In his new book about Jewish heroism during the Holocaust, Steve Sheinkin describes the harrowing events of Rudolf Vrba’s life. Vrba, a Slovakian Jew who escaped from Auschwitz and publicized its horrors, not only survived but focused on saving other Jews from a worse fate. Sheinkin presents this story with historical accuracy, compelling language, and careful framing of Vrba’s motives and decisions. The result is both an essential retelling of Vrba’s life and a cogent analysis of how Europe’s Jews were nearly annihilated.
Using understatement and brief, telegraphic sentences, Sheinkin conveys how Vrba’s normal life was shattered and replaced by terror. When the book begins, Vrba is a seventeen-year-old who is attempting to cross the border from his homeland into Hungary. As he removes the compulsory yellow star from his clothing, the narrator notes that this “was the first law he would break that night.”
To explain the conditions that gave rise to Nazism, Sheinkin grounds Rudolf Vrba’s story in its historical context. Between the widespread distribution of the infamous The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and restrictive immigration laws in both the United States and Great Britain, an atmosphere of hatred — or, at least, a dangerous level of indifference — prevailed. When dealing with the most difficult material, including the mechanisms of killing Jews in the death camps, Sheinkin doesn’t hold back. He describes the impossible moral dilemma of the Sonderkommandos, Jewish inmates who were forced to lead prisoners to the gas chambers and dispose of their bodies. Yet his descriptions are never gratuitous.
The escape itself is cinematic. Vrba used a children’s atlas he’d found among the personal effects of prisoners, which would be burned along with their owners. There are several close calls and improbable moments when his cause seems lost. The parallel narrative of Vrba’s childhood friend, Gerta Sidonová, who also dedicates herself to Jewish survival, highlights the role of women in the struggle against fascism.
Late in his life, Vrba chose to testify against a shameless Holocaust denier in the Canadian court system. Forcefully contradicting the man’s lies, Vrba gave renewed meaning to his personal history and to the history of the Jewish people. Impossible Escape is a focused and thoughtful exploration of resistance, even under the worst circumstances, and even when the outcome of that resistance is incomplete. As Sheinkin writes, “There are no storybook endings here.”
Emily Schneider writes about literature, feminism, and culture for Tablet, The Forward, The Horn Book, and other publications, and writes about children’s books on her blog. She has a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures.