Peter Moffat is writing a television adaptation of Jonathan Freedland's The Escape Artist

Peter Moffat is working with Bonafide Films on a television film adaptation of British journalist Jonathan Freedland's The Escape Artist. Peter Moffat, BAFTA winner of Your Honor (US) and Criminal Justice, is on board to write the series that tells the amazing true story of how Rudolf Vrba, a 19-year-old Slovak Jew, along with fellow Auschwitz prisoner Fred Wetzler escaped to warn the world about the Holocaust.

The pair's report led to 200,000 Budapest Jews being saved from immediate deportation to Auschwitz. The project is not yet networked and Bonafide has secured the television rights.

Freedland is a highly regarded British journalist who mainly writes about politics and international affairs for The Guardian, but has also written numerous works of fiction, some of them under the pseudonym Sam Bourne.

Margery Bone's London based Bonafide has previously collaborated with Moffat on the BBC drama The Last Post, in which Jessie Buckley played the lead role of a family stationed in the Middle East during the 1960s Aden emergency.

The independent production company recently signed an investment and distribution deal with BBC Studios. Bonafide also made Mood, the BBC's BAFTA-winning adaptation of the Nicôle Lecky play.



"Jonathan Freedland's conclusion that Rudolf Vrba deserves to 'stand alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler and Primo Levi at the forefront of narratives defining the Shoah' is hard to argue with," said Moffat (pictured). "It is a great privilege to be asked to edit this deeply moving work."

The executive producers are Moffat, Bob Bookman, Freedland, Jonny Geller, Bone, Tom Dunbar and Zander Levy. Freedland is represented by Jonny Geller of Curtis Brown and Peter Moffat is represented by Charles Walker of United Agents. Nick Marston negotiated the film and television rights to the book on behalf of Curtis Brown and JL Media's James Jackson on Bonafide's behalf.