YouSaid · the spoken record

Jonathan Freedland

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20
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2022-12-25
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2022-12-25
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  1. “This Rohorti, the leader of Hungary, halts the deportation of the Jews of Budapest. And that is why I say Verber, along with Wetzel, should be credited with saving 200,000 Jewish lives. It is one of the great acts of rescue and heroism of the Second World War, and it is why I consider Rudolf Verbert's name should be up there with Anne Frank Oskar Schindler, Primo Levy as the names that define our understanding of the Holocaust.”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “And then in late June, well, then finally, in a way, Roosevelt and the Pope, they feel, I think, to some extent shamed into acting because now their publics know about this. And they write to the de facto leader of Hungary, where the last Jewish community that hadn't yet been fully eradicated and slaughtered or caught in the Nazi inferno, better way of putting it, they write to the de facto leader of Hungary and say, you've got to halt these deportations. Now, by then, 437,000 Jews of the Hungarian provinces had been deported and most of them murdered in Auschwitz. But the Jews of the capital city, Budapest, had not yet been killed. They get that plea from the Pope, almost a threat from Roosevelt, the Yorby prosecutor for war crimes, if you allow this to continue, and they halt.”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “In its terms, Nazi language processing 10, 12, 15,000 killing, 10, 12, 15,000 Jews a day, even after his report was out. But I do want to say, because I don't want people to come away with the idea that it somehow failed, it didn't because the report was taking many, many roots, and one of them was it reached a journalist in Zurich, a British journalist, Walter Garrett of the Exchange Telegraph Press Agency, and a man who knew a story when he saw one. And he sees this report, and he realized this is the scoop of the century in a way. And it's an amazing scene. At night, on his bicycle, he writes a version and posts it through the mailbox of all the different news agencies in neutral Switzerland. And that gets the word out. It then does make it into the newspapers.”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “In seconds. Then it meant physical copies had to be carried hand to hand, in secret, smuggled across borders, translated in attic rooms in secret. And I have the detail there of how that happened. I think this is the first time the journey of the report has ever been fully reconstructed, as I've done in this book, how it got to all these different people. But it somehow does reach the desks of Winston Churchill, who writes in the margin of the summary version he gets, you know, what can be done, what can be said. It reaches Franklin. Bombed, there was never that action either from the RAF or from the United States Air Force and Auschwitz carried on”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “I mean, he believed sitting there in Auschwitz that the proof that no one in the world knew of Auschwitz's existence was Auschwitz's existence. It was unimaginable to him that a place in Europe was existing killing at its peak 12,000 to 15,000 people a day. That was impossible if the world knew about it because obviously the world would stop that. There was no way that would be allowed to happen. So he believed that just saying it and getting this report out would do the job. It didn't quite work out that way. And that would really be a defining theme for the rest of his life. But the report would then embark on its own journey. And that too, to my mind, is a series of more extraordinary escapes. The word itself, the truth kind of escapes across occupied Europe because this report, you know, now we imagine when you disseminate information, you press send on a computer and it's all over the world.”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Can sort of disgorge all this information that's been in his head for nearly two years. And the Slovak Jews there in Jilina write it all down. And what is produced is called the Verber Wetzler report is really a product of dictation. It's 32 pages, single-spaced, of hard factual information. And at that moment, it's April 1944 we're talking about. At that moment, it is the most full thorough detailed account of Auschwitz that has existed anywhere at any time. It's the first, really, full detailed account of what is going on in this place before then people had fragments, they had intimations, they pieced bits and pieces together, but now they have the actual, they have the goods, they have this fact. And his view was the minute this had been done, obviously, Auschwitz would cease to function.”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “I mean, that's such a big question and such an important question. They do get across the border. They make contact with the remnant Jewish community, the tiny handful of Slovak Jews who have held on and not been deported. There had been a pause in the deportations from Slovakia. They made contact and then still in hiding, you know, in a basement in the Slovak town of Zilina. They pour out everything they have observed. I did toy with calling this book The Memory Man because Rudolf Herbert, besides pulling off this extraordinary act of physical escape, it was worth it because, or rather it was made valuable because he had a gift of an extraordinary memory and he had memorized all those transports he had seen. He'd logged every single one of them to the point where when he does reach that basement in Jillila, he can almost download.”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Quite a few of, to my mind, the people who are really in the first rank of chroniclers of the Holocaust, they sort of got how important he was. You know, we might come onto this, but he wasn't a well-known man. But Martin Gilbert, who wrote a kind of definitive history of the Holocaust, he made a big deal of Rudolf Herber. Jeremy Isaacs, who would go on to run Channel 4, made that series The World at War, an episode on the Holocaust. He interviewed Rudolf Herber. Though Claude Lansman, obviously, I think, so there were hundreds of pages of transcripts of interviews with Rudy that I could go through. His papers are now in the Roosevelt Archive in New York. There was a lot of material to work on. It seemed to me that he himself knew that his story was worth telling and he wanted to make sure the information was there to be picked up.”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Well, that's a big responsibility to put it that way, and in a way, by writing a story, I do see that. I mean, he left behind an amazing amount of... Of information. I mean, for one thing he wrote his own memoir in 1963, it's very good. He co-wrote it with a Fleet Street journalist. It's very well done. But he was also interviewed, I mentioned Claude Lansman, but he was interviewed by...”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Conversations where she was able to tell me the full story and to give me those letters, and that really set me on my way.”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “And so when we sat in that garden, she was telling me memories of the man before this. Shaping experience. And just to say, because you said that moment of extraordinary good fortune, on the second last, I think, of our visits, she said, you know, my grandson is here because there's something I want to give you. And it's upstairs and I can't reach it myself. And Jack, her grandson went upstairs and came back down with a red suitcase, which she and he together handed to me and she said, those are Rudy's letters. And, you know, it was one of those moments where you thought, okay, I'm sort of meant to write this story somehow. This was meant to be. And we had, I think, one more conversation, and then I did get a phone call from Jack saying that his grandmother, Goethe, had had a full and had died. But it came after she and I had had those, I think, six very, five or six very long recorded conversations.”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Well, an extraordinary moment where your sort of heart is racing. And this was in that COVID summer of 2020. And I drove over there about, you know, 15 minutes from where I live. And we sat in her garden, socially distanced. It was on warm days and I had a tape recorder. I used to move it over with my foot. I didn't dare go anywhere near to her because she was 93 years old. And the extraordinary thing about her was that not only had she been married to him after the war, she knew Rudy, as she called him, from before the war they had been teenage. I say teenage sweethearts in a way he was a teenage crush of hers, I think. But she had known Rudolf Weber, the man who before he went to Auschwitz. She knew him as a teenage boy. By then, his name then was Walter Rosenberg, Welter Rosenberg. That was the person she knew when he was 14 and she was 12.”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “A message from Goethe Verbova saying, I live, dear Jonathan, I live in Moswell Hill. I am available this Thursday. Why didn't you come and see me and we can talk?”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “And I did the maths and worked out this would be a woman in her early 90s if she was still alive. I asked around a few people the closest I could get was that I did find out that she had taught at university college London at some point in her career. I worked out again that she would have retired probably 30 years ago. But I did that thing that journalists do, which is you sort of you fire off an email speculatively with no hope really that anybody will answer it. And I did it by working out the email address, you know, first name dot last name at ucl, et cetera. And I sent it off and thought it will ping back saying undeliverable or there'll be an administrator saying Professor Verbova, she had become a scientist, you know, left the department 25 years ago, you know.”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Yes, that it is almost exactly how it worked out, and it is quite true that there is an urgency now about telling stories of the Holocaust because so few of the people around then are around now. And Verber himself died in 2006. I knew that was, there was no possibility there, but I had read that he had been married twice. His second wife is alive and well and living in the United States, and she and I spoke a great length for this book many, many times. But I'd also read that he had a first wife who had moved to England. They had both been married in post-war Czechoslovakia and that she and he both had lived in England in the 1960s.”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Young teenage boy who had done the most outlandish thing possible in order to get the truth out. And that was percolating in my mind and it eventually led me to sit down and write this story.”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Did he escape? And it stayed with me. It stayed somewhere lodged in the back of my mind for decades, thinking that is an amazing story. And I found that it did, in a strange way, sort of come back to me in the last five or six years, specifically since about 2016, the era of fake news and post-truth and so on. I find myself thinking again of Rudolf Herber, partly because, and I haven't yet mentioned this, but Verber his motive for escape was in order to warn the world what was happening there and to really to get the truth out from underneath this mountain of lies in Auschwitz. And so in this era of 2016 and Trump and Brexit and so on, when the word of the year from the Oxford English Dictionary was post-truth and we were in this era of fake news, I found myself almost instinctively going back to this.”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Scarface or something, you know, with Manhattan as the backdrop he's speaking in English. A lot of the others were speaking in Polish or Czech and so on. And I just thought, who's that guy? You know, he seems out of place among all these people who are bearing witness from what seem to be a vanished historical era. And it turned out that his name was Rudolf Weber, as I say. And it's mentioned almost as an aside by Claude Landsman that this man Verber had escaped from Auschwitz. And I knew, just sitting there as a 19-year-old, the same age as the character who was being described as, if you like, that even then as a 19-year-old, I knew that Jews did not escape from Auschwitz. I mean, it hardly ever happened. And what's odd is that Landsman almost doesn't really talk about that with Verber. He just puts it to one side and really wants to press Verber on everything he saw when he was inside the camp. But I was sitting there thinking, how on earth?”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “How exactly it happened? And he spoke only to witnesses, people who had seen that process close up. And as a 19-year-old, you know, it seemed to me to be a succession of these old, often broken men and women who were testifying to what they'd gone through. And then suddenly on the screen comes this figure who explodes off the screen just full of charisma and vitality. He seems a generation younger than everyone else. In some ways he was. His name was Rudolf Verber and he was describing the experiences he'd had as a 19 year old, as a teenager in Auschwitz. The reason he leaps off the screen, by the way, is partly how he looks. He's very handsome. He's very striking. He's tanned. He's wearing a tan leather coat. He's got a full head of hair. It's dark. It's not gray like all the others. He looks like kind of Al Pacino in.”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Thank you, Man Veen. That's a very kind introduction. And when I first heard about this story more than 35 years ago, I've carried this around for a long time. It stayed somewhere in the back of my mind ever since I was 19 years old when I went to see in the Curzon Mayfair in London one part of a two-part documentary film. I saw the whole film, don't worry, but the big moment came In that first part where the documentary film was show up by Claude Lansman, which is this epic documentary of the Holocaust, as I say, nine and a half hours long, consists, there's no archive, it consists only of interviews with people who witnessed the eradication, the attempted eradication of the Jews of Europe. And Landsman was fascinated in the mechanics of that.”

    2022-12-25 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas, Part 4 – Jonathan Freedland, Will MacAskill and Katherine Rundell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT