The Man Who Escaped Auschwitz
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 28 June 2022
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In April 1944 nineteen-year-old Rudolf Vrba and fellow inmate, Fred Wetzler broke out of Auschwitz. Under electrified fences and past armed watchtowers, evading thousands of SS men and slavering dogs, they trekked across marshlands, mountains and rivers to freedom. Vrba's mission: to reveal to the world the truth of the Holocaust.
Celebrated journalist and broadcaster Jonathan Freedland joins Dan on the podcast to tell this astonishing story which can be found in his new book 'The Escape Artist'.
This episode does contain descriptions that some listeners may find distressing.
Produced by Mariana Des Forges
Mixed and Mastered by Dougal Patmore
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome everyone to Dance Know's History It. We return to the Holocaust as we must and |
| 0:06.5 | as we do a lot on this podcast. There's another extraordinary history that's just been written |
| 0:11.3 | this time by the very, very great guardian journalist Jonathan Friedland, he's a broadcaster, |
| 0:16.6 | he's a comment writer, he's a fictional author, he's extraordinarily talented. And he has |
| 0:21.0 | come across a story that even after years of making this podcast and hearing so many extraordinary |
| 0:26.8 | stories of survival from Auschwitz and survival through the horrors of the Holocaust, this one shocked me. |
| 0:32.9 | It's called the Escape Artist. It's about Rudolf Werber, who's a teenager, his teenage boy who |
| 0:37.5 | went to Auschwitz, he survived, he almost died of typhus, he didn't, he survived, and he spent |
| 0:44.0 | a huge amount of time at Auschwitz and I got to know it better than anybody else, working in so |
| 0:49.1 | many of its different compartments of that gigantic murder factory. He managed to escape, he managed |
| 0:55.6 | to escape and tell the world, bringing the first report from Auschwitz to the outside world. |
| 1:02.4 | Churchill got a whole of his report, Roosevelt and others. It did have an impact on the Holocaust, |
| 1:08.9 | on the course of the war, not as much as you'd have liked, but it did have as you will hear. |
| 1:13.6 | It's a very, very special story indeed and we've got one of the best telling it. So here is |
| 1:18.6 | Jonathan Friedland talking all about the Escape Artist in joy. |
| 1:28.4 | Jonathan, thank you for coming on this podcast. It's an absolute pleasure to end to be with you. |
| 1:34.0 | I've got broadcast royalty here and I'm very, very excited, but also you bring me, you bring me |
| 1:39.1 | quite the tale, just me think you've heard it all. The Holocaust just keeps providing these |
| 1:43.8 | unbelievable tales and this is another one. Each time you think that surely nothing could be |
| 1:49.9 | more dramatic and remarkable than this. I mean, tell me about Rudolf Werber. |
| 1:54.4 | So Rudolf Werber is the first and one of only four Jews who ever escaped or broke out of Auschwitz |
| 2:02.6 | and he did it to warn the world. He did it when he was 19 years old. He and Fred Vetzler, two prisoners |
... |
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