Later, Walter would discover the truth of the Familienlager . It had existed for the same reason as the concentration camp-ghetto Theresienstadt itself: as a showpiece, a macabre Potemkin village that could be displayed before the inspectors of the International Red Cross, should they ever demand to come, as proof that rumours of the Nazi slaughter of Jews were untrue. （Ahead of such a hypothetical visit, it would not be hard to empty out the neighbouring sub-sections, to preserve the illusion.） The family camp, with its regular clothes for the adults and sweets for the children, was simply an elaborate extension of the same pattern of deception that characterised the entire Nazi endeavour to rid the world of Jews.
For Walter, first love had coincided with bereavement. That first night he had had with Alicia was their last together, and the last of her life.
But the heartbreak was accompanied by confusion. His faith had been firm that, once people knew that death awaited them, they would not walk quietly towards it. Now he understood that information alone was not enough. The inmates of the Czech family camp had had the information. They could see the crematoria with their own eyes; the chimneys were just a few hundred yards away. They had known that the Nazis were murdering the Jews they had brought to Auschwitz. The trouble was, they never believed this scheme applied to them.
The reason for their special status had been a mystery to them, as it had been to the other prisoners in Auschwitz, but special they believed they were. They had been certain that they would be exempt from the death sentence the SS were carrying out on their fellow Jews. Only when it was too late did they see that they had been entirely wrong.
Now, surely, the remaining Jews of the Familienlager , those who had been shipped to Auschwitz in December 1943, would be stripped of any delusions of specialness. They had to know that their death was a certainty, scheduled for six months to the day after they arrived. They had seen what had happened to the others, how they had been driven to the gas chambers, never to return. They knew they were going to die.
And yet life in the family camp went on as it had before. The musicians staged concerts, the amateur actors put on plays. The rival political factions kept debating the ideal future, even though the only certainty was that they had no future. Walter concluded that even incontrovertible knowledge of one’s fate was not enough. If people were to act, there had to be a possibility, even a slim one, of escaping that fate. Otherwise it was easier to deny what was right in front of you than to confront the reality of your own imminent destruction. The surviving Czech Jews of the Familienlager knew they were doomed, but they were already prisoners in Auschwitz: what else could they do but live each day as best they could?
Even so, the Jews outside, the people of the world: they would be different. They would still have options for action so long as they did not board those trains, which they would not if they knew the fate that awaited them. They just had to be told. Walter would tell them – and he would do it soon. He would escape.
PART III
The Escape
13
Escape Was Lunacy
E SCAPE WAS LUNACY, escape was death. To attempt it was to commit suicide. Everyone knew that, even if they did not say it out loud. Calamity would surely rain down on whoever was reckless enough to utter the word and unfortunate enough to hear it.
The impossibility of escape had been taught to Walter Rosenberg early, within a week of his arrival in Auschwitz back at the start of July 1942. He and thousands of others had been forced to stand in silence and watch a public hanging, performed with full ceremony. The SS men had lined up with guns over their shoulders and marching drums strapped around their necks, while out in front stood two mobile gallows, wheeled into position, one for each condemned man.
The stars of the show were announced as two prisoners who had tried and failed to escape. Walter and the others had to watch as the men were brought out; a Kapo tied their ankles and thighs with rope, then placed a noose around each of their necks. One stood silent and impassive, while the other attempted to deliver a rousing speech, a final denunciation of their Nazi captors. No one heard a word he said, of course. The drums were there for a reason.
The Kapo turned a crank, a trapdoor opened and the first man dropped just a few inches: not enough to bring instant death. His body twisted and turned, first one way and then the other. It was not over quickly; the crowd was forced to watch a long, slow strangulation. Then the hangman moved to the second gallows, where the same sequence was acted out once more. Afterwards, the inmates were kept there a full hour, forbidden even to look away. They had to stand, in silence, staring at the two dead bodies twirling in the wind. They had notices pinned to their chests, written as if the words were spoken by the dead themselves: Because we tried to escape …
Walter understood that the Nazis wanted him and every other prisoner to conclude that escape was futile, that any attempt was doomed. But Walter drew a very different lesson, one that to him was obvious. The danger, he concluded, came not from trying to escape, but from trying and failing . From that day on, he had been determined to try – and to succeed.
The first step, he understood, was education. His schooling had been interrupted, but now he would become a student of escape. His primary texts would be the failures of others.
Small lessons came every day. He saw a political prisoner hang for the crime of wearing two shirts under his tunic, which the SS took to be preparation for an escape. Walter had made a similar mistake himself once, when those two pairs of socks had given him away. He made a mental note: no outward changes.
But the start of 1944 would teach a much deeper lesson. It came after he learned of the escape plan of one of the camp’s larger-than-life characters: Fero Langer, the same man with whom Walter had briefly shared a prison cell in Nováky eighteen months earlier. Walter remembered him well: Langer had given him a hunk of salami for the journey that would end in Majdanek. ‘Bullo’ they called him in Birkenau, a one-man organising machine who had acquired a cash fortune in less than a year in the camp. Bullo had hatched a plot to achieve the same ambition nurtured by Walter: to get out and reveal the truth of Auschwitz to the world. What’s more, and in violation of one of the cardinal rules of camp life, he talked about it. One afternoon, over a bowl of potatoes in Fred Wetzler’s block, Walter sat quietly and listened as the Bull set it all out.
He would escape with fellow prisoners from Poland, Holland, Greece and France. That way, he calculated, their testimony would spread across the globe with no need for translation. Central to the scheme was the help of an SS man whom Fero had known as a schoolboy back in Slovakia, an ethnic German by the name of Dobrowoln?. Fero said he trusted him like a brother. Indeed, it had been this Dobrowoln? who first came up with the idea .
Langer’s fellow Jews were sceptical, but Bullo insisted he was not relying on trust or human kindness: he had also promised the man a reward, in the form of food and valuables from Kanada, in addition to the diamonds, gold and dollar bills his rescuer would need to bribe assorted SS men. The plan was simple. Together with a second SS officer, Dobrowoln? would march the polyglot quintet to the perimeter, then show the guard permits authorising the prisoners to engage in essential work outside the camp. From there, they would walk the three or four miles to where Dobrowoln? would have parked a truck, bought especially for the purpose. They would then drive to the Slovak border and to freedom.