WORD LISTS

"Impossible Escape" by Steve Sheinkin, Chapters 6–12

Tue Jun 04 10:39:07 EDT 2024
By Vocabulary.com (NY)Visual Thesaurus Moderator
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
quota
More than two million European Jews had settled in the United States in the past few decades, but the American government had shut that door in the 1920s with strict immigration quotas.
influential
You couldn’t get into Britain either, not without influential connections.
shorthand
She had zero interest in being a secretary. Like Rudi’s study of Russian, practicing typing and shorthand was just something to do, something to occupy her gifted mind.
graze
There was a guard in the kitchen, but he seemed busy grazing on the food lying around.
steep
They dove under the wire, skidded down a steep hill, splashed across a shallow stream, and charged into the woods, laughing like kids with the joy of running free.
forge
With any luck, the contact he’d met in Hungary had sent the forged identity papers he’d promised.
kiosk
Rudi tore down the city street and circled a busy newspaper kiosk like a mouse in a cartoon.
evade
She and her mother, Jozefina, would set out first, the family decided. Max would travel separately, hopefully giving them all a better chance to evade notice.
in earnest
“I felt in every fiber of my body that the fight for survival had started in earnest,” Gerta would later say.
sliver
That was one sliver of mercy—Slovakia’s president, Jozef Tiso, had promised that families could stay together.
neutral
Small numbers of people who were able to escape occupied territory and reach Britain, or neutral countries such as Switzerland, told of what they’d seen and heard.
multitude
“To remove the anticipated multitudes by shooting would be absolutely impossible,” he’d later explain, “and, in respect of the women and children, would impose too great a strain on the SS men who would have to carry it out.”
impose
“To remove the anticipated multitudes by shooting would be absolutely impossible,” he’d later explain, “and, in respect of the women and children, would impose too great a strain on the SS men who would have to carry it out.”
precedent
Höss decided to use poison gas. There was precedent for this. With Hitler’s approval, the Nazis had already used poison gas to murder tens of thousands of Germans with mental illnesses or physical disabilities.
vermin
In September 1941, the Auschwitz staff tested their first gas chamber. Guards forced Soviet prisoners of war into a basement room in Block 11, the camp’s punishment block. They threw in Zyklon B—toxic hydrogen cyanide in crystal form, a pesticide used in camp to kill vermin and disinfect clothes.
annihilation
“I must admit openly that the gassings had a calming effect on me,” he would later say, “since in the near future the mass annihilation of the Jews was to begin.”
emaciated
Emaciated men with shaved heads, wearing striped prisoner uniforms, moved around pushing wheelbarrows, digging holes.
assortment
They were closely watched by healthier-looking men in a strange assortment of mismatched clothing, with green triangles sewn on their shirts.
determined
Because the more Rudi saw of Majdanek, the more determined he was to escape.
concierge
Anyone could be a police informant, including the concierge who lived on the ground floor and kept a nosy watch on the building’s residents.
brood
Her mother saw that she was brooding, bored and lonely, worried sick about her friends.
asset
Non-Jewish adults had often told her she did not “look Jewish”—disturbingly, they meant it as a compliment. But could her fair hair and blue eyes be an asset now?
promptly
Gerta entered the store—and promptly blanked on the Hungarian word for matches.
coveted
Kitchen jobs were coveted in camp—for the opportunity to steal food.
flank
Flanked by SS men, they marched in a column out of Majdanek.
ponder
Rudi began pondering escape options.
lanky
He looked around the car, hoping to find an accomplice, and spotted the blond hair and lanky frame of Josef Erdelyi.
assess
What about the weathered wooden floor? Could they crack a few boards and slip out? They agreed to assess their chances at the first stop.
cordon
Dozens of SS guards, with their submachine guns, had already formed a cordon around the train.
lackey
The kapo turned and climbed the stairs, his lackeys close behind.
overwhelming
Was there any effective way to fight back against such overwhelming evil?
evidently
Rudi watched prisoners carry in barrels of steaming liquid. He was served a portion and gulped it down. This, evidently, was the “tea”—gray and bitter.
diabolical
An orchestra? In this diabolical place?
procession
This procession looked to Rudi like a ghoulish hallucination. A military-style march in rows of five, neat and orderly—but when you focused in on individual people you could see that many of them were skeletal and wobbling.
naive
For now, he only knew he’d been absurdly naïve. To have imagined himself in a wheat field, awaiting the right moment to make a break for the woods! It was the fantasy of a child.
rafter
Franz brought them into another barracks, a narrow, barnlike space with wooden rafters and tall rows of bunk beds, three levels high.
assimilate
They were among Hungary’s more than eight hundred thousand Jews—almost 9 percent of the country’s population—and well assimilated into Hungarian life.
unsettle
The boys babbled on about sports, about friends at school. Normal things—that’s what was so unsettling. They seemed utterly uninterested in the war or the fate of Jewish people in countries under Nazi control.
assume
“They never asked about me,” Gerta recalled, “what it felt like being a refugee, assuming another identity, not being able to go to school.”
gallows
Rudi lined up with thousands of other prisoners in a courtyard outside the camp kitchen. Two wooden gallows sat in front of the building. A row of SS guards, guns on straps over their shoulders, beat on military drums.

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