From there, they would march the twelve or thirteen minutes it took to reach a wooden platform beside a stretch of railway track that branched off the main line. The platform was long and narrow: just three or four yards wide, but perhaps 500 yards long, long enough, at any rate, to accommodate a locomotive pulling fifty cattle trucks . Walter and the Rollkommando would take their positions and wait.
Next, a group of SS men would come, perhaps a hundred of them, and take up their own positions, one man every ten yards, along the full length of the wooden platform so that it was completely encircled. They had rifles and dogs. Only then would the escort that had brought Walter and the others stand down, because the men of Kanadakommando were now inside a tight, armed cordon. The electric lights would be switched on, so that the ramp was lit as brightly as if it were noon. It might be shivering cold, but the prisoners would wait in their coarse, striped uniforms, in rows of five, as always.
The main track was no more than twenty yards away. It was an important line, connecting Vienna to Kraków, and sometimes regular passenger trains would go by slowly enough that the prisoners could see the travellers inside. Walter would spot the dining car and wonder what the ladies and gentlemen within made of the illuminated spectres lined up on the platform. Or maybe they blinked and missed them. Maybe they just did not see.
Soon a new group arrived, the SS officers, men on a more exalted plane than the guards who formed the ring. Walter thought of them as a gangster elite , neat as mafiosi in their crisp uniforms and polished boots, with the swagger of seniority. The buttons on their uniforms were gold rather than silver. They held nothing so gross as a club, but rather a gentleman’s cane; some wore white gloves . There would be between a dozen and twenty of them, including a doctor. This group would be in charge of proceedings.
Finally, the signal would be given and slowly the train would pull in, the locomotive at the front. There would, Walter noticed, be a civilian in the driver’s cab.
The guards in the outer ring did not move. Instead there would be a handover, as the commander on the train handed papers and keys to his counterpart on the platform. Those keys would then be distributed by the man in charge to his subordinates, and they would take a position in front of the wagons, usually one SS man for every two or three cattle cars. Then, at a signal, they would step forward and unlock the wagons. Walter and the others would get a first glimpse of the mass of people held within.
Alles raus! Alles raus!
To reinforce the instruction, the SS men would sometimes kick or hit the first few people to tumble out of the wagon, whacking them with a walking stick. Close by were Kapos , armed with clubs and sticks of their own. Walter knew the condition these new arrivals were in: their thirst, their hunger, their disorientation after being for days on end cramped into that tiny, fetid space with so many others. And now, as their eyes adjusted to the dazzling lights, they were being driven out, and told to get off quick, quick. Take no luggage with you! Leave everything behind!
The deportees were herded immediately into columns, one for men, the other for women and young children, each made up of rows of five. In an instant, families were divided, husbands parted from wives, mothers from sons. The night sky began to echo to the din of tears and separation.
All the while, and under the direction of the Kapos and their clubs, Walter and his fellow prisoners were set to clearing out the wagons. At speed, Walter would climb into a cattle truck, oblivious to the stench, pick up two heavy bags, jump back down and throw them on to the heap that was forming fast on the ramp. In his first few days, his focus was on mastering the physical requirements of the job and seeing what he could get out of it for himself. Deprived of the more readily accessible largesse of Kanada HQ, he and the other 200 men of Rollkommando had to make their own luck.
Walter was a quick study and before long he could tell at a glance whether a case was packed with clothes, kitchenware or food. Soon he got the hang of running with two suitcases while taking a bite of salami, tossing it to another inmate, all without being spotted. He developed a new skill: the ability to open a tin and wolf down its contents in a few, unobserved seconds.
The Kanada boys knew which Jews they were unloading by the provisions that suddenly became available. If they were tasting cheese, they had just received Jews from the Netherlands. If it was sardines, a transport of French Jews had arrived. Halva and olives identified the Greek Jews of Salonica, dressed in colours Walter had never seen before and speaking a language that was new to his Ashkenazi ear: the Sephardic Jewish dialect of Ladino , or Judeo-Spanish. He saw them all, delivered to Auschwitz by the thousand.
Only when every last bag or suitcase was off the train – loaded on to trucks and taken to Kanada – could the Rollkommando attend to clearing out the dead. The order of priorities was very clear, and any deviation from it was punished. After all, extracting worldly goods was Kanada’s core business. Luggage came first, the dead second.
Corpse removal was an unpredictable business. A transport from the east, in midwinter, that took ten days, might leave as many as a third of the passengers, perhaps 300 people, dead on arrival. But if the train had come from the west, from Prague or Vienna or Paris, where the Nazis had had to maintain at least the appearance of a civilised act of resettlement, and if the journey had taken no more than a couple of days, then there might be only three or four corpses on board. The same was true of the number of dying in each cattle truck, those who were not yet dead but who lacked the strength to stand up and get off the train, even under threat of a blow from the bamboo cane of an SS man. They too had to be dealt with – and Laufschritt , at the double. Always at the double.
That meant grabbing all the unmoving bodies, two inmates to each corpse or semi-corpse, one clutching the ankles, the other taking the wrists, and dashing to the end of the platform, spurred on by the club and the cane of the Kapo and the SS, where a fleet of trucks would be waiting, sometimes half a dozen of them, ready to ferry the lifeless for disposal. These were dumper trucks, the kind whose back can lift to tip out a load of sand or gravel, but for this operation the cargo box remained flat and open. Walter and his fellow corpse-bearer would have to skip up the rear steps at the back of the vehicle – Laufschritt, Laufschritt – where more prisoners were on hand to receive the load. They would take hold of the body and stack it, while Walter and his comrade would turn around and charge back to the empty train, to retrieve any other Jew who had not survived the journey. At no stage did anyone separate the dead from the dying . There was no time and no capacity to distinguish between the two categories. Breathing or not, the bodies were tossed on to the truck and the truck would then make the short drive to the crematorium for burning.
The two columns of deportees now moved forward towards the gangster elite, to the reviewing party that would decide their fate. They did not know it, but the new arrivals were about to face selection. If they were sent to the right, they would be marched off first , registered as prisoners and given the chance to work and therefore to live, if only for a while. If they were directed left, their imminent destiny was death.
The SS man in charge was usually the duty doctor, sometimes Josef Mengele, or sometimes a mere corporal of the sanitation service , charged with picking out those who were unfit to work: the old, the sick, the very young. Walter noticed that good-looking women between the ages of sixteen and thirty would be picked for survival and grouped together in a row of their own. There might be women who were fit and strong, and certainly capable of work, but if they had children in tow the SS finger would point them towards the left: the Nazis did not want the disruption of mothers making a scene on the ramp as they were torn from their young. It was simpler, cleaner, to keep them together and murder them both.