The Escape Artist (2024)

In April 1944, three weeks after German forces invaded Hungary, nineteen-year-old Rudolf Vrba and fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler were among the first Jewish prisoners to escape Auschwitz and report on it. Weeks later, Hungary's Jews were being sent to Auschwitz at a rate of 12,000 a day, and the report the two men wrote became a race against those trains. Jonathan Freedland's book, first published in 2022, tells the escape at a thriller's pace, but the harder story is what happened to the warning: who read it, who acted and how slowly. He follows Vrba into a combative later life without polishing him into a saint. A gripping way into the question of what the world knew, and a good pick for readers who prefer narrative history to analysis.