113: 📚The Escape Artist: Jonathan Freedland talks to Dr Bea Lewkowicz “I knew both Vrba and Wetzler”

More than once, Jonny Gould’s Jewish State has circled back to a previous episode with startling new revelations.

In episode 88, I sat down with my old friend, Jonathan Freedland to discuss his latest bestseller, The Escape Artist, about the two young Jewish men who broke out of Auschwitz to warn the world of the horrors within.

Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler’s 32-page report reached the desks of Roosevelt, Churchill and the Pope and they warned Hungary’s Admiral Horthy to stop the deportation of his country’s Jews to Auschwitz - or they’d make him a war criminal.

On receiving this, Horthy panicked and stopped turning a blind eye to the death trains leaving Hungary.

200,000 Jewish lives were spared because of Vrba and Wetzler.

Dr. Bea Lewkowicz is known to both of us. She’s a fellow member of my synagogue and one Shabbat morning, she told me that rather uniquely, she knew both men, Rudolf and Alfred, her own Uncle Freddo.

But the contrasting post-war fortunes of the two men was stark.

Rudi lived a metropolitan academic’s life in Vancouver, but Fred was trapped behind the iron curtain in Czechoslovakia, constrained and ostracised by the repressive communist regime.

Bea is director of the AJR Refugee Voices Testimony Archive of the Association of Jewish Refugees, where she creates and archives holocaust testimonies. She’s also a director of Sephardi Voices UK.

So for the first time in the series, I’m more than delighted to hand over the interview microphone to Jonathan, in conversation with Bea.

If you’ve read the book and invested in their remarkable story, you’ll love this.

Jonny Gould’s Jewish State is proudly supported by Dangoor Education.