The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland

One of the books bought for my birthday was The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland. This is a biograpy of the Auschwitz escapee Rudolf Vrba. Vrba, a Jewish Czech teenager, wanted to escape from Auschwitz in order to alert the world to what was going on but found it very hard to get a hearing. The book is well written especially the Auscwitz episodes. The book covers the whole of Vrba's story. He died in 2006. The book is the opposite of hagiography but is respectful to its subject who seems to have been a unique character in many ways. One of the interesting things that arises in the book is the fact that merely informing people of what was happening was not enough. At one point we read

"... information alone was not enough. The inmates of the Czech family camp had had the information. They could see the crematoria with their own eyes; the chimneys were just a few hundred yards away. They had known that the Nazis were murdering the Jews they had brought to Auschwitz. The trouble was, they never believed this scheme applied to them. The reason for their special status had been a mystery to them, as it had been to the other prisoners in Auschwitz but special they believed they were. They had been certain that they would be exempt from the death sentence the SS were carrying out on their fellow Jews. Only when it was too late did they see that they had been entirely wrong."

It is not enough to inform people that judgement and hell is true. Even when confronted with clear proof they will not want to believe and will reject the message.