Your Book Review: The Escape Artist - by Scott Alexander
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Your Book Review: The Escape Artist<br>Finalist #5 in the Book Review Contest
Scott Alexander<br>Aug 14, 2026
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[This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
Holocaust stories, both true and fictional, tend to repeat the same few clichés over and over. There’s the innocent child who only partially understands what’s happening (Diary of Anne Frank, Boy in the Striped Pajamas). There’s the sentimental redemption story that focuses on a small individual act (Life is Beautiful, The Book Thief). And of course, there’s the good German, or at least the morally conflicted one (Schindler’s List, The Reader).<br>You won’t find any of these tropes in The Escape Artist.<br>This 2022 book by Jonathan Freedland1 tells the true, and largely unknown, story of one of the few Jews ever to break out of Auschwitz. The details of his improbable escape are remarkable enough, but what really makes the story fascinating is the way it so thoroughly defies every single expectation we have of a Holocaust narrative. Its deeply unlikeable protagonist eventually alienates every friend and supporter he has, and dies a bitter old man, almost completely forgotten by history. His story lacks not only good Germans, but even good non-Germans, with his harshest criticism saved not for the Nazis, not even for the dithering Allies, but for the Jewish leaders of Europe. And though one could see the story of his escape as a triumph, in his own telling, it’s a failure, for although he makes it out of Auschwitz against all odds, he fails at his larger mission: to stop the Holocaust. There’s no redemption here, no moral uplift, no lessons save for perhaps the grimmest and most nihilistic “lesson” I’ve ever encountered in any story, Holocaust-related or otherwise: that when confronted with the unthinkable, most people’s natural tendency is denial.<br>But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. To get out of Auschwitz, first you have to get into Auschwitz…<br>I.<br>Here’s a hot take for you: Auschwitz was bad.<br>It was bad for all of its prisoners, of course, but it was the worst for the Jewish ones, who, if they survived at all, were held in harsher and more tightly controlled parts of the camp than everyone else. During the five years between Auschwitz’s opening in 1940 and its liberation by the Soviet Army in 1945, at least 900 prisoners attempted escape, and around 200 of them succeeded—but, because of their stricter confinement, only a handful were Jews2.<br>Walter Rosenberg, our protagonist, is the first. And crazily enough, he goes to Auschwitz voluntarily.<br>Of course, it’s not like he knows what he’s signing up for. The Nazi line at the time—an illusion they go to great lengths to maintain3—is that the Jews deported from Europe are all being “resettled in the east.” In 1942, when our story begins, Walter is a Slovak teenager, just eighteen years old. He’s being held at Majdanek, another Polish concentration camp, after two failed attempts to escape Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia4. Majdanek itself is at this point “merely” a labor camp—not unheard of in wartime—though it will eventually become a death camp after Walter has left it behind.<br>The camp administrators seek volunteers for “farm work” elsewhere, and Walter is one of the first to raise his hand, despite the dire warnings from another prisoner: “Go there and you’ll die.” It’s not that he doesn’t believe the warnings. But he’s decided that being moved somewhere else, no matter where that somewhere else is, might bring an opportunity for escape. And from the moment the Nazi tanks first rolled into Czechoslovakia, Walter has been single-mindedly focused on escape5.
Walter in a photo taken after the war, looking like a dead ringer for Joaquin Phoenix.<br>Already, Walter has a sense that he’s different from the other prisoners—and, for that matter, from most people he knew back home in his hometown of Trnava. Why aren’t they doing anything? he wonders. Why aren’t they all trying to escape too? If Walter were alive today, one gets the sense he’d describe himself as high-agency and everyone else as NPCs. You Can Just Do Things, he believes, even when the thing in question is escaping from a concentration camp. Maybe this is youth talking. Maybe it’s naivety. Or maybe Walter is simply, constitutionally, a difficult person: allergic to authority and already showing the same contrarian streak that will later get him fired from multiple academic jobs.<br>And so Walter goes to Auschwitz.<br>The Nazis obviously do not actually believe their inscription on Auschwitz’s gates, that “work will set you free.” But this story is full of bitter ironies, and among them is that for Walter,...