Just 19 years old, Jonathan Freeland He went to the London cinema with his father to watch the 1985 documentary ‘Shoah’, which he directed. Claude LanzmanIt lasts about ten hours, bringing together first-person testimonies of the victims, witnesses, and executioners of the murder of Jews by the Nazis during World War II.
It was a strange experience for Freedland to see an endless line of gray old people who had suffered so much. But there was one character that caught his attention. He was full of charisma and, as he recalled, bore a certain resemblance to Al Pacino from ‘Scarface’. He wore a leather jacket, had thick, dark, shiny hair, and spoke English, oddly enough, when everyone else in the movie spoke Polish, Russian, or German. More than just a number from the past, It was as if he was an up-to-date, dynamic person who announced in passing that he had escaped from Auschwitz.
The documentary didn’t really concern a fact that seemed like such a big deal for a 19-year-old. It was almost impossible for a Jewish prisoner to escape from Auschwitz, almost no one escaped. And since Freedland knew he was going to investigate his story, it was only a matter of time.
Now, after writing a column for ‘The Guardian’ and being a regular for ‘The New York Times’, the author has found enough strength to write ‘The Master of Fugue’, a book in which he reviews the history of the Fugue. man in history rudi vrba.
Q. Why did you decide to write this book now?
r. I’ve been thinking about doing this for 40 years, and after realizing that we’re in a world surrounded by lies, with obvious examples like the Brexit campaign and the Trump campaign in 2016, I thought Rudi risked everything to reveal the truth. Beneath a mountain of lies His example struck me as a definitive case against post-truth and “fake news.”
Who was Q. Rudi Vrba (or Walter Rosenberg)?
r. Rudolf Vrba was an extraordinary man, born nearly 100 years ago in 1924 as Walter Rosenberg (name changed after his escape). He grew up in Slovakia and was a highly intelligent boy, gifted with language and science. But the most important thing that set him apart from the others was his refusal to do so as a Jew when asked to come by a certain date to be deported to the East. He found the order “stupid” in his own words. And so began the first of a long string of leaks. That’s why I named the book the ‘Master of Fugue’ because he was a life-long escapee from a series of truths, refusing to obey any orders that restricted his freedom or threatened his life. After being arrested and imprisoned in Auschwitz, Rudi realizes what this place really is. And he’s planning something crazy: to escape from the camp and tell the world what happened there, so that the foreign powers can mobilize and the Jews revolt. It’s one of those situations that escapes the cause a bit.
Q. Where did you find the strength to try something like this?
r. I think he had the urge to be free first, something that defined Rudi from the very beginning. Even as a child, he longed to be free. And this caused him to reject any instruction in any regime, in any country, that would restrict his freedom. But he also had the intuition that one of the Nazis’ most important weapons was deception. They lied to their victims so that they would get on the trains that would take them to their deaths calmly and orderly. They believed they were starting a new life in the East, because that’s what they were told. And this order and calm was crucial to the Nazis and their methods of mass murder. The assembly line of death could not function without it. Rudi realized that the only way to throw sand in the cogs of that killing machine was to break this deception and end the ignorance of the Jews in Europe so that they would finally know their fate. I think both his insight and his age, along with his sheer physical prowess and tremendous intelligence, played a big part. Not to mention his incredible memory that allowed him to store death data in his head.
Q. After the incredible escape, so well described in the book, Vrba and his escape partner Alfred Wetzler wrote a report denouncing the Nazi Holocaust. Under what conditions did they do it?
r. The survivors reached the small Jewish community in Slovakia and dictated to the Jewish leaders all the facts they had witnessed in the basement of a Jewish nursing home in the city of Zilina. A 32-page report came out.
Q. How did you start porting this at a time when there were no social networks? It is almost inconceivable that it did not create an international turmoil today.
r. The report could not be sent by pressing a button, as will be done today. Each copy had to be hand typed and then smuggled into Nazi-occupied Europe, which was quite a feat. It was secretly passed down from hand to hand and across borders by resistance activists and diplomats, until it finally reached the desks of Churchill in London, Roosevelt in Washington, and the Pope in Rome.
Q. There is a very dark part in this story about the Jews who were aware of the report (like the case of the Jewish leader Kasztner in Hungary) and preferred to save an elite group rather than warn the majority. massacre of thousands of people. How could such a thing happen?
r. Part of the explanation is simple disbelief. Kasztner had colleagues in Budapest who could not believe what they were told: they assumed the report was, as one put it, a figment of the fiery imagination of two hasty youths. However, Kasztner is said to have other reasons for not publishing the report. Some say he didn’t publish the report because he didn’t want to jeopardize the negotiations he was personally involved in with the Nazis to save Hungary’s Jews. Others say these talks with Adolf Eichmann and others had a different purpose: not to save Hungary’s Jews, but to save a small part of this community. In the end, Kasztner rescued 1,684 Jews who were put on a train that took them to safety. Many of them were his friends and relatives. His critics believe that the price the Nazis charged Kasztner for these lives was his silence, hence his refusal to publish the report written by Fred and Rudi. If that were the case, it would have saved 1,684 lives at the cost of 437,000 Hungarian Jews sent to the gas chambers in just 56 days.
Q. Perhaps the most surprising thing about this whole story is that when the report reaches the really important people, nothing happens.
r. For example, I think there are many reasons why the Allies did not try to bomb the train tracks leading to the Nazi death camps, as the Jewish leaders demanded when distributing the Fred and Rudi report. One objection was practical. The air forces in both London and Washington decided that this would be a “distraction” from the war effort. And they were convinced that the best way to help the Jews was to defeat Adolf Hitler. There was also a certain prejudice. In part, this meant that reports of murders by Jews in Nazi Europe were not always believed. The Jews were thought to be exaggerating. It also happened that politicians in both London and Washington were reluctant to let their countries think they were fighting for the good of the Jews. The leaders worried that there would be a backlash against the war if people thought it was to save Jewish lives.
You say that S. Rudi Vrba should be one of the heroes of the Holocaust, like Anne Frank or Primo Levi. Why not?
r. Thanks to the Vrba-Wetzler report and a series of diplomatic moves it prompted, 200,000 Jewish lives were eventually saved in Budapest. Why isn’t it listed next to these numbers? I guess partly because Rudi was a disturbed witness. We hope that even though Holocaust survivors are very, very old, they will somehow comfort us, that they will finally tell us that people are okay. However, Rudi refused to do so. He made an accusatory signal to anyone who did not pass on or act on the report that he and Fred had smuggled out of Auschwitz. As he once told a BBC television producer: “I am not a stereotypical Holocaust survivor.” As a result, people did not invite him to platforms that could make him famous. In other words, he was telling a story that wasn’t comfortable to listen to: People wanted to be told that anyone who didn’t take the side of the Nazis was a hero, that the Allies (the US and Britain, as well as prominent Jews) were a hero. in Hungary) behaved perfectly. And Rudi has insisted all his life that history is not that simple.