The book The master of the escape (Planet) signed by Jonathan Freedland deals with the escape of the first Jew from Auschwitz. A work already qualified as the next bestseller that serves the British journalist and writer to make an outstanding historical overview of those dramatic years, framed by Nazism, the Second World War and, above all and on this occasion, the final solution.
The British writer and journalist uses documents, testimonies or memories to shape a work centered on the Slovak Walter Rosenberg, a very intelligent young man raised in Orthodox Judaism who, when the persecution of his religion begins, goes on the run. until finding his bones in Auschwitz.
What he sees there makes him make the decision of his life: to let the world know what was happening in Auschwitz, a real extermination camp that was operating at an almost industrial level, that is, like a killing machine.
At the age of 18, Rosenberg began to gather information, take notes and, above all, mentally record what he saw and heard there: from the ramp-platform he knew when trains arrived daily, from what origin and with how many Jews piled inside. The same with the crematorium ovens and a host of equally terrifying details.
And he will also memorize a children's atlas with a map of Silesia that he finds in a space in the countryside called Canada, where the belongings and valuables of recently arrived Jewish families are piled up and who theoretically think they are going to shower when in reality they will be gassed
The next step was to flee. For this he had the complicity and help of his camp partner Alfred Wetzer, with whom he finally fled in April 1944. He had arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in June 1942.
Once abroad and with the support of the Jewish council of Slovakia, both give shape in a detailed and as little emotional way as possible to what was called the Vrba-Wetzler Report. Once written, it began to circulate and become known.
His idea is that it would reach the Jewish leaders, the Hungarians in particular, so that they would know what awaited them if they decided to go to Auschwitz, thinking that they were going to be resettled, following the regulations of the Hungarian authorities. With that knowledge they trusted that the families would rebel or at least not give any kind of facility.
But things did not develop as they thought. Resistance and, above all, great disbelief were the first reactions, specifically from the high officials of the Hungarian Jewish community.
With the United States, England and the Vatican, at first everything was an obstacle. Something similar happened with the regent of Hungary, which was not surprising because he was an ally of the Nazis, but subsequent pressure from Roosevelt among other leaders made him change his attitude, and he ordered the deportations leaving Budapest to stop. It can be assured that at least more than 200,000 Hungarian Jews saved their lives thanks to the Vrba and Wezler Report.
It is not surprising that Rosenberg-Vrba made that decision to send this information abroad when he was only 17 years old and watching over his life day by day in Auschwitz, right?
I have asked myself this question many times and in a somewhat deliberate way I mention the age of Walter and Rudi several times in the book, because it is surprising. But at the same time, thanks to that youth, he had that clairvoyance. Later in the book, a young Hungarian Jew appears, Georg Klein, who reads the report and decides to contact his relatives in Budapest to warn them of what is happening, and the older people do not listen to him, they cannot bear that truth. And yet, young people do believe him. This has to do with the age difference: when you are older you have dependents, children, a life, goods, property that you have to defend and therefore lose; and on the other hand, young people have that freedom, they don't have to protect anyone or hide the truth from anyone. And I think that youth is what gave Walter that clairvoyance above all.
He was of Orthodox Jewish background but soon fell away from the faith. In fact, in his identity document as a teenager he put 'none' as religion. What had happened?
'Walter had been raised in an orthodox Judaism environment, and there is a moment when he decides to put all those beliefs that have been instilled in him in the religious environment to the test, and that is that at the age of 13 or 14 he goes to a restaurant in Slovakia and He says that if like a pig lightning from heaven will fall on me right now and I will die, and if I do and it doesn't happen that's because God doesn't exist. He does so and from that moment he decides that God does not exist, and that will be a conviction that will accompany him for almost his entire life. Later in his life there is a change, but that surely coincides with a 16 or 17 year old Walter discovering that science is fundamental to him. He becomes ultra rational at that age, and in fact when he receives that deportation order that Jews have to get on the trains, it seems totally irrational to him, he says that he is a Slovak citizen, I was born and raised here, and his response It is not because it does not have any kind of logic. So this love for the city also makes him distance himself from the faith.
How do you explain that the Report did not have the expected effect at first between allied powers and Jews? Ignorance, disinterest...?
Disbelief, resistance and goings-on from some local Jewish leadership. But along with all this, there is also a fertile broth that somehow facilitates the application of the final solution. I hope it will be clear in my book that the main characters in the story I am telling are Slovaks, and in this sense they were persecuted by Slovaks. Those who put Vrba on a train were Slovaks and not Germans. The Slovak government gleefully deported all those Jews, getting paid for it. Now it is very easy to say that it was Germany but in reality this was a problem common to all of Europe, most of the countries collaborated, with exceptions such as Denmark or Bulgaria. And Germany took advantage. A very clear example of this atmosphere is that in 1938, during the Evian Conference, the question of Jewish refugees was discussed and all the countries present, including the United States and the United Kingdom, said that this was terrible, a disgrace, but that "we are not going to welcome Jews". And that for Hitler was in a way a green light, because he saw that nobody wanted those Jews in their countries. That conference was in July and when the Hungarian leadership decided to stop the deportations of Jews Hungarians to the extermination camps as a result of the Vrba-Wetzler Report managed to save 200,000 Jewish lives.In other words, the Western countries could have prevented the whole situation because the Germans were incapable of doing all this alone, and without the collaboration of the populations premises in Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Hungary would not have been possible.
Once the report was known in Western governments there was hardly any reaction.
The title of his book is "the master of the escape" to which one could add "the uncomfortable survivor".
He was not the typical survivor. He was not a survivor who was called in to do Holocaust reporting because he was an angry survivor. His account was very uncomfortable because it did not fit into the comforting narrative that has prevailed for a long time, that is, the one that always said that the bad guys were Hitler. and the Germans and "we did what we had to do." No. He spoke clearly of the failure of the allies in the face of the final solution that, for example, they did not bomb the railway lines that led the convoys to Birkenau, and of the conduct of the Jewish authorities that did not warn the Jewish population of what was happening . That passivity is the truth.
