Nazi prisons in their broadest sense are the protagonists of two attractive works with very different profiles. It is already known that the Nazi question and the Second World War are two inexhaustible thematic veins with a sustained popular pull in the publishing field, so the launches have to be well tuned. And this is the case of the works that have recently appeared by two British journalists, The Prisoners of Colditz (Crítica), the work of bestseller Ben Macintyre, where he talks about the other reality that was housed in what is considered the most secure prison of the Third Reich, and The Master of the escape (Planet), signed by Jonathan Freedland, about the escape of the first Jew from Auschwitz.
The book by the British Macintyre (who as a writer of spy works is considered to be on the level of Ian Fleming and John le Carré) is aptly subtitled "Survival and escape from the most impregnable Nazi fortress." Colditz was an impressive fortress managed by the Wermacht -they respected the Geneva Convention-, where the commanders and soldiers of the allied forces with a long history of escapes/escape attempts ended up.
And the thing continued. Descriptions of multiple prisoner escape attempts include the excavation of a 140-meter-long tunnel, known as the Métro after the French metro, which had its own ventilation and telephone system; the attempt to build a working glider to fly under cover of darkness (a plan that never came to fruition because the field was liberated before it could be attempted); and, at the beginning of the book, the attempt to leave the castle disguised with a mustache made of brush bristles and a fake gun made of cardboard.
But there was another Colditz, "not so heroic," explains its author. “The same conflicts and situations from which those officers came were reproduced there, especially of a social, racial and also sexual class type. A class microcosm where there were high commands who had their groups of subordinates as their servants, and in the French collective, cases of anti-Semitism, when the Jewish soldiers were separated”.
At a radically opposite extreme would be the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, the most inhuman face of Nazi barbarism, one of the masterpieces of the so-called final solution, that of the extermination of the Jewish population of occupied Europe. For this, the also British journalist Jonathan Freedland has shaped a book with signs of becoming a best seller. The down payment is already promising, but the escape of the first Jewish prisoner is an excellent reason to talk about the existence of the extermination policy or the passivity and/or incredulity of the allied powers and of the high Jewish officials upon learning of its existence. Of the same.
Based on documents, testimonies or memoirs, The Master of the Escape refers to the Slovak Walter Rosenberg, a very intelligent young man educated in Orthodox Judaism who, when the persecution begins, goes from flight to flight until he finds his bones in Auschwitz. He was 18 years old and there he saw and experienced firsthand what death was like on an industrial scale. Not because it is currently known, it is less horrifying: the arrival of the trains on the ramp/platform of the freight trains with Jewish families unaware of their future, the deceptions, the locks, the crying...
It was then that Rosenberg was clear that his mission was to collect and memorize as much information as possible about what was happening in Auschwitz, escape from there and make it known to the whole world, starting with those responsible and the closest Jewish communities so that they would know that was behind that resettlement policy.
Finally, and narrated with skilful pacing and uncertainty, Rosenberg manages to escape with his partner Alfred Wetzler. He was 19 years old and he was 25. Rosenberg changes his name to Rudolf Vbra and faces the second stage of the mission: together they draft and shape the transcendental Vbra-Wetzler Report, where they explain in detail the machinery of the final solution.
Freedland tells this newspaper that his interest in Rosenberg-Vrba arose when he saw the documentary Shoah by Claude Lanzmann at the age of 19. “The story I saw had a great impact on me and has been with me for these 35 years. In 2016 I took it up again because the Oxford English Dictionary established that the end of the year was “post-truth”, it was the year of Brexit and Trump, we were surrounded by people who were not telling the truth. So in a way this book, this story, mostly it does teach us the importance of truth; Vrba what he did was bring out this truth and try to fight against all the lies on which Auschwitz was built ”.
