What he could not see was much evidence of resisting, in the sense of striking a blow aimed at destroying or even slowing the killing machine. He wondered if he was being naive. Maybe there was a secret plan to which he was not privy. But even as time passed, there was still no sign of it.
To be sure, the underground had won improvements in daily life inside the Auschwitz concentration camp （as opposed to the death camp）。 Over the course of 1943, they succeeded in reducing the level of casual, quotidian violence against prisoners. The routine beatings, torture and murder of inmates: they all became rarer. Walter, the young would-be statistician, could see the shift in the data he was gathering in his own head. By his estimate, some 400 prisoners had been dying every day in Birkenau as 1942 turned into 1943. But by May 1943, the mortality rate had fallen drastically. For the underground, this was considered a great victory. Admittedly, the change in the weather had helped. But they had also succeeded in thinning the Kapo ranks of club-wielding criminal brutes, replacing them with German-or Austrian-born political prisoners who were not only recognised as fellow Aryans and therefore human beings by the SS, but also aspired to behave with dignity, even inside the inferno of Auschwitz. They wanted to humanise the prison camp and, judged by that narrow criterion, they were succeeding. But Walter could see, from his unending shifts on the ramp, that they were having next to no impact on what, to him, was the only issue that mattered: stopping or slowing the organised murder of the Jews of Europe.
Indeed, he came to believe that, for all its cunning and tirelessness, the underground was not hindering the Nazi project of mass slaughter but helping it, albeit indirectly and unintentionally. If only a thousand prisoners died in the camp, then only a thousand needed to be selected from among the new arrivals to take their place – which left more to be marched into the gas chambers. The better life was for the prisoners, the longer their life expectancy thanks to the ingenuity of the resistance, the fewer ‘civilians’ would be saved.
Besides, had Walter not already understood that order and calm was what the SS desired most, that it was, for them, an essential condition for the smooth running of their corpse factory? Granting a few privileges here and there, loosening the leash by which it held its inmates, was surely a small price for the Nazis to pay if, in return, their Auschwitz killing centre was buttressed by the presence of a settled, orderly concentration camp behind it.
He understood that Auschwitz was a special case. It was not like other concentration camps – Mauthausen, say, or Dachau – because Auschwitz doubled as a death camp. What might represent a noble policy for a resistance movement in those other places – a policy aimed at boosting the survival rate of the mostly political prisoners – served in Auschwitz only to oil and grease the machinery of mass annihilation . A teenager he might have been, but the victories of the underground, even those from which he directly felt the benefit, struck him as a bleak kind of success. He would have to do something more.
And yet, he knew it was impossible to act alone. It was only thanks to the underground that he was alive. Any hope of escape would remain a fantasy without them. He was about to learn that lesson anew – and to meet the man who would change his life.
12
‘It Has Been Wonderful’
H E HAD SPENT the best part of a year on the ramp, watching the Jews arrive, conscious that most would never be seen again. Now, in the summer of 1943, Walter gained access to yet more information on the inner workings of Auschwitz. It came thanks to a promotion, secured for him by the Birkenau underground and helped along by another wave of typhus.
A new surge of the disease prompted a transfer of prisoners to the previously unoccupied BII section of Birkenau, with Walter assigned to Sub-section D, or BIId. （These areas were so large, they almost represented camps in their own right.） The change in arrangements, and the expected influx of new prisoners, created the need for extra assistants to the men who kept count: the registrars. Only recently had Jewish, rather than Polish, prisoners begun to fill such privileged posts and Walter benefited from the change. He would work under the registrar for the mortuary: Alfréd Wetzler.
Walter already knew of Fred. He remembered him from their shared hometown of Trnava, where Fred, who was six years older than he was, had seemed an impossibly glamorous figure: self-assured, bohemian, charming. Among the young, a six-year age gap is a chasm. Back in Slovakia, Fred had not so much as noticed Walter.
Which meant the first words the two ever exchanged were in the morgue at Birkenau. Walter was being shown around by Szmulewski, the underground leader, who was introducing his young recruit to the people he would need to know. Wetzler greeted Walter warmly, only too glad to trade memories of the town they had both left behind.
Even so, for Walter, the experience was unnerving, because this conversation took place in a wooden building stuffed with 300 or 400 dead bodies piled into neat rows of ten. Wetzler himself was unfazed, breaking off at one point to attend to his duties, which meant overseeing the transfer of corpses to a truck which had pulled up outside the building.
He was joined by four Polish prisoners for a process that had clearly become routine and swift. Before a body was flung out of the door and on to the back of the truck, one man would lift its arm and read off the number from the tattoo. As registrar, Wetzler would note it down. A second man would then prise open the mouth of the deceased, looking for gold teeth: if he saw one, he would yank it out with a pair of pliers, then toss the gold into a tin can at his side. Walter noted the clinking sound it made as it landed. These men were not expert dentists and they were rushed; sometimes a gold tooth would go into the can still attached to a fleshy chunk of gum. Then the other two would grab the corpse, two limbs each, and chuck it on to the back of the truck. All of this was done at speed, with Fred Wetzler as overseer.
And yet, macabre as the whole display had been on that first meeting, Walter found himself returning often. He and Fred would share a cup of coffee and talk of home and of all that was gone. Fred had lost three brothers in the Sonderkommando . Life expectancy for the ‘special squad’ was especially low, even by Auschwitz standards: the SS would periodically murder the entire unit, so that their knowledge would die with them. And yet, despite the presence of all that grief, Walter would go to Fred’s little office whenever he could. It became a haven of sorts, even a hiding place. They were rarely disturbed. The SS tended to stay away from the morgue: they did not like the smell.
So Walter was delighted to work as Fred’s assistant registrar. He regarded it as a step up. Walter thought he understood why the underground had placed him there too: this way he would have access to ever more valuable information, which of course he would relay back to his superiors even if he feared they were not yet doing anything sufficiently worthwhile with it. And yet his new boss, Fred Wetzler, understood the appointment very differently. He could see that Walter had been shaken by his months on the ramp, that he had come close to breaking. He suspected the underground had seen that too and had decided to remove their new asset from the front line of horror, for his own sake.
They were plainly happy with the results, because within six weeks they had arranged Walter’s elevation to the rank of registrar in his own right. For the authorities, he was to keep track of the newly opened BIIa, or Sub-section A, Camp A in prisoner shorthand, where new inmates would be quarantined; for the resistance, he would share all he knew and serve as a human link between Camps D and A, which otherwise operated as two distinct entities, each sealed off from the other. Walter would shuttle between the two, acting as courier.