The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

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The escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, fled over one hundred miles to be the first to give the graphic and detailed descriptions of the atrocities of Auschwitz. After the Sudetenland was annexed to Germany in 1938, he moved to Plzeň and worked manual jobs, including agricultural work and a stint in a kaolin factory. In 1944, Walter Rosenberg (later known as Rudolf Vrba) and Alfréd Wetzler became the first Jewish prisoners to escape from Auschwitz. Other factors helped too: fitness, intelligence, adaptability, usefulness about the camp, sturdy footwear. While it did not lead to direct action by America or Great Britain, it was responsible for saving 200,000 Hungarian Jews.

Decades later, he would notice a waiter in a New York restaurant with a number tattooed on his arm and instantly tells him he must be a Jew from Będzin in Poland who had been sent to Auschwitz in the summer of 1943.After Werner died of his injuries, Pestek was discovered by partisans who spared his life despite the SS killings in the village.

Jonathan Freedland’s gripping book sets out to bring him to prominence as a name to rank with Levi, Anne Frank and Oskar Schindler. Hulda, her mother Gisela and daughter Ilse, all born into a Viennese Jewish family, were caught up in the tragedy of Hitler's Europe. Leo Holzer, the leader of the ghetto fire brigade—a hotbed of resistance [note 2]—heard about Lederer's resistance activities and postponed his deportation by recruiting him into the fire brigade.He told Pestek he was wealthy and that his contacts in the underground would help Pestek and Neumann. Josef Neumann said he had been approached by an unknown SS man—probably Pestek—with an offer of escape. Faltys demanded an exorbitant fee but offered a discount if they could smuggle another woman out of Auschwitz. Viktor Pestek [ cs, de] ( ( 1924-04-18)18 April 1924 – ( 1944-10-08)8 October 1944) was born in Czernowitz, Bukovina, then part of Romania, to a devoutly Catholic ethnic German family.

This many-layered mystery grabs on with its fast-paced plot, caper-ish events, and breezy narrative style.

He was arrested a third time and imprisoned with other political prisoners at the Small Fortress of Theresienstadt. It was 2004, and a cache of letters was found when our parents house was cleared in preparation for sale. Kárný concludes that the conflicting accounts make it impossible to know what happened, and he is convinced Lederer's account is not accurate. All this meant that the Vrba-Wetzler report, completed at the end of April 1944, provided a far more detailed picture of the Holocaust than the rumours and more fragmentary accounts that had emerged before.