Culture | Survivor’s rage

Rudolf Vrba escaped from Auschwitz to warn the world

Not everyone listened, as Jonathan Freedland brilliantly recounts in “The Escape Artist”

Pictured, Rudolf Ing Vrba, who escaped from Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Pictured in 1962 for an interview with The Daily Herald. He is possibly in London, walking down the road. See two other frames in this set where Vrba shows his prisoner number stamp on his arm.Rudolf "Rudi" Vrba (born Walter Rosenberg; 11 September 1924 - 27 March 2006) was a Slovak-Jewish biochemist who, as a teenager in 1942, was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. He became known for having escaped from the camp in April 1944, at the height of the Holocaust, and for having co-written a detailed report about the mass murder that was taking place there. Distribution of the report by George Mantello in Switzerland is credited with having halted the mass deportation of Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz in July 1944, saving more than 200,000 lives. After the war Vrba trained as a biochemist, working mostly in England and Canada.Picture taken 2nd February 1961

One day in 1978 Rudolf Vrba was in a restaurant in New York when he spotted a number tattooed on a waiter’s arm. Vrba (pictured) told him that he must be a Jew from Bedzin, Poland, who had arrived in Auschwitz in the summer of 1943. The waiter, amazed, confirmed this deduction.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Warning from hell”

Culture July 2nd 2022

How to win the long war

From the July 2nd 2022 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition
Reuse this content

More from Culture

An illustration of two hands holding pencils and writing on each other's sleeves, which resemble books.

Sex, drugs or chastity?

Pope Francis has written the first memoir by a sitting pope. God help us

An illustration of a blue backpack under a bright spotlight.

Backpacks are, surprisingly, in vogue

They are following in sneakers’ path and becoming more fashionable

An illustration of tornado echoing the shapes of the Spotify logo with broken notes flying in the air.

Spotify’s playlists have altered the music industry in unexpected ways

A critical assessment of the Swedish streaming giant’s musical legacy

Henri Bergson was once the world’s most famous philosopher

He sought to reconcile science and metaphysics

Witty and wise, “A Real Pain” is a masterpiece in a minor key

Jesse Eisenberg’s deceptively slight film asks big moral questions

Now it’s all about TikTok. But Huawei led the way

The Chinese telecoms firm was the first to raise America’s hackles