Amazon.com Review\\nAn Amazon Best Book of October 2022:The Escape Artist opens with one of the most riveting chapters you will read any time soon. Two young men are attempting to escape from Auschwitz as Nazi soldiers search for them, and come narrowly close to finding them. Rudolph Vrba was a brilliant young man who became one of only four people to escape Auschwitz. But that is just the beginning of the story. He set back for his native Slovakia; then he set out to warn the world of the atrocities he had witnessed. The author Jonathan Freedland deserves mention here, because he takes a fascinating story about an important if forgotten man in history—and he keeps the story from becoming one dimensional. Vrba was indeed a hero, but much of his effort to warn the world fell on deaf ears. And Vrba was himself a man of contradictions. I enjoyed this book immensely. And I was moved by it. I would not be surprised if it becomes a best seller. —Chris Schluep, Amazon Editor\\n"A brilliant and heart-wrenching book, with universal and timely lessons about the power of information — and misinformation. Is it possible to stop mass murder by telling the truth?" — Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow\nA complex hero.\nA forgotten story.\nThe first witness to reveal the full truth of the Holocaust . . .\nAward-winning journalist and bestselling novelist Jonathan Freedland tells the incredible story of Rudolf Vrba—the first Jew to break out of Auschwitz, a man determined to warn the world and pass on a truth too few were willing to hear—elevating him to his rightful place in the annals of World War II alongside Anne Frank, Primo Levi, and Oskar Schindler and casting a new light on the Holocaust and its aftermath.\nPeople won’t believe what they can’t imagine . . .\nIn April 1944, Rudolf Vrba became the first Jew to break out of Auschwitz—one of only four who ever pulled off that near-impossible feat. He did it to reveal the truth of the death camp to the world—and to warn the last Jews of Europe what fate awaited them at the end of the railway line. Against all odds, he and his fellow escapee, Fred Wetzler, climbed mountains, crossed rivers and narrowly missed German bullets until they had smuggled out the first full account of Auschwitz the world had ever seen—a forensically detailed report that would eventually reach Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and the Pope.\nAnd yet too few heeded the warning that Vrba—then just nineteen years old—had risked everything to deliver. Some could not believe it. Others thought it easier to keep quiet. Vrba helped save 200,000 Jewish lives—but he never stopped believing it could have been so many more.\nThis is the story of a brilliant yet troubled man—a gifted “escape artist” who even as a teenager understand that the difference between truth and lies can be the difference between life and death, a man who deserves to take his place alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler and Primo Levi as one of the handful of individuals whose stories define our understanding of the Holocaust.