Not more than twenty yards away stood those who had won from Fries the reprieve of a rightward flick of the thumb. Walter eyed the distance between the two groups, his and theirs, wondering if there was a way to make a run for it. But there were SS men all around, armed and vigilant. There was surely no way.
The ranks of the rejects were swelling. With his gift for swift and accurate counting, Walter estimated there were now eighty of them. Judging by what he had seen, the guards would wait till the number had reached a hundred, then march them off. If he waited much longer, he would be led to his death, he was sure of it. And yet to break out was to guarantee the same outcome. Those of his fellow condemned who had similarly worked out their fate had surely reached the same conclusion: weak and sick and surrounded by armed SS men, there was nothing they could do. He and Josef exchanged desperate whispers.
And then, once again, Walter was blessed with good fortune and an unexpected act of kindness. It came in the form of two sudden, sharp blows to the shoulders.
‘You bastards! What the hell are you doing here? ’
The speaker was a Kapo , one known to Josef rather than Walter. He was berating the pair of them for failing to obey orders, for standing in the wrong group. Loudly, he shoved them out of the gathering of the dead and towards the living. Once there, he dropped the performance, gestured towards those now being led towards the crematorium, those with whom Walter and Josef had stood a matter of seconds earlier, and said, ‘You’re lucky, boys .’ It was the truth.
After that, the group was marched towards a hole in the fence that separated the men’s section from the women’s. Since his arrival, Walter had done little more than glimpse the inmates there, just enough to see that they did not look like any women he had ever seen. They were starved, dressed in old rags of Red Army uniforms, and were barefoot or wore wooden shoes. Their hair was shorn .
Walter and the others were told to strip and then move through the hole. First, though, two Kapos performed one last inspection of their legs, then wiped their naked bodies down with a cloth soaked in disinfectant. Only then were they free to pass through into what had been the women’s camp. It was now vacant. Half the previous occupants had been deemed too ill to be allowed to live; the other half had been relocated to the women’s camp in Birkenau.
It was quite a cull that night. The Auschwitz grapevine said that half the prisoner population of the camp had been murdered. But it did not solve the typhus problem. There would be another weeding-out of the sick in mid-October, another the following January and another in February.
For Walter and the others, it meant a new start. Their heads were shaved to stubble again, they were washed and issued with a new striped uniform. They would live in the former women’s camp and, thanks to the thinning out of the ranks, there would be more space. New work units were organised too. Walter would not return to Buna, the gravel pits or the ski-painting workshop, but would be sent somewhere else: Canada.
6
Kanada
C ANADA WAS ANOTHER country and another world. A land of plenty, where stomachs were full, the wine was fine and the menu forever packed with exotic delights. It was a place of sensual pleasures, of crisp sheets, silk stockings and soft, plush furs. There was wealth in every denomination, gold and silver, diamonds and pearls. It might have been the richest, most luxurious place in Europe. And it was in Auschwitz.
Walter had heard tell of Canada, or rather Kanada, the Auschwitz Eldorado where no one ever went hungry, where, on the contrary, the most pressing question was which delicacy to feast on first. Only those blessed with the most improbable luck found their way there. And Walter was to be blessed once more.
It came after the typhus purge, when he was still naked, his skin still glistening with disinfectant. In the throng of men who had survived the cull, he heard someone speaking Slovak. Instinctively, Walter approached. The man turned out to be a dentist from a town not far from Trnava. A prisoner for five months, Laco Fischer counted as a hardened veteran – and he took a shine to Walter and Josef, two fellow Slovak Jews.
He told them that he had once walked the gold-paved ground of Kanada and that he was determined to get back. He had heard they were looking for recruits and he still had some pull with the Kapos from there. He used it, recommending himself and both of them into the bargain. Their youth, their strength, their relative fitness made them eminently eligible hires for what Walter would soon discover was an elite unit. With a word from the dentist, and after a brief physical test – another sprint, there and back – the Kapos gave the nod: Walter and Josef were in.
Now, after the sweat and struggle of his first few weeks in Auschwitz, where each day entailed a frantic, exhausting effort to survive, everything improved. They were housed in the basement of Block 4, offered actual showers, with water that was neither stone cold nor scalding hot. Each man had his own bunk and blanket. Whatever cruelties the SS and their enforcers maintained outside this building, inside it the Kapos spoke to them in an even voice, with no shouting and no snarling. Most notable, there were no beatings. Walter could hardly believe his fortune.
In the morning, the Appell revealed how much had changed. It seemed as if there were half as many prisoners assembled in twice the space. The Muselm?nner were gone; only prisoners capable of holding their heads back and their shoulders straight were present. To Walter, Auschwitz now resembled a body whose diseased limbs had been amputated. It was shameful to admit it, but he found the sight of it almost exhilarating.
Then came the order, summoning the Aufraumungskommando , the Clearing Command, to march to work. This was the Kanada group, and Walter was proud to be part of it.
Their destination was close to Walter’s last place of work, the DAW. It consisted of six large barracks . Five of them were wooden, each the size of a large stable, while the sixth was built from brick with a veranda from which the SS man in charge could watch proceedings, all arranged around a huge, square yard. Walter estimated it as covering more than two acres . The area was enclosed by barbed wire, with a watchtower in each corner, manned by guards armed with machine guns. What stunned Walter was the mountain formed in the middle, a vast pile of every kind of luggage: suitcases, rucksacks, trunks, parcels and kitbags. Nearby was a similar hill, formed entirely of blankets, thousands upon thousands of them. Close to that was another mound, shaped out of the battered and worn steel of pots and pans.
For this was the place officially known as the Effektenlager , the store of personal effects. Here were brought the belongings of all new arrivals to Auschwitz, taken from them as soon as they arrived. It fell to the Clearing Command to open the knapsacks and suitcases and sort the items inside, separating those things that could be used from those that were to be discarded.
Walter barely had a moment to absorb what he was seeing before he was plunged in to work. The prisoners were to attack the mountain of luggage at top speed, grabbing as many bags as they could carry, ideally two suitcases in each hand, then running with their load to one of the stable-sized storerooms, where they were to drop the bags on to a giant blanket laid out on the floor. Warehouse workers would then pounce on the cases or trunks, rip them open and spill out the contents, ready for expert sorters to descend. At lightning pace, they would form new piles: men’s clothes, women’s clothes, children’s clothes and so on, until those heaps were taken away to groups of women prisoners, who would then subject them to a more meticulous sorting. In that mission, they had three key tasks. First, they wanted to separate what was damaged or broken from what was usable. Second, they wanted to remove any and all indications of Jewish ownership: usually that meant tearing off the yellow star from a jacket or coat, though a tag bearing a Jewish name was similarly unwanted. Finally, and most importantly, they were under strict orders to search for any hidden valuables . That meant running a careful finger along the seams of all clothing, looking for any jewellery or money that might have been concealed there.