The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

by Jonathan Freedland
4.38 (20K)  •  2022

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Author-read excerpt, Auschwitz slides & brief summary of book’s plot
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Spoiler: The author reads a short excerpt from his book that explains the hero’s thinking as he made the decision to escape from the Nazis. Over slides that show the layout of Auschwitz and the complexity of escaping, he explains that Walter Rosenberg (a/k/a Rudolf Vrba) not only escaped from the death camp as a teenager but also wrote a report about Auschwitz that reached Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Pope, and saved an estimated 200,000 lives.
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Spoiler: Conversing with Jake Wallis Simons, the author discusses the exhilarating but laborious process of writing the book, saying he did not allow himself to imagine or even slightly fictionalize anything, that due to the trend of Holocaust-deniers he wanted to be more rigorous than ever about being able to document every word. Freedland talks about how his subject, Walter Rosenberg (a/k/a Rudolf Vrba), was in Auschwitz for two years, an unusually long time that gave him a deep and panoramic knowledge of the place.

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