Sure enough, one day in January 1944 the escape siren sounded. The headcount had shown some prisoners to be missing. Walter imagined his old cellmate, now on the run in a hidden corner of Slovakia. But by six o’clock that same evening Fero Langer had returned to Auschwitz. Or rather his body had returned. He had been shot dead, his face ripped apart. Three of the failed runaways lay on the ground, while the other two had been placed on wooden stools, their bodies propped up by spades thrust into the dirt. Their clothes were soaked in blood and next to them a sign read: Three cheers, we’ve come back again! Prisoners returning from work could see this little tableau and, in case they failed to get the message, they could hear the voice of the Lageraltester , the camp leader, bellowing, ‘That’s how you will all end up if you try to escape .’
It turned out that Dobrowoln? and his SS comrade had marched Langer and the others out, as planned, then urged them to run ahead to the supposed getaway vehicle before shooting them in the back. The SS men informed the camp authorities that they had successfully shot inmates attempting an escape – but not before they had rifled through their pockets and claimed their reward. Fero never reached the truck, let alone the border. It was a reminder of a lesson Walter had already learned for himself, a lesson about trust.
Still, that episode did not stop those with resources plotting to break out. Walter had struck up an unlikely friendship with a block senior in Camp A, a Polish-born Jew who had grown up in France, rising to become a captain in the French army, and who was now, aged thirty-three , a man of terrifying physical strength and menace. His name was Charles Unglick. Like Fero, he had built a network that included the Sonderkommando , who were sometimes able to pocket the valuables of those herded into the gas chamber. That, combined with his mafioso’s power to intimidate, had made him an Auschwitz millionaire, with SS officers on the payroll. Of particular interest to Walter, who always liked to be well turned out, was Unglick’s standing as one of Birkenau’s sharpest dressers. Walter especially admired the older man’s brown leather belt , which had been patterned with two criss-crossing lines that formed a kind of double helix. They had a joke between them: Charles would leave Walter that belt in his will.
Unglick was determined to use his position to escape and, like Bullo, he believed he had found an SS man who would help him. And not just any SS man, but an ethnic German who had been adopted and raised by a Jewish family in Romania and was now deployed in Auschwitz as a driver. To Walter’s astonishment, this Nazi spoke to Unglick in Yiddish.
The plan called for the SS man to drive his truck into Camp A. Unglick would climb into the vehicle’s vast toolbox and hide there. The Yiddish-speaking Nazi would lock it and, when challenged, would claim to have lost the key. They would drive away, and the German would be rewarded in diamonds and gold.
There was one more thing: Unglick liked Walter and suggested he join him in that toolbox. They would escape together, splitting Unglick’s huge fortune between them.
Walter was wary. Trusting an SS officer was surely an elementary error; they had all seen what had happened to Bullo. And yet Unglick’s confidence, his certainty, was hard to resist. Had Walter not dreamed of escape from the start? Was this not, at last, his chance?
He said yes and the two men drank a toast to liberty.
The truck would pull in and open up at 7 p.m. on 25 January 1944. At the appointed hour and at the appointed place, Unglick’s barracks, Block 14, Walter stood and waited. But there was no sign of Unglick or the truck. The minutes kept passing. Walter paced around, trying to look as natural as he could. A friend approached, inviting him to share a bowl of soup with a fellow underground member. Walter felt compelled to accept: it would look too strange to say no. Looking over his shoulder, back at the meeting point, he slipped into Block 7. His mood was bleak: he had thrown away his shot at freedom.
Around 8 p.m., there was a commotion down by the gate. Soon enough, Walter saw it: the bloodstained corpse of Charles Unglick. It did not take long for the SS to sit the body on a stool, once again propped up with a pair of spades . They kept him that way for two full days, as yet another warning.
The Birkenau bush telegraph soon revealed what had happened. Unglick had been running late. He had looked for Walter everywhere, only reluctantly giving up. After that, it was a re-run of the death of Fero Langer. The SS Yiddish-speaker had parked up, as agreed, and had concealed Unglick, as agreed. Except he had driven not to the border but to an empty garage. There he unlocked the toolbox and shot his co-conspirator dead. It was a profitable evening’s work. He had gained both Unglick’s diamonds and gold and the esteem of his SS masters, who admired his courage in foiling yet another attempted getaway.
As for Walter, he was left numb by an hour that had included abject disappointment at missing his chance to break out, bereavement at the loss of a friend and a strange kind of relief. Had he not accepted that spontaneous invitation to share a bowl of soup, he would have kept his appointment with Unglick and shared his fate. Instead, he had narrowly escaped death.
Afterwards, and in keeping with what had become a custom in the camp, the prisoner elite, including some of Birkenau’s most brutal Kapos , gathered to hand out the dead man’s clothes to the living. Normally, this was done in order of seniority , but this time they made an exception: in honour of the friendship the pair had shared, Walter could take whatever he wanted. He asked only for the belt. On the inside he inscribed in ink Unglick’s prisoner number and the place and date of his death: ‘AU-BI’ for Auschwitz-Birkenau, ‘25.1.1944’。 It would remind him, again, of the importance of trusting only those who deserved to be trusted.
The masters of Auschwitz made the most of these failures, ensuring they were known, betting they would sap their captives of all hope. But the attempts kept coming. From the creation of the camp in 1940 until 1942, only fifty-five prisoners had broken free. In 1943, the number of successful escapes rose to 154. Except most of those were Polish non-Jewish prisoners, whose conditions in the camp were better and who, crucially, had the bulk of the jobs, whether in the hospitals, specialised work details or bureaucracy, that made escape more feasible . The rest were Soviet prisoners of war. No Jew had ever got out alive.
Yet Walter’s situation was less hopeless than most. For one thing, his job gave him the ability to move around relatively unimpeded. For another, he was in Birkenau, where the ratio of SS men to prisoners was one to sixty-four: that made it relatively unguarded compared to the mother camp, where there was one Nazi for every fourteen inmates .
Also, and this was not as simple as it might sound, he knew where he was. He had once been part of a twenty-strong group of prisoners that were marched into the nearest town of O? wi? cim: a public relations stunt , Walter suspected, to show the locals that the prisoners were being well treated. From that trip, he knew that between the camp and the town flowed a minor river: the So?a. He could see mountains on the horizon and had identified those as the Beskyds .
That torn-off page from the children’s atlas he had found back in Kanada had allowed him to orientate himself further. He had worked out, in those few stolen minutes in the latrine, that O? wi? cim sat about fifty miles north of Slovakia’s northern border. Better still, he could see that the So?a originated on that same border and it flowed in an almost straight line, south to north. That meant that to navigate from Auschwitz to Slovakia, all he had to do was follow the river against its current. That would get him to the border by the shortest possible route. He had even committed to memory the sequence of settlements he would have to pass to get there: K? ty, Saybusch （or ? ywiec）， Milówka, Rajcza, Sól. He was young, fit and smart, and he knew this hellhole inside out. If anyone had a chance, it was surely him. What’s more, he soon had a new and urgent motive.