"A study of humanity like no other and an unforgettable read."
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Anthony Horowitz is one of the most prolific and successful writers working in the UK – and is unique for working across so many media. A born polymath, he juggles writing books, TV series, films, plays and journalism. Anthony has written over 50 books including the bestselling teen spy series Alex Rider, which is estimated to have sold 21 million copies worldwide and has been turned into a hugely successful TV series by Amazon Freevee. A third series has just been filmed and the fourteenth Alex Rider novel, Nightshade: Revenge will be out later this year.Also an acclaimed writer for adults, Anthony was commissioned to write two new Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk and Moriarty. He was commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to write continuation novels for James Bond with Trigger Mortis and Forever and Day, published in 2015 and 2018 respectively. A third novel in the series, With a Mind to Kill, was published in May 2022.
Anthony’s award-winning novel Magpie Murders was published in October 2016 to critical acclaim and was serialised on BritBox at the beginning of 2022 with Lesley Manville in the lead role. It was televised on the BBC in 2023. The sequel, Moonflower Murders, will begin filming in September 2023. His new series featuring Detective Hawthorne and a sidekick called Anthony Horowitz has four books so far: The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death, A Line to Kill and the recently published The Twist of a Knife. Anthony has just started work on a fifth: Close to Death.
Anthony is responsible for creating and writing some of the UK’s most beloved and successful television series including Midsomer Murders and he is the writer and creator of award-winning drama series Foyle’s War, which was the Winner of the Lew Grade Audience award for BAFTA.
Anthony was awarded a CBE in 2022 for his services to literature.
(photo credit: Canneseries/Olivier Vigerie 2022)
I’ve always had misgivings about books about Auschwitz. The evil of the place is so
overwhelming, its darkness so profound, that how can any writer find anything new to add to
what is already an extensive library on the subject? And there is a danger that repetition will
only blunt the horror of it all. I visited the camp one February, a few years ago, and standing
there in my jersey, gloves and puffer jacket, but still colder than I had ever been, I wondered
how anyone could have survived even a week there (the average life expectancy was actually
four months). Meanwhile, all around me, other visitors were taking selfies.
The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland, which came out last year and is now in
paperback, is a brilliant and important piece of writing because it tells a story that is less well-known, because it finds fresh details to illustrate the horrors of life inside the camp but above
all because its focus extends far beyond the gas chambers and the electrified fences. In terrible
detail, it explains how the world allowed the Holocaust to happen.
Its central protagonist, Walter Rosenberg, was just nineteen years old when he became
the first Jew to escape from the camp, hiding in a tiny dug-out beneath a pile of wood and
covering himself in petrol-soaked tobacco to put off the guard dogs. This breathless sequence
– he and his fellow escapee, Fred Wetzler, were just seconds away from being discovered – is
extremely tense; a reminder that, under another name, Freedland has written many
successful thrillers.
Once out, the two men had to travel 75 miles through enemy territory to reach the
border with Slovakia. “Just nineteen and twenty-five years old, Walter and Fred were entirely
on their own. The way Walter saw it, they had been written off by the world…” And this is the
nub of the matter. The descriptions of life inside Auschwitz are horrific enough. The casual
murders, the starvation, the daily torture are detailed in sombre, effective prose. But as
incredible as it may sound, what happens to Walter (who renames himself Rudolf Vrba) is in
some ways even worse.
He had escaped in order to tell the world what was happening. “If the Jews knew what
was coming, what sand might they be able to throw in the gears of the machine that was
poised to devour them?” A scientist and a mathematician gifted with an extraordinary
memory, he described his ordeal to a Jewish organisation in Bratislava – the UZ – and the
result was The Auschwitz Report which detailed everything from the arrival of the transports
from different parts of Europe to the numbers and even the names of those who perished.
The final list numbered 1,765,000 dead in just two years.
Almost nobody cared. Nobody did anything. The Catholic church responded to their
report with silence. Copies of the report got ‘lost in the post’. Jewish community leaders who
did receive it dithered. The Americans were lethargic. Churchill read the document but his
response was ineffectual. “What can be done?” he wrote to Anthony Eden. “What can be
said?” The British did consider air strikes on Auschwitz or even on the railways leading to the camp. They decided not to.
Jonathan Freedland does not lose faith with his subject. “His life was defined by what
he had endured as a teenager. But he was not crushed by it.” Even so, reading the second half
of this book, it’s hard not to feel that Rosenberg does not come out of it as quite the hero he
most certainly was even if he is credited with saving the lives of 200,000 people. For him, it
wasn’t enough. The last part of the book describes a life that self-destructs. He falls out with
Fred Wetzler and also with his daughter. An inveterate womaniser, he divorces his childhood
sweetheart and wife. He moves from country to country and seems to have few friends. When
he dies, in 2006, just forty people come to his memorial service.
The Escape Artist is a complex portrait of a man who was no artist and who never really
escaped from the shadows of Auschwitz or, indeed, from himself. It is a study of humanity like
no other and an unforgettable read.
The Escape Artist is published by John Murray
2 comments:
I also have an aversion to books with 'Auschwitz' in the title, of which there seem to have been several in recent years. However, I recently attended a talk given by Lucy Adlington on her book 'The Dressmakers of Auschwitz' and realised there are more stories to tell and those stories need to be told, written and read. The Escape Artist sounds very much as if it falls into that category. Thank you, Anthony Horowitz, for such a balanced and insightful review.
I also have an aversion to books with 'Auschwitz' in the title, of which there seem to have been several in recent years. However, I recently attended a talk given by Lucy Adlington on her book 'The Dressmakers of Auschwitz' and realised there are more stories to tell and those stories need to be told, written and read. The Escape Artist sounds very much as if it falls into that category. Thank you, Anthony Horowitz, for such a balanced and insightful review.
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