It would not need a full-blown revolt to disturb its equilibrium. Even a ripple of panic among the doomed would unsettle the Nazis and their plan. The way Walter saw it, Auschwitz was an abattoir and he had seen enough of those in the Slovak countryside to know that it is much easier to slaughter lambs than it is to hunt deer. If you have to catch animals individually, hunting them down one by one, it is slow, awkward work. It is never as fast or efficient as driving thousands at a time, herded and neatly organised, towards their deaths. The Nazis had devised a method that would operate like a well-run slaughter house rather than a shooting party.
Walter understood it well because he was standing every day and every night on the threshold of the abattoir. The sight of it nearly broke him. In those ten months, there were some fellow prisoners who feared Walter Rosenberg was about to crack. But just at the point when he might have come apart, he was filled instead with a hot and unstoppable urge: he had to act.
It did not take long for him to realise what he had to do. If the Nazi plot to destroy the Jews relied on keeping the intended victims entirely ignorant of their fate – to ensure they were lambs, not scattered deer – then the first step towards thwarting that murderous ambition was to shatter the ignorance, to inform the Jews of the capital sentence that the Nazis had passed on them. It was the only way to stop the killing. Somebody had to escape and sound the alarm, issuing the warning that Auschwitz meant death. Around the time he turned eighteen years old in September 1942, as he watched the SS decide with a flick of a finger who would live and who would die, Walter concluded that person should be him. His first chance came more quickly than he could ever have imagined.
10
The Memory Man
T HE OPPORTUNITY CAME without warning and quite by accident. It was night-time on the ramp, and Walter was doing his usual work, running back and forth along the platform, carrying two suitcases at a time, as the SS officers reassured the arrivals on this latest transport that they did not need to bother about their luggage: the ‘squad of criminals’， referring to the prisoners of the Rollkommando , would take care of things and save them the bother of carrying their own bags. The criminals, the SS would add, were kept under the strictest discipline: ‘So you don’t need to worry about your property. Just leave everything .’
During one dash, with a case in each hand and a rucksack on his back, Walter stumbled and fell. His foot had snagged on a loose plank on the wooden platform. Flat on his face, he saw something he had never spotted before. Looking through the planks, he could see through to the ground about ten feet below. The thought struck him immediately: right here, under the ramp, there was a space. Which meant there was a hiding place.
He finished his shift but an idea was forming. The ramp was getting worn down by continual, heavy use: hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people trampled on that timber surface, night after night. There would be other loose planks. If he could pull up just one, out of sight of the throng, he could slip down below and hide.
The trick would be to wait. The SS’s practice with each new transport was, initially, to surround the entire train but, as the Kanada detail worked their way through each cattle truck, from one end to the other, the cordon would shrink: the SS men did not bother encircling those wagons that had been emptied. Which meant that if you could wait underneath the ramp long enough, then creep back to the end of the train, under the platform and out of sight, you would find it empty and unguarded. You would be outside the cordon.
The position was perfect too. The ramp was in the no man’s land between the Auschwitz main camp and Birkenau; it stood beyond the outer perimeters of both. If you could wait till that night’s selection was over, until the latest batch of deportees had been despatched either as new prisoners to the camp or to the gas chambers, and until the SS had returned to barracks, you could then head out into the Polish countryside.
The next night and the nights that followed, Walter cased the ramp as he worked, sketching out how he would make his escape. He would have to stash food and clothes, purloined from Kanada. He looked hard to see if the SS placed a guard at the deserted end of the platform. If they did, and if it were just one man, Walter reckoned he could take him out with a knife and not make a sound.
Above all, he studied the wooden floor of the platform, searching for the weakest, most pliable plank, the one that could be lifted up and slotted back into place within a second or two. Soon Walter had created a mental map of the entire surface. He would make his move any day – any night – now.
But then the Rollkommando returned to the ramp for a new transport and Walter saw that it had changed. The gaps had gone. Perhaps spotting the danger of a complete collapse, the camp commandant had ordered that the platform be reinforced with concrete. It had happened fast. Walter reached his glum conclusion in an instant: there would be no escaping that way.
It meant that he would have to keep on working the ramp, seeing Jews sent to their deaths, taking mental notes of everything he saw, in preparation for the day he would tell the world. Later he would realise that, in some ways, he needed the mission he had given himself. It helped him get through each day, enabling him to endure what he was seeing unfold and, though it was harder to articulate, what he was seeing in himself.
For at eighteen years old Walter would witness events so harrowing they could change the life of the person who glimpsed them. He was witnessing such moments not once or twice, but day after day after day. He was in Auschwitz, a place where moral boundaries had dissolved long ago, where everything was permissible . This was a place where Dr Mengele once punished a Jewish woman by making a dog of her young son , because she had, in self-defence, killed an SS attack dog: he had the boy trained at the point of a whip to run on all fours, bark without pause and attack and bite Jews. Walter was in a place where one inmate might steal bread from another, even when that prisoner was dying and when the bread was covered in faeces. He was in a place where, after an execution by firing squad, prisoners might rush up to the warm corpses and eat what they could of their bodies, one reassuring another that a human brain was so delicate it could be eaten raw , without cooking.
On the ramp, Walter was watching the Nazis wielding bamboo sticks to herd children and anyone over forty to their deaths in gas chambers and he was doing nothing to stop them. He was loading the canisters of Zyklon B himself. Surely he was morally obliged to run at the first SS man in sight, put his hands around that man’s neck and throttle him, no matter the cost to himself. Was that not his duty?
After all, he could not claim ignorance. Unlike these families, who had boarded the train to Auschwitz in orderly fashion, having obeyed the instruction to bring their authorised twenty-five kilograms of luggage, he knew. The veil of deception had been torn from his eyes long before.
He had wanted to act; it was shaming to keep quiet while seeing all this murder around him . Worse, his work on the ramp made him a collaborator in the big lie: by cleaning out those wagons, by removing every last trace of each transport, he was helping keep the next batch of victims ignorant of their fate, and the next and the next.
But he knew he could do nothing. The reason was not so much that, if he did, it would ensure his instant death, but rather the inevitable Nazi reprisal that would follow. Not against him – he would be dead – but against his fellow inmates, those he would have left behind. Any act of resistance would be met with instant and grossly disproportionate punishment. If Walter had attacked one SS man and killed him, the SS would have killed, what, a hundred prisoners? And killing would be the least of it; death would feel like liberation given the torments their captors would inflict on them first. The SS were inventive in that area; Walter had heard the stories from the hell that was Block 11, the investigation block or, more accurately, the torture block . So no, there would be no heroic act of self-sacrifice on the Judenrampe . There could be no such thing, because no man would ever be sacrificing himself alone. The inmates were bound by a sense of responsibility to each other. They were not just prisoners; they were hostages.