https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/26/auschwitz-studies/
A review of The Escape Artist: the Man Who Broke out of Auschwitz to Warn the World,
by Jonathan Freedland, (HarperCollins, 400 pages, $28.99).
The murder of Jews began on December 8, 1941, one day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The German National Socialists herded victims into vans, locked the doors, then fed in the deadly exhaust fumes. In four months, the Nazis killed 50,000 Jews that way, but as author Jonathan Freedland explains, the killers didn’t want gas chambers on wheels.
They built “fixed purpose-built camps,” such as Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz, a former Polish army barracks near the village of Oswiecim in Upper Silesia. The remote location and proximity to railway lines made it ideal for “the method of murder by gas.” Walter Rosenberg, also known as Rudi Vrba, was the first Jew to break out of the place. The Escape Artist: the Man Who Broke out of Auschwitz to Warn the World is based on his account.
Walter hailed from Slovakia, where “the state religion of the infant republic was Nazism, albeit in a Slovak denomination.” Since Walter met the legal definition of a Jew, his high-school education was terminated. To prevent Jews from studying at home, they were ordered to hand in all textbooks.
The regime of Father Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest, also banned Jews from government jobs, restricted them from the professions and later banned Jews from owning cars, radios, and even sports equipment. Walter landed on a list for deportation and “resettlement” which took him to Majdanek and then Auschwitz, also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau.
There he became “a witness to and target of a program of industrialized continent-wide murder” that “aimed both to eradicate an entire people and turn a profit for the murderers.”
Among the camp’s living dead, known as Muselmanner, Walter spots engineers and managers of the site’s proprietor, the German industrial conglomerate I.G. Farben.