
Podcast
The escape artists who got out of Auschwitz
Only five Jews ever engineered their own escape from Auschwitz, says Jonathan Freedland on The Rest is History. The first two were Rudolf Vrba and his friend Alfréd Wetzler. On 7 April 1944, they hid in a hole “not much bigger than a double grave”, concealed beneath a log pile near the perimeter. After lying there for three days and three nights – the longest a missing persons search could go on, under camp protocol – the pair sneaked through the fence and headed into the countryside of Nazi-occupied Poland. They had “no map, no compass, no friends”. The only guide they had to make it back to the country of their birth, Slovakia, was a memorised page in a children’s atlas. But it was enough.