In November of 2011, on a cold, dark, misty day, I traveled to Poland with two couples who are friends of mine. One of the men is the pastor of a church in the U.S. The other pastors a church in Germany. Neither had been to Auschwitz-Birkenau before. Nor had I. Together, we walked the grounds of the camps. We saw the barbed wire and the guard towers. We stood inside a gas chamber. We saw the ovens. We learned the history. We asked many questions, and we wept.
Before leaving Auschwitz that day, I purchased a book titled London Has Been Informed. The book details several of the dramatic, real-life escapes from Auschwitz and the stories of real heroes who risked their lives to bring news of the horrors of the death camps to the Jewish communities in Hungary and to the Allies. Interestingly, our tour guide had not mentioned anything about these escapes. Intrigued, I began to track down whatever books and documentary films I could find, not simply about the Holocaust but about these escapes and their importance. I also wanted to learn more about the “Auschwitz Protocol,” the actual document written by several of these escapees to explain to the world what Hitler and the Nazis were doing to exterminate the Jewish people. To this end, I was blessed to meet with experts and scholars at Yad Vashem—the world center for Holocaust research—who spent many hours answering my questions and giving me their insights, for which I am very grateful.
On a parallel track, I spent time researching what Yad Vashem calls the “Righteous Gentiles.” I found myself intrigued with the stories of Christians—both Protestants and Catholics—who risked their lives to protect and rescue Jewish men, women, and children during the Holocaust. Some of these Christians, including pastors and priests, were arrested by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps. Indeed, some of them laid down their lives that others might live.
Le Chambon is a real town in France. An article on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes, “From December 1940 to September 1944, the inhabitants of the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (population 5,000) and the villages on the surrounding plateau (population 24,000) provided refuge for an estimated 5,000 people. This number included an estimated 3,000–3,500 Jews who were fleeing from the Vichy authorities and the Germans.” The article describes how a local pastor and his assistant led the residents as they “offered shelter in private homes, in hotels, on farms, and in schools. They forged identification and ration cards for the refugees and in some cases guided them across the border to neutral Switzerland.” The inhabitants of Le Chambon and the nearby villages were recognized for their exceptional efforts by the State of Israel in 1990, when they were named Righteous among the Nations. You can find the text of the article at http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007518.
Jacob Weisz and Jean-Luc Leclerc are fictional characters, but their stories are inspired by the heroic lives of numerous real men, both Jews and Christians.
Other elements in the story are factual. Among them:
The letters read by Jacob’s fellow prisoners in the train car are based on actual letters of warning sent by inmates to their loved ones.
The lessons for a successful escape given to Jacob by Steinberger are taken more or less verbatim from Rudolf Vrba’s book I Escaped from Auschwitz, pages 213–215.
The BBC broadcast Jacob hears in chapter 103 is taken from the transcript of the actual radio announcement on January 27, 1945. You can find it at http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/27/newsid_3520000/3520986.stm.
The suicide note left by one of the Jewish leaders in the Warsaw ghetto in chapter 44 is a real document, though I have taken a minor liberty with the timing. The real note was written on May 11, 1943, whereas in the book I have that scene taking place on April 24. You can find the full text of the note at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Bund.html.
Dr. Mengele was a real-life monster who performed sadistic experiments on live prisoners at Auschwitz from May 30, 1943, until January 1945, when he fled upon learning of the advancing Soviet army. Again, I adjusted the timing slightly; I have him already active at Auschwitz on April 25, 1943. My purpose in occasionally making minor alterations like this was to represent the conditions of life at Auschwitz and try to help the reader get a better sense of what it would be like to suffer in—and then try to escape from—that actual living hell. I hope you will do your own research to better understand the facts, the timing, and the implications.
Among the books and films I studied during this project and that I highly recommend:
London Has Been Informed: Reports by Auschwitz Escapees, edited by Henryk Świebocki
I Escaped from Auschwitz by Rudolf Vrba
Escape from Hell: The True Story of the Auschwitz Protocol by Alfred Wetzler
The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery by Witold Pilecki
Secrets of the Dead: Escape from Auschwitz, PBS Home Video
The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, and Day by Elie Wiesel
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer
The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There by Philip P. Haille
Weapons of the Spirit, a documentary film by Pierre Sauvage about the rescue efforts of the people of Le Chambon
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas
When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland by Nechama Tec
Silent Rebels: The True Story of the Raid on the Twentieth Train to Auschwitz by Marion Schreiber
The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust by Martin Gilbert
Auschwitz and the Allies by Martin Gilbert
The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? edited by Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum
Commandant of Auschwitz by Rudolf Hoess
In addition to these writers and film producers, I am deeply grateful to all those who helped me in my research. I feel special heartfelt gratitude to the staff and scholars at Yad Vashem and Christian Friends of Yad Vashem for their time, insights, and kindness. These include Dr. Susanna Kokkonen, Dr. David Silverklang, Dr. Robert Rozett, and Dr. Yehuda Bauer.
Special thanks in this effort also go to the great team at Tyndale House Publishers, including Mark Taylor, Jeff Johnson, Ron Beers, Karen Watson, Jeremy Taylor, Jan Stob, Cheryl Kerwin, Todd Starowitz, and Dean Renninger. I am deeply grateful to them for their ongoing support, partnership, and abiding friendship.
Thanks to Scott Miller, my good friend and superb literary agent at Trident Media Group.
Thanks so much to my parents, Len and Mary Rosenberg, for all their love and support on this project and so many others. Thanks to the November Communications team—June Meyers and Nancy Pierce—for their love and tireless assistance. Thanks as well to my extended family and close friends.
Many, many thanks to my dear and wonderful wife, Lynn, and to our four wonderful sons, Caleb, Jacob, Jonah, and Noah, for your love, your prayers, your patience, and your boundless encouragement. What a joy it is to do life with you guys. I am blessed beyond words.
Most of all, I’m grateful to my Lord—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—for sustaining me and for giving me the opportunity to share his love with others.
1
TEHRAN, IRAN
NOVEMBER 4, 1979
Charlie Harper was still five or six hundred yards from the compound, but he was alone; even if he could fight his way through the rapidly growing mob, he still had no plan to rescue those trapped inside.
He could hear gunfire. He could taste the acrid stench of thick, black smoke rising into the crisp, early morning air. He could feel the searing heat of the bonfires as American flags and tires and someone’s overturned car were being torched all around him. He could see the rage in the eyes of the young men—thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands, bearded, shouting, screaming, out of control—surrounding the emb
assy and threatening to overrun its grounds. He just had no idea what to do.
It was the twenty-six-year-old’s first assignment with the State Department. He was the most junior political officer in the country and had no field experience. He and his beautiful, spirited young bride, Claire, had been married only a year. They’d been in Tehran since September 1—barely two months. He didn’t even know the names of most of his colleagues behind the compound walls. But though he increasingly feared for their safety, he still refused to believe that he was personally in mortal danger.
How could he be? Charles David Harper loved Iran in a way that made little sense to him, much less to his bride. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, he hadn’t known anyone from Iran. He’d never been here before. He’d never even been close. But inexplicably he had fallen in love with the Persian people somewhere along the way. He loved the complexity of this ancient, exotic culture. He loved the mysterious rhythm of modern Tehran, even filled as it was with religious extremists and militant secularists. And he especially loved the food—khoroshte fesenjoon was his latest favorite, a savory stew of roast lamb, pomegranates, and walnuts, which the Shirazis, their next-door neighbors—God bless them—had already made for him and Claire twice since they had arrived at this post.
The language of Iran had been a joy for Charlie to absorb and master. He’d picked up Farsi quickly as an undergraduate at Stanford. He’d sharpened it carefully in graduate school at Harvard. When he joined the State Department upon graduation, he’d been placed immediately on the fast track to become a Foreign Service officer, was rushed through basic diplomatic training, and was sent to Tehran for his first assignment. He’d been thrilled every step along the way. Thrilled with using Farsi every day. Thrilled with being thrown into a highly volatile political cauldron. Thrilled with trying to understand the dynamic of Khomeini’s revolution from the inside. And convinced that the sooner he could get his sea legs, the sooner he could truly help Washington understand and navigate the enormous social and cultural upheaval under way inside Iran.
The violent outbursts of the students, Charlie was convinced, were spasmodic. This one would pass like a summer thunderstorm, as all the others had. The dark clouds would pass. The sun would come out again. They just needed to be patient. As a couple. As a country.
Charlie glanced at his watch. It was barely six thirty in the morning. Since hearing on the radio back at his apartment the initial reports of trouble, he’d been running flat out for nearly nine blocks, but that was no longer possible—too many people and too little space. As he inched his way forward, he could see the top floors of the chancery, not far from Roosevelt Gate, the embassy’s main entrance, but he knew he’d never make it there from this side. He’d have to find another way inside—perhaps through the consulate offices in the compound’s northwest corner.
Winded, his soaked shirt sticking to his back, Charlie shifted gears. He began trying to move laterally through the mob. His relative youth, dark hair, and dark brown eyes—a gift from his mother’s Italian heritage—seemed to help him blend in somewhat, though he suddenly wished he had a beard. And a gun.
He could feel the situation steadily deteriorating. The Marines were nowhere to be seen. They were no longer guarding the main gate or even patrolling the fence, so far as he could tell. He assumed they had pulled back to defend the buildings on the compound—the chancery, the ambassador’s house, the house of the deputy chief of mission, the consulate, and the warehouse (aka, “Mushroom Inn”), along with various other offices and the motor pool. Charlie wasn’t a military man, but he figured that decision was probably wise tactically. He could feel the mass of bodies surging forward, again and again. It wouldn’t be long before these wild-eyed students burst through the gate.
Would the Marines open fire when that finally happened? How could they? It would be a bloodbath. And yet how could they not? Many of the young men around him had pistols. Some had rifles. Some of them were already firing into the air. What if the students actually opened fire on American diplomats? The Marines would be compelled to return fire. Events could quickly spin out of control.
The roar of the crowd was deafening. Some fool, perched atop the perimeter wall, was shouting, “Death to America!” through a bullhorn. The frenetic, feverish crowd lapped up every word and chanted it back again and again, louder every time.
Charlie was finally making progress, and as he elbowed his way through the horde, he couldn’t help but think how ugly the embassy’s squat brick buildings were. The entire campus, in fact, looked like some cookie-cutter American public high school from the forties or fifties. It had even been dubbed “Henderson High” after Loy Wesley Henderson, the U.S. ambassador to Iran from 1951 to 1954. It was hardly a prize architecturally. But there was no question it would be a gold mine of intelligence for the radicals loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini if they actually got inside before his fellow FSOs burned and shredded all their documents.
Someone grabbed Charlie from behind. He spun around and found himself staring into the bloodshot eyes of an unshaven zealot probably five years younger but five inches taller than him.
“You—you’re an American!” the student screamed in Farsi.
Heads turned. Charlie felt himself suddenly surrounded. He noticed the kid’s right hand balling up into a fist. He saw into the kid’s vacant eyes, and for the first time, Charlie Harper feared for his life.
“Vous êtes fou. Je suis de Marseille!” he screamed back in flawless French, calling the kid crazy and claiming to be from France’s largest commercial seaport.
The vehemence of Charlie’s response and the fact that he wasn’t speaking English caught the student off guard. The kid went blank for a moment. He obviously didn’t speak French and for a split second seemed unsure how to proceed.
Charlie’s mind raced. He suddenly realized how quickly he’d be a dead man if these radicals discovered he was an American. He was tempted to kick the kid in the groin and dash off into the crowd. But there were now at least six or seven others just as large and every bit as angry.
One of them began to move against him, but just then a pickup truck filled with other young men—masked and screaming—hopped a curb and came barreling through the crowd. The driver laid on the horn and people went diving for cover. The truck screeched to a halt just to Charlie’s right. The young men in the back began firing machine guns in the air, and then, as the crowd finally cleared a direct path, the driver gunned the engine and drove headlong into Roosevelt Gate. The wrought-iron barricade crumpled in a twisted heap, and thousands of enraged students cheered and screamed and poured onto the embassy grounds as if they’d been shot from a cannon.
As quickly as he’d been grabbed, Charlie now found himself set free as his would-be attackers abandoned him and followed the crowd through the hole in the gates. His heart racing, adrenaline coursing through his veins, Charlie realized he’d been given an opportunity to escape. He seized the moment and began moving in the opposite direction, away from the main gate and toward a side street. He was still having trouble maneuvering through the rampaging mob, but moments later, he rounded the corner and caught a glimpse of the entrance to the consulate.
It was shut tight. He hesitated for a moment. Should he head there still? Should he try to get inside and help whoever was trapped there? The staff inside was mostly comprised of women who handled visa issues eight hours a day, day after day, year after year. They weren’t trained to handle revolutions. They had to be terrified. But could he really help them, or would he more likely be caught and brutalized instead?
Just then, he saw two consular employees quickly exit a side door. Elated, he was about to call out to them when a group of masked students armed with rifles came racing around the corner and surrounded the two young women. They jumped on them and began beating them mercilessly.
Charlie’s anger boiled. But there was nothing he could do. He was alone. He was unarmed. And again he thought of Claire back in their apartme
nt—alone, terrified, and three and a half months pregnant.
2
The twenty-minute journey home took two hours.
Cautiously working his way through the clogged streets—and purposefully taking a circuitous route, checking constantly to see if anyone was following him—Charlie eventually made it back to apartment 902 in the upscale high-rise with the spectacular views of the Tehran skyline. He burst through the door, quickly locked it behind him, and hearing the AM radio still on in the bedroom, headed there to find his wife.
“Charlie, are you okay?” Claire said breathlessly, jumping up to embrace him.
“Yes,” he whispered, holding her close. “But what about you?”
“I’ve been terrified about you,” she whispered back, beginning to cry. “I thought I’d never see you again.”
“Sweetheart, I’m sorry,” he said as quietly and lovingly as he could. “But I’m fine. Don’t worry. I’m all right, just a little shaken up.”
It was a lie. He wasn’t fine. He was scared and unsure what to do next. But as guilty as he felt about lying to the woman he loved, he worried for her and the precious life growing within her.
“Are you still bleeding?” he asked.
The Auschwitz Escape Page 42