The Escape Artist
By Jonathan Freedland
- Genre
- History, Society & Current Affairs
- Publisher
- John Murray (Hachette UK)
- Publication year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 9781529369045
The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World is a work of history by the journalist Jonathan Freedland, published by John Murray in June 2022. It tells the story of the Auschwitz escapee Rudolf Vrba. It won the National Jewish Book Award and was a Baillie Gifford Prize...
In 1944 a young Slovak Jew named Rudolf Vrba did what almost no one else managed: he escaped from Auschwitz, and he did it to warn the world. Jonathan Freedland's The Escape Artist tells Vrba's astonishing story - the meticulous planning, the flight, and the detailed report he produced documenting the machinery of mass murder - and then confronts the harder question of why his warning was so often ignored or suppressed. Freedland, a Guardian columnist, writes with the pace of a thriller and the care of a historian, restoring a figure history nearly forgot. intendle recommends it as an unforgettable act of witness, gripping and morally urgent. Winner of the National Jewish Book Award and shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, it is both a survival epic and a study of how the world responds to unbearable truth. A story that should be as famous as any from the Holocaust, told at last with the power it deserves.