Impossible Escape: Chapters 13–19

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
40 words 32 learners

Learn words with Flashcards and other activities

Definition First
Print Flashcards

Other learning activities

Answer a few questions about each word. Use this to prep for your next quiz! Compete with other teams in real time to see who answers the most questions correctly! Test your spelling acumen. Read the definition, listen to the word and try spelling it!

Teaching tools

Create and assign quizzes to your students to test their vocabulary. Assign learning activities including Practice, Vocabulary Jams and Spelling Bees to your students, and monitor their progress in real-time.

Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. conquest
    the act of defeating and taking control of
    Adolf Hitler’s military conquests reached a high point in the summer of 1942. Nazi Germany ruled a vast empire stretching from the coast of France in the west to the outskirts of the Soviet capital of Moscow in the east.
  2. objective
    the goal intended to be attained
    Hitler’s next major objective was the industrial city of Stalingrad, in southwest Russia.
  3. detain
    deprive of freedom; take into confinement
    Some were slave labor camps; others were used to detain anyone perceived as an enemy to Hitler.
  4. remote
    inaccessible and sparsely populated
    Compared to Auschwitz, these camps were small—fenced-in clearings in remote forests along railroad tracks. These places had one purpose: rapid mass murder.
  5. diesel
    an internal-combustion engine that burns heavy oil
    The SS guards shut the doors and pumped in carbon monoxide, using diesel engines to produce the poison gas.
  6. atrocity
    an act of shocking cruelty
    The journalist even cast doubt on his own story, citing a Jewish leader in London who thought the report, in the journalist’s words, “seemed too terrible and the atrocities too inhuman to be true.”
  7. unfounded
    without a basis in reason or fact
    The State Department called the story “fantastic,” treating it as a mix of exaggeration and unfounded rumor.
  8. farfetched
    highly imaginative but unlikely
    Of course, Americans knew there was nothing farfetched about innocent people being locked in prison camps—it was happening at home.
  9. internment
    confinement during wartime
    The government forced 122,000 Japanese Americans—most of them U.S. citizens, and against whom there was no evidence of disloyalty—out of their homes on the West Coast and into internment camps surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers.
  10. perpetrator
    someone who commits wrongdoing
    President Roosevelt sent a message of sympathy, vowing the American people would “hold the perpetrators of these crimes to strict accountability in a day of reckoning which will surely come.”
  11. reckoning
    a time or act of being held accountable; a settling of accounts
    President Roosevelt sent a message of sympathy, vowing the American people would “hold the perpetrators of these crimes to strict accountability in a day of reckoning which will surely come.”
  12. sole
    single and isolated from others
    Roosevelt’s position was that America’s sole focus would be on defeating Germany and its allies on the battlefield. Anything else was a dangerous distraction.
  13. account
    a record or narrative description of past events
    Might it have made a difference if there had been a firsthand account of mass murder at camps such as Auschwitz?
  14. esteemed
    having an illustrious reputation; respected
    The block senior, a high-ranking kapo with the green triangle of a career criminal, lectured the prisoners about how to behave in front of their esteemed guest.
  15. feign
    give a false appearance of
    Himmler strolled toward Rudi’s group with a phony smile pasted on his face. Was he bored already? Feigning interest to be polite?
  16. capacity
    the amount that can be contained
    A sign on the farmhouse door read DISINFECTION ROOM. In fact, this was one of two houses that Höss had converted to gas chambers, giving him added capacity beyond the crematorium.
  17. incessantly
    without interruption
    Ipi Müller, as always, spoke incessantly of his talented son.
  18. vat
    a large open vessel for holding or storing liquids
    He lined up with the other prisoners in front of the vats of morning tea.
  19. stubble
    short hairs growing on a man's face when he has not shaved
    The men then washed without soap and had the stubble torn from their cheeks and head by dull razors.
  20. flog
    beat with a whip, rod, or cane
    Stark flogged the prisoners down a hallway thick with the stench of burning flesh.
  21. disoriented
    having lost your bearings
    Disoriented with terror, only half hearing Stark’s curses, Filip took in details in random order:
    A fan spinning in an opening in the ceiling.
    In an open suitcase, several boxes of matches from a store in Slovakia.
    The body of a woman he’d gone to school with.
  22. scorching
    hot and dry enough to burn or parch a surface
    Through scorching, smoky air, he could make out figures moving around, hurrying back and forth.
  23. searing
    extremely hot
    He felt searing heat on his hands and face as he reached into the oven to stoke the fire.
  24. stoke
    (of a fire) stir up or tend
    He felt searing heat on his hands and face as he reached into the oven to stoke the fire.
  25. ghastly
    shockingly repellent; inspiring horror
    Weakened and disoriented from days in ghastly boxcars, people were desperate above all for a drink of water.
  26. ordeal
    a severe or trying experience
    People believed they would get through this ordeal, get something to drink, and be put to work.
  27. inhuman
    without compunction or compassion
    They had learned to expect inhuman cruelty from the Nazis—still, the idea of murder by poison gas, the mass murder of children, was beyond imagination.
  28. relentless
    never-ceasing
    Hitler’s relentless lies—and the centuries of lies and conspiracy theories that had come before—created a distorted reality in which Jews were seen as less than fully human.
  29. depraved
    deviating from what is considered moral or right or proper
    “But the reasoning behind the extermination process seemed to me right. I thought no more of it at the time.”
    In the history of the world, this type of depraved “reasoning” is not unique to Nazi Germany.
  30. saboteur
    someone who deliberately destroys or disrupts something
    Franz was dragged off to the punishment block, and then the SS man turned on the prisoners, calling them thieves and saboteurs, “vermin, trafficking in the food of men who are fighting to save civilization.”
  31. muster
    summon up, call forth, or bring together
    He and his friends sat together in the sun, heads between their knees, unable to muster the energy to talk.
  32. foreman
    a person who exercises control over workers
    Rudi and Josef worked for the French foreman for the next few hours, twisting steel wires into frames to reinforce concrete in the buildings under construction.
  33. condemn
    declare or judge unfit for use or habitation
    This was just another form of death sentence. People did not come back from the “hospital.” Condemned prisoners pleaded their case, insisting they were strong enough to keep going.
  34. thrash
    give a beating to
    Even if a kapo sympathized, he faced a difficult call—knowing he’d be thrashed by the SS for bringing a dying man to work.
  35. frail
    physically weak
    Ipi raised a frail hand to stroke his son’s cheek.
  36. budding
    beginning to develop
    Your son Filip, the promising grammar-school boy, the budding violinist, is not a musician but one who cremates corpses.
  37. synthetic
    not of natural origin; prepared or made artificially
    Rudi and Josef continued twisting wire frames at the Buna construction site—“buna” was synthetic rubber, which would be produced at this factory when it was completed.
  38. famished
    extremely hungry
    They weren’t sick, just famished and exhausted, but there’d be no chance to explain.
    They’d just been sentenced to death.
  39. precipice
    the brink of a dangerous or potentially disastrous situation
    “But remember,” he added, “in Canada you live on the edge of a precipice.”
    “What do you do there? What’s the work like?”
    “It’s tough. Let’s leave it at that.”
  40. morsel
    a small amount of solid food; a mouthful
    He watched, deeply moved, as the men drifted among crowds of prisoners, slipping friends lifesaving morsels of food, handing small bottles of medicine to prisoners who’d been doctors back in the real world.
Created on Tue Jun 04 10:39:20 EDT 2024 (updated Wed Jun 05 13:30:12 EDT 2024)

Sign up now (it’s free!)

Whether you’re a teacher or a learner, Vocabulary.com can put you or your class on the path to systematic vocabulary improvement.