But some of the advice belonged in the realm of psychology. Trust no one; share your plans with no one, including me. If your friends know nothing, they’ll have nothing to reveal when they’re tortured once you’re gone. That advice fitted with what Walter already knew for himself: that there were others eager to give up your secrets. The Politische Abteilung, the Political Department of the SS, had built up quite a network of informers among the prisoners, always listening out for talk of escape and revolt. （They were recruited by a threat from the SS that, if they refused to betray their fellow prisoners, their relatives back home would be murdered .） You never knew who you were really talking to. Best to say little.
Volkov had more wisdom to impart. Have no fear, even of the Germans. In Auschwitz, in their uniforms and with their guns, they look invincible. But each one of them, on his own, is just as small and fragile as any other human being. ‘I know they can die as quickly as anybody because I’ve killed enough of them .’
Above all: remember that the fight only starts when you’ve broken out of the camp. No euphoria, no elation. You cannot relax while you are on Nazi-ruled soil, not even for a second.
Walter did his best to take it all in, to remember it along with the mountain of numbers and dates that was piling ever higher in his mind. But there was one last bit of advice, for the escape itself.
The Nazis’ tracker dogs were trained to detect even the faintest odour of human life. If there was a single bead of sweat on your brow, they would find you. There was only one thing that defeated them.
Tobacco, soaked in petrol and then dried . And not just any tobacco. It had to be Soviet tobacco. Volkov must have seen the gleam of scepticism in Walter’s eye. ‘I’m not being patriotic,’ he said. ‘I just know machorka . It’s the only stuff that works.’
Volkov let Walter know that he had his own plans for escape and that he would not be sharing them with Walter or anyone else. He was happy to serve as the younger man’s teacher. But he would not be his partner.
For that role, there could only ever be one person. Someone whom Walter trusted wholly and who trusted him , someone whom he had known before he was in this other, darker universe, someone who, for that very reason, had an existence in Walter’s mind independent of Auschwitz: Fred Wetzler.
More than 600 Jewish men from Trnava had been deported to Auschwitz from Slovakia in 1942. By the spring of 1944, only two were still alive : Walter Rosenberg and Alfréd Wetzler. All the rest had either been swiftly murdered, like Fred’s brothers, or suffered the slow death in which Auschwitz-Birkenau specialised, worn down by disease, starvation and arbitrary violence, a group that almost certainly included Fred’s father. Fred and Walter had grown up with those 600 boys and men – as teachers and schoolmates, family friends and acquaintances, playground enemies and romantic rivals – and now every last one of them was gone. From the world they had both known, only Fred and Walter were left.
Despite the six years that separated them, that fact had sealed a bond of trust between them. Walter now regarded Fred as his closest friend . Their daily experiences were similar too. Fred had moved from the mortuary and was also now a registrar, a barracks pen-pusher, doing in BIId, Birkenau II Sub-section D , the same job that Walter was doing in Sub-section A. Both had a close-up view of the slaughter and its consequences. For Fred, that was literally true: his office had a window through which he could look out on to the yard of Crematorium II , enclosed by electrified fences and surrounded by watchtowers. When Walter visited, sipping coffee at the table by that window, he would take in the clarity of the view for himself. He could note the athleticism with which one particular SS man would vault on to the roof of the gas chamber, getting into position to shake out the pellets of Zyklon B. From their distinct vantage points, both Walter and Fred were able to count the dead.
And perhaps their states of mind were similar too. Fred had already seen the toll the permanent stench of death was taking on his friend, the signs of anxiety and depression. The massacre of the thousands from the Familienlager , including Alicia, had clearly shaken Walter badly. Fred had endured his own shocks to the system, even beyond the loss of his father and brothers. In the summer of 1943, in a rare example of a transport away from Auschwitz, the SS had shipped a group of prisoners from Birkenau to Warsaw, to work on ‘fortifications’。 Those transports took away most of Wetzler’s remaining Slovak friends. After they left, he felt lonely and alone. His mind turned more seriously to escape.
So the two men, bereft and bereaved, came together. In truth, they had whispered to each other of escape from the moment they had first come face to face in this place. Like Walter, Fred had been dreaming of breaking out from the start. There was an aborted scheme to crawl out through a sewer : he even did a test run. Another plan came to him when he worked at the morgue, back when the dead were taken to the town of O? wi? cim for burning. Fred reckoned he could hide among the corpses as they were loaded on to a truck, then jump off while in transit. He had to abandon that plan when the SS started burning bodies inside the camp instead.
Walter, still mindful of the disciplines of the underground, sought the approval of his contact in the resistance leadership, David Szmulewski. It seemed obvious that an unauthorised breakout aimed at revealing the secrets of Auschwitz had less chance of success than one with the underground’s backing. On 31 March 1944 Szmulewski gave Walter the leadership’s answer. It came as a grave disappointment.
They had concluded that Walter’s ‘inexperience, personal volatility and impulsiveness ’， as well as some unspecified ‘other factors’， made him ‘unreliable’ for this mission. What’s more, they thought it highly unlikely that the outside world would believe him. Nevertheless, Szmulewski offered the leadership’s assurance that, though they would not help the planned escape, they would not stand in its way. For his own part, Szmulewski stressed that he was sorry about the ‘higher decision’， which Walter assumed had been taken by the command group in Auschwitz I rather than in Birkenau.
The underground leader then added a request. Should Walter and Fred fail, it was the underground’s wish that they ‘avoid interrogation’。 If they did not, it would spell disaster for anyone who had spoken to either of them before the escape. Avoid interrogation. At that, Walter doubtless remembered Volkov and his recommended razor blade.
Walter was becoming impatient. The background din of construction, of cement mixers and the assembly of flat-pack huts, was now constant. Work on the three-track railway extension and the new platform it would require was going on without interruption. From his perch in the quarantine camp, Walter could see it take shape, hour by hour . He knew there was so little time. He had seen what had happened with that first transport of Czech Jews, how the truth had reached them too late, at the threshold of the gas chambers or, later still, once they were inside. He was determined that the Jews of Hungary would learn of their fate while they were still free , while they could still act.
This had to be the moment, he was sure of it. All he needed now was a plan that could not fail.
15
The Hideout
T HE PREMISE OF the plan was daringly, even absurdly, simple. Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, consisted of an inner camp and an outer camp. The inner camp was where the prisoners were kept at night, penned in behind not one electrified, barbed-wire fence that would kill anyone who touched it but two, each one fifteen feet high. A would-be escapee would have to surmount both those high-voltage barriers in the full glare of the arc lights that swept back and forth through the night, illuminating the vista for the benefit of the SS men stationed in watchtowers, surveying the scene, their fingers forever on the triggers of automatic weapons.