Walter liked tradition and he loved his grandparents: he was happy. The only cloud in the sky was a variant of sibling rivalry with his Viennese cousin Max, who was a couple of years older than him. Walter knew his grandfather took pride in his achievements in school, but he suspected that the old man liked Max more.
After his grandmother had a fall, and Walter’s grandfather decided he could no longer bring up the young boy alone, Walter was despatched to a Jewish orphanage in Bratislava. There, he impressed his teachers once more with his studiousness – asked to name his hobbies, he would say languages and reading, though he did make time to play football – and the headmaster suggested to Ilona that she should enrol her son in one of the city’s elite high schools. It would mean establishing a permanent residence in Bratislava, and hiring a young woman to act as Walter’s guardian while she remained on the road, but if the best was available to her boy, Ilona was determined he should have it.
When the time came to pose for a class photograph in the autumn of 1935, the outline of the man to come was visible. Just eleven years old, he may have looked a little nervous but he already had presence. His dark hair swept over to one side, and with the thick, dark eyebrows that would accompany him for life, he sat straight-backed, regarding the lens with intensity. The other boys did as they were told and posed with their arms folded. But not Walter.
He was still wearing tzitzit , the traditional fringed vest of the devout Jewish male, but his mother had made a cummerbund for him, to keep the tassels hidden. The payos , or sidecurls, which Walter would have worn in Nitra, were gone. For the first time, he was free to make his own religious decisions, without the influence of either his grandfather or the orphanage. One afternoon, strolling the streets of Bratislava with some lunch money in his pocket, he decided to put God to the test: he went into a restaurant and ordered pork. He took the first bite and waited for the bolt of lightning to strike. When it did not come, he made up his mind – and made the break.
Pupils at the gymnasium were given a choice of religious instruction: Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish or none. Walter chose none . On his identity papers, in the space set aside for nationality, he could have entered the word ‘Jewish’ but instead chose ‘Czechoslovak’。 At school, he was now learning not only German but High German. （He had struck a deal with an émigré pupil: each boy would give the other advanced lessons in his native tongue.） In the class picture for 1936, his gaze is confident, even cocky. He is staring straight ahead, into the future.
But in the photograph for the academic year 1938–9 there was no sign of fourteen-year-old Walter Rosenberg. Everything had changed, including the shape of the country. After the Munich agreement of 1938, Adolf Hitler and his Hungarian allies had broken off chunks of Czechoslovakia, parcelling them out between them and, by the spring of 1939, what was left was sliced up. Slovakia announced itself as an independent republic. In reality it was a creature of the Third Reich, conceived with the blessing and protection of Berlin, which saw in the ruling ultra-nationalist Hlinka, or Slovak People’s Party, a mirror of itself. A day later the Nazis annexed and invaded the remaining Czech lands, marching in to declare a Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, while Hungary seized one last chunk for itself. Once the carve-up was done, the people who lived in what used to be Czechoslovakia were all, to varying degrees, at the mercy of Adolf Hitler.
In Slovakia, the teenage Walter Rosenberg felt the difference immediately. He was told that, no matter the choice he had made for religious studies classes and the word he had put in the ‘nationality’ box on those forms, he met the legal definition of a Jew and was older than thirteen; therefore, his place at the Bratislava high school was no longer available. His education was terminated.
All across the country, Jews like Walter were coming to understand that although the new head of government was a Catholic priest – Father Jozef Tiso – the state religion of the infant republic was Nazism, albeit in a Slovak denomination. The antisemites’ enduring creed held that Jews were not merely unreliable, untrustworthy and irreversibly foreign, but also endowed with almost supernatural powers, allowing them to wield social and economic influence out of all proportion to their numbers. So naturally the authorities in Bratislava moved fast to blame the country’s tiny Jewish community – 89,000 in a population of two and a half million – for the fate that had befallen the nation, including the loss of cherished territory to Hungary. Propaganda posters appeared, pasted on brick walls; one showed a proud young Slovak, clad in the black uniform of the Hlinka Guard, kicking the backside of a hook-nosed, sidecurled Jew – the Jew’s purse of coins falling to the ground. In his first radio address as leader of the newly independent republic, Tiso made only one firm policy commitment: ‘to solve the Jewish question’。
After Walter’s expulsion from school, Ilona abandoned her work as a travelling saleswoman and the pair moved to Trnava, a small town thirty miles east of Bratislava. It was a shock after the capital: here all life, and multiple narrow lanes, converged on a central square named for the Holy Trinity and dominated by not one but two churches. In summer, Trnava was a cloud of heat and dust, the marketplace reeking of manure, hay and human sweat, the whole town overwhelmed with the stench emanating from the nearby sugar plant as it processed beet. Escape could be found in the countryside, with its flat fields of ripe corn and fresh breezes only a cycle ride away.
But if the Rosenbergs, mother and son, were hoping for refuge, they had come to the wrong place. The government’s determination to tackle the so-called Jewish question reached even here, touching small-town Trnava with its community of fewer than 3,000 Jews whose two synagogues stood a matter of yards apart. Not that the good people of Trnava needed much prompting: they had set fire to both synagogues a matter of weeks after Slovakia had gained its autonomy, in December 1938.
Walter soon joined up with a group of Jewish teenagers, who, like him, had been banished from the realm of learning. On the first day of term, the schools had hung signs on their gates announcing that Jews and Czechs were excluded, while their former friends chanted, ‘Jews out, Czechs out .’ After that, Walter and the other young Jews of Trnava, those in the eighth grade and above, were left to their own devices, wandering around town with no classes to attend and no place to be. Under the new rules, they were barred even from learning alone. Which is why Walter and his friend Erwin Eisler went one day to the local council building to hand in their textbooks, obeying an order introduced to guard against the threat of Jewish children studying in their own homes. Walter had complied dutifully, surrendering his books, but Erwin surprised him. Normally, Erwin was bashful, blushing at the mere mention of girls and ducking invitations to join the gang as they headed to a neighbourhood café. But on this day he showed unexpected pluck.
‘Don’t worry,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve still got that chemistry book.’
He had held on to one of the two volumes on inorganic and organic chemistry by the Czech scientist Emil Voto? ek. Thereafter Walter and Erwin would pore over that single text, teaching themselves in secret the knowledge their country was determined to deny them.