Of course, mere sneers and taunts from the new SS men posed no threat. But that was not what worried Walter. His fear was that, now that he had caught their attention, the pair would make the next, obvious move and search him. And that would be a disaster.
Because, although Walter dressed like this – the riding breeches, the neatly tailored jacket, the high-end boots – every day, he had made a change. Hidden inside his shirt, pressed against his skin, was a watch. He was remembering Volkov’s advice: timekeeping would be essential, for the first stage of the escape especially. If these two Unterscharführer s began frisking him, if they merely patted him down, they would find the watch instantly. And that would give him away.
He imagined the scene that would follow. The crowd staring at the gallows, the noose placed around Walter’s neck, as the presiding Nazi bellowed out the words: ‘Why should a prisoner have a watch unless he was trying to get away?’
Walter was right to be fearful. The SS men did indeed begin to search him, starting with the contents of his coat pockets. They dug in and pulled out dozens of cigarettes, a hundred in all, by the handful. He had, in effect, been caught carrying currency. Would the SS men realise that this was a provision for escape?
The sweat began to bead on Walter’s back. He did his best to stare straight ahead, to give nothing away. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Bolek and Adamek walk by, en route to the 2 p.m. rendezvous that Walter now believed he would never make. In nearly two years, he had never been stopped like this. To have come so close only to be thwarted here, in this way, over some lousy cigarettes. Walter cursed the fates that were clearly bent on keeping him in Auschwitz until his last breath.
And then he felt it, the thwack of a cane on his shoulder, a firm, stinging blow, followed by another. One of the SS pair was thrashing him with a bamboo stick, abusing him as a ‘dressed-up monkey’ and a ‘bastard’。 Yet Walter felt not pain but relief. For though the SS man was beating him, he was not inflicting what would have been a far greater punishment: he was not searching him any further.
‘Get going,’ he said eventually. ‘Get out of my sight.’ Walter was incredulous. It made no sense. A moment earlier, this man had threatened to send him to Block 11, and if he had wanted to do that he could have: the hundred cigarettes alone would have been sufficient grounds.
Perhaps he and the rest of the SS were thrown by word of Lederer’s escape, and the first rumours that one of their own officers had been involved. Or maybe it was sheer laziness. The Unterscharführer had said something about having ‘better things to do’ than frogmarching a lowly, if uppity, Jew across the camp. Easier to administer a beating and leave it there. Maybe it was as simple, and as random, as that: the man in the uniform could not be bothered to perform a chore that would have taken perhaps ten or fifteen minutes out of his day, but which would have cost Walter Rosenberg his life.
Given all he had seen, it was hardly a surprise to be saved by the whim of one of his captors. In a way, every Jew still breathing in Auschwitz-Birkenau had been saved the same way. From that initial flick of the finger on the selection ramp – to the left, to the right – through to the hundred moments of caprice that played out every day, from the Kapo deciding he could win a bet by killing someone else rather than you, on the spot with a single punch, to the doctor in the infirmary deciding whether you could stand on your own two feet or were too weak to be allowed to live, the difference between life and death often came down to a fickle split second, a decision that was not even a decision but rather an impulse, one that could just as easily have gone the other way.
Walter was free to go, and so he walked – as naturally and unhurriedly as he could, with a hint of authority, as if he were a foreman – towards the wooden hideaway. Just a few yards separated him from the place where it would all begin.
‘You old swine, how are you? ’
Immediately, Walter took off his cap and stood to attention. It was another SS-Unterscharführer , though this time the face was familiar. It was Otto Graf, one of the duo of enforcers Walter remembered from Kanada. These days Graf was at the sharp end, overseeing the Sonderkommandos , watching over the removal and incineration of the dead from the gas chambers.
‘I’ve been working all bloody night,’ Graf complained, anxious to chat. Walter tried not to look impatient. He had no watch he could look at, but he knew the 2 p.m. deadline was imminent. If he did not get away from Graf, the moment would pass and, after four aborted attempts, who knew if there would be another.
Graf offered him a smoke. ‘Here, have a Greek cigarette .’ Of course. The latest shipment of Jews, about a thousand of them, had come in from Athens a few days earlier. Walter made some excuse – he said Greek cigarettes aggravated his throat – and Graf moved off. At last, Walter could approach the hideout.
When he did, he saw the others were already there. Without a word, Bolek and Adamek gave the signal, a small nod of the head that said: do it now . They peeled back seven or eight layers of wood, exposed the opening, and Fred and Walter slipped in. Once inside, they heard the sound, above their heads, of planks being moved back into place and then, from one of their comrades, a whispered ‘Bon voyage .’ After that, nothing but silence and darkness.
It was 2 p.m. on 7 April 1944. Some of the SS men may have been in spiritual mood that day; perhaps they had been in church that morning, closing their eyes in prayer as they honoured the solemnity of Good Friday. But as Walter Rosenberg and Fred Wetzler lay still and silent in a hole in the ground, and as the daylight faded into evening, they did not know that this was also the night of the Seder , the start of the Jewish festival of Passover. On this night, the date shifting each year according to the lunar calendar, Jews were called to celebrate their liberty, to give thanks to a wise and mighty God for not forgetting his people, for rescuing them from an evil ruler and for delivering them from bondage. As Fred and Walter crouched in the dark, the instruction of ancient tradition was clear: this was the night Jews made their escape from slavery to freedom.
17
Underground
T HOSE WERE THE longest three days and nights of Walter’s life. In that tiny hole, the hours lasted for weeks. Contracted by space, time seemed to expand.
When it was light outside, he would picture his fellow inmates just beyond the woodpile, a matter of yards away, working as slaves from dawn till dusk. He would listen out for the punctuation of the day, the midday break for what passed for lunch and, a few hours later, the rhythm of marching feet: the sound of prisoners ending their shift and returning to barracks. At that point, he and Fred would hear the orders barked at the men, by Kapos mostly, and the strains of martial music , the camp orchestra forced to strike up a tune to herald the return of the working units.
On that first night, the Friday, Walter imagined the roll call: the initial discovery of first one missing name and then another, followed by some head-scratching conversation between the Kapos and the block leaders, one of them eventually having to tell the men in uniform that two Jews were unaccounted for. That admission would almost certainly have brought them a beating.
He imagined the reaction of his comrades as word slowly spread of who had gone missing. He knew how they would have winced as for ten long minutes that awful, howling siren filled their ears, the sound that was always the cue for an extended roll call, forcing the prisoners to stand in formation for hours on end, shivering and exhausted, as they were counted and counted again. But he also knew how they would have delighted in the possibility that maybe this would be the day that, at last, one or even two of their fellow Jews got away.