The SS called the building Bunker 1 or, more charmingly, ‘the little red house’， and it was not too difficult to adapt. They simply bricked up the windows, reinforced and fitted seals to the doors and drilled holes in the walls through which they would drop the granules of Zyklon B. They covered the floor with wood shavings, to absorb the blood, urine and excrement of the dying. That was up and running by May 1942. A month later there was a sister building in operation a few hundred yards away. It too was a secluded farmhouse, similarly adapted, and it was known as Bunker 2 or ‘the little white house’。 That came on stream in late June or early July 1942, just as Walter arrived in Auschwitz.
This was the very time that Auschwitz’s role in the Final Solution was ratcheting up. In the first part of the year, the gassings were sporadic and regional. They consisted mainly of irregular transports of Jews from surrounding Silesia. But in midsummer, just as Walter was marching off to the construction site in Buna, there was a change.
From July, transports began to arrive from across Europe daily, sometimes twice a day, usually carrying around a thousand people. They included Walter’s former neighbours in Slovakia, but also Jews from Croatia, Poland, Holland, Belgium and France: some 60,000 people in July and August alone. Admittedly, these were meagre numbers compared to those racked up by the senior partners in Operation Reinhard: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka killed approximately one and a half million people between them in 1942, some 800,000 in Treblinka alone. Apart from a relatively small number of ‘Gypsies’， mainly Roma and Sinti, all were Jews. In that same year, the figure at Auschwitz was 190,000, less than an eighth. Even so, by the time Walter was branded as 44070, the mass murder that would come to define Auschwitz was under way.
And yet Walter only really began to know of it that moment in Kanada where, in that pile of tiny shoes, the truth was staring him too hard in the face and he could not look away. Perhaps he could be forgiven for taking so long to understand what would eventually seem obvious, for failing to absorb the evidence that surrounded him, for failing to turn clear facts into knowledge. The SS had taken great pains to keep this operation hidden, even from those who were living at the scene of the crime.
The first killing site, the old crematorium, was already away from the barracks, but the SS went further to conceal it, disguising it with trees and shrubs , so that what was in fact an underground bunker once used as an arsenal would appear to be a natural mound. The second and third sites, the little red house and the little white house, were chosen very deliberately: abandoned farmhouses, safely out of sight.
The transports would arrive at night, under cover of darkness. And the Birkenau of the summer of 1942 was not the Birkenau that would come later, teeming with many thousands of prisoners. At this stage, the population was sparse. There were few witnesses.
Nor yet was there the telltale, near-permanent cloud of smoke, belching out from the chimneys of the crematoria. That would only come the following year, in the spring and summer of 1943, with the construction of the purpose-built killing machines that would be known as Crematorium II and Crematorium III, later joined by the smaller, simpler pair Crematorium IV and Crematorium V. When II and III were working at full throttle, they could burn as many as 1,440 human beings each day. Though they were built to be even more efficient – with both gas chamber and accompanying set of ovens on the same ground-floor level, thereby obviating the need for a service elevator to transport the bodies up from the place of death to the place of burning – IV and V struggled to cope. Little bits of know-how picked up by the stokers and furnace operators of the Sonderkommando – sorting corpses according to their combustibility , with the bodies of the well-fed used to speed up the burning of the bone-thin – helped, but not enough. Designed to be the last word in cremation technology, even these ovens and chimneys could scarcely keep up with Auschwitz’s phenomenal output of corpses. For all that, the SS could congratulate itself on having constructed a set-up that operated with the seamlessness of a Ford production line, ensuring that the gassing and incineration of Jews ran smoothly in a single, well-designed, properly ventilated site.
In the summer that Walter became an inmate of Auschwitz, however, things were much cruder. The corpses of the gassed were simply buried in the ground, in deep ditches carved into the Birkenau forest. The ground itself seemed to protest, refusing to swallow the dead: in the heat, body parts, rotting and stinking, appeared to emerge from the earth. The stench was nauseating and it pervaded the entire camp. Fluids were leaking from decomposing bodies, a black, foul-smelling mass that oozed out of the soil and polluted the groundwater. Even putting aside the health risk to the wider area, it hardly concealed what the Nazis were doing.
With the new crematoria not yet functioning, and mass burial unpalatable, there had to be an alternative. As it happened, the SS had a secret unit specialising in precisely this question, devising the most efficient system of disposal of human bodies. One method, piloted at Che?mno, seemed to work best. First, dig a deep pit. Next, fill it with the dead. Then set the bodies alight. Once that was done, send in a heavy bone-crushing machine to grind the skeletal remains into powder, which could then be scattered, leaving no trace behind.
That was good enough for Auschwitz commandant H?ss, who ordered that the Sonderkommando be forced to work on a new task: digging up the bodies already buried in Birkenau. That meant the prisoners pulling the decomposed corpses out of the ground with their bare hands. At gunpoint they were made to stack them in ditches, then set them alight, so that they burned in the open air. Afterwards, thanks to the heavy grinding machine, all that was left was ash and fragments of bone. Those were scooped up and poured into rivers or dumped in the nearby marshes, where they might offer no incriminating clue. The rest were used to fertilise the fields and surrounding farmland. Even when reduced to ash and dust, the Jews would be compelled to serve the Reich.
Understanding of all this reached Walter slowly and in fragments. There would have been rumours, of course, originating with the few prisoners who were privy to Auschwitz’s secrets, starting with the Sonderkommando themselves. But that talk would have circulated only among those with senior ranking in the hierarchy of inmates; it would not have reached a lad who had only been in the camp a couple of months.
And so Walter’s knowledge was confined to what he could see in Kanada: the worldly goods the dead had left behind, a piece of luggage for every soul extinguished by the men who ruled this place. He had to deduce, as a matter of logic, that Kanada flowed with milk and honey only because those who had brought such delights there had been murdered.
Walter was still eighteen when he no longer fought this understanding, when he began to absorb that he was a prisoner in a site of industrial slaughter, and that the group targeted for eradication was his own.
But he was allowed almost no time to digest it, because there was still more he had to take in – another, related revelation that was, in its own way, just as shocking.
8
Big Business
W HAT WALTER SAW in Kanada was proof that Auschwitz had not lost its founding ambition, the one nurtured by Heinrich Himmler. Even if it were now tasked with the business of mass murder, its Nazi proprietors were clearly determined that Auschwitz should continue to serve as an economic hub, that even in its new mission it should turn a profit.