Once again, Walter sailed through. So did Fred. But now one of the two Polish Jews failed to appear: apparently, his Kapo slavemaster had given him an extra task that meant he could not wander over to this part of Mexico.
Day three came, and with it the hope that it would be third time lucky. Walter made it, as did their two accomplices. But Fred was turned around at the Blockführerstube , the SS guard room, on the grounds that, of all things, his hair was too long . The mission had to be postponed again.
On the morning of Thursday 6 April, they were ready to make their fourth attempt. Except this time too the plan had to be aborted. The explanation was something neither Fred Wetzler nor Walter Rosenberg had ever allowed for, a story so unlikely that if they had not known of it first hand they would have dismissed it as a fantasy. It turned on love.
SS-Rottenführer Viktor Pestek was a strikingly handsome man. In his mid-twenties, he had something in common with the SS man who had tricked Bullo Langer: like him, he was a Volksdeutsche , an ethnic German, in his case originally from Romania. More unexpectedly, he also had something in common with Walter: as a Blockführer in the family camp, he had fallen in love with one of the young Jewish women imprisoned there. Her name was Renée Neumann, and Pestek was besotted.
He had resolved to save her from the gas chambers, which meant spiriting her away from Auschwitz. Renée had been adamant that she would not leave without her mother. That meant the SS man would have to find a safe house where he and the two women could wait out the war. Seemingly, that would require the help of anti-Nazis on the outside, people who would be prepared to lend a hand to two Jews in hiding. It was a wildly unlikely scheme, but Pestek had made up his mind to try.
Nor was he shy about his plan. He approached several prisoners, offering them a bizarre bargain. He would get them out and, in return, they would connect him with friends in the resistance.
He tried first to recruit Fred and then Walter, but neither was interested. Bullo’s betrayal by his old schoolfriend had persuaded both that trusting an SS man was folly. But Siegfried Lederer, forty years old and a block elder in the family camp, previously active in the Czech resistance, was not so wary. He said yes to Pestek’s improbable offer, even after he heard what the plan entailed.
Which is how on 5 April 1944 Lederer came to be in a washroom putting on the uniform of an SS staff sergeant, down to the silver cord of the Special Service. He waited for the signal, a red light that would blink three times in the window of the SS guardhouse by the gate of the Familienlager . When it came, Lederer stepped out and got on the bicycle that, like the SS uniform, had been left for him, raising his right arm in a Heil Hitler salute as he rode right out of the gate of the camp. There to open the gate for him was his underling, SS-Rottenführer Pestek.
They carried on like that, Lederer soon discarding the bike and on foot, together with Pestek, breezing past cordons of guards, the password ‘Inkwell’ opening any and all barriers. By 8.30 p.m. the pair of them were on an express train bound for Prague.
When Lederer’s absence was eventually noticed, and the sirens started shrieking in Auschwitz, the unlikely duo were far, far away. No SS man gave a second thought to the fact that Pestek was missing: he had signed himself off on official leave.
Lederer’s friends in the resistance did not let him down. They met the two men at Prague station and led them to a hideout they had prepared in the woods. But Lederer did not hang around. He made his way back to the same Theresienstadt ghetto from where he had been deported four months earlier: he wanted to warn the Jews there of the truth of Auschwitz. Except the Nazi programme of deception had been so thorough, all but his closest friends refused to believe him.
It remained for Lederer to fulfil the second part of his bargain with the love-struck SS man, even more outlandish than the first.
Once again, Siegfried Lederer put on the uniform of an SS officer. In the intervening couple of months he had evidently been promoted. Now he was to play First Lieutenant Welker. At his side would be Second Lieutenant Hauser, the role taken by Viktor Pestek. They carried with them a perfectly forged warrant bearing both the Berlin letterhead of the Reich Security Main Office and the seal of the Prague Gestapo, authorising the pair to remove two women from the Familienlager of Birkenau for interrogation. They boarded an express train in Prague. Destination: Auschwitz.
The two men split up temporarily, so that Pestek could complete an errand, but they agreed to reconvene at O? wi? cim railway station at noon the next day. The SS must have had a tip-off, because minutes before midday an SS flying squad on motorcycles arrived and promptly encircled the station buildings. When Pestek’s train pulled in, they surrounded that too. The SS squad commander spotted Pestek, leaning out of a window from his carriage, and moved in. Seconds later, from his perch in the waiting room, Lederer watched as Pestek fought back, triggering a shootout. A hand grenade went off, scattering the SS men on the platform.
Seeing his moment, and still in his SS uniform, Lederer jumped out of the waiting room window and grabbed the first motorcycle he could find. He sped off, heading west. Within a couple of hours, he had abandoned the bike and was on a train back to Prague and from there to Theresienstadt, where he would hunker down and prepare a small group of comrades for resistance xs. Pestek was not so lucky. He was arrested, interrogated and shot before he could ever say goodbye to Renée Neumann.
The sounding of the sirens on 6 April, announcing Lederer’s disappearance, prompted an immediate recalculation by Fred and Walter. It made no sense to attempt an escape when the SS were already in a state of high alert. Better to pause.
And so they waited until lunchtime on Friday 7 April. Once again Walter approached the gate, poised to tell the SS man standing sentry the same yarn about needing to visit the crematorium. The guard seemed suspicious, but Walter made it through. He headed towards the timber pile. He could see it. Would today be the day?
Then, without warning, Walter felt hands grab at him. They belonged to two SS-Unterscharführer s who had pounced, seemingly out of nowhere. His mind raced through the possibilities. How could these men possibly know what was afoot? Unless … had Walter and Fred been betrayed, their plan exposed before they had even taken the first steps towards implementing it?
Walter now looked hard at the two officers who had apprehended him. The trouble was, he did not recognise either of them. They were new. Which meant Walter could not make the kind of instant decision he, Fred and the other inmates had learned to make every moment of every day in Auschwitz and on which their survival depended. It was the same decision Fred had made three days earlier, on the day first slated for the escape: namely, whether this or that SS guard was not just cruel or vicious – that much was taken as read – but whether they were particularly sharp-eyed, vigilant and zealous or, alternatively, lazy and easily duped. Gazing at these two men who had grabbed him, their faces new and therefore blank, Walter had no clue.
The first sign either one of them gave him to go on was a sneer.
‘What have we got here? ’ the man said, taking in Walter’s elaborate get-up. Rosenberg’s garb was familiar among the camp regulars, including the SS men who knew that the rules permitted a registrar to wear clothes of his own. But these men were not yet accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of Birkenau’s permanent population.