{"id":39700,"date":"2022-10-07T01:41:41","date_gmt":"2022-10-07T08:41:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=39700"},"modified":"2022-10-05T12:52:31","modified_gmt":"2022-10-05T19:52:31","slug":"the-repackaging-of-a-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2022\/10\/07\/the-repackaging-of-a-hero\/","title":{"rendered":"The repackaging of a hero"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anyone who knows more than a little bit about Holocaust hero Rudolf Vrba \u2013 a Vancouverite for 31 years \u2013 will approach Jonathan Freedland\u2019s The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World\u00a0<\/em>(London, UK: John Murray, 2022) with delight and apprehension.<\/p>\n

Will this Guardian<\/em> journalist and thriller writer take the high road, encouraging everyone to seek out Vrba\u2019s own fascinating, still-in-print memoir? Or will he be more like Elvis swinging his hips, simulating Black-style music, because, hey, most people won\u2019t know the difference?<\/p>\n

Rudolf Vrba\u2019s name is nowhere to be found on the cover. At the top of the jacket is the subtitle. At the bottom, Freedland\u2019s name. The main title, front and centre, implies 19-year-old Vrba was Houdini-like but, as Freedland well knows, Vrba and his co-escapee Alfred Wetzler took advantage of an escape plan and a hideout conceived and built by others.<\/p>\n

The pair\u2019s report on Auschwitz was by far Vrba\u2019s greater achievement \u2013 exposing the vast scale of murder at Auschwitz to the world-at-large, convincing everyone who read it. The pair is now credited with saving 200,000 lives.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

As someone who knew Vrba, I am sympathetic to Freedland\u2019s undertaking. How do we get more people, including academics and even Jewish community members, to celebrate one of the greatest heroes of the 20th century?<\/p>\n

Thankfully, The Escape Artist <\/em>is clear and precise storytelling. With access to Vrba\u2019s archival materials in New York\u2019s Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library and input from both of Vrba\u2019s wives, Freedland has also been able to add a good deal of fresh information to the public record.<\/p>\n

It will be enlightening for most readers to learn that four other men actually planned and built Vrba\u2019s getaway hideout (where Vrba and his cohort Wetzler hid for three days). This seldom-cited quartet tested it for real, escaping for several days before being caught and tortured, but not killed.<\/p>\n

Vrba\u2019s own narrative \u2013 first entitled I Cannot Forgive<\/em> and later changed to I Escaped From Auschwitz<\/em> \u2013 omitted crediting the extreme courage of these men. Without them, Vrba would never have reached Slovakia and co-written the Vrba-Wetzler Report, intended to forewarn 800,000 Jews of Hungary not to get on those trains. From Freedland, not from Vrba, we also learn how one of the tortured members of that quartet was able to assure Vrba that he and his escapees had not divulged their undiscovered hideout in the \u201cMexico\u201d section of the camp.<\/p>\n

\u201cMexico\u201d was so-named, Freedland tells us, because poor souls marooned in the construction zone with makeshift shelters were not given clothes; consequently, naked prisoners had to drape themselves in blankets and other prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau thought they looked like New Mexico Indians.<\/p>\n

Vrba did make clear, however, that in order to travel over land through hostile territory for a grueling 14 days, he and Wetzler had followed explicit directives that Vrba had received from a Russian prisoner named Dimitri Volkov. Hence, it was Volkov who was the master of escapology; Vrba was his disciple.<\/p>\n

\"image<\/a>For virtually all of the people on the planet who have not sought out the two volumes of fascinating, self-published memoirs by Vrba\u2019s first wife, Gerta, The Escape Artist <\/em>will be welcomed for divulging details of Vrba\u2019s first marriage. Gerta had to take her leave, penniless, with their two daughters, to escape from a philandering and distrustful husband who was clearly still in recovery after almost two years in Auschwitz.<\/p>\n

The extent to which both his daughters felt estranged from him is touched upon. We also learn more about his eldest daughter Helena\u2019s apparent suicide in Papua New Guinea in 1982 (an overdose of chloroquine in response to her love affair with a married man who left her) after she had all but severed ties with her father three years earlier.<\/p>\n

As well:<\/p>\n