The Man Who Escaped from Auschwitz to Warn the World

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2022

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rudolf Vrba was sent to Auschwitz at the age of seventeen, and, because he was young and in good health, he was not killed immediately but put to labor in the camp. Vrba (originally named Walter Rosenberg) quickly discovered that the scale of the killing was greater than anyone on the outside knew or could imagine, and Jewish communities were being deported without understanding their fate. Jonathan Freedland chronicles Vrba’s story in his new book, “The Escape Artist.” The young Vrba had a “crucial realization, which is [that] the only way this machine is going to be stopped—this death machine—is if somebody gets the word out,” Freedland told David Remnick. Freedland recounts how, against terrible odds, Vrba managed to escape the camp, and provided direct testimony of the Holocaust that reached Allied governments. This interview was recorded at a live event at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:11.2	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:15.0	In 1986, I went to see Shoah, Claude Lonsman's film about the Holocaust.
0:22.8	And to this day, I'm pretty certain that it's not only a masterwork, but the greatest achievement in documentary film. Lansman got
0:28.5	remarkable interviews, an SS officer who was at Treblinka, a barber at the same camp, a Polish railway
0:35.8	worker who, under duressress helped drive the locomotive
0:39.0	pulling boxcars filled with Jews to the death camps. And then there was Rudolph Verba. Verba was
0:46.9	sent to Auschwitz when he was just 17 years old. And when he appears in the documentary show,
0:52.4	Verba is still in middle age. He's immensely alive.
0:55.1	He's handsome, oddly cheerful, and absolutely unwilling to talk in cliche.
1:00.5	He told his story with startling clarity, how despite the odds, he had decided to escape and tell the world of the horrors of Auschwitz.
1:10.3	This astonishing story is told in a new biography by the British journalist Jonathan Friedland.
1:16.6	Its title is The Escape Artist, and I spoke with Friedland at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.
1:25.8	I'd like to know to begin how you found your story and why you found it to be so essential that you were going to give all your time to it for a while.
1:36.9	The answer comes almost in two parts about when did it come to me as a subject.
1:41.0	On one level, it came to me age 19, which is relevant because the man
1:45.1	we're talking about is Rudolf Verber, and he escaped from Auschwitz when he was 19. I was 19,
1:51.0	and I was in a room like this one, a darkened auditorium, a movie theatre in London, to see the film
1:57.6	Schoer, Claude Lansman's epic nine and a half hour film about the shower.
2:03.6	And then suddenly, onto the screen, explodes this figure, who is utterly unlike all the others.
2:10.3	He is charismatic. He's handsome. He's wearing this tan leather coat. He could be Al Pacino in Scarface. I mean, he exudes charisma. And immediately in the cinema, I sort of looked up and who's that? You know, I want to know more about him. And almost as an aside, Lansman just mentions that this man escaped from Auschwitz. And even though I was 19, I was old enough to know then
2:36.1	that Jews just didn't escape from Auschwitz.
	...

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