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The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World
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Part 2, Chapters 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Camp”
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “The Ramp”
This ramp was newly constructed. Located between Auschwitz I, the mother camp, and a subcamp, Birkenau, the SS officers called it “the old Jewish ramp,” or Alte Judenrampe (94). Mass transports of Jewish people arrived by night to this ramp in cattle trucks. Due to savage treatment from SS officers, mortality rates were high on the ramp for Jewish prisoners who were part of the rolling group (Rollkommando).
Once the train arrived, SS officers told the arrivals to leave their luggage in the cattle trucks. They then forced the Jewish people into columns: one for women with children, one for single women, and one for men. Walter’s task, alongside the other prisoners, was to first remove belongings and then clean the cattle trucks, including removing the dead and dying. Walter learned to steal and consume food quickly and discretely from luggage since he and the other men no longer had access to Kanada.
Elite SS officers then reviewed all arrivals:
They did not know it, but the new arrivals were about to face selection. If they were sent to the right, they would be marched off first, registered as prisoners and given a chance to work and therefore to live, if only for a while. If they were directed left, their imminent destiny was death (98).
The Nazis sent all women with children, even those fit and strong, to the left. SS officers argued about the number of Jewish arrivals that should go to the labor camp versus the death camp. At Auschwitz, SS officers selected 80% of Jewish arrivals for immediate death.
Walter worked on the ramp for 10 months, where he helped unload at least 300,000 Jewish people. This assignment almost broke Walter’s spirit. In fact, fellow prisoners were concerned for Walter’s mental health. At Kanada, Walter had imagined the lives of the Jewish people through their luggage; on the ramp, Walter saw them. He repeatedly witnessed their final, doomed minutes. For example, Walter once witnessed a group of Jewish arrivals who saw a truck carrying corpses. The arrivals cried “a thin cry of collective horror at the sight of scores of dead bodies piled up like so much discarded rubbish. […] Some surely understood what this grotesque spectacle augured for their own fate” (113). Walter thought that these arrivals might finally revolt. Instead, the arrivals went to their own deaths.
Walter also uncovered the Nazis’ greatest and most devastating trick in 1942 right as he turned 18 years old: They hid their genocidal plans behind deception and misinformation. This realization did not destroy Walter. Instead, it filled him with determination to act. He needed to escape to warn his people what awaited them at Auschwitz. Walter believed this was the first and most important step to stopping the Nazis’ genocidal plan.
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “The Memory Man”
In Chapter 10, Freedland focuses on Walter’s moral struggle. He did not know how to act on his realization that the Nazis concealed their genocidal plan through deception and misinformation. On the one hand, Walter believed his moral duty was to stop the Nazis at all costs, including his own life. For example, he contemplated trying to throttle an SS officer, which would result in his immediate death. Walter also experienced deep shame. He believed that working on the ramp made him complicit with the Nazis’ web of lies. By cleaning the wagons, he prevented the next batch of Jewish arrivals from understanding their impending doom.
Walter remained unconcerned about his death. He worried instead about his fellow prisoners. Walter knew that a single act of resistance would result in the SS officers inflicting instant and disproportionate punishment on the Jewish prisoners. The SS officers not only killed many prisoners but also tortured many in the infamous Block 11 (the investigation or torture block) to uncover more resistance plots. Even though Walter desired to act against the SS officers, he remained unwilling to put his fellow prisoners in danger.
For this reason, Walter turned to formulating an escape plan. Walter knew he needed data to convince the world and other Jewish people about the horrors taking place at Auschwitz. Using a child’s memory game, he began memorizing evidence of industrialized murder, including “the number of trains, the number of wagons per train, the approximate number of passengers, the point of origin” (110).
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary: “Birkenau”
Walter and Josef both contracted typhus. They turned themselves in to an ambulance station, which was a mistake. The men thought doing so would give them a day off and time to recover. Instead, the orderly, a Polish prisoner, registered them both for the hospital. At the hospital, they would receive a lethal injection of phenol, which is toxic to humans. The orderly agreed to remove Walter’s name from the list. However, Josef refused to listen to Walter. Walter later learned that Josef died trying to escape after realizing his doomed fate.
Several prisoners helped Walter hide in Kanada, as he still had not recovered. Freedland notes that “the typhus, the flogging from Wiegleb, the surgery with minimal anesthetic, they had all taken their toll” (117). Walter knew he would die without medical treatment. Laco, the Slovak dentist (introduced in Chapter 6), helped arrange medicine and rest for Walter. He also introduced Walter to the underground resistance at Auschwitz. The resistance recruited Walter to join them; they knew Walter could withstand torture due to the flogging from Wiegleb.
The underground was not a single group but was instead comprised of many subgroups. Block 4, home to those who worked at Kanada, represented the group’s base. The resistance used the necessities and luxuries pilfered at Kanada to exert control over SS officers through bribery and blackmail.
Walter helped the resistance by stealing medicine from the Kanada supply and carrying messages between underground leaders. He also gathered information, “which was Auschwitz’s most precious commodities” (120). As part of his fact-gathering mission, Walter volunteered in Birkenau to learn more about the death factory. He saw horrific things there, including the pits where the Nazis burned the bodies of murdered Jewish people.
The SS officers moved Kanada to the Birkenau subcamp in 1943. Living conditions were more difficult in Birkenau than in Auschwitz. Prisoners also died at Birkenau faster than at Auschwitz due to savage mistreatment by SS officers. The underground also operated at Birkenau, led by David Szmulewski. Walter enjoyed being part of the underground, especially the protected status and higher social standing that came with membership.
Walter initially believed the resistance’s goal was to sabotage the death factory. He quickly realized this was not the case. Rather, the underground protected its members. By doing so, they indirectly and unintentionally supported the Nazis’ genocide plan. Walter condemned this complicity because he firmly believed that “the duty of any person who knew the horror of Birkenau was to stop it” (125). Here is where Walter’s life-long hatred of Jewish leadership began. Walter knew he needed to do something more. He needed to escape, but in the wake of Josef’s murder, he needed an accomplice.
Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary: “It Has Been Wonderful”
In the summer of 1943, another wave of typhus hit Auschwitz. The SS officers transferred prisoners, including Walter, to a previously unoccupied section of Birkenau (Camp D). Walter received a promotion, assisting the section’s morgue registrar, a fellow Slovak from Trnava named Alfréd (Fred) Wetzler. Wetzler recorded the number of deaths and oversaw the transfer of corpses out of the mortuary.
The underground, satisfied with Walter’s performance as assistant registrar, arranged for his promotion to registrar. Walter oversaw a newly opened subsection (Camp A) where SS officers quarantined new prisoners. Walter’s promotion came with several benefits. First, he had more freedom. As long as he walked with purpose, the Kapos and SS officers rarely bothered him. Second, his health drastically improved since he had access to food. Walter’s wardrobe also improved. This benefit especially pleased Walter since he cared about his appearance. Finally, and most importantly, Walter had greater access to information. His section not only housed new prisoners, but it was also located along the route to the gas chambers. Walter recorded the numbers of both new prisoners and those sent to their immediate death.
Even for an expert like Walter, surprises still occurred at Auschwitz. One example is the Familienlager, or “family camp.” The camp arrived in September 1943 and was comprised of 5,000 Jewish people including families, the young, and the elderly from Czechoslovakia. SS officers allowed the group to live in relatively good conditions. SS officers also allowed the camp to govern itself and maintain a vibrant Jewish life, which included education for the children and music performances.
SS officers told Walter and Fred, who oversaw registration at the family camp, to use a different prisoner numbering system. Attached to each arrival’s registration record was the phrase “Special treatment after six months’ quarantine” (132). The Nazis used “special treatment” as a euphemism for death by gas chamber. Underground leaders warned the family camp’s leadership about their impending doom. Despite this reality, the leadership refused to revolt. Exactly six months after their arrival, SS officers herded most camp members to the gas chambers, including a young woman named Alicia Munk, who Walter had fallen in love with.
Another wave of Jewish people arrived at the family camp in December 1943. SS officers also assigned them “special treatment” after six months. Despite what happened to the first group, the second group did not revolt, instead maintaining life as before.
Part 2, Chapters 9-12 Analysis
In this section, Freedland documents Walter’s character growth due to his transition from a teenager to a young adult as well as the horrors he lived through at Auschwitz. Working on the ramp nearly broke Walter, and it broke many of his comrades. Freedland highlights that “just at the point when [Walter] might come apart, he was filled instead with a hot and unstoppable urge: he had to act” (106). This desire to sound the alarm and warn the world and the Jewish people about Auschwitz drove him for the rest of his life. Freedland thereby highlights the ways in which the horror committed by the Nazi regime had a complex, even polarized impact on Walter. On the one hand, they nearly brought him to his death by making him lose his will for survival. On the other hand, the depth of the Nazis’ atrocities stirred in him the desire to somehow prevent or curtail the genocide he was witnessing. In this way, Freedland illustrates the varied human responses to the horrors of the Holocaust: Taking Walter’s complex emotional response as an example, the text elucidates how some prisoners were driven to resist the Nazis’ genocidal plans, while the depth of these atrocities impacted others in such a way that they lost the will to live.
Walter also struggled with Auschwitz’s underground resistance. On the one hand, he benefited from their protection. Yet he was also deeply disappointed that the resistance did not try to stop the factory of death and came to believe that, by doing so, the resistance was complicit in the Nazis’ mass murder project. Here, too, the situation is a complicated and nuanced one. On the one hand, the resistance collaborated to bring about a result actively in contradiction with the genocidal goals of the Nazi regime—namely, the survival of its members. On the other hand, the resistance sought to accomplish this by cooperating with the logic of the Nazi concentration camp: They did not try to bring about the destruction of the camp as a whole but only saw to it that their members did not meet the worst fate in store at the camp. By working within this framework, the resistance was complicit in the Nazis’ atrocities.
As in the story about the train conductor from Part 1, Freedland here complicates this complicity, evoking the theme of Complicity in the Holocaust: Why Different Groups Failed to Decisively Act to Prevent Genocide. The resistance was comprised of prisoners of the camp who were, by definition, coerced into this situation. Acting to sabotage the activities of the camp meant almost certain death. Walter was convinced that the way the resistance chose to respond was wrong. Walter, however, also felt that he himself was complicit in the atrocities committed at the death camp due to his work on the ramp. By emphasizing these complexities and contradictions, the text raises questions about how one should act when “the right thing to do”—in this instance, to resist the atrocities of the Nazi death camp—demands what could be considered a superhuman ability to disregard one’s own fate.
Freedland emphasizes Walter’s uniqueness. He was able to memorize large volumes of information. Walter also had unprecedented access to Auschwitz. Freedland underscores that Walter “was able to see so much, and he had the brainpower to remember it” (112). Here, Freedland adds another layer to the theme of The Power of (Mis)Information and Deception. Walter believed knowledge was key to shattering the Nazis’ web of lies. Although Walter believed that once Jewish people knew about their doomed fate at Auschwitz, they would refuse to board the deportation trains, the text suggests that knowledge is not always enough. In order for there to be action, all the data Walter collected and memorized needed to be combined with belief. The text suggests that people did not have the reaction Walter hoped for because a part of them did not truly believe death awaited them. Their inability to believe in their imminent demise rendered all the knowledge and data ineffective, even when the prisoners were eyewitnesses to the truck carrying corpses. The text therefore suggests that part of the power of misinformation and deception is that it creates doubt and uncertainty even about realities that are considered most obvious or irrefutable. The text further implies that, in the face of such doubt, people often opt not for the explanation that best accounts for the data but rather the one that is the least painful to believe.
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