18
On the Run
S UNDAY 9 APRIL was no day of rest for the SS. Sturmbannführer Hartenstein, the man in charge of the units responsible for guarding the camp, had been notified by teleprinter at 8.33 p.m. on Friday that two prisoners were missing. But it was not until Sunday that he telegraphed word of Fred and Walter’s escape to his superiors in Berlin. He addressed his cable to Gestapo headquarters, but copies were sent to all Gestapo units in the east, to all units of the SD, or Security Service, and to the Kripo, or Criminal Police, as well as to the Grepo, the border police and to SS administrative head office. In the flat, bureaucratic idiom of the Third Reich, telegram No. 2334/2344 told the story so far:
To RSHA, Berlin, WC2, to the SS Administrative Office D, Oranienburg, to all commanders Eastern Gestapo criminal investigation police and border commands in reference to: Jews in preventive arrest. 1. Rosenberg, Walter Israel, born 11 Sept. 1924, at Topol’？any, arrived 30 June 1942, from RSHA. 2. Wetzler, Alfréd Israel, born 10 May 1918, at Trnava, arrived 13 April 1942, from RSHA: Rosenberg and Wetzler escaped 7 April 1944, from concentration camp AU II, Sections II A and II D. Immediate search unsuccessful. Request from you further search and in case of capture full report to concentration camp Auschwitz. Additional to RSHA: request from you transcripts on Rosenberg and Wetzler from official search leader. Additional to SS headquarters: information forwarded to the Reichsführer. Further report follows. Fault of any guard so far not determined. Concentration camp AU, Division II, 440709, 4/8/44 D4 （signed） Hartenstein, SS Major
As those words pulsed along the wires connecting Auschwitz to both Berlin and the eastern reaches of the Nazi empire, Fred and Walter remained unmoving in their small, almost airless cavity inside Birkenau. They had no idea that the Reichsführer himself, Heinrich Himmler, had been told of their escape. They did not know that the camp authorities had all but given up hope of finding them, or that the SS major in charge of keeping Auschwitz’s prisoners locked up had admitted yet another grave lapse on his watch and had, as yet, found no one to blame. Fault of any guard so far not determined. They did not know that their names – with the addition of ‘Israel’， which the Nazis bestowed on all Jewish males whose first names did not appear on their list of 185 identifiably Jewish names – would soon be pinned up on the bulletin board of every police station, however small, even in the remotest frontier town of occupied Europe.
For although the SS thought they had escaped, it would be many hours before Fred and Walter believed it for themselves.
They did not emerge from their hole in the ground until nine o’clock the following night. Even when they had wriggled under the fence of the camp, even when they had crossed the line marking the ‘zone of interest’ – an area of some fifteen square miles, taking in the swathe of land between the Vistula and So?a rivers and including dozens of Auschwitz sub-camps – they would hardly be able to breathe easy. The universe outside Auschwitz contained almost as many perils as were held within.
That was especially true for two Jewish escapees. From the day they arrived back in 1942, the two of them, like all Jewish prisoners of the camp, had been cut off from the world. They had no network of comrades they could contact. There was no resistance organisation waiting for them to emerge, armed with food or clothes or false papers or indeed arms. While non-Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz had been allowed to receive food parcels and the like, thereby retaining at least a connection to the rest of the human race, the Jews had been very deliberately isolated. Just nineteen and twenty-five years old, Walter and Fred were entirely on their own.
The way Walter saw it, they had been written off by the world the day they stopped being Alfréd Wetzler and Walter Rosenberg and became prisoners 29162 and 44070, if not the day they stepped on to those deportation trains. True, they had become people of standing in the Auschwitz inmate hierarchy, but all that was lost now. The moment they crept out from under that fence they had entered a social vacuum . They knew no one; they had no one.
But that also meant no one had them. While Bolek, Adamek and one or two others knew the pair were plotting to escape, no one knew of their plans once out of the bunker and no one knew their route. The underground had refused to authorise official help, and so there was no risk of a comrade giving away that information under torture and no risk of a mole, one of the Political Department’s informers, doing the same more freely. On this Fred and Walter had been fastidious: they had not even talked of their route to each other.
All they had agreed on was that they would head south, to Slovakia. It was relatively near, about fifty miles away, but its chief commendation was that it was the land of their birth, the one place where their accents would not mark them out as foreigners and so attract instant suspicion. They had no contacts here in Poland. In Slovakia, they had no idea who, if any, of their friends or family were still alive. But in the land of their birth they would at least know where to start.
To Slovakia, then. With no documents, no map and no compass , just that list of names in Walter’s head, assembled from a torn page of a child’s atlas: K? ty, Saybusch （or ? ywiec）， Milówka, Rajcza, Sól.
Walter was beginning to worry about dawn. They could not risk being out in the daylight, and yet obviously they needed to be further away from the camp. They could see the outline of a forest: if they could get there before daybreak, they would find a place to hide and rest.
But even as they kept on walking, the trees seemingly refused to get any nearer. At first light, they came out on to open ground: they were still so close to the camp that, to their alarm, they heard the Auschwitz gong announcing morning roll call. They were in a cornfield, exposed for all to see.
They took a look around and then, a heartbeat later, threw themselves to the ground. Perhaps 500 yards away were the distinctive grey-green uniforms of the SS. There were several of them, escorting a group of women prisoners.
Flat and on their fronts, Fred and Walter were breathing fast. Had they been seen? Would the SS men come over here and shoot them on the spot? Volkov’s advice had been clear: no running. They would have to hold tight.
Eventually, one of the pair lifted his head, a periscope breaching the surface. There was no sign of the women or the SS. They had been lucky.
But they resolved not to reveal themselves again, not in the light of day. So they completed the rest of the trek to the forest like jungle warriors, advancing on their stomachs, rising to their feet only when they spotted a hollow or ditch, some of them filled with snow, in the hope that these dips in the ground might keep them hidden from view.
Finally, they were in among the thick fir trees. They rested a while; they might have dozed.
The quiet was broken by the sound of drums and song. The voices were young, belting out a chorus in healthy, hearty German. Fred and Walter hid themselves in the bushes, then heard the crunch of footsteps as SS men walked close by .
Eventually they peeked through the branches, only to see that they had run into a gathering of the Hitler Youth. Perhaps these young servants of the Reich were camping or going on an improving hike, rucksacks on their backs, getting to know the terrain of the new, expanded Fatherland. It would make sense in this part of Silesia, which had once been Polish but was now, following annexation, heavily Germanised, the original Polish population driven out of their homes, replaced by ethnic German settlers . Walter watched as these children, not thirty yards away and under a canopy of trees, ate their sandwiches. He reflected that their fathers were either the Volksdeutsche who had displaced the locals or the SS who had enslaved him and murdered his people.