That would explain the initially baffling activity that caught Walter’s eye by one of the warehouses. A row of perhaps twenty women were straddling a bench, flanked by rows of zinc buckets. On one side, the buckets were full of tubes of toothpaste, which Walter assumed had been extracted from the trunks and suitcases. The women would squeeze out the paste, then discard the empty tube. It seemed such mindless, pointless work. Until someone explained that every now and again they would find a diamond, stashed in a toothpaste tube by an Auschwitz deportee who had hoped it would serve as an insurance policy. Sometimes it was not a stone they found in the tube but coins or a wad of banknotes rolled up and placed within.
The work of the toothpaste squeezers, or rather the thinking behind their work, was how Kanada got its name, at least according to one theory. It was said that German-speaking members of the clearing squad could often be heard asking, as they sorted items, ‘Kann er da nicht was drin’ haben?’ （Might there be something [of value] inside?）。 Kann er da became Kanada. Alternatively, it was because in the years before the war large numbers of Slovaks, and Poles too, had emigrated to Canada. The legend grew that even a peasant who could not make a living at home could find a plot of land and make a better life for themselves in Canada. In the central European imagination, Canada was a mythic land of untold wealth.
But there was no time to dwell on the improbability of this place, because Walter was to be a mule, spurred to work by the blows and kicks of Kanada’s two SS Unterscharführer s, men whose names he would not forget: Otto Graf and Hans K?nig, the latter known as der K?nig von Kanada , the King of Kanada. In the real world, before Auschwitz, both had been actors in Vienna. Here they were forever in character, goading and prodding the human baggage animals before them, administering brutal and summary injustice. Walter had been working for only a few minutes when he saw K?nig flog a prisoner to death for helping himself to something he had found in the suitcase mountain: an apple and a piece of bread.
Soon Walter understood the dead man’s mistake. At one point, while shuttling back and forth between the mountain and the storehouses, one of the cases Walter was carrying split open. Among the shoes and shirts that spilled out were sandwiches and a hunk of salami. The sight of them stopped him, partly because he had not eaten for the best part of two days and partly because he remembered the advice the Kanada veteran had given. In Kanada, he had warned, it was best to go easy. Only dry bread for the first day or two; for a stomach shrivelled by two months of Auschwitz rations, anything more would be too much.
So Walter did not pick up the food that had tumbled out of that bag. Even if he had wanted to, there was no time. K?nig and Graf were on him the second the bag broke, thumping him to get on. But in that moment, while the SS men were diverted, the prisoner behind Walter had, like a bird spotting a worm, swooped down, picked up and swallowed the salami without breaking stride. That, then, was how the prisoners of Kanada sated their appetite. Walter learned his lesson. He began to anticipate the beatings of others meted out by the Unterscharführer s, to prepare for them, almost to look forward to them. Because when they came, he could steal and eat and survive .
Food was all around in Kanada, so long as you knew when and how to take it. That, surely, was why the women of Kanada looked like real women, not the shaved, stick-thin ghouls, the female Muselm?nner , whose barracks had just been vacated. These were women of conspicuous flesh and warm blood, young and in rude health, the mere sight of whom distracted the adolescent Walter Rosenberg. They were watched over by women Kapos , who themselves looked flush and, odder still, elegant.
He was reeling from the strangeness of it all, as well as rushing to do as he was told and keep ahead of the boots and sticks of the SS men. But slowly, as he got used to the work and as he had enough food in his belly to allow something other than hunger and immediate physical survival to enter his thoughts, he began to see what he was actually looking at in Kanada.
Perhaps it was the family photographs that would so often drop out of a trunk or rucksack. Maybe it was the pile of children’s shoes. Or perhaps it was the area crammed with babies’ prams, hundreds of them, both new and old, shiny and worn. Whatever it was that did it, soon Walter could not help but draw the conclusion which should have been obvious from the start.
He had arrived in Auschwitz on a cattle truck packed only with those deemed fit enough to work as slaves. From then on, those had been the only kind of people he had encountered in the camp: fellow prisoners, male and female, forced into hard labour. To be sure, he had seen many of them beaten and starved to death, or else sent to an infirmary from where they emerged as corpses to be burned. Still, for those who could escape that fate, Auschwitz was a labour camp: brutal and hellish, yes, but a labour camp. Is that what he had told himself? Because now he had to let in a much darker truth.
He had had vague suspicions , of course he had. How could he not, given what was all around? But, if he was honest, he had tried to smother those. Now that he had seen Kanada, he could do so no longer.
Clearly, it was not only the fit and capable, people like him, who had been brought to Auschwitz. Look at those clothes, piled high, the dresses of old women, the trousers of old men. Look at those little shoes. Look at those prams.
Now he understood. The lemons, the tins of sardines, the bars of chocolate, the shawls, the shirts, the leather shoes, the children’s toys, the apples, the figs, the sandwiches, the winter coats, the cognac, the underwear, the wristwatches, the faded pictures of family outings, they had all been packed by anxious mothers and worried grandfathers, embarking on what they believed, or hoped, was resettlement for a new life. Each item had been chosen carefully, for space was limited. They had been able to keep only what they could carry, holding their last worldly goods close as they were squeezed into those airless, filthy cattle trucks. That was why there was a mountain of pots and pans: these people thought they were moving house. They had come with their elderly and with their children. The more pessimistic had taken precautions – sewing a diamond into a hem, hiding cash in the lining of a suitcase, squeezing dollar bills into a condom, then secreting it in one of those tubes of toothpaste – preparing a nest egg for the future, to be spent in the unlikely event all went well or to be used as a bribe if things turned desperate.
These people had never set foot in the Auschwitz that Walter knew, the Auschwitz of Arbeit Macht Frei , morning roll call and assorted working Kommandos . They had certainly entered the Auschwitz complex; that much was clear now. The proof was right in front of him. But they had disappeared, swallowed up by the night . In Kanada, he was surrounded by the evidence, though the SS were at pains to disguise it. Walter noticed that once the suitcases and knapsacks had been shaken out and emptied in the storehouse, another group of prisoners would rush to take them off to be burned, along with any identifying documents. It seemed important to the Nazis that the people who had come here, whose most intimate property was stacking up in the Effektenlager , should leave no trace.
The thought did not form immediately. It took time, perhaps because it was too enormous, too at odds with everything Walter had learned, and wanted to believe, about science and progress and civilisation. But, eventually, he had to conclude that he was not only a prisoner in a concentration camp, a Lager of slave labour, but an inmate of something altogether new: a factory of death. Here was a place where women and men classified as being of no value – or rather, deemed by their very existence to pose a mortal threat to the health of the German nation and the Aryan race – were murdered. They were killed, along with their aged parents, along with their children, along with their babies. Walter had seen the piles of shoes with his own eyes. There could be no escaping the reality. The Nazis were bent on eradicating the Jewish people and they were doing it right here, in Auschwitz.