In April 1944 nineteen-year-old Rudolf Vrba and fellow inmate Fred Wetzler became the first Jews ever to break out of Auschwitz. Under electrified fences and past armed watchtowers, evading thousands of SS men and slavering dogs, they trekked across marshlands, mountains and rivers to freedom. Vrba’s mission was to reveal to the world the truth of the Holocaust, a truth too few were willing to hear.

Now Jonathan Freedland, journalist, broadcaster and multi-million-copy bestselling author, has told the story of Vrba in his new book The Escape Artist and in July 2022 he came to Intelligence Squared to recount this tale of extraordinary courage and heroism.

As Freedland related, in the death factory of Auschwitz Vrba had become an eyewitness to almost every chilling stage of the Nazis’ process of industrialised murder. The more he saw, the more determined he became to warn the Jews of Europe what fate awaited them. A brilliant student of science and mathematics, he committed each detail to memory, risking everything to collect the first data of the Final Solution. After his escape, that information would form a priceless thirty-two-page report that would reach Roosevelt, Churchill and the pope and eventually save over 200,000 lives.

But Vrba’s escape from Auschwitz was not his last. After the war, he kept running – from his past, from his home country, from his adopted country, even from his own name. Few knew of the truly extraordinary deed he had done.

It’s an extraordinary adventure story – one that also raises profound questions for our own times about truth and lies, and who gets to be believed and who does not.

Praise for Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World.

‘A brilliant and heart-wrenching book, with universal and timely lessons about the power of information – and misinformation’ – Yuval Noah Harari

‘A magnificent book. I could scarcely breathe at some points. What a tribute to its extraordinary hero, and it’s such an important and necessary story to read . . . I can’t praise it too highly. What an achievement’ – Philip Pullman

‘An immediate classic of Holocaust literature. Superbly researched and written, it is both a gripping story and deeply moving, I literally could not put it down’ – Antony Beevor

‘Immersive, shattering, and, ultimately redemptive book . . . An epic of terror and endurance . . . Written with Freedland’s page-turning, gripping, hard-edged immediacy, The Escape Artist is profound in thought, boundless in humanity, an immediate modern classic’ – Simon Schama

‘Awe inspiring, exciting and poignant, this is a thrilling read, a piece of redemptive storytelling and a work of important Holocaust historical research: Freedland has given Rudolf Vrba his rightful place in history – and in the process written a book that I couldn’t put down’ – Simon Sebag Montefiore

‘The Escape Artist is marvellous. It is original, meticulous and utterly compelling – and ultimately a deeply tragic tale’ – Philippe Sands

‘A must-read stand out piece of history . . . This is Freedland at his finest . . . It is both a celebration of the extraordinary will, courage and resilience of the hero -– Rudi Vrba – and an all too prescient warning of how hard it is to wake up the world to things it would prefer not to see’ – Emily Maitlis