And yet, like so many young, intelligent men before him and since, Walter yearned for there to be some meaning to his life, some meaning especially to his own enforced silence and inaction in the face of extreme evil. If he could live long enough to escape and warn the Jews of their fate in this accursed place, might that not justify the fact that he had stood by impotently as mass murder was committed in front of him? If he were able not merely to observe this horror, but eventually to testify to what he had seen, might that not justify his own survival ? He did not yet know the phrase survivor guilt, but the teenage Walter intuited it and sought to pre-empt it.
It was around then, and with this new self-instructed mission in mind, that Walter set about a task that would both provide a meaning to his own descent into the underworld and change the course of history. He would record what he was seeing. Not in a diary full of sharp, human observation nor in mental sketches and notes that would one day blossom into great works of art; as it happened, and unbeknown to him, there were others in Auschwitz doing that. No, Walter was a student who had thrived in mathematics and the natural sciences. His language was numbers and hard facts. He would collect the data of industrialised murder.
And then he would memorise it. The number of trains, the number of wagons per train, the approximate number of passengers, the point of origin. He had no idea how he would get this information out, but he knew as a matter of instinct that if it was to be effective – if it was to be believed – it would have to be detailed and accurate. He soon devised a method, which worked like a child’s memory game . Each day he would say to himself everything he already knew, before adding whatever new nugget of information he had acquired that day. The trick was to keep surveying the mountain of facts that was accumulating in his head, scaling it once more every single day, becoming ever more familiar with each layer of it, adding to it only incrementally. In that effort, the Nazis helped him.
The numbering system they imposed – branding every deportee who survived selection, and became a registered prisoner, with a string of digits inked into their flesh and worn on their striped uniform – that system acted as a precious record, and reminder, of transports past. For the numbers were not random. Instead, they advanced chronologically: the more recent the transport, the higher the number.
As time went on, Walter came to recognise these figures and the stories they told. If he spotted a tunic bearing a number between 27400 and 28600 , he knew that he was facing a figure worthy of the highest respect, a survivor of the first convoy of Slovak Jews back in April 1942. If the number was between 40150 and 43800, there was a strong chance that the wearer was French, brought to Auschwitz on one of three transports in June 1942. Between 80000 and 85000 revealed that the prisoner was among the few who had been selected for labour from the convoys of trucks, not trains, which arrived without interruption during one thirty-day spell, bringing in Polish Jews from the ghettos of M?awa, Maków, Zichenow, ?omza, Grodno and Bia?ystok. Those 5,000 apart, the rest were what Walter and his fellow inmates called ‘civilians’ : women, men and children who would never work as slaves in Auschwitz, those whose sole acquaintance with the camp would be the railway platform, the truck and, finally, the gas chamber.
Walter saw examples of all these numbers around him in the camp, worn by those who had been directed right rather than left at the Judenrampe . They served as a living record of the trains and trucks that had come to Auschwitz full of those condemned to die.
Working on that ramp day in and day out, emptying out every transport, Walter had a vantage point that was exceptionally rare. And working in the clearing Kommando allowed him to see places others either never saw or saw but never lived to remember. In November 1942, for example, a group of Kanada men were sent to clear out a pile of clothes that had been left at the gas chamber of the Auschwitz main camp. Walter was one of them. From the outside, he was able to note the roof covered with earth, and then, once he had entered the building, he could see the garage-style doors of the gas chamber along with its two side openings. He was able to step inside the room itself. He could stare into the darkness.
Perhaps this project of his, to see and remember, to count the Nazis’ victims as they came in, was quixotic and doomed; he could be killed at any moment, and the knowledge methodically building up in his head would die with him. But if such a goal made sense at all, there were few better placed than Walter Rosenberg to attempt it. He was able to see so much, and he had the brainpower to remember it.
As he worked through those months, climbing on to the filthy cattle trucks and removing the luggage that contained valuable goods and sentimental trinkets, food supplies and heirlooms, he only became more convinced that he had understood the Nazis correctly. A smooth process of destruction was what the SS wanted and, for that, absolute, watertight ignorance was a prerequisite. One incident on the ramp confirmed his analysis.
It was a moment so fleeting, it seemed almost to evaporate. But Walter would never forget it. On a cold night in late 1942, and for only a few seconds, the bubble of ignorance in which the Nazis sought to envelop their victims was pierced.
It was around midnight when it happened. Walter and the others had ushered in a transport of French Jews: the kind that usually made for an easy evening for the Nazis. These were western European Jews whose skin had not been thickened by ghettos, pogroms or recent persecution; they had lived largely comfortable lives and their first instinct was to believe what those in authority said to them. Sure enough, on that winter’s night, they were doing precisely as they had been told. They were lining up for selection.
Suddenly, out of the darkness came a truck. Walter and the others were used to it; it was a nightly occurrence. It would ferry that day’s load of prisoner corpses – those who had been beaten to death, crushed by the weight of work, starvation and disease or else finished off in the infirmary – from the Auschwitz main camp to Birkenau, where the bodies would be burned. Its route involved crossing the railway tracks, just ahead of the platform.
Usually when the vehicle was approaching, there would be a signal and the arc lights that flooded the ramp would be switched off for two or three seconds to allow the truck to cross over. But on this night the switch failed. The lights stayed on.
It meant that the French deportees, neatly lined up in their rows awaiting further instructions, saw – brightly lit up – the vehicle as it came closer and reached the railway line. It tried to push forward, surmounting the tracks. It nudged up against them, but could not progress: it was too heavy, weighed down by its load.
Now, in the white electric light, those on the platform watched as the truck surged forward only to lurch back, the whole vehicle bouncing and swaying as it tried to advance. And as it heaved, its cargo was disturbed; the bodies on board started to shift. Walter watched along with the new arrivals, as they saw lifeless, twig-like limbs flopping over the side of the truck. The arms seemed to be signalling a macabre farewell.
The French Jews in their winter coats saw it and their response was involuntary. They let out a wail, a thin cry of collective horror at the sight of scores of dead bodies piled up like so much discarded rubbish. The sound contained something else too: despair, for some surely understood what this grotesque spectacle augured for their own fate.