Far off there was a sudden commotion, the voices distant but excited. Fred and Walter could hear the men just above them pause, their ears seemingly cocked to pick up what was happening. A second passed. Then another. Finally, one of the pair said, ‘They’ve got them! C’mon … Hurry .’ And, down below, Fred and Walter heard their would-be discoverers scramble away.
Sunday night passed into Monday morning. Now it was a countdown, Walter staring at the hands of his watch, knowing that if they could hold out just a little longer …
The morning shift returned, bringing with it the same din, the same barking, both human and animal, for another ten hours, each minute passing at the same agonising pace.
Eventually the Kommando returned to barracks. The three days were nearly up.
At 6.30 p.m., Walter and Fred finally heard the sound they had longed for. Announced loudly, it rang out: Postenkette abziehen! Postenkette abziehen! It was the order to take down the grosse Postenkette , the outer chain of sentry posts, shouted from one watchtower to the next and then the next, circling the entire perimeter, becoming louder when it got nearer, fading as it shifted further away, before it finally completed a full circuit. To Fred and Walter, those words, bellowed out by the men who had enslaved them and murdered hundreds of thousands of their people, sounded like the sweetest music. It was an admission of defeat by the SS, recognition that they had failed to recapture the two prisoners they had lost.
As SS protocol demanded, the outer ring of watchtowers was vacated, the cordon shrunk to lock in only the inner camp. Walter could hear the SS guards returning to the smaller loop of sentry towers. This was the great flaw in the Auschwitz system, the gap through which he and Fred had long planned to make their escape.
They were sorely tempted to rush, but they restrained themselves. First they had to emerge from the side cavity. For Walter, even inching forward sent a sharp pain shooting through his arms, legs, trunk and neck. His muscles were stiff and cold, his first movements jerky and uncertain, as if his body needed to relearn basic motor function. It took time for both of them, but finally they were in the main pit. They squatted and stretched, rotating their wrists and feet; they hugged each other in the darkness.
Now they took a deep breath and pressed their palms against the roof, trying to give the bottom board a push. But it would not move. They tried another spot on the ceiling. Still it would not budge. Was this to be the fatal flaw in their plan? Had they accidentally sealed themselves into their own tomb? It was the one thing they had not practised or even thought about. They had assumed that, if you could pile a plank on, you could take it off. But lifting boards is easy from above, when you can remove one at a time. Not so from below, when the weight of the entire stack is pressing down.
Shoving in tandem, grunting with pain, they managed to lift one of the bottom planks no more than an inch. But it was enough to give them purchase. Now they could get hold of it, just enough to shove it sideways. Fred turned to Walter with a smile. Thank God for those Germans who nearly found us, he whispered. ‘If they hadn’t moved those planks, we’d have been trapped .’
It had taken longer than either man had imagined, but finally there was an opening in what had been the roof of their home since Friday. There was a glimpse of the moonlit sky.
They summoned their strength again, shifting and shoving the boards until they could, with excruciating effort, haul themselves up and out. At last, they had done it. They were out of that hole in the ground.
But they were not yet out of the camp. There was still so much ground to cover if they were to become the first Jews to break out of Auschwitz. Even so, for the teenage Walter Rosenberg, it was an exhilarating feeling – but not a wholly new one. Because this was not his first escape. And it would not be his last.
PART I
The Preparations
1
Star
F ROM THE START he knew he was special. He was not yet Rudolf Vrba, that would come later. His name was Walter Rosenberg and he had only to look into his mother’s eyes to know he was a one-off. Ilona Rosenberg had waited so long for him, desperate for his arrival. She was already a stepmother – her husband, Elias, came with three children from a previous marriage – but that was not the same as holding a baby of her own. For ten years, she had yearned for a child; the doctors told her she should stop hoping. So when Walter arrived on 11 September 1924, she greeted him like a miracle.
She doted on him, as did his half-siblings, two brothers and a sister, all of them more than a decade older, with Sammy and Fanci in particular more like an uncle and aunt than a brother and sister. The object of the kind of attention usually reserved for an only child, little Walter was precociously clever. He was four or five when Fanci, keen to meet up with her boyfriend, would drop Walter off at the one-room schoolhouse where her friend worked, so that someone other than her could keep an eye on him. He was meant to play or crayon in a corner, but she would return to find the teacher pointing to Walter Rosenberg as an example to be followed by the other children, some of them twice his age.
‘Look how well Walter is doing his work,’ she would say. He was not much older when his family would find him quietly turning the pages of a newspaper.
He was born in Topol’？any in the west of Slovakia, but close to the middle of the new land of Czechoslovakia that had been created just six years earlier. Before long, the family had sold up and headed to the far east of the country, edging close to Ukraine – to Jaklovce, a speck on the map so forgettable trains would pass through without ever stopping. They could not stop: there was no station, not even a platform. So Walter’s father, the owner of a local sawmill, took it into his head to build a platform and modest waiting area – a structure which, to Walter’s delight, doubled as the family’s sukkah during the autumn week when Jews are commanded to demonstrate their faith in the Almighty by eating their meals in temporary huts, exposed to the heavens.
The young Walter enjoyed life in the country. The family kept chickens, with pride of place given to an egg-laying hen. When the parents noticed that eggs were going missing, Fanci was ordered to keep watch: perhaps a fox was raiding the henhouse. One morning Fanci discovered the culprit and it was an unlikely predator: her little brother was breaking into the coop, stealing the eggs and eating them raw.
The Rosenbergs did not stay in the village long. Elias died when Walter was four years old, so Ilona headed back west, where the family had roots. Now she needed to make her own living. She went out on the road, a travelling saleswoman, supplying or altering the lingerie and underwear she made herself. But it was hardly the ideal set-up for raising a young child. She once left Walter with a friend, what Ilona would have called ‘a kept woman’。 Angry with a patron who had discarded her, the woman bribed Walter to pretend that he was the couple’s love child, as she paraded around town loudly complaining about, and naming, the terrible man who had abandoned her and this darling little boy. Walter was rewarded for his performance with a trip to the bakery and whatever cake he fancied.
After that, Ilona decided that her son should live with his grandparents in Nitra. It worked out well. Walter soon formed a strong bond with his grandfather, who raised him in the customs of strictly orthodox Judaism. Occasionally, he might run an errand that took him to the home of the town’s much respected rabbi, and on Fridays Walter would follow his grandpa as he and all the other men headed to the river, using it as a mikva : submerging their bodies in the water, making of it a ritual bath where Jews cleanse themselves in preparation for the sabbath.