If these structures seemed unfit for human habitation, that was because they were meant for animals. They were built from German army kits, flat-packs allowing for the rapid self-assembly of stables for military horses. The SS seemed to find it amusing to keep their prisoners that way. Sometimes, there would be straw on the floor, as if the Jews held within were livestock; there were iron rings on the walls, in case any of the animals needed to be tethered. One unit was meant to house no more than fifty-one horses , but the SS kept at least 400 Jews in each. The roof beams bore stencilled slogans: Be Honest or Order is Holiness or Hygiene is Health , the last exhortation especially cruel, given the insanitary conditions in which the inmates of Birkenau were held. Toilet facilities consisted of a long concrete slab, punctured with dozens of circular holes: defecation was to be en masse, privacy a memory. The washroom was one very long trough.
The killing programme in Birkenau was as ad hoc as its construction. While the SS waited for the streamlined, purpose-built facilities that would become Crematoria II, III, IV and V, they had to make do with the makeshift gas chambers formed out of that pair of converted farmhouses. When it came to the means of disposal of bodies – first burial, then incineration – the SS had no blueprint. As those flaming pits dug into the earth testified, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, a place that unlike Treblinka or Sobibor or Belzec was not designed for industrial-scale slaughter, the Nazis were improvising.
But if Birkenau was messier than the main camp on the outside, it was a harsher, crueller place on the inside too. When Walter put aside, for the sake of his calculations, the instant slaughter of the ‘civilians’ in the gas chambers, confining his numbers only to the prisoners, he could see that the death rate in Birkenau was faster and more furious than in Auschwitz. He had grown used to arbitrary killing, but in Birkenau murder was sport. Kapos might kick the head of a Muselmann , collapsed on the dirt, as if it were a stray football. Several had a competition, won by whichever Kapo was able to kill a prisoner with a single blow . If an inmate were too sick to work, a pair of Kapos would stretch their victim on the ground, place an iron bar across his neck and then – one, two, three – jump on each end. The neck would be broken, a life ended. All across the camp, in front of each barracks, there would be piles of stick-thin bodies, usually coated in mud. Birkenau reeked of rotting flesh.
Still, even in this mire, there was an underground and Walter arrived with a couple of names, along with an unwritten character reference from Farber. That led him to David Szmulewski, de facto head of the resistance in Birkenau. Another veteran of the International Brigades in Spain, Szmulewski was a Zionist and radical who had made his way to Palestine as an illegal immigrant, only to be chased out by the ruling British authorities. He deemed Walter of sufficient potential to merit introductions to the rest of the underground leadership. Before long, Walter was ushered into a world whose existence few inside or outside the topsy-turvy universe of Auschwitz would ever have imagined.
The resistance had used their leverage – the currency of bribery combined with the suasion of blackmail – to win posts for themselves that had previously gone only to the brutal green-triangle caste of ex-criminal Kapos . Slowly, the ranks of block elders and block registrars – those charged with keeping track of the inmates in each barracks, playing their part in the roll call that counted them out at dawn and counted them back in at night – were filling up with red-triangle political prisoners. For those lucky few – the overwhelming majority, some 80 per cent of them, Poles rather than Jews – the living conditions were, compared to the rest of the camp, positively luxurious.
To Walter, these men lived like aristocrats . They had their own rooms, narrow and bare, admittedly, but sectioned off from the rest of the barracks. They had access to real food, rather than the adulterated bread and not-quite-margarine or the thin, weak soup on which ordinary prisoners had to survive. These men – officially Kapos , secretly rebels – might gather in one of those small bedrooms to enjoy an evening meal of potatoes and margarine or a bowl of porridge, and high-level conversation. For Walter, the teenager from Trnava, it felt like a privilege just to sit and listen. His admiration for these men only deepened when he realised that they were, in fact, eating modestly, at least in comparison with the delicacies that were freely available to them via Kanada. They could have dined like the Kapos Walter had encountered in Auschwitz I, feasting on the finest fare of Europe. Instead they chose relative frugality, perhaps choking on the knowledge that outside those private rooms, close enough to breathe in the aroma, their fellow prisoners were starving .
Walter enjoyed his protected status. He liked the fact that the combination of his connections to the underground and his standing as an experienced prisoner earned him some wary respect from the green-triangle Kapos . When he was not at work – he had returned once more to the ramp – he could move around relatively freely.
And yet, glad though he was to have found shelter within Birkenau’s prisoner elite, it was not straightforward. He was grateful to them for their protection; he admired their restraint. But a doubt about them took root and refused to wither.
Perhaps it was because of the job he was doing: he was seeing the Final Solution both intimately and at scale. Now that he lived in Birkenau, he was even closer to the process, which made his self-assigned task of collecting the data of the dead easier. He got to know some of the block registrars, the tellers and bookkeepers of death, against whose figures he could check his own. He had a good contact in the Sonderkommando , the special squad of prisoners charged with surely the worst job in Auschwitz, namely emptying out the gas chambers and disposing of the corpses: his friend Filip Müller was one of those who worked the ovens. Filip could work out how many bodies were to be burned in each shift by the amount of fuel that had been set aside for the task: when it came to fuel, the SS never over-supplied, preferring to provide exactly the quantity required and no more. Day by day, number by number, Walter Rosenberg was adding to his mental tally, a ledger that was no less comprehensive for not being written down.
But his new proximity to the killing gave Walter something else besides extra statistical detail. He was now a more direct witness to the journey of those new arrivals once they got off the train. He would see them herded towards the fake shower block; he would see with his own eyes the deception and its effects. He would see the mothers and their children quietly lining up to descend the steps that would take them underground, never to be glimpsed again, queuing politely for the Auschwitz butcher , as he saw it, all because they believed the lie they had been told.
That only entrenched his determination to get out and tell the world. For clearly the duty of any person who knew the horror of Birkenau was to stop it. He had assumed that that was the goal of the resistance, to bring production at the death factory to a halt. But now he began to wonder if he had got that wrong, if that was not their goal after all.
From what he could see, the underground was chiefly a kind of mutual self-help society, a fellowship dedicated to the welfare of its own members. In that goal, it was plainly successful. It used bribery and blackmail to powerful effect, ensuring those under its wing enjoyed better material conditions and leniency from the authorities when needed. To Walter, the resistance was part trade union, part anti-Nazi mafia .