For the Ages: A History Podcast

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, Part One

New-York Historical Society Season 3 Episode 16

In April of 1944, Walter Rosenberg escaped from Auschwitz alongside Fred Wetzler, making them two of a very small number of Jews who were able to escape a concentration camp and make their way to safety during the Second World War. In the first of this two-part conversation, Jonathan Freedland and David Rubenstein discuss how anti-Semitism shaped Rosenberg’s life in the years leading up to the war, his eventual internment as a teenager in Slovakia, and how his plans to escape took shape once he landed in Auschwitz.