It was all done at speed and sometimes, amid the noise on the platform and the cacophony of different languages, the selector would dispense with the flick of the finger and use the crook of his walking stick to grab the neck of the Jew before him and tug him or her towards the left or right. That was especially useful if, say, a son and father were pleading not to be separated: the SS man would physically pull them apart.
Within the SS, the decision-makers argued over what proportion of deported Jews should be killed instantly and what proportion should be spared or, more accurately, killed at a slower pace, by means of ‘annihilation through labour’。 Some wanted as many Jews to be enslaved as possible: why squander their value as workers before exploiting it? Even if these Jews were too weak to work more than a week or two, surely a few hours of manpower were better than none. Others thought it foolish to burden the working arms of Auschwitz with anyone but the healthiest and strongest Jews: all the rest should be despatched to the gas chambers without draining even a modicum of the camp’s resources .
The argument went back and forth without ever securing a resolution from Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the only man who could have decided it. But the debate was settled in practice if not in theory. Four out of every five Jewish arrivals at Auschwitz were selected for immediate death. If you looked too old or too young to work, if you were conspicuously weak or unwell, you were sent to the left. From there, for most of the period Walter worked the ramp, you were directed to board one of the large SS trucks that were waiting for you, or else to walk the mile and a half from the camp to the little red house or the little white house, and there meet your death.
In this process of selection that played out night after night, there was no role for the Rollkommando except to stand and watch. At Buna or the gravel pits, Walter had done work that would break a young man’s back. But this was work to break the heart. Under the glaring lights, and amid the chaos and the din, the screams and the tears, he was seeing up close the faces of the doomed, and he was seeing so very many of them. Still in his teens, he had to contemplate the last goodbyes of mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, in the minutes before they were murdered, and from just a few feet away. Starvation rations, filth, hard labour and constant, casual violence: he had learned to endure all those, to let his body absorb the blows. But now it was his soul that was taking a beating.
In the storehouses of Kanada, among the piles of blankets and shoes, he had had an intimation of the victims; he could imagine their lives. But here on the ramp, he could see them. And with each new train, he had to relive a dread most knew only once: the terror of arriving at Auschwitz.
Some would have been destroyed seeing what Walter saw, others driven mad by it. Neither response was unknown in Auschwitz. Walter was indeed brought low, low enough that fellow prisoners noticed a change in him. The brashly confident, even cocky teenager who had arrived at Auschwitz began to show signs of nervousness and depression . Some found him emotionally volatile.
And yet Walter did not succumb and he did not lose his mind. On the contrary, he applied that precocious brain of his – the brain of the boy who had taught himself chemistry from a single forbidden textbook – to what he saw. Perhaps it was his way of coping, a kind of willed detachment, but where others might have tried to avert their gaze, Walter watched all the more acutely.
He noticed the variations: how the SS might play nice one night, wielding the stick or the jackboot the next; how one day might bring a single transport, the next five or six; how sometimes 75 per cent of the new arrivals would be sent to the gas chambers, sometimes 95 per cent. But Walter had learned enough science to know that it was all about spotting patterns, and before long he had found one. Once he had, it was all he could see – and it filled him with a new determination, urgent and fervent, to break out.
There was so much to take in, especially for one still so young: that he was both a witness to and a target of a programme of industrialised, continent-wide murder, and that this project aimed both to eradicate an entire people and to turn a profit for the murderers. But now he was coming to see another dimension that enabled all the rest. Slowly at first, he realised that the Nazis were engaged in a great and devastating trick, that the crime unfolding before him rested on a single, essential act that made the entire enterprise possible: deception.
The Nazis lied to their victims at every step of their journey towards destruction, step after step after step. Those people falling out of those stinking cattle trucks had boarded them believing they were being taken to new lives in a new place: ‘resettlement in the east’， they called it. Those Jews had packed up their belongings and held on tight to them because they thought they were building a new home, one that would need pots and pans, clothes for their backs and toys for their children. They believed that because that was what the Nazis had told them and it was what their own friends and families had told them, in the form of those postcards home that they did not realise had been written at gunpoint – those messages of forced cheer that Walter had heard read out on the train on the way to Majdanek – and which were designed to seal the lie.
The lying carried on the instant the SS men unlocked the wagons. If they were in a hurry, if there were to be five or six transports in a single day, they would be brutal. But if there was time, if the weather was good and the air was warm, the SS men might lay on a different show . They would pretend that the dreadful journey the new arrivals had endured had been some kind of aberration, a mistake that was about to be rectified. ‘Good God,’ they might say, ‘in what state did those horrible Slovaks transport you? This is inhuman.’ Those transported from Paris or Amsterdam, people raised to expect the best of the civilised Germans, were primed to believe that anyway, to feel relief that, at long last, they were now in the hands of German officers who would, naturally, ensure that food and drink would be available, that their luggage would be looked after and that order was about to be restored.
If time permitted, the pretence would continue as the new arrivals climbed on to the trucks that would take them to the killing sites. SS men, their manners impeccable, might help the sick clamber aboard, offering a helping hand. For those heading to the death chambers on foot, there was more reassurance in the form of enquiries about the Jews’ professional qualifications or trades back home. Why would they ask such things if they did not intend to make use of the deportees’ skills?
If anyone asked where they were being taken, the answer came back: ‘For disinfection.’ Given how squalid the journey had been, that made sense. More reassurance came on that trek past the Birkenau camp, and then across the meadow, from the sight of an ambulance – a green military van bright with a Red Cross – driving slowly behind their ragtag column, occasionally picking up those who could not keep walking by themselves. The vehicle did carry a doctor. But his purpose was not healing the sick or saving lives. The medic inside was the SS doctor who would supervise the gassing, and the cargo on board consisted of cans of Zyklon B. Walter knew all about that too: the Red Cross vans originated in Kanada, and one of his occasional jobs was to load them with the deadly canisters.
The scene of the crime itself was disguised, as was the murder weapon. The doomed believed they had been brought to a secluded, bucolic spot, a farmhouse alongside two wooden huts for undressing, enclosed by fruit trees. By Crematoria IV and V, there were flower beds .