The majority of pages are undamaged with some creasing or tearing, and pencil underlining of text, but this is minimal. His job was to pull suitcases from a gigantic pile and sort the items inside, looking for valuables. The Vrba-Wetzler report was shocking (even though the British and American government officials were already aware of some of the details).

Lederer crossed the open ground outside the ghetto while the sentry was looking the other way and passed through a fence. Margery Bone’s Bonafide Films has secured the rights to Freedland’s book, which is set to be made into a high-end limited series. His [Walter’s] faith had been firm that, once people knew that death awaited them, they would not walk quietly towards it.This first-hand report alerted Western authorities, such as Pope Pius XII, Winston Churchill, and Franklin D. After 135 pages of brutality, sixteen-year-old Walter Rosenberg (who will become Rudolf Vrba, the first Jew ever known to have broken out of Auschwitz and the subject of this astounding history) witnesses an anomaly: a Familienlager, a section of the camp where Jewish families are kept together, fed, and essentially allowed to have normal lives, as much as you can in a concentration camp. Lederer's absence was discovered in the morning of 6 May by an SS man inspecting the family camp who had seen a woman exiting Lederer's block and stepped in to investigate, only to discover Lederer missing. It’s a brilliant insight — one that Rosenberg (later known as Rudolf Vrba, the false identity he took on after his escape) was ideally positioned to reach. Incredibly, Freedland actually does include this man, Siegfried Lederer, and even mentions that Lederer warned the Jews about the camp .

But what I like most about this book and the complex character of Rudi Vrbo is that both refuse to fit pithy boxes—of hope, possibility, or even what a Holocaust survivor is.According to Lederer, he was then driven to Constance, alternately dressed as a civilian and an SS officer. And whereas younger Jews believed Vrba, the majority were with philosopher Raymond Aron, who said: “I knew but I didn’t believe it. It took until 10 April 1944, but eventually Vrba and fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler “achieved what no Jew had ever done before: they had broken out of Auschwitz”.