The Sunday Times - UK (2022-06-05)

HISTORY

Dominic Sandbrook

The Escape Artist The Man

Who Broke Out of Auschwitz

to Warn the World

by Jonathan Freedland

John Murray £20 pp400

Jonathan Freedland’s

excellent book opens in the

most thrilling way imaginable.

It is April 7, 1944. In a lumber

yard in the outer compound

at Auschwitz II, two men are

lying absolutely still in a hole

in the ground, hidden

beneath a pile of wood. They

know that once their

disappearance from the inner

camp has been detected, the

SS will throw up a cordon

around the outer ring, with

sentries and dogs patrolling

every inch of ground. But if

the two men can stay hidden

for 72 hours, the cordon will

come down. The outer camp

will be unguarded, and they

can walk out overnight.

The hours pass and the

two men hold their breath

whenever they hear the

jackboots or muffled curses

of the German sentries

overhead. Time and again the

sniffer dogs come close, but

the men have sprinkled the

The memory

man of

Auschwitz

Walter Rosenberg spent his time in the

death camp building a ‘mountain of facts’.

Then he escaped to tell the world — and

his report saved 200,000 lives

The new

love rules

How a 1950s theory

went mainstream

— and is guiding

young people’s

relationships

22



ground with tobacco to keep

them away. At one point two

Germans begin to search in

the woodpile, only to become

distracted by something else.

At last the 72 hours are

over. The German voices fade;

the sentries return to their

towers. The two men wait a

little longer, just to be sure.

Then, after more than three

days below ground, they heave

themselves out of the hole, lift

off the timbers and walk out

of Auschwitz.

This, though, is merely

the prologue. The heart of

Gated hell Walter Rosenberg

escaped Auschwitz in 1944

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5 June 2022 19