14
Russian Lessons
O NE OF THE advantages of his role as barracks pen-pusher for Camp A, the quarantine camp, of Birkenau was that he had a good view of everything and everyone that came in and out. So when, at 10 a.m. on 15 January 1944 , a group of people stood on the road that separated the men’s and women’s camps of Birkenau, it caught Walter’s eye. They were prisoners, but they stood out instantly. Their clothes were better than most inmates’， for one thing, and they were carrying specialist equipment: tripods and theodolites, calibrated rods, measuring instruments and the like. They looked like surveyors, checking out a new construction site.
Walter approached the electrified fence that stood between him and them and saw that the man in charge was familiar: a German red-triangled political prisoner, a former trade unionist and anti-Nazi by the name of Yup, short for Joseph. Walter remembered him from when they had both been imprisoned in the main camp, in 1942. They had formed a connection back then; perhaps Yup was impressed that Walter had had his own brush with the socialist resistance during that brief flit to Hungary.
‘What a pleasant surprise ,’ Yup said, smiling broadly. ‘Who’d have thought it? You’re alive! And looking well too.’
Across the barbed wire, Yup asked whether Walter was able to ‘organise’ a cigarette, and Walter obliged.
‘So,’ Walter said eventually. ‘What’s all this then?’ He gestured towards Yup’s men. ‘What are you doing here?’
Yup told Walter that what he was about to say was strictly confidential. His voice dropped. ‘We’re building a new railway line. Straight to the crematoria.’
Walter looked sceptical. ‘A new line? But they’ve just repaired the old ramp.’ He knew all too well about the work on the Judenrampe , its timber planks reinforced with concrete.
But Yup was adamant. He had overheard from the SS that Auschwitz was bracing itself for a huge new influx of Jews to be killed. The Jews of Hungary were coming soon, he said, about a million of them. The SS had determined that the current ramp simply could not cope with that kind of number, and certainly not quickly enough.
It was his experience on the ramp that made Walter instantly accept what Yup had told him as the truth. He knew better than most that if the SS wanted to kill on that scale and at that speed, they would have to change the current set-up. The big bottleneck in the system was the journey the victims had to make from the ramp to the gas chambers: a short but time-consuming truck ride for every hundred Jews. Extending the railway line for that one-and-a-quarter-mile stretch would make the process far more efficient.
And of course it would be the Jews of Hungary. They were the last ones left, the one major Jewish community of Europe not yet to have been pulled into the inferno. Walter had seen the Jews of France, Belgium, Holland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Germany and Greece in Auschwitz. The Jews of Hungary had been conspicuous by their absence.
Confirmation came via the grapevine of the green-triangle Kapos and their chums in the SS’s lower orders. Unglick had found that the SS duo assigned to Camp A were both easily bought with liquor. They also became chattily indiscreet when drunk. That was how Walter learned that, having savoured Greek olives, French sardines and Dutch cheese, the SS was licking its lips for the arrival of ‘Hungarian salami’ .
And so by the early spring of 1944 there was a double urgency to Walter’s determination to escape. Those 5,000 or so Czechs who had entered the family camp in the second wave, arriving on 20 December 1943, would be put to death exactly six months later on 20 June. That was beyond doubt; it was the hardest of deadlines. But now there was the prospect of an even more imminent, and much larger, slaughter: hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews would board trains for Auschwitz in a matter of weeks, trains that would take them to the very gates of the gas chambers.
Walter had his motive and now he acquired a mentor. After the Poles, the most successful escapees from Auschwitz were Soviet prisoners of war. Many thousands had been brought to the camp at the start, dying in the cold and dirt as they worked as slaves to build Birkenau. But there was another group, Walter estimated there were about a hundred of them, known to the Auschwitz veterans as the ‘second-hand prisoners of war’。 Captured in battle, they had been sent initially to regular PoW camps but then despatched to Auschwitz as punishment for bad behaviour, including attempted escape. Among them was one Dmitri Volkov.
Not for the first time, Walter had reason to be grateful for the Russian he had taught himself back in Trnava. It meant he could talk with the second-hand PoWs as he registered them, even those whose appearance was forbidding. To Walter, Volkov was a bear of a man from the land of the Cossacks, Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine. Enormous and with dark, deep-set eyes, and still in his Red Army uniform, he looked like someone to be approached with care.
But with time they got to know each other, eventually striking an unspoken bargain not dissimilar to the high-school deal that had seen Walter trade lessons in Slovak for tuition in High German. Volkov allowed Walter to practise his Russian. In return, the young pen-pusher handed over his allocation of bread and quasi-margarine, honouring a vow he had made to himself much earlier: that he would not take his official ration so long as he had access to food from elsewhere. He noticed that Volkov did not eat even that meagre portion, instead cutting it into quarters, to be shared with his comrades.
They began talking. Not, at first, about the camp, but about the great Russian literary masters Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, moving on to the Soviet writers Gorky, Ehrenburg and Blok. Eventually, Volkov began to lower his guard.
He revealed that he was no mere conscript but a captain in the Red Army. In making this admission, Volkov was taking a huge risk: it was Nazi practice to shoot all Soviet officers. But he had decided to trust Walter, and not only with that information. He also told him of his own experience of escape, for the captain had once broken out of the Nazi concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. As his teenage pupil listened, and over several days, Volkov proceeded to give Walter a crash course in escapology .
Some lessons were intensely practical. He told him what to carry and what not to carry. In the second category was money. Kanada might be overflowing with the stuff, but it was dangerous. If you had money, you would be tempted to buy food from a shop or a market, and that meant contact with people which was always to be avoided. Better to live off the land, stealing from fields and remote farms. Also not to be carried, at least when making the initial escape, was meat: the SS Alsatians would sniff it out immediately.
So: no money, no meat. As for what he would need, that category was larger, starting with a knife for hunting or self-defence, and a razor blade in case of imminent capture. That was a cardinal rule for Volkov: ‘Don’t let them take you alive .’ Also: matches, to cook the food you had stolen. And salt: a man could live on salt and potatoes for months. A watch was essential, not least because it could double as a compass.
The tips kept coming. All movement was to be done at night; no walking in daylight. It was vital to be invisible. If they could see you, they could shoot you. Don’t imagine you could run away; a bullet would always be faster.
Keep an eye on the time, hence the watch. Don’t be looking for a place to sleep when dawn breaks; make sure you’ve found a hiding place while it’s still dark.