The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World
by Jonathan Freedland
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Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World:
“Only when information is combined with belief does it become knowledge, and only knowledge leads to action.”
“He had had reason before to contemplate this difficult but stubborn fact: that human beings find it almost impossible to conceive of their own death. After all, one of Rudi’s fellow Auschwitz escapees had encountered this phenomenon directly and within months of his escape. In a desperate turn of events, Czesław Mordowicz was caught by the Gestapo in late 1944 and put on a transport that would send him back to Auschwitz. Inside the cattle truck, he told his fellow deportees that he knew what awaited them. ‘Listen,’ he pleaded, ‘you are going to your death.’ Czesław urged the people jammed into the wagon to join him and jump off the moving train. They refused. Instead they began shouting, banging on the doors and calling the German guards. They attacked Mordowicz and beat him so badly, he was all but incapacitated. He never did leap off that train, but ended up back in Birkenau. All because he had given a warning that the warned could not believe and did not want to hear.”
“only when information is combined with belief does it become knowledge. And only knowledge leads to action.”
“Instead, he was doing something much harder and more admirable. He was carrying the losses he had endured, and living all the same.”
“He did not consider himself a hero, if a hero is defined by success in his chosen mission. Perhaps Rudolf Vrba saw himself instead in the tradition of the Jewish prophet, who comes to deliver a warning, only to grieve when that warning is not heeded.”
“Walter’s escape had been built on his initial conviction that facts could save lives, that information would be the weapon with which he would thwart the Nazi plan to eliminate the Jews. Witnessing the fate of the Czech family camp, and its residents’ immovable faith, despite the evidence all around them, that they would somehow be spared, had led him to understand a more complicated truth: that information is necessary, to be sure, but it is never sufficient. Information must also be believed, especially when it comes to mortal threats. On this, if nothing else, he and Yehuda Bauer might eventually have found common ground: only when information is combined with belief does it become knowledge. And only knowledge leads to action. The French-Jewish philosopher Raymond Aron would say, when asked about the Holocaust, ‘I knew, but I didn’t believe it. And because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.”
“Rudi knew that he was refusing to fit what he called ‘the survivor clichés manufactured for the taste of a certain type of public’: he would offer no uplifting aphorisms, reassuring his audience that, ultimately, human beings were good. He was unforgiving and he was angry.”
“Information is necessary, to be sure, but it is never sufficient. Information must also be believed.”
“It's much easier to slaughter lambs than hunt deer”
“He soon devised a method, which worked like a child’s memory game. Each day he would say to himself everything he already knew, before adding whatever new nugget of information he had acquired that day.”
“only when information is combined with belief does it become knowledge. And only knowledge leads to action. The French-Jewish philosopher Raymond Aron would say, when asked about the Holocaust, ‘I knew, but I didn’t believe it. And because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.’ All this Rudolf Vrba understood, and yet he was not ground down by it.”
“With no irony, Rudi said, ‘Don’t worry. I know another way out.”
“Christie challenged Vrba on his conviction that, since he had seen thousands enter the gas chambers, they had all been killed. How could he be so sure? ‘A quarter million people go in and I never saw one civilian come out,’ Rudi replied. ‘So it is possible that they are still there, or that there is a tunnel and they are now in China; otherwise they were gassed.”
“Walter saw it with new clarity. The factory of death that the Nazis had constructed in this accursed place depended on one cardinal principle: that the people who came to Auschwitz did not know where they were going or for what purpose. That was the premise on which the entire system was built.”
“But still, there were sometimes a thousand or more people on that platform, outnumbering the Nazis by perhaps ten to one.”
“Only when information is combined with belief does it become knowledge. And only knowledge leads to action.”
“Even at Yad Vashem, the country’s official Holocaust archive, museum and memorial in Jerusalem, the Auschwitz Report was filed away without the names of its authors. When historians referred to the report, they tended to speak of ‘two young escapees’ or ‘two Slovak escapees’ as if the identities of the men who had performed this remarkable deed were incidental. What might explain this relative lack of recognition? It certainly did not help Wetzler that he was out of sight of western writers and historians and, therefore, mostly out of mind. As for Rudi, while he was accessible, and a model interviewee, he was not an easy sell in Israel or in the mainstream Jewish diaspora. Those audiences would have thrilled to hear the story of his escape and his mission to tell the world of Auschwitz, but he never left it at that. He would not serve up a morally comfortable narrative in which the only villains were the Nazis. Instead he always insisted on hitting out at Kasztner and the Hungarian Jewish leadership, as well as the Jewish council in Slovakia. He faulted them for failing to pass on his report and, in the Slovak case, for compiling the lists that had put him on a deportation train in the first place.”
“In other words, the Zionist movement, like every other, produced both saints and sinners while under the Nazi jackboot. The human responses to the horror of the Third Reich were varied and seldom ran on ideological lines.”
“On 3 July, the New York Times ran a story from its correspondent in Geneva, headlined ‘Inquiry Confirms Nazi Death Camps’,”
“Starvation rations, filth, hard labour and constant, casual violence: he had learned to endure all those, to let his body absorb the blows. But now it was his soul that was taking a beating.”
“heroism of the Czech communists and the suffering”
“Whether Kasztner truly believed that his negotiations with the SS might eventually save the Jews of Hungary, or whether he did the Nazis’ bidding solely to preserve the friends, relatives and ‘prominents’ he had handpicked for rescue – abandoning the many to save the few – the result was the same.”
“Walter concluded that even incontrovertible knowledge of one’s fate was not enough. If people were to act, there had to be a possibility, even a slim one, of escaping that fate. Otherwise it was easier to deny what was right in front of you than to confront the reality of your own imminent destruction.”
“There could be no such thing, because no man would ever be sacrificing himself alone. The inmates were bound by a sense of responsibility to each other. They were not just prisoners; they were hostages.”
“Between 1942 and 1944, an estimated six tons of dental gold were deposited in the vaults of the Reichsbank.”
“That meant the prisoners pulling the decomposed corpses out of the ground with their bare hands. At gunpoint they were made to stack them in ditches, then set them alight, so that they burned in the open air. Afterwards, thanks to the heavy grinding machine, all that was left was ash and fragments of bone. Those were scooped up and poured into rivers or dumped in the nearby marshes, where they might offer no incriminating clue. The rest were used to fertilise the fields and surrounding farmland. Even when reduced to ash and dust, the Jews would be compelled to serve the Reich.”
“that information is necessary, to be sure, but it is never sufficient. Information must also be believed, especially when it comes to mortal threats. On this, if nothing else, he and Yehuda Bauer might eventually have found common ground: only when information is combined with belief does it become knowledge. And only knowledge leads to action.”
“It was also the story of how history can change a life, even down the generations; how the difference between truth and lies can be the difference between life and death; and how people can refuse to believe in the possibility of their own imminent destruction, even, perhaps especially, when that destruction is certain.”
“would”
