The Rest Is History - 292: The Shadow of the Holocaust

Episode Date: January 5, 2023

In our second episode exploring the story of Rudolf Vrba, Jonathan Freedland joins Tom and Dominic again, to discuss the global reaction to the Vrba–Wetzler report: did anti-Semitism shape the Allied response? *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. report come x2 jews who escaped birkenau correctness whereof confirmed from the beginning june 1943 90 incoming jews gassed death stop three gas chambers four crematoriums birkenau auschwitz, stop. So that was a telegram from the British journalist Walter Garrett, sent in June 1944 to London. And that's the moment in many ways, isn't it, Tom, when the first revelations of the death camp at Auschwitz begin to percolate out. And it's thanks to this report that we talked about last time

by these two extraordinary men, Rudolf Verber and Fred Wetzler. And we're joined by Jonathan Friedland again, whose book The Escape Artist chronicles this incredibly haunting and riveting story. Jonathan, welcome back to The Rest is History. Thank you. Good to be with you. So we ended last time, didn't we, with Churchill. You had the report on Churchill's desk.

What can be said? What can be done? This is, you know, let's just go into this because it's such a big question. What can be done, would you say, in the summer of 1944? So the report, now known as the Werber-Wetzlar Report, that these two escapees have dictated, in effect, 32-page, single-space, full of the evidence of what's happened, of what is happening in Auschwitz-Birkenau, has made its way to these various, you know, chancellories of government. On its journey, it's changed because now attached to it, almost physically attached,

paper clipped on the front, in effect, is a demand from the Jewish leadership, you know, headquartered in Jerusalem, Chaim Weizmann, who would go on to be the first president of the state of Israel. Moshe Shertog then would become Israel's second prime minister. They have attached a demand and other Jewish leaders have done the same saying, here's the evidence of what's going on in Auschwitz. Now we call on you to bomb the railway tracks to this killing factory. If this is a factory, then take out the conveyor belt, which is the railway tracks to this killing factory. If this is a factory, then take out the conveyor belt, which is the railway tracks. So now Churchill and Roosevelt are not just discussing, my word, isn't this awful, these terrible things that are going on. There is a

tangible proposal. Churchill discusses it with Anthony Eden and gives what Churchill's biographer, Martin Gilbert, says is the most direct instruction he ever gives in the course of the whole of the Second World War, which he says, no need to take this to cabinet. Get anything out of the air ministry you can. Invoke me if necessary. Direct, let's do this, he's effectively saying. Eden goes to Archibald Sinclair, the minister in charge of the Air Force, and says, how about it? Sinclair looks at it and says, hmm, this is an operation that would have to be done by day. We only, we, the RAF, are bomb at night. This is over to the Americans. And Eden, even though he's had that direct instruction from Churchill, basically leaves it at that. He doesn't press Sinclair or say, no, come on, let's think of a way around it. So that's a sort of practical objection.

And it does go over to Washington. And meanwhile, Washington, by the way, has received the report through multiple channels of their own. But it goes through this bureaucratic maze where people say, this seems more your department than mine, we should all get a response. And it's another five days here, seven days there, different departments in Washington. It has to get from the office where it was first picked up in Switzerland over to the United States. Delay, delay, delay. And at this point, the Jews of Hungary, the community that was most in Rudolf Werber's mind, in a way, because he knew they were the

last Jews of Europe not yet pulled in to the Nazi inferno, they are being killed at this point at a rate of 12,000 to 15,000 a day. So Churchill has responded with the kind of moral sense of shock and horror that you might expect. But what is going on in the minds of all these bureaucrats and officials and officers that is making them not think, well, we've got to act on this? Well, it's a combination of practical objections like the one Sinclair made about the right time to do the bombing. In Washington, there's this view which comes from the top. It comes from Roosevelt, which is, look, anything which diverts from the war effort, the effort to defeat Hitler is a distraction. We shouldn't do it. And this will take us, of course, as it happens, it would have been three or four kilometer diversion from other industrial targets that the Allies were bombing in Nazi-occupied Poland. So it was barely a diversion. But there's also, there's practical, but there's also prejudice. And there are Whitehall officials who read this report, who say, for example, you know, we should allow for a certain degree of Jewish exaggeration when reading this testimony. Later

on, there's a foreign office official who says, I think this office, the foreign office, has already used up too much time on these, quote, wailing Jews, unquote. And so those memoranda, I quote from them and cite them in the book. There is an equivalent prejudicial reaction in Washington.-Semitism, you know, where people are shown the report, there's a response from Yank magazine, an American army journal that has actually asked for evidence of Nazi war crimes, because they think it will obviously sort of motivate, gee up the GIs. And they are shown the Werber-Wetzler report in English, and they look at it and they send it back saying, this is too Semitic an account. Might the Office of Information not have one that is rather less Jewish? It gives an account of war crimes that is less Jewish in nature. We want different victims,

please, because our readers won't warm to the idea of Jewish victims. There is also in both London and Washington the view that it will be bad for if public opinion believes this is somehow a war for the Jews. As you know, the isolationist movement in the United States that fought very hard, it was the biggest anti-war movement in American history, still to this day, by the way, had campaigned for Roosevelt not to join the war. They said this is a Jew war. There was that movement within the America First movement that said somehow, why do we have to go to war to save the Jews? Churchill and Roosevelt are both aware of that and want to essentially downplay the cause of saving Jewish lives.

They are uncomfortable with it. They think it will weaken them. Even though this is genocide, I mean, this is literal genocide. Millions of people are dying, and they think that the cause of saving millions of lives would be unpopular with the British and American public? Isn't it also, isn't it, a couple of things. It's partly that it's too Semitic, as Jonathan says, but is it not also that precisely because it is so vast, people struggle to comprehend it? Well, that's the third leg of this stool. And that's really important,

is there's prejudice, there's practicalities, but there's also incomprehension or incredulity, rather. And the test case for this, I think is, I mean, there are multiple people have this reaction. There's one story I tell in the book that I think is very powerful. Felix Frankfurt, a Jewish judge on Roosevelt, on the Supreme Court in the Roosevelt era, meets a messenger from the Polish underground, not Jewish actually, who comes to see him, saw Roosevelt too, Saw Anthony Eden. Jan Karski, his name was. And he tells him what's going on in the Nazis' attempt to eliminate the Jewish people,

eradicate Jews from the face of the earth. And Frankfurter says to Karski, I don't believe you. And the man who has brought Karski immediately leaps to his feet and starts defending Karski's credentials. And Frankfurter raises his hand and starts defending Karski's credentials. And Frankfurt raises his hand and says, I didn't say he wasn't telling the truth. I said, I don't believe him. I can't believe him. It's impossible to believe. And I quote there, the French Jewish intellectual Raymond Aron, who says when it came to the Holocaust, I knew, but I didn't believe. And because I didn't believe, I didn't know. And the hardest case of the lot is in Hungary and the Hungarian Jewish

leadership, the people who Rudi Werber most wanted to address. Remember, he wanted to warn those Jews not to get on the trains, because if you get on the trains, this is what awaits you. The report reaches the leadership of the Hungarian Jews in the form of Rezu Kastner, de facto leader of Hungary's Jews, and it reaches them much earlier than Roosevelt or Churchill, who are getting this report in June. Kastner gets it more or less with the day the ink is still wet, in late April, and Kastner essentially puts it in a drawer and does not pass it on to the Jews of Hungary. Now, that's a whole other subject of why Kastner did that. I get into it in the book. He's a hugely controversial figure to this day. Some people think he was a hero because

he saved some Jews. Other people think his price for saving those tiny number, 1,600 Jews, was essentially to let 400,000 go to their deaths. And people debate this still. But he, Kastner, was surrounded by fellow members of the Hungarian Jewish leadership who looked at it and said, how can we believe this? We cannot comprehend that the most civilized nation in Europe, the people of Goethe and Kant, the Germans, could possibly be doing this. This is unimaginable. How do we know, says one member of the Hungarian Jewish Council, that this isn't the product of the fevered imagination of two rash young men? And there are more examples, too, of people reading the report and just not being able to believe such a thing were possible in their world.

Jonathan, just one other institution that famously didn't have divisions, but did have a huge role to play in this whole drama, which is the papacy. And the role played by Pius XII, the Pope, throughout the Second World War. I mean, that's incredibly controversial. What light does the history of the Verba report shed on the role played by the Catholic Church and the Pope in particular in the Holocaust? This interests me too, and it does shed some light. For one thing, when that report is making its journey across multiple paths, one of the key paths, two men, resistance men, meet in the National Gallery and smuggle it from one briefcase to another in the National Gallery in Budapest. They then make six copies. Remember, this is before, now, you know, if we want to publish something, we press a button, there are a million copies everywhere. Each copy had to be handmade, somebody sitting at a typewriter or with carbon paper making a copy. They handmade six copies, and they had in mind who would get them, and they decided senior clerics in Hungary needed to read this. And one of them is taken to the cardinal, the cardinal archbishop in Budapest,

who is shown the copy and is told what is happening, and is essentially pleaded with to say, you know, say something to your flock that they mustn't collude with the deportation of Jews who are now being sent out of the Hungarian countryside at a rate of 12,000 to 15,000 a day to their deaths. Until this document, they could say, well, we don't know why they're being sent or what fate awaits them. Now they know. And the archbishop sinks to his knees and says, we don't know why they're being sent or what fate awaits them. Now they know. And the archbishop sinks to his knees and says, we should pray, and then says, I can't do anything until the Pope, the Holy Father, has said nothing and done nothing. Until he says something, my hands are tied. I can't possibly go out, you know, alone. And so the Pope, you know, the Vatican threw an envoy who actually

meets Werber in a cloistered monastery in the Slovak countryside, a secret meeting after Rudi's escape. He's now, by the way, living under false Aryan papers, given a false name. Walter Rosenberg has become Rudolf Werber, a name he will keep with him for the rest of his life. Fred Wetzler has become Josef Lannik. But Werber and a later escapee are taken to meet an envoy of the Pope. And for six hours, this papal envoy, young man, Monsignor Martellotti, grills Werber and his fellow escapee about Auschwitz. And the two escapees worry that their testimony is somehow not really getting through. It doesn't seem to be resonating with this man who's a representative of the Pope. They're telling him about the gas chambers,

the column of smoke that comes out of the chimney day and night as Jewish bodies are burnt, children, men, women. It doesn't seem to be landing. And eventually, Werber's fellow escapee says, Catholic priests are being killed there too. And the Monsignor's ears prick up. And now he says, well, you know, tell me more. He said, not the same way. Their bodies arrive. They have already been shot dead, but their bodies are incinerated in Auschwitz. We've seen it, Catholic priests arriving. And in the escapees account, the Monsignor at that point faints on hearing this. And when he comes around, he now says, tell me what I need to do. What should I do? That it's the death of fellow Catholics that finally moves him. He promises

then to get the report to the Vatican. So it takes a long time. And in terms of actually doing anything, it is only after the telegram that Dominic read out at the start by Walter Garrett, a journalist for the Exchange Telegraph Wire Service, which then is published in the Swiss newspapers and goes around the world. It's in the New York Times a few days later. It's only once the report, which they have already seen, is made public that the Pope and Roosevelt actually both make direct diplomatic intervention, as if they are now worried that their own publics know what they know. The Pope writes to the regent, Miklos Horty, who is ruling Hungary, and says, can't bring himself to use the word Jews, by the way. He says, these unfortunate souls,

very telling, these unfortunate souls are being deported, and this distresses the Holy Father, and he pleads with Horty to do something. Even that, actually, I'm not sure. And by the way, the Pope does not make that public. It's still a private communication to Budapest. Roosevelt, through an intermediary, cables Horty and says, and remember, this is after D-Day has happened, right? So the war is, you would think it's almost in its closing chapters, and yet the Holocaust is at its peak at this point. More Jews are being killed now every day than at any other point. He writes to Horty saying, it looks like you're going to be on the losing side of the war, a warning that we will hold accountable anyone who has facilitated this deportation and murder of Jews. And finally,

when he sees that warning, Horthy, clearly fearing a war crimes trial, finally blows the whistle and halts the deportation. And I describe how that's done. There's a power struggle within Hungary's ruling circles. What's fascinating about it is it proves that it's possible, that if these puppet leaders, these vassal states, these occupied nations had acted, they did have the capability to do it. The German Nazis were not on the ground in big enough numbers to do the deportation of Jews unless they had the Hungarian authorities working with them. Horthy says no. And at that point, the deportation halts exactly at the moment when the next group of Jews

were about to board the train, which is the 200,000 Jews of Budapest. They were next, and they were about to be shoved onto those trains, and Horthy holds it. Is that 200,000? Is that basically the number that gets saved? It is. I qualify it because even though Horthy orders the deportation, and even though literally a train on its way to Auschwitz turns around and comes back, saving the lives of those people, after Horthy is gone and deposed, the Arrow Cross, the fascist militia party that then governs Hungary, engage in murdering Jews themselves. There's a famous episode of drowning Jews in the Danube. And that number, of course, was saved from deportation, but eventually were killed. But at the moment they

acted, the Werber-Wetzlar report leads to the saving of 200,000 Jewish lives, which is why I argue that Werber, with Wetzler alongside him, deserves to be ranked alongside Oskar Schindler or Anne Frank or Primo Levi as those stories that define our understanding of the Shoah. It is a towering achievement. Verba himself would always focus on the 437,000 Jews who were deported and killed in a space of 56 days, all of which happened after his report. And therefore, as far as he was concerned, all of whom could have been saved. But we should look in the round and count those 200,000 and regard that as one of the great achievements of this period. Just on the 437,000, the 56 days.

So is it reasonable to say that had the report been completed, had it made its way to Horthy, let's say, had he immediately acted? I mean, people do act. You talk about vassal states. We did a podcast last year as part of our World Cup marathon about Denmark, about the saving of the Danish Jews. I mean, obviously the numbers are so different,

and saving them is much less difficult because you can just go over the straits to Sweden, to neutral Sweden, but it can be done. So do you think, I mean, is it legitimate to say, had history worked out slightly differently, had individual people made different choices, almost half a million people would have survived? Yeah, I think Horthy, by what he did in early July 1944, stopping the deportations proves that they could be stopped. And he could have done it earlier. The Nazis had marched in to Hungary in April 1944, become an occupying army, but they used so few people to actually organize the deportations without the collusion of Hungarian authorities on the ground. I don't think it would

have been possible. And by the way, just showing the report to Horthy, I don't think would have been enough. He had been shown it. I mean, one of the storylines that I find amazing is that there was a ally for Werber Wetzler inside the royal palace, that his daughter-in-law was a sort of dissenter and a copy had been smuggled to her. And she put that in front of her father-in-law and said, look what is happening to the Jews being deported from our country. Terrible thing, he says. I believe it's true.

He agrees with her that it's true. He doesn't dispute the, he doesn't have the incredulity problem. He believes it's true and still does nothing. It's only when his own position is threatened by that Roosevelt cable that says war crimes trials are coming, that he act. So I think the capability was there. It proves that there was competence, if you like, that it was within the scope of those authorities if they had wanted to. And of course, this question comes back again to the allied leaders. You know, there is a debate among historians about would bombing the tracks have made a difference?

Wouldn't they have repaired the tracks within a week or so? My response to that is if 15,000 people are being killed every single day, then a week makes a huge difference. That's tens of thousands of people whose children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren would be in our world and never were. So I think there was scope for much more action than ever happened. And the problem, there were many problems, prejudice and practical problems,

but the one problem that Rudi Verbe himself never really accounted for was the human incapacity to absorb information that is painful, unpalatable, horrific to absorb. And that afflicted, that is not, that's a human thing. There were Jews as well who just could not digest that information. So Jonathan, let's take a break now. And when we come back, perhaps we could look at what the impact of Auschwitz was on Werber himself, who seems to have led a pretty unhappy life. And then just kind of look at the implications of what you're saying there, the impossibility of getting a handle on the scale of the crime that the Holocaust represents. So we'll be back in a few minutes. 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 where we're into the final quarter of this what has admittedly been quite a quite it's quite a bleak story isn't it uh jonathan's no way of of escaping it and it is bleak partly because what really struck me reading your book was that it made me think about

the way in which we tell the story of the holoca So if you think of, I mean, the most famous, I guess, the most popularly famous version of the Holocaust is Schindler's List. And Schindler's List ends with this extraordinary moment of catharsis, which everyone will remember. It's incredibly sort of heartrending and tear jerking, where the people, the descendants are kind of queuing up to honour Schindler, I guess. And there's a sort of feeling, you leave the cinema, obviously haunted, and you've seen this incredibly harrowing story, but it has sort of ended on a reassuring note, if you like. Verber's life does not end on that kind of note, really, does it? Because he is haunted by the by it and he's bitter you know there's no moment of salvation and redemption at the end

am i being unfair or is that no i mean you're not and um i wrestle with this a bit because i and others in rudy's life wanted him to have that moment that you're describing at the end of Schindler's List. And I, in the book, sort of try and get that for him. There was an episode which I was so pleased to discover because I wanted this to have happened in his lifetime. And that is that a man called Georg Klein, who had been in Budapest in 1944 at the very same age as Rudy, he was also 19 at that point, had been shown a copy of the report and had acted on it and had chosen to escape rather than get on the trains to what he was being told was a new life in the East. And he made a point 40 years later, after having, by the way, the same experience I had of seeing Rudolf

Erbar in the film Shoah, and thinks, hang on, that's the person who must have written that report I saw when I was a teenager. By now, he's living as a very eminent cancer specialist scientist in Sweden. And he crosses all the way over to Vancouver in Canada, on the west coast of Canada, about as far, by the way, as you can get from Auschwitz in Europe, to go and meet the man who he believes saved his life. And he makes this journey and sees Werber and says, it's because of you in this report that I was saved. And I'm so grateful. And not just me, but because of the thing we talked about earlier, the 200,000 in Budapest, you say you did something so extraordinary and so wonderful.

And that's the note I tried to end the book on, that Gail Klein's children and great-grandchildren are alive, and so are the descendants of those 200,000, more, I write, than even Rudolf Verbe, who was so brilliant at memorizing the detail, more even than he could count. So I want people to take that away. But when Verbe himself heard that, he couldn't hear it. He just focused on the numbers he didn't save. And I've spoken to other people who've worked with or talked to Holocaust rescuers, and apparently this is a very common trait. The Nicholas Wintons of this world, you know, the British man who is credited with saving some 600 lives, all those people involved

in the Kindertransport, what preoccupied them was the ones left behind. That's what they kept thinking about. And Werber couldn't really think of himself as the hero of the 200,000. Rather, he was the one who had not done enough for the 437,000. Now, he didn't channel that all inward and blame himself. Instead, he was full of livid fury at those who had failed to pass on. His warning, top of his list, was the Hungarian Jewish leadership, Rezu Kastner, who he believed, as actually an Israeli court did find, had sold his soul to the devil by working with the Nazis.

Again, highly contested. Others have a different view, but that's, you know, in a way, another story. But Verbe himself was convinced that he, as well as the allies, as well as other leaders in other places, had had the warning that he and Fred had risked everything to bring out and had not done enough with it. And the result was that Verbe himself became a figure that was, in the words of somebody who lived, you know, a fellow Jewish community member in Vancouver said, you know, we couldn't invite Rudy even to Holocaust memorial events in our town,

because you did not know that he would not descend into, his words, accusations and rage. There was a symposium in Vancouver every year for high school students about the Holocaust. They had a panel of Holocaust survivors. And Rudolf Werber, the ultimate survivor who had seen everything in Auschwitz, was not invited because he was too angry to be a palatable figure for those high school kids. He wouldn't just say, you know, the evil people in this story is Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and everyone else was good, which is sort of what we want. Instead, he said there was culpability all around. But also, Jonathan, I mean, you call this book The Escape Artist, and there's a sense that even after he's escaped Auschwitz, his life

continues to be a process of flight. So he's in communist Czechoslovakia. He defects from there. He goes to England. He goes to Israel. He goes to Canada. He goes to America. And there seems to be a kind of perpetual restlessness. He separates from his wife.

His elder daughter commits suicide. And it's evident that that shadow is never really escaped. I mean, I guess when you've lived through what he lived, I mean, it's just so unimaginable what the impact of it must have been that it must surely have shadowed him right up to the day of his death. his first wife. I think I mentioned when we spoke last time that I managed to track her down and find her just weeks before her death at age 93. And she told me about the marriage together and how terrible it was. It was so acrimonious, the divorce. The years later, she gave me actually a red suitcase full of his letters. And that was the moment when she passed that to me that I thought, okay, I am somehow meant to write this story. But what came through in those letters was tremendous acrimony and bitterness. But age 93, she was able to say, you know,

we were both so damaged. I mean, she was a Holocaust survivor too, in the sense she had been on the run in Slovakia. She'd never been in a camp, but she'd been in hiding. She'd lived on false papers and so on. We were both so damaged. And so no wonder that he was, for her, in her eyes, a terrible husband, an unfaithful husband, and this distrust, this paranoia, which had helped him in Auschwitz because he didn't trust the wrong people, made him impossible to live with, she said. All that said, he did then make a new life in Vancouver.

He married again a second wife who was, and I don't think this is a coincidence, a whole generation younger and from a continent away from the Holocaust. She was an American who, when he met her, was 24 years old, utterly unmarked by the trauma of Europe, as he would have felt it. And he was there on the far west coast of Canada. I think these things are not coincidences. And she described a man who could be playful, who took great pleasure in the very simple things in life that, you know, enjoyed being inside when it was raining, would look outside and say, isn't that wonderful?

Because this is somebody who had been naked in the frozen waste of my Danek or Auschwitz. He could enjoy practical jokes and he would sort of be quite goofy. And she describes a man who somehow was able to find a new life. He was very committed as a scientist, you know, as a biochemist, teaching at the University of British Columbia. And he would be very insistent, oh, you know, Auschwitz and the Holocaust takes up 1% of my time, no more. Nevertheless, I've gone through the papers, files upon files upon files of material on this subject. He would be testifying at war crimes trials. He testified against a notorious Holocaust denier in Canada. He was on the stand for days. When he was ill, finally with a terminal

illness, he said to a friend when the illness had got the better of him, the Gestapo have finally caught up with me. When he was living in England, he drove past Battersea power station, saw the chimneys and said, it reminds me of Auschwitz. Of course he couldn't escape it. That shadow was there all the time. I found in his papers a birthday greeting he had sent to his youngest daughter when she turned 44. And he reminded her that 44 was his lucky number. Why? Because his Auschwitz number was 44070. He thought 44 was his lucky number because that was part of the number he'd had in Auschwitz. So this is a complicated man, you know, in every conceivable way, who both found a new life, and yet at every turn,

Auschwitz was the event which had shaped him. And of course, how could it be any other way? This is a massive question, Jonathan, but do you think part of the reason that he's not so well known is that we expect Holocaust survivors to be martyrs only, to be kind of saintly? And he was too spiky. He's too difficult. He doesn't fit in. We have now, I mean, we can get into this issue of where the Holocaust stands in that kind of moral consciousness as this kind of almost sacred transcendent moment. But he doesn't fit that, does he? view that we are very unfair in what we demand of Holocaust survivors, but I would also say it goes wider of survivors of great traumatic events, that we do endow them with a kind of saintliness, and we want them, therefore, to dispense a kind of consoling, healing wisdom to us,

as if their touch will somehow sanctify us. And, you know, there's very, very few Holocaust survivors left now. The numbers are very dwindling. But when you hear them interviewed on the radio, the interviewer adopts a tone of voice they also have with kind of Dalai Lama or something, you know, this sort of hushed reverence. And they want an uplifting experience.

And I think this is such an unfair demand to make. And Rudy was so aware of it. I found in his papers a letter he wrote to a BBC producer. The BBC producer had invited him to come on a TV documentary. And Rudy says, I must warn you, I am not the cliched Holocaust survivor. I won't be that person for you. I'm going to be spiky and awkward and difficult. And the main way I'm going to be difficult is I'm going to tell you that there is guilt to go around here. And everyone you think is the heroes of this story, and that might be Jewish leaders, but it might be Roosevelt, it might be Churchill. Well, it's not always as simple as that. You know, he was keen and he was very tailored, by the way, I should say this to his audience. When he was in Germany, he absolutely pointed the finger at Germany and Nazis and Hitler and was very clear on it.

But if he was talking to Americans or Brits, he would mention the failures in London and Washington and so on. He was difficult. And I think that's why he wasn't famous. He didn't get the invitation even in Vancouver. But that's also why he was not invited to all the big conferences and elevated into that stature. I think it's really telling that the really very best, in my view, chroniclers of the Holocaust sought him out. They understood how important he was. Claude Lansman puts him as a key witness in the film Shoah. Martin Gilbert spoke to him

often for his book, Auschwitz and the Allies, and other books. The top two or three people got it, but I think other people thought, difficult character, let's steer clear. But Jonathan, to go back to Auschwitz, you have this terrifying description of what the inhabitants of Auschwitz looked like and how, and to Walter, to Rudy, they don't seem human. The living dead, walking skeletons with bowed heads and sunken hollow eyes, non-men whose muscle and flesh had wasted away, who were expiring in plain sight, the breath of life leaving them slowly but inexorably. And I think that is how, perhaps in the imagination, that is how we think of the people who die in Auschwitz,

is as people in a sense who are already dead, who have already passed into a dimension of shadow. It's because Rudy is such a distinct individual. He's so alive. He's not a ghoul. He's not a thing of shadow. He is a living, breathing person. But that, it seems to me, is why your book, I am sure, you say that you want him to rank alongside Anne Frank and Primo Levi, but I'm sure your book will rank alongside Anne Frank's diary and Primo Levi's book as a record of what it was like to be human amid all that suffering, of what it's like to be a living individual amid the six million. Because that is the problem, isn't it? With making sense of the Holocaust, of fathoming the Holocaust, of presenting the Holocaust as a field of study, is how do you

extract individuals from the totality of those millions? I mean, even doing this, Tom, you know, when Jonathan says 15,000 a day, 20,000 a day, you have to do a bit of work. You have to translate it into something concrete. And that's quite difficult to do. And I agree with you. I think, I mean, well, are you conscious of this, Jonathan? Do you think we dehumanize the Holocaust almost by turning it into numbers rather than

countless individuals? But there's no, I mean, that's what's amazing about this book is that by and large, we don't, you know, you go to Auschwitz, you die. That's what it's for. So we don't have records of what it's like, but this gets you as close as it's probably possible to get to the lived experience of all those horrors. Well well you do me in this book great honor by what you've just said there tom i'm honored by what you said there the idea that it might rank alongside those stories uh that that is huge to me and so i'm absorbing that i think the idea of an individual and hearing of a life was very important to me if I was ever going to go anywhere near this subject,

because it's almost the only way you can make it, not just a statistic. I think the idea that Auschwitz, even when it's known, and we all see those polls where it shows that people don't know what it was, et cetera, and that it's passing into not just history, but perhaps ignorance. For the people who do know of it, you know, they know six million died. There was gas chambers. That's it. That's sort of it. What people know, they imagine, yeah, maybe you got off a train, you were gassed.

That's what people know. And actually, the idea that this was a, one holocaust survivor auschwitz survivor described as a metropolis of death it was a place with a society with a black economy with a hierarchy with competing factions with politics in a way i mean that restores something of the reality of it and therefore the humanity of the people who went through it. And, you know, I have been very heartened by people who've said to me, look, I really thought I was quite knowledgeable about this. But now that I've read this, I realized what I didn't know and how much there is to know. I think there's, you know, it is about somehow restoring the dignity to these people who went through this. You know, it is about somehow restoring the dignity to these people who went through this.

You know, even that small fleeting story that you referred to in our earlier conversation, Dominic, about the Czech mother who said, you know, she got off the train. She tells the SS man this, you know, it can't be true, can it, that we're all going to be killed. Just by telling her story, you know, for a moment, she's somebody who died, her children would never, never had any life at all. For a moment, there's a humanity that is restored to that person, not much, because we don't know her name or anything else. So that's the great challenge with this and with atrocities in other periods and other times is that they how do we rescue them from oblivion and the oblivion that comes when they are just a number and he is one person but through him i think we somehow can get a bit more of a grip on the whole thing and in a strange way that's what he always wanted us to do. I mean, that's what's so strange to me about

him is that his whole life, and even after his death, he's still testifying and warning us of what happened in Auschwitz. I mean, what he did as a 17, 18, 19-year-old is carrying on 80 years later. Thank you, Jonathan. So your book, The Escape Artist, can't recommend it highly enough. Thank you all very much for listening. Thank you, Jonathan, for coming on. And we'll be back soon. I hope there's something perhaps

slightly less overpowering and overwhelming. Thanks very much for listening. Bye-bye. Goodbye. Bye-bye. 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. That's restishistorypod.com. 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 ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets