That was the first clear benefit of this new job. As a clerk of the camp, Walter had a measure of free movement. So long as he looked purposeful, perhaps carrying a sheaf of papers, he could walk around the place without much risk of being challenged. Obviously that was helpful in his work for the underground, but it also made life much more bearable for him. True, the place in which he had now won the right to roam was a killing field, but his was better than the lot of the ordinary prisoner: confinement, surveillance and the permanent threat of physical violence.
Walter began to look less and less like a regular inmate too. He was fed rather than starved and he had returned to robust health. Always mindful of his appearance, he now had some discretion over his wardrobe. The zebra trousers could go, replaced by riding breeches and black boots, polished to a bright shine. His head was shaven, but he could cover it with a neat cap. Though he was still required to wear the regulation striped jacket, he had a bespoke version cut for him by one of the tailor inmates. Indeed, a hallmark of those in the upper reaches of the inmate hierarchy was a higher quality of prisoner garb: clothes without patches, proper shoes and, in what was an unofficial privilege granted to clerks such as Walter, a breast pocket sewn on to the outside of his striped shirt-cum-jacket.
But of all the advantages that came with his new role, the one that mattered most was his increased proximity to information. He was convinced that he saw the face of every new prisoner brought to the camp from 8 June 1943 onwards, because that was the day he began as the Schreiber of Sub-section A, the quarantine camp which was every new arrival’s first stop . And although he was no longer on the ramp, he was still in a position to log the traffic heading to the gas chambers. It was a simple matter of location. Camp A was the section closest to the main gate and, in the row of human stables that formed that section, his own stable, number fifteen, was the second along, just forty or fifty yards away from that entrance and with a clear line of sight. If a convoy of trucks were carrying Jews to their deaths in Crematoria II and III, it went through that gate. It was quite a procession: an escort of motorcycle outriders, complete with a machine-gunner in each sidecar, just in case anyone got any ideas of jumping down from the truck. If, on the other hand, a convoy were heading to Crematoria IV and V, it would take the road that ran directly in front of Walter’s barracks. In the daytime, he would simply count every vehicle as it went by, building up a tally based on the rate he had seen at the ramp: a hundred people per truck. At night, he would listen out for a fresh shipment of Jews, the whole barracks shaking as each vehicle trundled past. Walter had only to count the number of tremors to make his tally.
His job allowed him, within limits, to wander the camp and survey it. He had been granted a chance, all but unheard of among the inmate population, to glimpse the entire set-up and commit what he had seen to memory. Several times he took himself to the area between Crematoria IV and V, pretending that he had some business there, watching the people being taken into the gas chambers, then walking on. He filed away what he learned along with the numbers he was amassing in his head, adding new ones each day. And he no longer needed to rely on guesswork. His job required him to compile a daily report from the registration office, which meant constant access to first-hand information about every transport that reached Auschwitz, including the records kept by the chief registrar .
He may not have realised it yet, but thanks to a series of arbitrary events and lucky breaks, Walter Rosenberg had acquired an unusually comprehensive expertise in the workings of Auschwitz. He had lived or worked in the main camp, at Birkenau and at Buna: Auschwitz I, II and III. He had worked in the gravel pits, the DAW factory and in Kanada. He had been an intimate witness of the selection process that preceded the organised murder of hundreds of thousands. He knew both the resistance and the Kapo class, and the overlap between them, from the inside. He knew the precise layout of the camp and believed he had a good idea as to how many had entered Auschwitz by train, and how many had left via the chimney. And he had committed it all to memory.
Throughout, he remained convinced that knowledge of this diabolical place and the terrors within was the only weapon that might thwart it. Once people knew their fate, their fate would be changed.
But that creed of Walter’s was about to be jolted.
Even to an expert like Walter, Auschwitz-Birkenau remained a universe of mysteries. It contained black holes of the deepest darkness. This was a place where, thanks to the scarcity of latrines and a strict night-time curfew, regular prisoners were forced to choose between soiling themselves in their bunks, their faeces infecting the sores on their skin, or defecating in the same bowls from which they ate. This was a place where infanticide was commonplace. Childbirth was forbidden in Auschwitz, yet there were women who had passed through selection despite being in the early stages of pregnancy. Some would induce a miscarriage, but others carried their babies to term. That spelled death for both of them, because according to the Nazi principles of selection mothers of young children were a condemned category. Both mother and baby would be sent to the gas chambers within a week of the birth. The prisoner medics concluded they had only one option: in order to preserve the life of the mother, they had to end the life of the child. In Auschwitz, a newborn baby would know only a few moments of life before being poisoned. No record would ever be kept, the child’s existence erased so that the bereaved mother could appear once more at roll call, apparently fit and ready for slave labour.
And yet through such inexplicable darkness came the odd beam of light, often no less inexplicable. One came in September 1943 with the arrival of a transport like no other. They pitched up in the camp right next door to Walter’s, BIIb or Sub-section B, 5,000 Czech Jews, shipped to Auschwitz from the concentration camp-ghetto of Theresienstadt. Except they had undergone no selection to weed out those who were too young or too old or too sick. Families had been left intact: mothers, fathers, children, all together. They were wearing their own clothes; their hair remained on their heads. They had been allowed to keep their own luggage.
Their journey had been smooth and they were assisted into their new quarters by SS officers who could not have been more solicitous, laughing and chatting, handing out fruit to the adults and sweets to the children, tousling the hair of those who held tight to their dolls and teddy bears.
Walter and the others looked on, open-mouthed in astonishment. What inversion of the Auschwitz laws of physics was this? How had so much life intruded into the kingdom of death?
The more the long-time prisoners found out, the more confused they became. It fell to the registrars to sign in these new arrivals, and Walter noticed one oddity straight away. He and Fred Wetzler had come to know the Auschwitz numbering system reflexively, able to pinpoint a prisoner’s country of origin and date of entry with just a glance at the digits sewn on their shirt or inked on their arm. These ascended in an identifiable, ordered sequence. But the residents of the Familienlager , the family camp, were tattooed with a number that was entirely unrelated. Attached to each resident’s registration record were the words: ‘Special treatment after six months’ quarantine’。
Quarantine was familiar enough. New prisoners were quarantined before entering camp life. But ‘special treatment’ meant only one thing. It was the SS euphemism for death by gas.