They were returned to Auschwitz, a full week after the sirens had first shrieked the news of their disappearance. Though they did not come back like Bullo or Unglick, as corpses, they were battered and bruised. The grinning SS men marched the group through the camp: captured slaves to be paraded as proof of the might of their masters.
Walter was watching, the despair rising. As a scholar of Auschwitz escapology, he had felt sure that this time they had cracked it, that they had finally hit upon a method that could not fail. He had wanted to believe they had found the one small point of weakness in the permanent Nazi chokehold over them. But he had been wrong. He did not know how or where or when, but these four men had failed. It would mean death for them and unending imprisonment for him and Fred: if this operation had been a success, they had planned to use that same bunker as their own escape hatch to freedom. That hope was now dashed.
One of the men, manacled as he was, caught Walter’s eye. It was Eisenbach and, incredibly, he gave Walter the faintest hint of a wink. Walter took that to mean that they had not yet buckled; they had not given up the secret of the bunker. Still, they were on their way to the Auschwitz headquarters of the Gestapo, to be thoroughly searched and interrogated . After that they would face the notorious Block 11. Whatever secrets a man held, he did not hold them for long once he faced the torture of the punishment block.
During their questioning, they were escorted from Auschwitz to Birkenau where each was ordered to point out their hiding place. They did as they had agreed in those critical few moments after they had been seized by the German foresters: they all pointed to the same spot.
A few days later, on 17 March, a familiar tableau at Birkenau took shape once more. Thousands of inmates gathered, the SS drums struck up. The two mobile gallows were wheeled into position. The presiding SS Sturmbannführer gave the expected speech, warning that what the prisoners were about to witness would be their own fate should they ever be deluded enough to think they could break free. He invited them to gaze upon the six doomed men that stood before them, their wrists tied behind their backs: Citrin, Eisenbach, Gotzel and Balaban along with two others who had not made it nearly so far. Those two had not taken the precaution of ditching their valuables. Instead they had been found loaded with wealth: one version of the story said it was gold, another said it was diamonds concealed in a loaf of bread.
The crowd had to watch as the first of this pair, and then the second, was bent over the flogging block and subjected to fifty lashes. It took a full half-hour for each man to be flayed like that, the sound of leather against flesh ringing out in the silence, blow after blow. And when it was done, the drums rolled and the two ruined men were led up the steps to the place of execution. After that, the same performance that Walter had witnessed as a novice in this place nearly two years earlier: the hangman moving fast, rushing to get it done; the crash of the trapdoor; the terrible, twisting display.
Now it was the turn of Eisenbach and the others. First, came the flogging: thirty-five lashes for each of the four men who had escaped via the hiding place they had built in Mexico. And then …
Walter braced himself, but that was it. The four were marched back to Block 11, there to face God only knew what torments. Walter assumed his comrades would be spared no cruelty. He was sure they would be punished with a slow, tortured death.
Except that too turned out to be wrong. They were eventually released from the place known as a hell within Hell, sentenced to the hardest possible labour in the penal unit, isolated from the rest of the camp. They were meant to see no one there, but Walter had come to view Auschwitz’s rules as surmountable. Using his registrar’s unofficial licence to roam, he found his way there and to Eisenbach. The two did not make eye contact as he asked the older man the only question that counted.
‘Do they know?’
Eisenbach was digging a ditch with his bare hands and he did not change his movement even slightly, grunting only ‘No.’
He had not broken. Nor had the others. Partly because they were strong, even in the face of great pain. But also because they were clever. The tactic they had agreed in advance was to seem broken, to appear to crack under Gestapo pressure. When their interrogators had demanded to know how they had escaped, and where they had hidden, each one of them had, eventually, pointed to the same spot in Birkenau. But they had not pointed to the secret bunker. They had instead indicated a separate, pre-agreed but wholly bogus place of escape .
It meant the real escape hatch was still in place, intact and undiscovered. It was waiting for Fred Wetzler and Walter Rosenberg.
16
Let My People Go
T HEY SET THE date for Monday 3 April 1944. They had everything lined up. They had had both the advice of experts and the failure of others to guide them. They had no need to hide a change of clothes: as barracks bureaucrats, they were already allowed to dress close to the way they would need to on the outside. And they had supplemented what they had with strong boots, thick coats and first-rate trousers and jackets from Holland, all sourced via Kanada. They had the secret hideout, in the form of the still undisturbed hidden bunker of Mexico. They had the information they needed, all stored away in their heads . And they had the desperate urgency of men convinced they needed to sound the alarm not next week or next month but right now. They could see the three-track railway that was all but ready to receive the condemned of Hungary, to deliver them to the doors of the crematoria that would turn them into fire and ash.
Everything was set, the meeting time fixed for 2 p.m. Walter was ready. In his own eyes, he looked like a prosperous Dutch gentleman : tweed jacket, white woollen sweater, woollen riding breeches and high leather boots . He headed to the outer camp, as nonchalant as he could manage, acting the part of an Auschwitz official, out on his rounds.
He made it too, breezily telling the SS man on the gate that he needed to make a visit to the crematorium. In truth, his dearest hope was that today would be the last time he would ever see that place, where the burning of human bodies had become as routine as the smelting of steel in a metalworks, an unremarkable part of the industrial process. He was waved on his way.
Walter reached the outer camp and the woodpile. There he met Bolek and Adamek , two Jews from Poland whom Fred and Walter had enlisted for the task ahead. The pair were in the Planierung commando: they worked in construction, charged with making the ground level. That gave them a comfortable alibi to be hanging around in Mexico near the hideout. True, involving them meant breaking one of the sacred Volkov rules, expanding the circle of trust. But Walter could see no other way.
The hour had come. The three of them were all set. But there was no sign of Fred.
The obvious decision followed. There was no time to linger; that would arouse suspicion. The three men drifted off in their different directions, as if there had never been a planned rendezvous, let alone one that had been missed. When they returned to the inner camp later that evening, Walter got word of the reason for Fred’s no-show. Manning the exit from his part of the camp was an SS guard whom Fred knew to be especially vigilant: Fred had calculated that it was better to hang back than risk it. And so the four men – Walter, Fred and the two Poles – rescheduled. They would try again at the same time the next day.