you know, a single punch to knock out and kill a Jewish prisoner. They did not see what they were doing as anything like that. Rather, they were still slaves in the camp. And instead of being told to, you know, carry cement, their job, and we should distinguish here because Canada

was a specific job, meaning you were in the warehouses, but there were these other jobs to be registrars or pen pushers. Look, on some level, you could say they enabled the wheels of the concentration camp to turn, They allowed the thing to function and therefore on some level that you could make the charge that Dominic raised. Their view, and certainly I think Rudy's view, was that they were engaged

in the business of resistance, that he got the job he got as a pen pusher, barracks pen pusher was his phrase, as an assistant registrar. He got that job because the underground, the Aus ashford resistance and again you know dominic at the beginning you were saying how you realized all these things about us that you didn't know i mean it was news to me that there was a really organized auschwitz resistance and underground

they got secured jobs for their people in those places a lot of them were non-jewish german political prisoners but increasingly jewish prisoners were also able to get those roles secured jobs for their people in those places. A lot of them were non-Jewish German political prisoners, but increasingly Jewish prisoners were also able to get those roles. And it was because he was in that role that he was able partly to survive. He got more rations. He was able to wear his own clothes. He also had this, a job that enabled him to really see what was going on. But just to show you how alive Rudy was to the issue that Dominic raises, he became frustrated with the underground because he saw that they were working very hard to improve their own conditions, which they did very effectively through a combination of bribery and

blackmail of their SS guards. They effectively did increase not just the quality of life, but their life expectancy in Auschwitz. The concentration camp did rise. Meanwhile, adjoining the Auschwitz concentration camp is the death camp, the gas chambers, the crematoria, and that is continuing at a huge pace. And what Rudy realizes, again, with that great clarity that he seems to have as a very young man is, well, in a very perverse way, the smooth functioning of this concentration camp, where the death rate is now falling, is actually having a knock-on effect on the death camp, because every time a new transport arrives, in the past, they used to have to pick off 5% or 10% of the new arrivals to keep the concentration camp running. Now they just don't need any new people because people are

living longer in the slave labor camp. And therefore, those Jews who are arriving now are sent directly, 95%, 97%, 98% to the gas chambers. So he puts it very harshly. And he says, you know, he realized that the resistance was, you know, if anything, allowing more Jews to be killed in the death camp part. And so he begins to think, look, I'm glad that resistance is making life better for prisoners. I myself am benefiting from it. But that is not good enough. Morally, that is not acceptable. The task we have to engage in is stopping the killing in the death camp and in the gas chambers. And that's why he becomes resolved that he must escape and warn the Jews of Europe. And he is ideally qualified to do that because he has witnessed the functioning of the death camp.

He has seen how it's ignorance on the part of the deportees of their fate that enables them to be processed. And he is intellectually brilliant. And before, you know, back when he's in Slovakia, in the village, he's been deprived of his education. You have this incredibly moving detail about how they find an old chemistry book, him and a friend, and they kind of study it as though it's the most precious thing in the world. And so he is used to memorizing things. And that makes him a kind of, you know, a living compendium of information about Auschwitz. And so that he feels, you know, he has the personal stake in escaping, but also that he will be doing a great service, that he will be saving his thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions in his dreams

of people. So I think we should take a break at this point. And when hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions in his dreams of people. So I think we should take a break at this point. And when we come back, perhaps we could talk about his escape, whether it were, you know, whether he how many people he managed to save and the kind of the long term consequences of Auschwitz on his life. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club.

If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Jonathan, we began the first half. Tom read the first few sentences of your book, The Escape Artist. So that was April 1944. It's Rudolph Walter's great moment. So take us through the escape. What's the plan? Because the plan is, you know, it's phenomenally clever, isn't it?

It is. It's really ingenious. It rests on their identification of a gap in the Nazi defences. And it's not a physical gap. It's not like they've discovered there's a hole in a fence somewhere. Rather, and this is where it's his great brain that is so important, he and his escape partner, Fred Wetzler, discover there is a flaw in the Nazi method. And it turns on, in a way, the Nazis' great strength, which is their loyal fidelity to routine, their very predictability. I'm going to hold back the exact way they do it because I am quite keen for people to read the book. Suffice it to say, I'm guessing like you two and men of our generation, I have read a lot of World War II escape stories. We've seen the movies, etc. To me, this is the most thrilling of all of them and that's

partly because it is the hardest possible escape to mount because jews were held more tightly than anyone else it's you know um there were escapes of soviet political soviet prisoners of war from auschwitz and of polish political prisoners but jews uh they're a grand total of five ever made it out. One was taken out by an SS man. I tell the story in the book, which is a sort of very exceptional story. It happened the day before Rudolf's escape. But in terms of engineering your own escape, Rudolf Erber and his friend Fred Wetzler are the very first to do it. And it turns on that idea that they have seen a flaw, that in the Nazi routine, there is a way of turning that method against them. And it requires great physical resilience. It will see the two of them, as you heard from those

introductory paragraphs, essentially hiding in a hole in the ground for three days and three nights in a space not much bigger than a double grave, the two men side by side. They will have to do that in order to outwit the kind of security protocols that the Nazis have imposed specifically on Jewish prisoners. It is so ingenious and incredibly, it does mean that on April the 10th, 1944, they emerge in the dead of night, in the darkness, and reach the outer perimeter of Auschwitz and are able to wriggle out of that fence. And suddenly, they're out. And so, Jonathan, he's armed himself with two things, I think.

And the first is a scrap of the page of a children's atlas that he had found back in Canada, which shows him how to get from Auschwitz to the Slovak border. Basically, you follow the line of a river. And the second thing is that he'd met a Russian prisoner of war who gave him a lot of very, very firm advice about what you do when you escape. Don't trust anyone, all kinds of things. Can you just describe what it is that he gets from that Russian prisoner of war? Because should anyone need to escape, it might provide some kind of useful tips. It's quite right. As soon as Rudy had made

the decision, I've got to escape, he does become this kind of student of escape. And as you said, he was very used to being self-taught. He'd already done that even before Auschwitz, because he, from age 14 onwards, couldn't go to school anymore. So he was used to that. He was armed also with a friend, and that's very important. In Fred Wetzler, he had found a companion who he trusted. The two of them trusted each other. And that's because, I'm convinced of this, that they were from the same hometown. They had known each other before Auschwitz. Very difficult to trust somebody who you'd only known in this upside down, morally inverted realm of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where good is bad and black is white and day is night. You couldn't

be sure of someone who you'd only known there. But he knew Alfred Wetzler from Terneva in Slovakia, six years older than him. So he was armed with that. He was armed, as you say, with this memory. He'd had to commit it to memory, this image of the map that he'd seen very briefly in a children's atlas in Canada. That told him at least where he was in the world. Oswiecim, the nearest town to Auschwitz. He'd seen that on the map and worked out, OK, I need to go 90 to 100 kilometers, about 90 kilometers to reach the border with Slovakia. And he was armed with these extraordinary, as you put it, this compendium of facts. He'd memorized every transport, every date,

every point of origin, a freakish feat of memory that he'd done. But otherwise, he did feel as if he came out of there with nothing because he had no map, as he put it, no map, no compass, no friends. There was no network, no resistance network outside Auschwitz ready to greet Jewish escapees. There were, if you were in the Polish resistance or if you were a Soviet prisoner of war, there were people outside who might help you. But he was in Nazi-occupied Poland. He and Fred were there, where at any turn there could be Wehrmacht, you know, German soldiers.

They do encounter them at one point. There could be Volksdeutsche, you know, ethnic Germans settled there. And there could be Poles who were collaborating with the Nazis. So danger everywhere. But he did have in his head the sort of course in escapology that had been taught to him by this man, Dmitry Volkov, a Ukrainian actually, formerly a captain in the Red Army and a prisoner in Auschwitz, who took a long time to win his trust, but told him things like, you know, do not move during the day. You can only go at night. You sleep during the day, you move at night. Don't have money.

Don't even accept money because you have money, you'll be tempted to spend it. And by spending it, that means it will take you into a village and you'll be spotted. You've got to stay away from other people. You know, foraging for food. You've, you know, avoiding meat because the smell of it could attract animals. You know, all kinds of tips, even, and this is the thing I think captures people's imagination most. It certainly captured mine when I came across this detail when I was 19. But when you're in hiding, he said, you need to sprinkle around your hiding place tobacco, not just any tobacco, but machorka, a form of very cheap Russian tobacco that has been soaked in gasoline and then dried. He says, don't tell me why, but the smell of that repels the SS sniffer dogs and the sort of bloodhounds that will be chasing you.

I mean, this level of detail was taught to him by this Red Army captain. And so, you know, they had a lot of know-how. They had ridiculous physical bravery. He was just 19. Fred was 25. And somehow in those, it's about 10 or 11 days afterwards, doing as they were told, traveling in the night, They crossed forests and rivers and mountains and marshlands, going through hostile territory, Nazi-occupied Poland.

I mean, it wasn't the same as Auschwitz, but it wasn't easy for a Jew on the run. Their feet swell, they get injured. At one point, they come under fire, they have to cross through ice and snow at one point. But somehow, they they have pulled off what at that point nobody else had ever done before. They were the first Jews ever to have engineered their own escape from Auschwitz-Birkenau and to have made their way successfully to freedom. And their plan. So they have a plan, don't they? A larger scheme, which is they're going to tell the world and save Jews that way. So here's the slightly complicated thing.

There is a state-approved Jewish center in Slovakia. That's right, isn't it? The UZ? I know I should be pronouncing that differently. That's right. No, no, that's right. There's the Jewish center or, in effect, Jewish council is being used by the Nazis.

They did this everywhere. The Nazis would, every time they were in charge, and the fascist authorities in Slovakia did the same, they would make sure their instructions were passed to the Jewish communities by the Jewish community leadership. And they would say to the Jewish community elders, you know, it's your choice. Either we do it and you can see that we will do it brutally or you do it and maybe you get to soften the blow in some way. So, you know, you draw up the lists of everybody you have between the ages of 16 and 30. And if you don't, we'll just pull people out of their houses and they would demonstrate that that's how they would do it. And so this was a terrible moral dilemma. I mean, the most awful predicament. Do we do the devil's work or do we let the devil do his work unfettered? And the

Jewish leadership in Slovakia made the, you know, not all of them, some wouldn't go along with it, but they made a decision to do it. And Walter Rudy hugely resented them, actually, because the order, for example, to turn up that initial deportation order, it came, as it were, on Jewish community headed notepaper, and he wrote on their letterhead, you know, And he remembered that and thought, well, you know, how can I possibly trust these people with the information I have and yet didn't really know who else to bring it to? What he didn't know was that within the official Jewish leadership, a large group of that same body of people were also engaged in resistance activities, and they called themselves the working group, and they were also engaged in illicit underground activities. So these were the sorts of hideous moral dilemmas that people were thrown into, where you can see with your own eyes that your fellow Jews are going to be bundled on trains and deported.

Do you allow that to happen brutally or do you allow it to happen where you have some hand in it and perhaps can dilute the edict somewhere? None of us can know what we would decide. None of us can judge, I don't think, what was right or wrong in that situation. Rudy himself was very judgmental and judged those people very harshly for what they did. But he does make contact through an amazing series of scrapes, really, you know, at one point involving he and Fred dressing up as Slovak sort of pig herds and helping transport a farmer, a good man who helps them. They dress up as his pig herds and bundle a whole lot of pigs onto a train and thereby go to a local regional meat market, livestock market, and there make contact with a Jewish doctor who leads them to the Jewish, underground Jewish leadership. And from there, they are transferred to a small town of Zhilina, where, and I've stood in this room, they're in

the basement of the Jewish old people's home in Zilina, for the best part of a fortnight, they are in secret, in hiding, debriefed. And there has to be in hiding, these are now wanted men. And I reproduce in the book, the SS Gestapo telegram. The telegram goes from the SS to the Gestapo saying, you know, these men are on the run and are wanted. And this would have been put up on the bulletin board of every Gestapo office across the Nazi empire, across Europe, you know, Walter Israel Rosenberg and Alfred Israel Wetzler. The Nazis insisted that every Jewish man, if his first name was not identifiably Jewish, adopted the name Israel as a middle name.

And so you see that in this telegram. But there in hiding, the information they have gathered pours out of them. They cannot stop. two years, the estimated number, the point of origin, and even the sort of serial number allocated to the handful of prisoners on each transport who were selected to live and become slave laborers, those numbers that are famously tattooed on the arm. So he a transport from, say, you know, Grodno in Poland in August of 1943 or whatever. He's memorized them all. And so every word that comes out of them is taken down as if in dictation by a man who works for the Jewish leadership. And he writes a very dry, strictly factual, 32-page, single-spaced account of what's happened.

Reading your account of it, you say that it describes so much that Auschwitz conjures up. The life of an Auschwitz prisoner, the topography of the camps, the initial journey by cattle truck, the shaving of heads and bodies, the tattooing of numbers, the colour-coded triangles, the barracks, the inner and outer

chain of watchtowers, the roll call, the sign saying Arbyte McFry, the slave factories, the hanging of attempted escapees, the starvation, the casual beatings, all of it. So all of that is in there. But I was startled when you say that the word gas didn't appear until page seven. And its core revelation that all but a small number of jewish deportees for auschwitz were murdered on arrival didn't come until page eight so i mean that's it's again it's this kind of weird combination of the i mean the unbelievable horror of what is being described and yet evidently this kind of almost bureaucratic, punctilious attention to detail. I think that's probably on Oskar Krasniansky,

who compiles the report. He's no writer, and he's no journalist, and he doesn't order the verbatim words that have come out of these two young men in the way that I think any of us would. Instead, oddly, he decides to sort of frame it chronologically. So each one, Wetzler and then Werber, describe chronologically what happened to them, starting with their arrival in the transit camps, Novaki in Slovakia, in Rudi's case, and Sereb in Wetzler's case.

And that's why it partly takes you till page seven before you actually get the kind of the lead you know and it's very it's frustrating to read in that sense because you just want to you think it should grab the reader by the scruff of the neck i think what was going on there was in a sense and awareness that this will be unbelievable to people reading it and therefore if you start with the sort of headline, as it were, it would be too easily dismissed. And therefore, it needed to be assembled sort of methodically, where, you know, it's first one fact, then the next fact, then the next until they build. And, you know, between them, Oskar Krasniansky, who compiles the report, he's actually an engineer, and his boss in the Jewish

council, Oskar Neumann, is a lawyer. And so between them, an engineer and a lawyer, neither of these are people interested in telling a sort of gripping story. They are rather interested in presenting a chronological sequence of facts and a kind of anatomy of this factory of death, which is something nobody has ever known in human history before. And so this document is drawn up and who does it go to and what is their reaction? So the report is finally finished and it embarks on a journey of its own, almost in a kind of escape journey of its own. And I think my book is the first time in one place that's ever been assembled, the actual route it took. It is a gripping yarn, I think, in its own right, because it has to be smuggled hand to hand across borders, across occupied Europe. Anybody

who's found holding this thing would immediately themselves be, you know, imprisoned or worse by the Nazis. And so it's a very dangerous document and how it gets smuggled across Europe is to me riveting where, you know, I have the account of a woman who, you know, is literally in a kind of garret in an attic, is secretly translating it into Hungarian. You know, there are figures in the resistance who meet each other at an art gallery and smuggle one copy's surreptitiously moved from the briefcase of one resistance man into the briefcase of the other so that no one will see the handoff of the documents. You know, this is a red hot piece, document that has to be handled with great care, improbably, incredibly, through a whole procession of sometimes ridiculous characters, it finds its way to the desk of

Winston Churchill in London, of Franklin Roosevelt in Washington, and Pope Pius in Rome, you know, we have the margin scrawl of Winston Churchill in the summary of the document that reaches him where he writes, what can be done, what can be said, as if rendered almost speechless by what he has seen. That's one way of reading that. Brilliant. Well, I think we should take a break there with the report having reached the desks, I should say, of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. And maybe, Jonathan, you'll join us again next time to talk about what happens to the report, how the Allies respond, what happens to Rudolf. And then we can chat a little bit, I think, about how we talk about Auschwitz and the Holocaust and a single person's experience. So lots to talk about,

and we will see you on The Rest is History next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Goodbye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde.

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