The doctor let slip the odd morsel about himself. He had been in Spain during the civil war, fighting with the International Brigades. He had once worked with the Hungarian socialists Walter mentioned.
Then Walter confessed his worry about his losing battle with typhus: that surely the patience of the deputy Kapos and Ernst Burger, the registrar of Block 4, was not infinite; they would not cover for him for ever. Farber sought to soothe his anxiety. The deputy Kapos were veterans of the anti-fascist fight in Spain too. As for Burger, he added, ‘He’s one of us .’
That remark had to pierce a haze of fever and illness before Walter understood it. Us? Who was ‘us’？ But finally it sank in and when it did, Walter felt an elation he had not known since he arrived in this desolate place. Us. It could only mean that there was a resistance organisation in Auschwitz, an underground. And by the use of that small, single word – us – had he not announced that eighteen-year-old Walter Rosenberg was in it?
Walter had not misread the signs. He had indeed just been recruited. Young as he was, his silence under the whip of Wiegleb had given him a reputation for resilience. This boy who had not talked even as the skin was flayed from his flesh, he could be trusted to withstand torture . For a putative member of the resistance, there was no more important credential.
Walter’s status within the camp changed from that moment on. Now he enjoyed the protection of the underground, though it was hardly a single entity. All sorts of groups organised themselves clandestinely: it might be members of this or that Czech nationalist party or trade union, veterans of the same unit in Spain, or else fellow social democrats or communists . Walter was too young to have that kind of history, although the Austrian Marxists were impressed to learn of his connection to his Viennese cousin, Max: Walter’s one-time rival for his grandfather’s affections back in Nitra had gone on to become active in the Austrian communist party and his comrades remembered him. In any case, Walter was now seen by qualified medical personnel who administered legitimate drugs, taken from the hoard of stolen medicine that passed through Kanada, and given extra food rations to accelerate his recovery. It was all arranged by Farber and his comrades. There was no clearer mark of Walter’s new, protected position than the fact that the deputy Kapos in Block 4 now looked out for him; if he needed the lavatory in the night, one would rise from his bunk and guide him there.
It made sense that the resistance was so deeply embedded in Block 4, home of the Kanada command. They had access to the currency essential to any functioning underground. The necessities and luxuries, the clothes and the cognac, that were in abundance in Kanada could be used to extract favours and ensure the blind eyes that were a prerequisite for any kind of secret network. The underground in Auschwitz could organise because they could ‘organise’。
What’s more, they exerted a powerful hold over those Nazis who were themselves drawn to Kanada and its riches. Walter had seen for himself the corruption of the SS, how tempted they were by money. All that cash stuffed into a trunk, bound for the Reichsbank? Not all of it made it to Berlin. Some of it tended to stick to the pockets of the Germans charged with its transfer. Prisoner members of the resistance witnessed those acts of petty theft, or learned of them, and then used that knowledge to blackmail their Nazi masters.
Which meant they had the means to restore Walter to health, finding a soft job for him in Kanada. A young man who had survived longer than most, fluent in both Czech and Slovak, with excellent German, Polish, Russian and a smattering of Hungarian to boot, was now an asset to be protected and cultivated. They arranged for him to sort spectacles, working his way through the piles of eyeglasses that had once defined the faces of thousands upon thousands of schoolteachers and tailors, bookbinders and watchmakers, radicals and loners, lawyers and mothers and poets and daughters who had been sent to their deaths in the gas chambers that stood no more than a couple of miles away.
He was deployed as soon as he was fit enough, tasked with pocketing medicines from the Kanada supply or carrying messages from one underground leader to another. Walter was delighted to do it. He did not mind that he was but a tiny cog in the machine of resistance. Every little act was a small step towards what was, surely, the underground’s ultimate mission: an eventual revolt aimed at the destruction, or at least the sabotage, of the death factory.
The months passed, the autumn of 1942 turning to winter. Walter did his best to keep track of the transports rolling into Auschwitz, adding to his mental tally. Once the battles with Wiegleb and the typhus louse were over, he devoted himself less to mere survival and more to his survival’s newly determined purpose: the gathering of information. That this was among Auschwitz’s most precious commodities seemed obvious to him. He had only to look at how jealously the SS guarded it. So he set to work as a self-appointed researcher of the Auschwitz killing machine, taking every opportunity to expand his knowledge of the death plant that surrounded him. When the camp authorities looked for volunteers to work in Birkenau, Walter offered himself, so that he could take a closer look.
He was part of a Kanada unit put on a truck and sent to Birkenau to clear out a horses’ stable stuffed, floor to ceiling, with the clothes of the dead. But that mattered less than the route there. It took them past a number of open fire pits, craters that were six yards wide , six yards long and six yards deep and that had been carved into the ground, and which warmed the air, even in midwinter. The prisoners had seen their glow from the main camp, but now Walter was close enough to feel their heat. He inched towards the edge of one pit and what he saw there would never leave him.
It was a sight that confirmed Auschwitz-Birkenau as the corner of earth where the human race had finally turned its perennial fantasies of hell into material reality. There, at the bottom of the smouldering pit, the flames now shrunk and spent, were human bones. Among them – not burned, but only charred – were the heads of children . Later he would learn that the head of a child contains too much water to burn easily. The bodies of their parents had been incinerated, but the children remained.
Walter committed the sight to memory. Perhaps it was the only way to carry that image once he had glimpsed it, to lock it away in a secure mental file of which he would be the eventual courier. If he had to be a spectator to horror, then he would make himself a witness. He would be a reporter.
Christmas came and went, the SS forcing their Jewish captives to learn and sing ‘Stille Nacht’ – ‘Silent Night’ – perhaps to remind the Germans of home. Those who did not sing it properly were murdered. In Birkenau, the SS put up a huge Christmas tree and on Christmas Eve they brought out a group of prisoners. For their own entertainment, they gave the men a pointless task, ordering them to gather up soil in their coats, shooting any man who collected too little. Then they stacked the corpses in a heap under the tree, piled up like festive gifts .
The new year brought a change, following a turf war between two of Auschwitz’s big beasts: Wiegleb and Fries. The dispute was settled with a decision that Kanada be relocated. It would move to Birkenau.
On 15 January 1943 Walter and the others marched to their new barracks, noticing the contrast straight away. Where what Walter thought of as the Auschwitz mother camp was neat and organised, all paved pathways and red-brick buildings, Birkenau was a chaotic mess. Built on soggy marshland, it consisted of structures thrown together in wood, barely proofed against the elements.