And yet he could not escape death. He saw it in the faces of those who marched off for work, in neat rows of five and columns of one hundred, straight after roll call. There was something strange about the way many of them walked, more marionette than human, their movements jerky and angular as they struggled to keep up. They were inspected as they left, watched by a man whom Walter would come to fear as an especially vicious brute among brutes, SS-Oberscharführer Jakob Fries. He was improbably tall, a mountain of a man, his face broad, his eyes pitiless, forever armed with a club almost as big as he was. His task was to weed out those too weak to work. His favoured method was to test their strength with his stick or his boot. If they could withstand the blow or the kick, then they might be allowed to carry on to work. If they could not, their fate was sealed.
There was a term for such men and Walter soon learned it. The living dead, walking skeletons with bowed heads and sunken, hollow eyes, were known in the camp as Muselm?nne r : non-men whose muscle and flesh had wasted away, who were expiring in plain sight, the breath of life leaving them slowly but inexorably. And yet, in some, the will to survive still flickered. Before an inspection, it was not uncommon to see two Muselm?nner slapping each other in the face, to redden their cheeks and feign vitality . Walter watched those Fries deemed unfit staggering back into the camp where, if they were lucky, they might be given some manageable task, perhaps in the timber yard. If not, they would be sent to the camp hospital. That, Walter soon understood, was a death sentence.
Death was all around. On that first day, Walter saw a team of prisoners loading a cart with what he estimated were 200 corpses, piling them up like so many carcasses on a butcher’s wagon. Close by were a couple of prisoners he recognised from Trnava.
‘What’s going on here?’ he asked one of the pair, gesturing towards the dead. The reply was delivered without emotion.
‘They’re today’s harvest .’
They were looking at the corpses of men who had died the previous evening, whether through a beating or starvation or illness. Their bodies would be taken away and burned. Walter was left in no doubt that what he had seen was utterly routine.
He learned something else from those two prisoners, something important that would stay with him. It was about the fate of the rest of the men who had made up their transport from Slovakia. There had been 600 of them originally and now only ten remained: these two, Otto and Ariel, and eight others. It turned out that the rest had been given an horrific task: burning the bodies of Soviet prisoners of war killed by the SS. Those who survived that ordeal were then put to death, Otto explained, ‘because they knew too much ’。
Walter would hear of such things in snatched fragments, piecing them together slowly and over time. All he knew on those first days in Auschwitz was that staying fit and strong was essential – he was glad of those days in the orphanage, playing football – and that work was a prerequisite for survival.
Walter was assigned initially to the SS food store but that did not last long. He and Josef would be bounced around multiple labour details. Their first transfer was to Buna .
Buna was to be a mammoth Industriekomplex , a planned network of factories and plants that would sprawl across an expanse of land bigger than the main Auschwitz camp and the much larger neighbouring site at Birkenau, known as Auschwitz II, put together. ‘Buna’ was the product that would be made there, a form of synthetic rubber deemed necessary for the war effort. But first these factories had to be built, work that would be done by slave labour. Which is where Walter and Josef came in.
Wake-up came at 3 a.m., too early for roll call. A green-triangled German Kapo issued the advice that from now on the men should eat only half of their nightly bread allocation, saving the rest for the following morning because there would be no food till noon and they would need it. ‘You’re going to work harder than you’ve ever worked in your lives ,’ he said. Before that, there was a heavy march to be completed. Walter, Josef and the others headed off in the now familiar fashion: rows of five, columns of one hundred, past the scrutinising eye of Oberscharführer Fries, and through the gate.
The very first time Walter walked out through that gate, when the second black-and-white barrier lifted, he had allowed himself a fleeting thought of escape. Surely, the mere act of leaving the premises like this meant that it was at least theoretically possible. But that consoling thought had dissipated the day he reached one of the higher storeys of the building that housed the SS food store. From that vantage point he saw that the outer reaches of Auschwitz were surrounded by a perimeter of their own, a chain of watchtowers much like the ones that policed the inner camp: structures with windows on three sides, the fourth left open for the SS man behind a mounted machine gun. Walter understood then that the camp had been laid out in such a way that anyone trying to break for the outer fence would be visible instantly from these crows’ nests. They would be gunned down before they even got close.
So there was no exhilaration to be felt in the dark as Walter, Josef and the others marched into the unknown, no kernel of hope that they might see a gap in the Nazi defences. There was only dread.
They reached a railway track. There they waited until a long goods train – made up of some seventy or eighty wagons – pulled in. An instant later, the SS men were using clubs and dogs and the threat of automatic weapons to push the men into the wagons. The pressure of it was suffocating. The truck was divided into two, one section for what Walter estimated was about one hundred prisoners , the other for the Kapo and three or four henchmen. The last time Walter had been kicked and shoved into a cattle truck like this, his first instinct had been to look for an opening, a hatch, some means of escape. He had no such thoughts now. His only goal was to survive.
The journey was awful. They were crammed so closely together that the smell of blood, sweat and shit made him gag. One man close by was nursing an arm broken by a Kapo , another had succumbed to dysentery. Walter was desperate to get off that train.
But exit brought no relief. From the instant the doors of the cattle truck opened, Walter understood that what he had endured so far was mild compared to what was to come. The Kapos were already in a fury, whipping and beating the prisoners at a frenetic pace, lashing them as they shouted, ‘Faster, you bastards!’， watched by SS men who, armed with guns and Alsatian dogs, seemed to be in a similar fever, kicking the Kapos for not moving quickly enough.
Walter saw a Kapo bludgeon a man just in front of him who had made the mistake of stumbling. The blow made the man stagger, straying out of line, which prompted an SS officer to open fire. But the SS man missed, killing the prisoner next to his target. Now a Kapo demanded that the stumbling prisoner pick up the dead body and carry it.
‘This is not a graveyard!’ he bellowed.
That set the tone. Men, weak from hunger, deprived of sleep and under a hot summer sun, were being lashed like pack animals, pushed to use the strength they did not have to go faster and faster. The walk was a couple of miles, though it felt much longer. It was at around 8 a.m., having had nothing to eat or drink since being woken five hours earlier, that they finally reached the building site.
Walter surveyed a diabolical scene. At first glance, it was as one might expect: cement mixers, iron girders, timber, concrete posts, metal rods standing to attention, half-completed structures waiting to be filled in and finished. But all around men were running from one place to another at an abnormal pace, as if in a film played at double or triple speed.