None of it made sense. Why keep these families alive only to kill them in six months? And why suspend the usual rules, why treat them so gently?
The confusion only deepened as Walter saw that this was no first-day trick, akin to the show of courtesy with which the SS liked, when time allowed, to greet transports en route to the gas chambers. No, the five-star service continued, day after day, week after week.
Of course, this was relative. Compared to normal life in the outside world, conditions in the family camp were sufficiently harsh that a fifth of those 5,000 inmates were dead within a few months of arrival. Still, besides the camp elder, who was a German green-triangle criminal Kapo , every other administrative post – whether as a block leader or the head of a work unit – was held by a Jew, usually a veteran of the Theresienstadt camp-ghetto. In contrast with the rest of Auschwitz, the Jews of Camp B were allowed to govern themselves.
And so Walter and his fellow inmates would look on in baffled awe as Camp B maintained a vibrant Jewish life, complete with music performances, drama productions and, above all, classes for the children. On one side of the fence were the inmates of Camp A, bald and thin in their uniform stripes, while on the other energetic youth leaders were instructing their charges in the glories of European history and culture, the battle of Thermopylae and the novels of Dostoevsky, reciting passages by heart from books they did not have. The Familienlager even had a choirmaster who taught the children to sing ‘Ode to Joy’ , a hymn of praise to the brotherhood of man, singing it not a few hundred yards away from the crematoria that burned day and night, their chimneys turning Jews into ash.
For Walter, who turned nineteen four days after the arrival of the mysterious 5,000, his wonder was not confined to the strangeness of so much vitality in the midst of murder. His focus was earthier. He and the other men of Camp A could not but marvel at the sight of young women whose bodies were not emaciated like their own, but soft and full. They were so close too, separated by a mere wire.
Over-the-fence flirtations began; secret, if distanced, rendezvous were made. At first Walter could only look on. However much he had played the man of the world to the young Gerta Sidonová back in Trnava, far too experienced to be seen with a girl in a pom-pom hat, the truth is that he had left the town a boy and that is what he remained. Auschwitz had toughened him; it had educated him in the puzzles of the human soul. But it had also left him frozen in adolescence. He had been consumed with the business of staying alive and, when not warding off illness or death, the dream of escape. He knew nothing of sex or romance.
Nevertheless, and like many of the men of Camp A, he fell in love. Her name was Alicia Munk , and she was one of the youth workers over the fence. Three years older than Walter, tall and dark, she was, to him, unfathomably beautiful.
Slowly, they got to know each other, she telling of her life in a town north of Prague, he recounting the odyssey that had brought him here. They could not kiss; even their fingertips could not touch. The fence stayed between them. But in those conversations, which became daily, Walter felt his heart dissolve.
His work for the underground stepped up. For one thing, the presence of children in Auschwitz created new and unfamiliar needs, as the resistance tried to divert precious resources to the youngest. Demand increased in December 1943 when another 5,000 deportees from Theresienstadt arrived: once again, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters.
But hanging over all these efforts was the unbending fact written on every one of those registration records, some of which Walter himself had compiled: Special treatment after six months’ quarantine. There was a deadline. The families that had arrived on 8 September 1943 were scheduled to die on 8 March 1944. And in matters such as these the SS tended to keep their word.
In March, with that deadline looming, there was a sudden change. Camp A was immediately emptied of regular prisoners, leaving just the likes of Walter: the permanent staff . In place of the evicted inmates, came the families from next door. Regardless of what the move portended, Walter could not help but be delighted. For among those Czech arrivals from Camp B was Alicia Munk.
Until this moment, they had conducted their courtship across a boundary fence, the one that separated their two camps. But now even that short distance was gone. He could stand close enough to catch the scent of her. That evening they exchanged their first kiss. Walter felt embarrassed by his inexperience and gaucheness, but also filled with longing, for Alicia and for a future.
But 8 March was getting nearer. Walter was asked to take soundings, to see how many inside the family camp might be willing to revolt. Surely there would be many volunteers, given that they possessed what every other Auschwitz arrival had lacked: advance knowledge of what happened to Jews in this place. They could see the chimneys, they could smell the smoke. But few stepped forward.
The problem was, too many of the Familienlager inmates could not accept that the SS would murder the very children they had played with, whose names they knew. This was a problem Walter had not anticipated. These Jews had the information. The trouble was, they did not believe it.
It was on the eve of the dreaded day when, at last, Walter and Alicia spent a night together. They were in the small bedroom, partitioned off from the rest of the stables-cum-barracks, that, as a registrar, he could call his own. It was the first time he had ever had sex and he was hesitant, needing encouragement from Alicia. But together, in a place of relentless death, they clung to each other and insisted on life.
As 8 March dawned, the effort to organise some kind of resistance grew desperate. There was an attempt to recruit a leader for the family camp, someone who would set off an uprising that, yes, was doomed but which might just throw a wrench into the killing machine, perhaps even allowing a few dozen to escape into the forest. The chosen candidate, a much loved youth leader by the name of Fredy Hirsch, was approached, but he could not bear that the certain casualty of any attempt at insurrection would be the youngest children: they would not be able to fight, they would not be able to escape and fend for themselves. They would be left behind, to be butchered. Hirsch knew that those children would be gassed anyway, but he could not face it. He poisoned himself.
And so there was no uprising. The trucks arrived at the appointed hour. Kapos drafted in from elsewhere in Auschwitz wielded their sticks and clubs and forced the Jews of the family camp on to the vehicles. As the children screamed in terror, there was time for only the briefest farewell with Alicia. She whispered in Walter’s ear that they would meet again one day.
‘It’ll be wonderful,’ she said, before pausing. ‘But if we don’t …’ She hesitated again. ‘It has been wonderful .’
A moment later they were forced apart and she was pushed on to the convoy, which would make the journey of just a few hundred yards to the crematoria.
There was, at the last, a small attempt at physical resistance. When all doubt, and therefore hope, evaporated, when the Czech Jews had entered the gas chamber itself, and as others were still filing in, only then did some of the Jews of the family camp begin raging and cursing at their captors and rushing towards the door . Those who made it that far were instantly shot by SS men.
They had left it too late. Of the 5,000 Czech Jews who had arrived the previous September, only sixty-seven were kept out of the gas chambers, though that was hardly an act of mercy: among them were eleven pairs of twins preserved as subjects of medical experimentation.