ESCAPE ARTIST
Amid the confusing chaos and searing carnage of war, twists of fate often seem to be the main determinant of who lives and who dies. For those who survive, luck may certainly play an outsize role. But wily resourcefulness can be equally crucial. In the bloody kill zone of Budapest, Hungary, during the waning months of World War II in Europe, Ferenc “Feri” Shatz was fortunate to have plenty of both. And he would need it to emerge unscathed from multiple brushes with death, sometimes by a razor-thin margin.
Shatz’s path to survival began in October 1944, in a cornfield on the outskirts of the Hungarian capital. The short, slight, 18-year-old Jew had endured months of brutal service rebuilding bombed-out railroads and highways as a slave laborer in a Nazi forced-work battalion and felt certain he could not endure the grueling 15-hour workdays much longer. The guards murdered any workers who fell injured or exhausted, so Shatz knew that if he faltered, his reward would be a bullet to the head.
Shatz knew that if he faltered, his reward would be a bullet to the head.
The teen had devised a desperate, daring plan, and the chance to employ it arrived suddenly one day as he and his fellow Jewish workers struggled to repair damaged rail lines just north of the Hungarian capital. “It was American bombers that provided my means of
