This was the unique political economy of a death camp where the worldly goods of a doomed people were stolen and piled up, the mountain of wealth growing higher every day. And now that he was working in Kanada, Walter Rosenberg was at the centre of it.
He proved himself a reliable worker. Soon the old hands were calling him by his first name. He was promoted, no longer simply carting trunks and suitcases to the warehouses where they were unpacked, but moved to the next stage of the process: ferrying blankets filled with clothes to the sorting station, staffed by women, many of them fellow Slovaks. Like everyone else in Kanada, he learned to be constantly trading: slipping the girls a bar of chocolate in return for some bread and cheese, a sip of lemonade or just a smile.
Walter’s direct overseer, a green-triangle Kapo called Bruno, used him as a personal courier, getting him to carry gifts to his lover, a Viennese beauty who served as his counterpart in charge of the Slovak sorting girls. Back and forth Walter would go, carrying a fresh orange on one trip, a fine wine the next. The Kapo couple even had a hidden love nest, crafted out of piles of blankets in one of the warehouses.
But during one shift Bruno pushed Walter too far. He loaded him up until Walter looked like an heiress in a department store: a bottle of Chanel, sardines from Portugal, gourmet sausages from Germany, an elegantly wrapped bar of Swiss chocolate, all concealed in a heap of clothes. And that was the moment the SS man in charge of Kanada, Scharführer Richard Wiegleb , did a spot check on Walter, demanding he drop what he was carrying to the ground. Out it all tumbled. Wiegleb saw everything.
‘Well, what a strange collection of clothes.’ He checked off the items, one by one.
He demanded to know who had put Walter up to this. He knew it was Bruno but he wanted confirmation. And he intended to beat this young Jew until he got it. He ordered Walter to bend over.
‘Who gave it to you?’ he asked, before bringing the cane down on Walter’s backside.
‘Who gave it to you?’
He asked the same question again and again, slicing into Walter’s flesh. As the stick rose and fell, Walter could feel the eyes of the entire Kanada detail on him: even if they were carrying on with their work, they were watching.
Wiegleb administered forty-seven blows that day. Some of the Kanada veterans said it was a record. And though the agony of it made him fall to the ground unconscious, Walter Rosenberg never answered the SS man’s question.
When he came round, the pain was excruciating. Walter could barely move. He knew he was not fit to work, which in Auschwitz meant he would die. The lashing inflicted by Wiegleb had left an open wound which had become infected, his immune system barely capable of mounting a defence given an Auschwitz regimen of insufficient nutrition, hygiene and sleep. His legs and backside swelled like balloons. He developed an abscess in his left buttock, which had to be drained. Left unattended, it would kill him. He needed an operation.
The very idea of it, in Auschwitz, was ridiculous. It would require ‘organising’ on a huge scale. Doctors, orderlies, block elders: they would all have to be bribed. There were very few people in the camp with the heft to pull that off. Which meant Walter’s fate rested on Bruno the Kapo : would he acknowledge that he, along with his Viennese lover, owed Walter their lives? There was nothing compelling him to do so. It would be easier to let Walter die, taking his secret with him. But if he did that, no regular inmate, or Kapo for that matter, would ever take a risk for Bruno again. Such were the calculations of Auschwitz.
And so Bruno bartered and traded until he had arranged treatment for Walter, as well as a supply of medicine, food and drink, all direct from Kanada. He was owed enough favours by enough people to make it happen. The operation , when it came on 28 September 1942 – just as German forces and the Red Army were locked in deadly combat in the battle of Stalingrad – was traumatic. Walter felt the incision of the blade before he was properly anaesthetised. He tried to shout, but could make no sound. He eventually passed out from the shock.
But the surgery was successful: Walter got himself discharged a week later . Not for the first time, though he had been knocked down, he had got back on his feet. That meant an immediate return to work. The trouble was, he had been marked down for the industrial construction site at Buna. Given the state he was in, that kind of hard labour would kill him.
Walter mentioned Bruno’s name to the hospital registrar , and that was enough to get the order revoked: he was sent back to the Clearing Command instead. It was too risky for him to show his face in Kanada itself: Wiegleb would see him and instantly know that he had been defied. But Bruno had a solution. Walter would go to the source. He would work on the ramp.
9
The Ramp
T HIS WAS NOT the first unloading ramp, a railway platform really, that had been in use in Auschwitz. Walter was familiar with that first one: it had been the place where he had got on and off the goods train that had shuttled him and the other prisoners back and forth in cattle trucks to the construction site at Buna. No, this was its replacement, only recently pressed into service. It was on the site of the freight station that once served the town of O? wi? cim, sandwiched between the so-called mother camp, Auschwitz I, and its soon-to-be much bigger offspring, Birkenau, or Auschwitz II. It was here that the mass transports of Jews arrived. They called it the Alte Judenrampe : the old Jewish ramp.
Walter’s job would be among the squad of slaves who were the first to see the doomed arrivals off the trains as they came in, removing their luggage and clearing out the cattle trucks that had brought them to Auschwitz.
The work was not sought after by the prisoners of Kanada. It was more physically demanding than labour in the storehouses or at the sorting tables and it was more dangerous. The mortality rate around Wiegleb and his men was high anyway, but on the ramp it was higher still. The SS were liable to lose their patience and lash out. They wanted everything done so fast.
Walter worked on that ramp for ten months straight . In that time, he helped unload about 300 transports, seeing the dazed and frightened faces of perhaps 300,000 people if not more: Jewish children and their parents, the old and the young, the broken and the defiant, from across the continent, in what for almost all of them was the final hour of their lives. As the nights went by, and as the days turned to weeks and then months, and as the tens of thousands of faces passed by, his old dream of escape did not disappear. But it did change. It became something harder and sharper, tempered less by hope than by resolve. It now aimed for something much larger than himself.
This is how the job worked. Transports would usually arrive at night. When the train carrying a new batch of Jews was about a dozen miles away , word would reach Auschwitz, where the officer on duty would blow a whistle and shout, ‘Transport is here!’ Then everyone involved, SS officers, doctors, Kapos , drivers, would take up their positions, the SS men heading over to the Judenrampe in trucks or on motorbikes. Meanwhile, the relevant detail of the Clearing Command, some 200 strong and known as Rollkommando , or the rolling group, would be told to get ready . It might be the middle of the night, four in the morning, but an SS man would come to Block 4 and wake them, and then they would be marched out, past the electric fences, watchtowers and machine guns of the Auschwitz main camp, escorted by an SS group that had been waiting for them at the main gate.