It did not take long for that hope to fade. At their first stop, twenty-four hours into the journey, when the doors were opened for the first time, the SS man in charge barked out another briefing. There was to be a headcount, here and at every stop to come. If any man was found missing, ‘ten men in his wagon will be shot’。
That put an end to it. It was one thing to risk his own life. But to take the lives of ten others? No. And if there was one thing Walter had learned these last few months, the SS did not make empty threats.
They travelled another thirty-six hours in that cattle truck. It followed the same pattern as the voyage that had taken Walter from Nováky to Majdanek less than a fortnight earlier. The initial food ration – in this case, some bread, marmalade and salami – ran out along with the little water they had been given. The thirst was as intense as it was before, perhaps even more so given the suffocating heat of a wagon packed with eighty adult men. Once again, there would be no relief: the train stopped outside, rather than at, the stations where there might be a chance to fill up. When those breaks came, Walter and his fellow captives had to watch the SS men drinking from canteens that seemed to overflow with fresh, cold water.
Eventually, the train slowed down for the last time as it arrived at its destination. Walter peeked through a gap in the wagon doors. He saw watchtowers, which were familiar enough, but also buildings made of brick, so different from the primitive wooden shacks of Majdanek.
The doors were opened and the SS corralled the prisoners off the train and into line. Once their masters were satisfied, they were ordered to march.
Walter noticed another difference. He was walking on a proper, paved road, not one of the dirt tracks of Majdanek. Most striking of all, he saw bushes and trees – such a welcome sight after the desolate blankness of the camp outside Lublin.
Something like optimism entered his heart that summer evening, as he approached this mysterious place. It endured even as he saw the beam of the searchlight on the camp entrance, illuminating the posse of SS men who stood there, gun in one hand, the leash of an Alsatian dog in the other. It drew strength from the clean, well-kept courtyard and from the tall, double gates that guarded this place, bearing a simple three-word slogan: Arbeit Macht Frei , Work Makes You Free. If work was what this place was about, that was all to the good. He was young and fit; he could certainly work. Thank heavens he had rejected the advice that would have kept him in Majdanek and away from here. Because fortune really did seem to have smiled upon him.
It was 9 p.m. on 30 June 1942. And Walter Rosenberg was in Auschwitz.
PART II
The Camp
5
We Were Slaves
W ALTER ROSENBERG SAW the twin rows of white concrete posts, each one equipped with porcelain insulators and linked by what looked to be high-voltage wires, and concluded that an electrified double fence enveloped the camp. He saw the watchtowers, on each of which was posted an SS man, his hands on a mounted machine gun; he saw the searchlight that constantly swept the camp after dark; and he saw the highly disciplined dogs that accompanied their SS masters. He looked closely at it all and wondered what secret was being guarded at this place that made it so imperative that no one ever be allowed to break out.
That first late evening he still had reason to believe that he had taken a step up from the filth and chaos of Majdanek. The barracks were not just solid – brick built, on several floors and as big as a secondary school – but each one had its own number, marked on both a painted sign and an electric lantern by the doorway.
It was dark when they were marched towards Block 16, then sent down to the basement. There they had a briefing of sorts from the block senior, a Kapo , wearing the distinct green triangle of the criminal （a convicted murderer, as it happened）。 This man warned the new arrivals that, no matter how thirsty they got, they were not to drink the water from the tap on the wall: that was a fast track to dysentery. Walter committed the advice to memory. He slept that night on the floor.
The next morning brought a 5 a.m. start for Appell at 6 a.m. As he had already learned at Majdanek, roll call was to count both the living and the dead, the latter category understood also to include the dying. If the figures all tallied, and no one was missing or presumed escaped, then the roll call would be declared over and the corpses could be taken away – each body carried by a single prisoner on his back, with the lifeless head lolling over one of his shoulders. As the pairs staggered off, they looked to Walter like double-headed monsters, prisoner and corpse joined together shuffling slowly towards the mortuary: it was hard to tell which one was dead and which alive, because they were both skin and bone .
It was strange for him and the other new arrivals, lined up in their civilian clothes, watching the inmates march off to hard labour while they were to stay behind. They were left to amble around the camp, around its open areas at any rate, trying to make sense of it. It was only on the following day that they were plunged into the ritual of induction, a re-run of the process Walter had undergone two weeks earlier in Majdanek.
It began with a forced trip to the showers. The Kapos beat them in there with clubs, herding 400 into a room built to contain thirty at most, then beat them back out again, kicking and clubbing them until they were standing naked in the cold. After that, still naked and shivering, came something new. They lined up to be tattooed with their Auschwitz number. Two fellow prisoners acted as clerks, taking down the inmates’ names and places of birth: Walter was entered into the ledger as having been born in Pressburg, the old Austro-Hungarian name for Bratislava. He gave his occupation as ‘locksmith’， adopting the trade of the man who was not quite his stepfather but regularly at his mother’s side. That done, it was time to be marked. Previously, the tattooing process had meant being leaned against a wall by a prisoner who then pressed a special stipple , resembling a stamp with metal numbers, into the left side of the chest, just under the collarbone. Often it was done with such brutality that many deportees fainted . But on this day, Walter was offered a choice. He could be branded on the left or right arm, on the outside or the underside. Walter nominated the top of his left forearm, where the mark would be immediately visible, and so it was done. For the next two and a half years, he would not use his name officially again. From that day on, he was 44070. Before long he would learn the importance of numbers in Auschwitz, how a low, ‘old number’ marked you out as a veteran, putting you closer to the top of the camp hierarchy whose strictures and privileges inmates strictly observed.
Eventually, they were given clothes. Their old ones were taken away, never to be returned and they were handed the familiar uniform made of coarse cloth, patterned with dull grey-blue and white stripes. So Walter would be a human zebra like all the others. Yet as he pulled on the tunic-cum-shirt – his number sewn on to it alongside the standard symbol for Jewish inmates, a star formed from two triangles , one the red of a political prisoner, the other yellow – as well as the trousers, baggy cap and wooden clogs, he took comfort, and not only from the fact that he was no longer exposed to the elements. He also liked that he was now indistinguishable, at a glance at least, from the rest of the pack, that he could, if he worked at it, melt unnoticed into the crowd. To disappear was, in its own way, a kind of escape.