The pits were so deep that, even when standing in them, the prisoners’ heads were below ground level. From there, they were instructed to shovel the gravel on to a horse-drawn wagon that was waiting by the lip of the pit. Everything about it was hard. For prisoners starved into weakness, just lifting the shovel was an ordeal: it was so heavy. But merely lifting it was not enough. The inmates had to raise it above head height if they were to have any chance of getting the gravel on to the bed of the wagon. Except the gravel was full of water, which not only made it even heavier, it also meant every time they pitched a spadeful, they got drenched. The water would trickle from their necks to their shoulders, right down to their toes, soaking them to the skin. Prisoners found their feet, barely protected by a pair of wooden clogs, rapidly became swollen . For all his youth and vigour, it happened to Walter: he soon found he could not move properly.
The problem was so widespread, the overseers ordered an inspection by a medical ‘commission’。 Walter did not have to be told what would happen to those deemed unfit to work.
When the time came, he lined up with the others, ready to be judged. It took all his strength to stand at full height, keep his back straight and hold the pose. He was desperate to control himself, not to let his expression give him away. Even if he wanted to scream, these men would not see his swollen feet or the intense pain he was in.
Two hundred men failed that test. They were sent immediately to the adjoining camp at Birkenau. But Walter was not one of them. His performance had worked; he had mastered the pain . He was still alive.
Would he have survived even one more day in the pits? He never had to answer that question, because he was – in another stroke of fortune – transferred once more. Now he was detailed for labour at the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke or DAW, the German Equipment Works, an SS-owned business whose vast premises were right by the main Auschwitz camp, and which were perhaps eight times the size.
The DAW specialised in kitting out the German military, whether with boots, uniforms or military hardware. Among the items its workers made, perhaps destined for use by German troops on the eastern front in midwinter, were skis. Walter’s job was to paint them . After what he had seen at Buna and what he had been through in the gravel pits, the prospect must have seemed like a holiday. He would be indoors and, besides, how strenuous could ski-painting be?
But there was nothing casual about this assignment. Each worker had to paint a prescribed minimum number of skis each shift: 110. Failure to paint that number, and paint them properly, would bring a thorough flogging. It meant there was no let-up.
Walter only had to look at a fellow DAW group to see the consequences of missing a production target or falling below the standards set by their captors. Nearby was a group charged with making cases for shells, including, at one point, a batch of 15,000. The order was completed only for an inspection to reveal that the cases were fractionally too small. The SS determined that that was a deliberate act and they shot several Jews for sabotage .
But soon there was a new threat to confront. One August evening, the prisoners returned from a day’s labour to find the camp abuzz, lit up not just by the usual searchlights but by portable ones carried by SS men wearing battery packs on their backs. Everyone seemed to be up and about, the workers of both the night and day shifts all gathered in the main square. But they were not lined up for a special roll call. Instead, Walter could hear the sound of wood against stone, of clogs scuffling on the ground at a frenzied tempo: men were running backwards and forwards, as if in some crazed round of late-night exercise.
It took a while for Walter to understand. They were kept standing and in silence for hour after hour, as midnight came and went, waiting and waiting until 3 a.m. when Walter caught a glimpse, in the glare of the searchlight, of the club-wielding human mountain, Jakob Fries, presiding over a macabre nocturnal Olympiad.
As if assessing competing athletes, Fries had each prisoner move past one by one. Once an inmate was directly in front of him, he would inspect the man’s legs. If they looked bloated, a jerk of Fries’s thumb would send the man to the left. If they did not, Fries would order the prisoner to sprint: twenty yards there, twenty yards back . Those who ran well were pointed to the right. Those who staggered or swayed were sent to join the other rejects on the left.
One after another, they came before Fries. Run. To the left. Run. To the right. Run. To the left. To the left. To the left. Run. To the right …
Walter looked over at the group on the left, who were now being led away as others took their place. He had been in Auschwitz long enough, he had heard enough stories, to know what happened to those who failed Fries’s fitness tests. Meanwhile, the inspection line was getting shorter. Soon it would be him.
He was so tired, the exhaustion eating into his marrow. During the long wait, he had fallen asleep while standing up. And now it was his turn. Despite the fatigue and the hunger, he knew that he was about to run for his life . He would have to mine deep into himself and find, buried somewhere, a pocket of energy. He set off.
He ran the first stretch as hard as he could, his feet pounding on the ground. On the return leg, he could see him, the monstrous Fries, standing there with his club, waiting.
Now would come the verdict.
The Oberscharführer raised his hand, most of it balled into a fist, and jerked his thumb. He had assessed Walter Rosenberg, who prided himself on being a fit and strong lad not yet eighteen years old, and decided to send him not to the right but to the left.
Exhausted as he was, breathless as he was, Walter could feel himself fill up with fear. His friend Josef was running now, stumbling then stumbling again. When Fries despatched him too to the left, to stand with Walter and about forty others, that sealed it. They had both failed the test. Walter looked at his fellow rejects and noticed something that, at last, explained what was happening. These men were shivering, but not from the cold. They had a fever. Which could mean only one thing. Typhus.
So that was why they were examining the prisoners’ legs. They were looking for signs of the dark spotty rash or the joint and muscle pain that would count as early symptoms. Now Walter understood. The masters of Auschwitz feared the camp was about to be engulfed by a new wave of the disease. In March, they had responded to an outbreak in the women’s camp by dunking those infected in baths of Lysol, but that only made things worse, accelerating the spread. Before long, typhus was claiming 500 lives a month . If it had only been prisoners who were at risk, the SS would not have worried: prisoner lives were dispensable. But the Nazis dreaded this disease for themselves. The lice that carried it had no respect for rank or racial classification: they could transfer the blood of an infected Jew to an Aryan in an instant. What’s more, the SS saw that the well-fed found it harder to recover from typhus than did the starving. If they wanted to eradicate the louse, they would have to eradicate all those who carried it. Put another way, they would not attempt to heal the sick. They would kill the sick .
So it was that those who failed Jakob Fries’s sprint test that August night were put to death: on 29 August 1942 a total of 746 prisoners were killed. Walter and Josef, wobbly on their feet after so many hours without food or sleep, had been selected to stand among the condemned. They had been chosen to die.