Illness was rife and there was hardly any food to eat or water to drink. In the morning, before roll call and after a 5 or 6 a.m. wake-up, it might be black chicory coffee or an infusion brewed from weeds. In the evening, perhaps ten ounces of bread, accompanied by marmalade or a pale imitation of butter, artificial fat of the worst quality , washed down with the same brew they had drunk at the start of the day. Twice a week there might be a slice of horsemeat sausage or beetroot. No wonder Erwin had looked so skeletally thin.
Given all this, Walter should not have been surprised by one aspect of the morning roll call that had been overlooked in the Oberkapo ’s briefing. But he was, all the same. While he and the others did their best to line up in neat, regimented lines of ten, as instructed, there was a category of prisoner that did nothing of the sort. It consisted of the dead, heaped in a pile just behind the living, and counted just as methodically, their bodies taken to the crematorium and burned. These were the men who had died in the night, whether from hunger, violence or something less visible – the light going out, as they lost the will to live. Walter did his best to count the dead and then remember the number, keeping a mental tally in his head. It became a habit.
After roll call, it was work, much of it back-breaking. Work, Walter understood rapidly, was life. The message was rammed home in the camp song, in which they were drilled during their first days at Majdanek and which they were forced to stand and sing, again and again, for hours on end, even after a full day’s grinding toil, which took an enormous physical effort . Once memorised, the words stayed with Walter long afterwards. He could not shake them:
Aus ganz Europa kamen, wir Juden nach Lublin.
Viel Arbeit gibt’s zu leisten, und dies ist der Beginn.
From the whole of Europe came we Jews to Lublin
Much work has to be done, and this is just the beginning.
For some, the work that had to be done meant being marched by the Kapos away from Majdanek itself, to nearby industrial sites and factories. Walter watched as the men left the camp, that hymn to the nobility of labour ringing in his ears, and a thought planted itself, one that would not grow and ripen until much later.
For him, there was to be no such offsite trip. He was to work in the camp itself, in construction, carting around bricks and wood at speed, under pressure from Kapos who would hit anyone who did not keep running.
And so on that day in the summer of 1942 Walter Rosenberg became one of the 13,000 Slovak Jewish men who were shipped to Majdanek to work as slaves. Quite what he and his fellow prisoners were building was not clear. Nobody told them.
Of course, he never stopped thinking about escape. He was as determined as ever to do it, but it was clear that there was a right way and a wrong way to go about it. The fate of the man who had rushed at the fence confirmed that merely to be suspected of trying to escape was a capital crime. After that, Walter would not even allow himself to get close to the barrier, lest it look like an attempted escape. No, breaking free from Majdanek would require a much greater act of imagination than his escape from Nováky.
Opportunity came sooner than he would ever have expected. He heard a Kapo patrolling the barracks, bellowing out an appeal for 400 volunteers to do farm work.
Walter did not hesitate. Farm work was rich in possibility. It would be away from the camp; most likely, there would be transport involved, probably a train. That created options. The work would be out in the open, away from this tightly policed prison camp. That made escape at least imaginable. Among the thousand men who eagerly offered themselves as volunteers, Walter was one of the first.
‘I’m leaving the camp soon,’ he told one of the more seasoned prisoners, with something like pride. ‘The train’s due to leave in a few days .’
His fellow inmate, a Czech political prisoner, gave him a kick. ‘Are you crazy? Do you know where that train’s going?’
‘No,’ Walter replied, ditching the load he had been carrying.
‘Look, you fool. I’ve been in Dachau. That was bad enough.’ Back there, he explained, when the SS truly wanted to punish someone, this new place was where they sent them. The Czech was adamant: Walter was making a huge mistake.
‘Go there and you’ll die ,’ he said.
But Walter’s mind was made up. For him, the destination was irrelevant. The exit from Majdanek and the chance of escape that came with it, that was the point. Or as he put it to his older comrade: ‘Anywhere’s better than this dump.’
When the day came for the volunteers to leave, Walter sought out the Czech to say goodbye. The man did not wish him luck. He told him simply, ‘You’ll be sorry .’
After that, Walter lined up with the rest of the volunteers as they were told to strip out of and discard their striped uniforms and put on regular clothes instead. They were handed trousers, jacket, shirt and cap, all ill-fitting and mismatched. Walter looked at the clothes and wondered who had worn them before. They might belong to any one of them, the prisoners gathered in this gang of 400 or the inmates they were about to leave behind. They might be the garments of the dead, those whose bodies were stacked and counted each morning at roll call.
Walter understood immediately why this change of costume was necessary. They were about to be marched to Lublin station, back through the streets of the city. The SS men clearly did not want the locals to see the way they kept their slaves. Hence the caps, to cover up their shaven heads.
Still, real clothes were real clothes and Walter and the others were glad to be wearing them. It took the edge off the long delay, as they stood around for hours waiting to be checked and processed. Eventually they were formed into a column, SS men took up their positions on either side of them, and they began to march. After just twelve days in Majdanek, Walter was leaving. It was a fine morning in late June and he was focused on what he thought lay ahead: the chance of something different, above all the chance of escape.
As if reading his mind, the SS officer in charge addressed Walter and his fellow would-be farm workers once they had arrived at Lublin station. He explained that they would be given food for the journey, which they should save because he had no idea how long it would last.
‘And remember,’ he said. ‘It is useless trying to escape.’
Naturally, that only made Walter think about it more. No sooner had the heavy doors of the cattle truck been locked and bolted and the train got under way than he was looking for gaps in the enemy’s defences. Even before that, when the captives were herded inside, he was looking for a potential co-conspirator.
As luck would have it, he saw a familiar face, a fellow veteran of Nováky. His name was Josef Erdelyi and there was another connection too: Walter had been at school with Josef’s girlfriend.
Walter had learned to make swift assessments and he soon determined that Josef was made of the right stuff, that he could be trusted: after his experience with the other, love-struck Josef in Topol’？any, Walter knew that that was the one indispensable quality. Soon he had whispered the word ‘escape’。 Josef was receptive and both now began to examine the wagon closely. The window was barred, but the floor offered possibilities. If they could only punch a hole in it, they could wait for the train to slow down, then drop through it and out. They agreed to do nothing till after nightfall. In the dark, a getaway would be easier.