Jonathan Freedland's "The Escape Artist"

Journalist and broadcaster Jonathan Freedland is a weekly columnist for the Guardian, where he edits the paper’s op-ed pages and chairs its Editorial Board. He was previously the Guardian’s Washington correspondent. In 2014 he won the George Orwell Prize for Journalism.

Freedland applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, and reported the following:

The ninety ninth page of The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World contains what might be one of the most harrowing passages of the book: a description of the mechanics of the death camp, specifically the process of ‘selection’, whereby the Nazis would assess a trainload of Jewish arrivals, deciding who would live and who would die. Those selected to live – albeit as prisoners, forced to do slave labour - would be sent to the right. Those selected to be murdered immediately, in gas chambers, would be sent to the left.

A reader who opened the book at that page could - very nearly - have a misleading impression of the book. They might think they are reading a general account of Auschwitz, albeit one written more directly and – I hope – engagingly than a regular history book. Only in the final lines of page 99 is there a hint of something else, with an appearance of the book’s central character: the Escape Artist himself, Rudolf Vrba, who at that time, in 1943, went by the name he was born with, Walter Rosenberg.

Walter is there, at the foot of the page, because he was an eye-witness to those events: a prisoner at the camp, tasked with unloading the cattle cars, he would be standing on the railway platform as the ‘selections’ unfolded, night after night. Indeed, it was that experience, which very nearly broke him, that prompted the decision that would change his life – and would lead to the saving of 200,000 lives.

For Walter realised that the Nazis were able to carry out their plan to eradicate the Jews of Europe in part because their victims had no idea what lay in store for them. The Jewish arrivals had been lied to at every stage of their journey to Auschwitz, told they were being ‘resettled’, to start new lives in the east. That’s why they lined up in relatively orderly fashion: because they were utterly ignorant of their fate. The teenage Walter decided someone had to escape and get word to the remaining Jews – and the world – of what Auschwitz meant. And he decided that person should be him. What’s more, he actually pulled it off, in what has to be the most extraordinary escape story of the second world war, a story whose pivotal moment may well be said to come on page 99 of this book.

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