Escaping from history?

A review of The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland (John Murray Press, 2023)

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian journalist and liberal Zionist who accused Corbyn of antisemitism. Currently, he is embroiled in a public row with the Jewish Chronicle from which he has resigned due to its new owners pandering to Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies.1 Freedland’s biography of Rudolf Vrba, a Slovak Jew who broke out of Auschwitz to reveal its operations, has been slated by Tony Greenstein.2

This controversy has contemporary relevance because the Holocaust is used to justify genocide in Gaza. This is sometimes countered by suggesting socialists focus on an Israeli “Holocaust industry” and Zionist complicity with that mass murder. Vrba’s experience is crucial for judging both approaches. Indeed, his autobiography, I Escaped from Auschwitz, is more useful than the writings of either Freedland or Greenstein.

Slovakia was the first Axis partner to hand its Jewish citizens to the Nazis, and 17-year-old Vrba was one of these Jews. Promised “resettlement”, they were persuaded onto rail transports to death camps. In gut-wrenching detail, his autobiography describes systematic inhuman violence and Auschwitz’s killing machine. The 10-15 percent Jews not gassed and cremated after “selection” were subjected to slave labour conditions.

Vrba’s survival depended on his indomitable will, and “involvement with ‘leftist’ anti-Nazi activities before I was brought to Auschwitz”.3 This meant that he was taken under the wing of Auschwitz’s underground resisters, many of whom had fought in Spain’s International Brigades. They helped allocate him to Auschwitz’s “Kanada” section (so called because the name implied utopia). Here, food, clothing, and other loot from victims was sorted for shipping to Germany. With access to these resources, he avoided physical breakdown. Those who succumbed to that were dubbed Muselmänner (today, a derogatory term for Muslims) by the Nazis and immediately put to death. Later, Vrba was tasked with registering arrivals, which gave him invaluable insight into the scale and character of the Auschwitz operation.

At one point, there was hope of an uprising. Deportees from the Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague were spared selection because they were accompanied by Red Cross observers. David Schmulewski, the leader of the underground, discovered the Nazis’ new plan for them and told Vrba about the next day:

Everyone dies. And because of that, it could be our day. This is the first time they’ve tried to gas a few thousand people who will know what is going to happen. This is the moment for revolt, and the SS know it… If the Czechs rise… hundreds of us, maybe thousands, will be beside them, and with a bit of luck, we could smash this whole stinking outfit.4

Schmulewski added there were “half a dozen different political schisms in that camp…communists, Zionists, anti-Zionists, social democrats, Czech nationalists, the lot”. Informing them of the impending bloodbath was important but “they won’t have a chance” unless they united behind a determined leadership.5 Tragically, this failed to materialise, and the revolt did not happen.

Vrba and Wexler then resolved to escape, their task made urgent by preparations to slaughter Hungarian Jewry, a community exempted till then. As Vrba put it:

I wanted to warn those yet to come what lay ahead because I knew they would rise and fight, as the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto had fought. Once they knew the truth, they would refuse to walk meekly to the slaughterhouses.6

Against virtually impossible odds, the pair reached Bratislava (Slovakia) in April 1944 and provided a detailed account of Auschwitz to the Jewish Council. That went to the Pope, Franklin D Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and also to Rezső Kasztner, Zionist leader of Hungary’s Jews. None of these individuals acted. Kasztner used the information to negotiate with Adolf Eichmann for a train carrying over 1,600 Jews to safety (including members of his family) in exchange for gold, money and diamonds. Meanwhile, unaware of the threat facing them, the rest of the community were rounded up for Auschwitz—where 437,000 died. Eventually, the Vrba/Wexler revelations contributed to ending deportations, saving around 200,000 lives.

In a racy novelistic style, Freedland’s account covers much of this ground, additionally delving into Vrba’s postwar family life. Yet, Freedland downplays key features, in particular Vrba’s espousal of active resistance in contrast to the main Zionist strategy—flight to Palestine to establish a “Jewish” state. Freedland writes that Vrba “was a supporter of Israel and rooted for it”.7

In fact, he was excoriating in his criticism of Zionist leaders like Weizmann and wrote:

Throughout Europe, it is true, there were Jews who had their champions. The communists, the socialists, and the true nationalists had the underground. The wealthy had their money. The Zionists had their Kasztners.8

Vrba was not the Houdini-like “escape artist” Freedland portrays but an active resister of antisemitism and fascism. He would join the Slovak National Uprising in August 1944 and later was a key witness in Nazi war crime trials.

In his review, Greenstein rightly criticizes Freedland’s inadequate treatment of Vrba’s anti-Zionism but stops there. One line mentions “the Nazi’s plans to exterminate” Hungary’s Jewish community, but the remaining 270 lines are dedicated to attacking Zionism, including the claim that “The Zionist movement, because of its collaboration with the Nazis…has virtually no Jewish anti-Nazi resistance heroes to its credit”.9 Zionism absolutely deserves criticism, but the greatest act of anti-Nazi resistance, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, was headed by Mordechai Aniliewicz, a Zionist who led a varied coalition including anti-Zionist Bundists, and many more.

The response of Zionists and non-Zionist Jewish leaders to the Holocaust was driven by factors outside their control. Under enormous pressure, the Judenräte (Jewish councils) exhibited a spectrum of behaviours—from outright collaboration, through cooperation under duress, to open resistance. Appalling decisions were made, but it was not primarily loyalty to a potential state in Palestine that determined these. General politics, social position and local circumstances were overriding factors. To impute major responsibility for the Holocaust to Zionist strategy is fraught with dangers. It inadvertently takes the spotlight off the Nazis and antisemitic collaborators in Poland, France and elsewhere. This coincides with the European far right today, which downplays the role of their forebears.

Freedland and Greenstein are projecting current preoccupations with Palestine and Israel onto the past. Freedland minimises the inadequacy of Zionism’s response to antisemitism, leaving little alternative but flight. However, as well-motivated as Greenstein may be with regard to Palestine, by focusing exclusively on Zionist flaws, his account becomes unbalanced and ignores key points. Both writers compete for primacy in a hierarchy of oppression. That is a road to nowhere.

A wider framework is required: the defeat of the German revolution; the German ruling class’s role in Hitler’s rise to power; Nazi counter-revolution; rivalry between the Axis and Allied imperialist blocs leading to war; and the racism the capitalist establishment perpetuated everywhere to divert attention from its exploitative system and crises. As part of a world war costing 75 million lives, the industrial extermination of 6 million Jews stands out as a monstrous example of capitalist barbarism. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising is evidence that Jewish leaders, Zionist and non-Zionist, could have done more. Yet, the burden of guilt for the greatest single crime in history lies not with the victims but firstly with the Nazis, next the collaborationist regimes within the Axis bloc or under Nazi occupation, and then the Allied governments. At least from 1944, they had the ability to end it but instead stood by while millions burned.

Vrba hints at just such a systemic explanation. After the war, he testified at trials of Nazis in order to “present the Auschwitz story in its proper perspective”. He continued:

It will correct, for instance, a popular belief that Hitler created his mass murder machine merely to satisfy his hunger for dead Jews. Undoubtedly, his obsessional antisemitism produced the seeds from which the extermination camps in general and Auschwitz in particular grew; but the Nazi system, which abhorred waste, soon turned this obsession to profit. Killings were carried out with an efficiency which few time-and-motion experts would fault, and they paid rich dividends. There was sadism, too, of course, but it was merely an ancillary product of a vast business enterprise.10

At present, the vast business enterprise of capitalist imperialism threatens all humanity with its ancillary products—climate destruction, war, genocide, pandemics and more. Racism is used once again to deflect criticism. Vrba’s story demolishes the argument that the Holocaust justifies Israel or excuses its actions. It is also a warning against today’s far-right movements whose origins are steeped in antisemitism and nurtured by capitalist conditions. In 1944, Vrba and Wetzler took incredible risks to sound the alarm so as to encourage those in danger “to rise and fight”. We should heed that call today.

Donny Gluckstein is a Socialist Worker Party member whose publications include The Radical Jewish Tradition (with Janey Stone, Bookmarks, 2024), The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class (Haymarket Books, 2012), A People’s History of the Second World War (Pluto Press, 2012) and, as editor, Fighting on All Fronts: Popular Resistance in the Second World War (Bookmarks, 2015).

Notes