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

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Here are some lines from the night of the murder in this book that kept me in the dark until the very end. Unbeknownst to him, Lederer was not the first Auschwitz escapee to bring news of mass executions by gassing. Bone said: “We are thrilled to be working again with the immense talent that is Peter Moffat on this unique and important story. He witnessed this first hand working on the ramp where the trains arrived, overcrowded with Jews destined for annihilation.

These terms would dominate the life of Walter Rosenberg, a Slovakian Jew who along with three others would escape from Auschwitz in 1944. He was dismissed from the fire brigade and lost his protection from deportation because he was caught smoking. He also fills out the story of Vrba’s life after the war, when some of the luck that had sustained him in Auschwitz ran out. Marriage to Gerta produced two daughters but was short-lived because of his volatility and womanising.The details of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the depravity and deceit of the Nazis were hard to read and will remain with me forever I think, but that’s as it should be. On the night of 5 April 1944, Siegfried Lederer, a Czech Jew, escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp wearing an SS uniform provided by SS- Rottenführer Viktor Pestek.

Both Vrba’s wives were still alive and willing to be interviewed about his rich but somewhat tormented postwar life in Czechoslovakia, England and Canada. Almost all the Jews who were deported to the family camp in May 1944 were unaware of Lederer's previous visit to Theresienstadt, and the few who had access to Lederer's reports made no effort to avoid deportation.It was around September 1942, the month when he turned 18, that Rudolf Vrba came to a momentous decision. How this Russian man was able to survive was beyond extraordinary, with all the will power and a lot of luck he with other inmates managed to fool the Nazi and escape…not an easy task. They were not subject to selection upon arrival, were allowed to retain their civilian clothes, and were not forced to shave their heads.