Once there, the deception did not let up. These were the Jews’ final minutes, but the Nazis encouraged them to believe in a future they did not have. ‘What is your trade? A shoemaker?’ the officer would ask again. ‘We need them urgently, report to me immediately after!’ As the victims followed the order to strip off their clothes, the SS would tell them that they were about to bathe, that they should stay calm and that afterwards they would be given ‘coffee and something to eat ’。 That was when the reminder would come to tie all shoes into pairs, so that they would not go astray and so that, ‘Afterwards you won’t have to waste time finding the other shoe.’ In fact, the SS were thinking practically: the shoes of murdered children would only be of use back home if they came in pairs. When the Jews were finally pushed inside the gas chamber, the trickery did not end. The sign on the doors read, ‘To the Baths’。 In the gas chambers that came later, in Crematorium II , the ceiling was dotted with fake showerheads. （Even the gas itself was part of the deception: the manufacturers of Zyklon B had altered their product, ridding it of the almond smell which, previously, had acted as a warning to anyone who got within inhalation distance. Now there was nothing to give it away.） Walter soon understood that all this was not some cruel and elaborate joke. It had a clear and rational purpose. That much was plain from his own work on the ramp.
He and his fellow slaves of the Kanada command were under the strictest orders not to breathe a word to anybody getting off the trains. There was to be no contact whatsoever. Walter had seen what would happen if that rule were broken.
One night there came a transport from the concentration-camp-cum-ghetto of Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. It was one of the western transports, where the Nazis had made an effort to keep up appearances, and where the human cargo arrived in relatively good condition. One of those disembarking was a well-dressed Czech mother, holding the hands of her two small children, and she was clearly relieved to have arrived at last. She said as much to a German officer: ‘Thank God we’re here.’ She was one of those deportees who believed that the nation of Goethe and Kant would at last bring a measure of sanity to proceedings.
That proved too much for one of Walter’s young comrades who, as he ran past her, hissed words meant both to scold and warn: ‘You’ll soon be dead.’
The woman looked not so much scared as affronted by this intrusion from a ghoulish man in pyjama stripes, his breath foul, his head shaved, a prisoner who was surely therefore some kind of criminal. Why else would he be here, looking like that? Instantly, she approached a German officer as if she were the aggrieved patron of a Prague department store, demanding to see the manager. ‘Officer, one of the gangsters has told me that I and my children are to be killed,’ she complained, in perfect German. The SS man, gloved, his uniform creased in all the right places, gave her his most benign and trustworthy smile and said, ‘My dear lady, we are civilised people. Which gangster said this to you? If you would be so kind as to point him out.’ She did as she was asked, and the officer took out his notebook and quietly wrote down the number of the prisoner, visible on the man’s tunic. Afterwards, when everything was finished and all the people had gone, the officer sought out that prisoner and had him taken behind the wagons and shot. Walter was among those who carried his corpse back to the camp. At around the same time, the woman who had complained was gassed, along with her two young children.
Other prisoners tried to give gentler warnings, and valuable advice, as the selection loomed. Say you’re sixteen , they might whisper to a young teenager. Tell them you’re thirty-five , they might urge a man the wrong side of forty. Look fit. Act healthy. Be strong. Hardest of all was the counsel blurted out in a second to mothers: Give up your children , let the old folks take them. What was any parent to make of such an instruction? How was it possible to understand advice whose premise was: your children will die anyway, so save yourself?
But to give such a warning was to risk the fate of the boy Walter had seen taken off and murdered. Walter witnessed for himself the pains the Nazis took to ensure their intention remained hidden, chiefly by cutting off the information supply. He saw how he and the rest of the Rollkommando were under orders to ensure no trace of the previous transport remained, so that there would not be so much as a clue that anyone else had been at this same Judenrampe a matter of hours earlier. They had to clean it down to the last speck. He saw too how the SS men moved among the Jews as they lined up on the platform, demanding that nobody speak. ‘Silence, everybody! ’ they would shout. ‘This is not a synagogue!’ There was purpose to that order. If no one could speak, no one could pass on a rumour or share whatever doubts might be forming, whatever inferences were being made. No one could voice the question: what are they going to do to us?
The SS wanted no hint of the slaughter to leak out. It was one reason why the Nazis developed an elaborate lexicon of euphemism to cover what they were doing. Jewish arrivals were not murdered, but rather subject to ‘special handling’ or ‘special treatment’。 The men who had to pull apart their corpses, cutting off their body hair and pulling out their gold teeth, were members of nothing more gruesome than the blandly named ‘special squad’。 It was for that same reason that the SS tried to drown out the screams of the dying with the sound of an idling engine, the same reason the gas chambers were first sited in locations that were remote and unseen, the same reason Auschwitz itself had been chosen for the work of slaughter – in part because it was isolated. No one was meant to know.
Running back and forth on the ramp for those ten long months, whether carrying corpses or suitcases, Walter gradually understood why the Nazis were so bent on keeping their victims ignorant of their fate, even to the last.
They needed their killing machine to run smoothly and without disruption, and that required their victims to be calm or at least amenable to instruction. Given the time pressure the SS were often under, with another transport coming down the track, there was no room for delay caused by panic or, worse, rebellion. Ideally, the SS liked to keep their victims tranquil by organising a gentle, polite disembarkation. But if time was tight, a swish of the cane would bring quiet by more direct means. Either way, what mattered was ensuring that the Jews coming off those trains did not know what fate awaited them. If they did, they might begin to cry out, they might start pushing and shoving, they might refuse to form columns, in rows of five, and instead rush for the barbed-wire fences or even at their captors. True, they would be overwhelmed and pacified eventually: the SS carried sub-machine guns and their victims had nothing but their own bodies, weakened by hunger and thirst. But still, there were sometimes a thousand or more people on that platform, outnumbering the Nazis by perhaps ten to one. If the Jews knew what was coming, what sand might they be able to throw in the gears of the machine that was poised to devour them? They might not stop it, but surely by even a modest show of defiance they could slow it down.
Walter saw it with new clarity. The factory of death that the Nazis had constructed in this accursed place depended on one cardinal principle: that the people who came to Auschwitz did not know where they were going or for what purpose. That was the premise on which the entire system was built.