Impossible Escape: Chapter 28–Epilogue

by Steve Sheinkin
This is the true story of Slovakian teenager Rudolf Vrba, who escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp in April 1944 and provided eyewitness testimony that stopped the deportation of 200,000 Jews in Hungary, including his childhood friend and future wife, Gerta Sidonová, who reconnected with him through her underground resistance network.

Here are links to our lists for the book: Prologue–Chapter 5, Chapters 6–12, Chapters 13–19, Chapters 20–27, Chapter 28–Epilogue
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. presume
    take to be the case or to be true
    If the prisoner was not found in three days, it was presumed they were dead somewhere, lost in a pile of bodies.
  2. dub
    give a nickname to
    Huge piles of lumber sat in the dirt of this construction site, an area of camp prisoners dubbed “Mexico.”
  3. scour
    examine minutely
    This gave him an up-front look at the massive search—more than a thousand SS men, Rudi estimated, with a couple hundred dogs, scouring and sniffing every corner of the outer camp.
  4. impulse
    a sudden desire
    When they were hiding in the lumber, the prisoners carved a little message to the Nazis on the wood and signed it with their prisoner numbers. A foolish impulse that could only make their situation worse.
  5. casual
    appropriate for ordinary or routine occasions
    When he got behind the cover of a half-built barracks, Rudi stopped, turned, and took another route toward the lumber pile, trying to calm his steps into the casual stride of a routine errand.
  6. sprawling
    spreading out in different directions
    They were still on land controlled by Auschwitz authorities, a sprawling territory cleared of Polish villages and farms.
  7. ideal
    conforming to an ultimate standard of perfection
    From here, they would turn east toward the Sola River, which flowed out of the mountains of Slovakia and provided an ideal north-south landmark.
  8. rural
    living in or characteristic of farming or country life
    The Nazis were moving quickly to round up Jews in the rural communities and small towns of Hungary.
  9. dense
    hard to pass through because of heavy growth
    They ran for the trees and burrowed into what was already becoming a familiar spot—a tiny jungle of dense, wet bushes.
  10. thicket
    a dense growth of bushes
    They were in a public park.
    When the friends peered out from their thicket, they saw uniformed SS men and their wives strolling along winding lanes.
  11. humble
    low or inferior in station or quality
    How could they know which of the Polish families wouldn’t immediately turn them over to the SS? They couldn’t. They had to pick a house and hope.
    They chose a humble-looking hut.
  12. parcel
    a wrapped package
    It was the grandmother, holding a parcel, and a man about her age, a Polish farmer, with a pistol in his hand.
  13. ravenous
    extremely hungry
    They let go of their knives and ate like ravenous dogs.
  14. wary
    marked by keen caution and watchful prudence
    He’d been wary of a trap. The Germans knew that people in town sometimes helped anti-Nazi partisans—maybe they’d dressed two agents as runaway prisoners to entrap the locals.
  15. apprehend
    take into police custody
    They’d all seen the warrant for two Slovak Jews from Auschwitz, and they were expected to help apprehend the fugitives.
  16. tender
    hurting
    Rudi’s feet were so swollen and tender, he could barely walk.
  17. exempt
    grant relief from a rule or requirement to
    Tiso had exempted some Jewish doctors from resettlement, putting them to work in small towns to show his “love” of the rural population.
  18. undaunted
    unshaken in purpose
    Her typing was rusty at this point, her shorthand nearly nonexistent. Undaunted, with her forged identity papers in hand, Gerta walked into a large office building and applied for work as a secretary.
  19. tranquil
    not agitated
    With new clothes, cash, and false identity papers provided by Jewish leaders in Žilina, the friends traveled to a small town in the Tatra Mountains in eastern Slovakia and tried to settle into the tranquil routine of ordinary students enjoying a summer holiday.
  20. fortified
    secured with bastions
    Early the next morning—D-Day—the soldiers stormed the heavily fortified coastline and fought their way up the beaches.
  21. dwindling
    gradually decreasing until little remains
    Even now, as their empire crumbled, the Nazis directed their dwindling resources to mass murder, racing to deport the Jewish population of Hungary to Auschwitz.
  22. appeal
    request earnestly; ask for aid or protection
    President Franklin Roosevelt appealed directly to the Hungarian ruler, Miklós Horthy, to stop the deportation of Hungarian Jews.
  23. refinery
    an industrial plant for purifying a crude substance
    On July 2, U.S. bombers hit oil refineries and rail yards in Budapest.
  24. compliance
    a disposition or tendency to yield to the will of others
    The Nazis did not have sufficient forces in Hungary to continue their operations without Hungarian compliance.
  25. somber
    serious and gloomy in character
    “There were times when we wondered whether we would ever be happy again,” Rudi would later write of his feelings that summer. “These were somber moments in which we feared that never again, perhaps, would we be able to live normal lives.”
  26. amass
    collect or gather
    Now, for the first time, photographers and film crews from Allied countries recorded images of a Nazi death camp. Reporters began collecting the testimony of surviving prisoners. The staggering, heartbreaking process of amassing the story of the Holocaust had begun.
  27. feeble
    pathetically lacking in force or effectiveness
    Adolf Hitler lived in underground bunkers, stooped over and visibly aged, throwing feeble tantrums at the parade of disastrous news.
  28. uprising
    organized opposition to authority
    In Slovakia, partisan fighters rose in open rebellion against the pro-Nazi government. Thousands of German troops poured into Slovakia to smash the uprising.
  29. artillery
    large but transportable armament
    On January 17, 1945, with Soviet artillery pounding in the distance, the Nazis evacuated Auschwitz.
  30. valor
    courage when facing danger
    Rudi Vrba served with the Slovak freedom fighters through the end of the war. The newly reestablished government of Czechoslovakia awarded him its highest medal for valor in combat.
  31. suppress
    reduce the incidence or severity of or stop
    “We hardly slept at all,” Gerta recalled, “but our desire to pass the exams at the end of the three months so that we could start university in September was so strong that it suppressed our need for sleep.”
  32. supremacist
    a person who believes that some group is superior to others
    He set up a publishing house in his Toronto home and began distributing white supremacist and pro-Nazi books and pamphlets, including a work of his own entitled The Hitler We Loved and Why.
  33. infringe
    go against, as of rules and laws
    Canada’s Supreme Court struck down the “false news” law as unconstitutional, saying it “infringes the guarantee of freedom of expression.”
  34. staggering
    so surprisingly impressive as to stun or overwhelm
    The truth about World War II is staggering. The suffering was so vast, the numbers so large, that historians can only offer estimations.
  35. vigilant
    carefully observant or attentive
    At a school talk in 1995, a student asked if Rudi thought the Holocaust could happen again.
    “If it was possible yesterday, it’s possible again,” Rudi said, “unless we are vigilant.”
  36. inspire
    serve as the inciting cause of
    As she got older, though, she could foresee a time when there would be no Holocaust survivors alive to tell their stories. This inspired her to share her own survival story in a book, Trust and Deceit, and in talks at schools and museums.
  37. hearty
    showing warm and sincere friendliness
    “He has a hearty, wide smile,” McKay wrote, “and a singsong way of speaking.”
  38. memento
    a reminder of past events
    Rudi had just two “physical mementos” of Auschwitz, McKay noted. “The number 44070 tattooed on his arm, and the belt of a beloved, brave fellow prisoner.”
  39. compact
    briefly giving the gist of something
    I was convinced that I needed to think of some way to sum up this heartbreaking, infuriating, inspiring story. To give you some compact takeaway, some profound message to apply to daily life.
  40. profound
    showing intellectual penetration or emotional depth
    I was convinced that I needed to think of some way to sum up this heartbreaking, infuriating, inspiring story. To give you some compact takeaway, some profound message to apply to daily life.
Created on Tue Jun 04 10:39:53 EDT 2024 (updated Wed Jun 05 13:45:51 EDT 2024)

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