"The Escape Artist," Jonathan Freedland's compelling work of narrative nonfiction, tells the story of Walter Rosenberg, the first Jewish person to escape from Auschwitz. The book is divided, roughly, between what happens in Auschwitz and what happens afterward.
Rosenberg was a Slovakian Jew, arrested by the Nazis not once but twice (he escaped the first time), packed onto a train with thousands of other Jewish people and hauled off to the concentration camp Majdanek in Poland. He was there long enough to catch a last, poignant glimpse of his brother Sammy before being transferred to Auschwitz.
We know about Auschwitz. We know what happened there. But Freedland, with his strong, clear prose and vivid details, makes us feel it, and the first half of this book is not an easy read. The chillingly efficient mass murder of thousands of people is harrowing enough, but Freedland tells us stories of individual evils as well that are almost harder to take.
His matter-of-fact tone makes it bearable for us to continue to read. Here are the almost casual brutalities of the SS men — playing football with the head of a dead prisoner, shoveling the dying onto trucks along with the dead and hauling them away to be burned, punishing a rabbi by dunking his face into raw sewage and then shooting him, opening a porthole in a gas chamber filled with screaming people in order to spit on them and then closing it again.
And here is mass murder, growing more and more efficient, with chuckling SS guards handing a line of docile prisoners towels and soap as though they are going to be bathed and not killed.
It was that docility that tormented Rosenberg. If the Jews only knew what they were lining up for, he believed, they would not go quietly. If the world knew what was happening here, leaders would rise up to stop it. It is excruciating to read that he was mostly wrong on both counts.
During his two years in Auschwitz, from age 17 to 19, Rosenberg vowed to escape and alert the world, and so he paid close attention, committing everything he could to memory — not just the layout of the camps and its railroads, but the number of Jews on each train car, the number of trains, the number of people herded into the gas chambers and incinerated, the tattooed numbers on prisoners' arms and what they meant.
When the Nazis began working on a new, more efficient railroad that would shuttle prisoners directly to the gas chambers, he and fellow prisoner Fred Wetzler made a plan. They hid for three days under a woodpile — three being the magic number of days the Nazis searched the camp for missing prisoners — and then they crawled out and staggered miles through the snow to freedom.
