The Escape Artist

The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

The astonishing, forgotten story of the hero who escaped from Auschwitz to reveal the truth of the Holocaust.

April 1944. Nineteen-year-old Rudolf Vrba and fellow inmate Fred Wetzler became two of the very first Jews to successfully escape Auschwitz. Evading the thousands of SS men hunting them, Vrba and Wetzler made the perilous journey on foot across Nazi-occupied Poland.

Their mission: to reveal to the world the truth of the Holocaust.
Vrba’s unique testimony would save some 200,000 lives.

But he kept on running – from his past, from his home country, his adopted country, even from his own name. Now, at last, Rudolf Vrba’s heroism can be known.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist and former foreign correspondent. He was named Columnist of the Year in 2002, Commentator of the Year in 2016 and won an Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2014. He is the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s contemporary history series, The Long View, and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.

He is the author of 11 books, two of them non-fiction, including his first book, the award-winning Bring Home the Revolution.

He has written nine thrillers under the name Sam Bourne, including The Righteous Men which was a #1 Sunday Times bestseller and has sold over 2 million copies worldwide.