“Escape From Auschwitz” - with Jonathan Freedland

Jonathan Freedland, the guest in Episode 6 of New Lines magazine’s “Wider Angle” podcast, is a Guardian columnist, podcast broadcaster and presenter at BBC Radio 4. He is a past winner of an Orwell Prize for journalism and the author of 12 books. The latest one, “The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World,” was the basis of the conversation with Riada Asimovic Akyol.
Rudolf Vrba, the main character in Freedland’s book, along with companion Fred Wetzler, were the first Jewish prisoners who successfully escaped Auschwitz. Through descriptions of the childhood and family life of Walter Rosenberg, Vrba’s name before he changed it later in life, Freedland also depicts the expanding antisemitism in Europe in the late 1930s. As anti-Jewish propaganda grew more prevalent in Rosenberg’s homeland of Slovakia and elsewhere, grisly policies followed.
Rosenberg was transported to Auschwitz in June 1942, where he soon learned that “death was all around.” Freedland adds how a 17-year-old Rosenberg then became even more determined to get out of Auschwitz - to tell the world and at the time “currently ignorant” Jews of Europe the truth, to warn them about it. But after Rosenberg’s brilliant, meticulously planned and incredibly difficult escape from Auschwitz on April 10, 1944, with his companion Wetzler, he soon became greatly disappointed.
It was only later that he learned that “the rest of the world was not nearly as ignorant” as he and Fred had thought - like the leading politicians in London or Washington, for example. Yet, for their own different war-related reasons, they did not act to save the Jews. Freedland asserts that the fact that the “Vrba-Wetzler report” ended up preventing the deportation of close to 200,000 of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz makes Vrba and Wetzler “towering figures of the Shoah period.” He adds in the podcast that “the story of Rudolf Vrba deserves to rank alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler, Primo Levi, as the epic stories that define our understanding of the Holocaust.”
Finally, Freedland explains the lack of recognition for Vrba. He says in the podcast: “Something now felt to me the right time to tell Rudolf Vrba’s story. There was something about the passage of a lifetime that made me feel there would be people ready to hear it. Because a lot of people were not ready to hear what Vrba said, because he was too angry. I think these huge episodes in human history are, they sort of defy gravity, in the sense that the deeper you go into them, the deeper they become. I don’t think you ever touch the bottom.”
“Wider Angle” is produced and hosted by Riada Asimovic Akyol.

[@davidvalensi8616]

Read Vrba's book "This I cannot forgive". He wasn't popular because he not only alerted the world to the holocaust, he pointed out the people who enabled the holocaust by their inaction.

[@chicdambach9480]

Exceptional story. We must pay attention.

[@nickpeim]

Vrba was exceptional although clearly more wounded than he let on. His book is the strongest challenge to collective ethical understandings today.

[@shawnjames8011]

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[@shawnjames8011]

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[@shawnjames8011]

Yes the world was ready. Yes purping add L. fuel yet don't touch unless vcomfotable thats all.PF W A LL

[@shawnjames8011]

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[@shawnjames8011]

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