The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World
by Jonathan Freedland
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1:45
Author-read excerpt, Auschwitz slides & brief summary of book’s plot
4K
16
Oct, 2022
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.
61:06
Author and Jake Wallis Simons converse live + audience Q&A
1K
21
Oct, 2022
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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Publications
The New York Times: The Dangers of Willful Ignorance
The Guardian: The astonishing story of how Rudolf Vrba escaped the Nazi camp, and his mission to tell the world about it
The Wall Street Journal: ‘The Escape Artist’ Review: Sounding an Alarm on the Holocaust
The Times: The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland — the memory man of Auschwitz
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