The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

Freedland highlights how Rudi remained restless in the post-WWII years. He was unhappy living under a communist regime in Czechoslovakia. The government asked for Rudi’s help removing anti-communist students from the university. Rudi refused and resigned from his position. He was not interested in taking away someone’s freedom, like what had been done to him. After completing his doctorate in 1951, Rudi was unable to get a research job, which was the price of his political disgrace. Rudi also saw growing antisemitism within the government. He no longer felt like a free man in Prague. As a result, he turned to plotting his escape. Similar to Auschwitz, he knew he needed to successfully escape the country the first time. Rudi used his academic prestige to hide his escape plans. He traveled back and forth between Czechoslovakia and other countries for conferences for several years, always returning to his home country. He finally made his escape in 1958. Unbeknownst to him, Gerta plotted her and her daughter’s escape. She fell in love with a British scientist and wanted to join him in England. Rudi and Greta escaped the country around the same time.

Rudi traveled to Israel. He was uninterested in the Zionist movement, the goal of which was to establish a Jewish state. Instead, he chose Israel “chiefly as a gateway to the west” (265). A US university offered Rudi a position in 1958. However, US authorities denied him a visa due to his communist ties. During this time, the US government was extremely unfriendly toward communism. Rudi did not like Israel, finding it too clannish. In addition, Jewish leaders, such as Kasztner, whom Rudi loathed, were in positions of power in the country. After Kasztner’s murder by an underground right-wing Jewish group who believed he collaborated with the Nazis, the Israeli Supreme Court and government officials wanted the country to move on from the past. Rudi was unwilling to do so.

After 18 months, Rudi left Israel and moved to England. His children and ex-wife lived in the country. Rudi found work at a neuropsychiatric research unit, which allowed him to continue the studies started in Prague. Rudi focused on how living creatures, including at the cellular level, respond to extreme stress and trauma. Rudi and Gerta continued to have a difficult relationship.

Rudi’s life in England started to fall apart. Gerta won total legal custody over their children. Rudi also became convinced that his boss was stealing his scientific ideas. Instead of talking to his boss directly, Rudi complained to the Medical Research Council, or supervisory board. His boss did not renew his contract.

Rudi moved to Canada in 1967, where he secured a faculty position in medicine at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Rudi received Canadian citizenship in 1972. One year later, he received a two-year visiting lectureship at Harvard Medical School. US authorities finally granted Rudi a visa. Rudi met his second wife, Robin Lipson, at a party in Boston. The two married in September 1975. Freedland notes that “slowly the agitation and restlessness began to recede; Rudi seemed to mellow” (276). In contrast with Gerta, Rudi did not police Robin’s behavior. He supported her independence (she eventually became the primary breadwinner through real estate), and he ran the household, something he had once seen as woman’s work. Rudi did not like to talk about Auschwitz, including with Robin. Robin learned his life story by reading his memoir.

Despite telling Robin and colleagues that “he found the subject of Auschwitz ‘boring’” (277), he could never completely distance himself from it. In fact, his scientific work slowed as Rudi continued “his war against the old enemy” (282). German prosecuting authorities repeatedly called on Rudi for decades to testify at the trials of SS officers from Auschwitz. Rudi also initiated several legal proceedings. As one example, he joined a group of Auschwitz survivors who sued the German conglomerate IG Farben in 1961, demanding backpay for their work constructing the site at Auschwitz. They were awarded only $625. The company did not have to compensate for the enslaved Jewish people who lost their lives.

Rudi also helped identify Hans König, the King of Kanada. A group representing Sinti and Roma people in Germany brought forth a case against König for murdering more than 20,000 prisoners of what the Nazis offensively dubbed the “Gypsy camp” at Auschwitz. König tried to hide as a witness against himself. After the war, his alias became Heinrich-Johannes Kůhnemann, a renowned opera singer. Rudi immediately recognized König.

Rudi also helped bring war criminals who escaped to Canada to justice. These men tried to deny that they were engaged in the mass murder of Jewish people, but Rudi helped compile evidence against them.

These trials helped Rudi do the one thing that helped drive his escape from Auschwitz: “He was standing up and telling the world the truth” (284).

Historians and filmmakers interviewed Rudi, including French director Claude Lanzmann, who directed a nine-and-a-half-hour documentary called Shoah. Freedland first learned about Rudi through this film. After the release of Shoah, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation approached Rudi. They wanted to film his return to Auschwitz in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At this time, Auschwitz was in bad shape. Only later would it become a well-tended memorial site and museum. While filming an unauthorized shoot in Birkenau, the crew realized they were accidentally locked in. People began to panic, except Rudi. He stated with no irony, “Don’t worry, I know another way out” (286).

In all his communications with chroniclers of the Holocaust, Rudi always mentioned Fred, even as their relationship soured over the years. Rudi did not like Fred’s wife, and he believed that Fred was complicit in the Czechoslovakian reign of terror, which also included antisemitic policies. Neither of them became famous, like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. Even today, people still do not credit their names when discussing the Auschwitz Report. Historians will instead “speak of ‘two young escapees’ or ‘two Slovak escapees’ as if the identities of the men who had performed this remarkable deed were incidental” (287).

Rudi did not speak about his past easily. He was very selective about who he shared it with. Once he started, it was difficult for him to stop. He always returned to the same point: “the betrayal committed by Kasztner and those who failed to spread the word” (292). Not all Holocaust survivors or historians agree with this belief. In fact, Freedland suggests this belief is why Rudi is not more famous. People do not want to view Jewish leaders as villains.

Freedland ends this chapter by emphasizing that despite all Rudi endured, he never “lost his lust for life, and adventure, that had marked him out as a young teenager” (293). While Rudi’s time at Auschwitz left a permanent mark, it did not break him. Those who he trusted saw this side of Rudi.

Freedland documents the worst experience Rudi endured: the death of his daughter Helena by suicide. Helena and Rudi had a rocky relationship for many years. Things became especially tense when Helena told him that she wanted to study malaria in Papua New Guinea. Rudi opposed her moving to the country. His sixth sense warned him that something terrible would happen to her. Rudi tried to tell Helena but was too harsh: “This is not a good idea, you’re not a strong enough person. You’re going to come back in a box” (296). Helena ignored Rudi’s wishes. She died by suicide in May 1982.

Rudi blamed himself for Helena’s death. He lashed out at everybody and tried to understand Helena’s death using science, throwing himself into the academic literature on suicide. He came across research that suggested suicide rates were higher among those who pursued careers in medicine and with Austro-Hungarian ancestry.

Rudi shrank from two explanations. First, he refused to connect his Holocaust survival with her death. Rudi did not want Hitler to destroy the second generation of Jewish Holocaust survivors, although research shows that the trauma from the Holocaust still impacts Jewish people today. Second, he did not believe his family history was relevant, despite the fact that his dad might have died by suicide. Helena’s death shook Rudi to the core. During a trip to Czechoslovakia, eight years after Helena’s death, Rudi finally began to heal. He survived his daughter’s death because of his desire to keep living.

Rudi’s desire to escape Auschwitz was based on three assumptions. First, the outside world had no knowledge of Hitler’s death factory running at Auschwitz. Second, once the Allied powers knew about the death factory, they would act to stop the mass murders. Third, and most importantly, once the Jewish people knew the doomed fate that awaited them at Auschwitz, they would refuse to board the deportation trains.

In Rudi’s final decades, he learned that the world, especially leaders within the Allied powers, knew about Hitler’s desire to eradicate the Jewish population from the world. Moreover, Allied leaders and Polish exile groups began to hear about the purpose of Auschwitz beginning in 1942 from escaped members of the Polish underground. Despite this knowledge, they still failed to act to save the lives of thousands of Jewish people. Their own wartime goals, antisemitic beliefs, and inability to accept the truth of the Nazis’ Final Solution plan resulted in the murder of six million Jewish people. Filmmaker Martin Gilbert helped uncover and publicize these facts in his film Auschwitz and the Allies.

Rudi also had to confront his assumption that the Hungarian Jewish people would have acted if they knew the fate that awaited them at Auschwitz. Ample evidence, including from Hungarian Jewish people themselves, suggested that knowledge alone was not enough. Rudi stood by his belief.

Rudi loved life. Even when he was diagnosed with bladder cancer, he was determined to keep living. Freedland unfortunately notes that “his cancer cells had learned from their host: they had escaped” (310). Friends believed Rudi’s cancer could have been cured if he trusted doctors more rather than trying to organize and research his own treatments. His fear of showing weakness, a product of his time at Auschwitz, became his greatest vulnerability. Despite his declining health, Rudi found comfort. He spent every day with Zuza, who dropped everything to be by her father’s side during his final months. Rudi passed away on March 27, 2006. Freedland ends by stating that “though he never escaped Auschwitz’s shadow, he lived a life in full, as a man in full” (313).