The Escape Artist

The astonishing, forgotten story of the hero who escaped from Auschwitz to reveal the truth of the Holocaust. In April 1944, a teenager named Rudolf Vrba was planning a daring and unprecedented escape from Auschwitz. After hiding in a pile of timber planks for three days while 3,000 SS men and their bloodhounds searched for him, Vrba and his fellow escapee Fred Wetzler would eventually cross Nazi-occupied Poland on foot, as penniless fugitives. Their mission: to tell the world the truth of the Final Solution. Vrba would produce from memory a breathtaking report of more than thirty pages revealing the true nature and scale of Auschwitz—a report that would find its way to Roosevelt, Churchill and the Pope, eventually saving over 200,000 Jewish lives. A thrilling history with enormous historical implications, The Escape Artist is the extraordinary story of a complex man who would seek escape again and again: first from Auschwitz, then from his past, even from his own name. In telling his story, Jonathan Freedland—the journalist, broadcaster and acclaimed, multi-million copy selling author of the Sam Bourne novels—ensures that Rudolf Vrba's heroic mission will also escape oblivion.