The self-teaching continued wherever the teenagers got together. Sometimes they gathered in a meadow known after its previous incarnation as ‘the pond’， sitting around, trying to make sense of the world that seemed to have turned upside down. Walter soon established himself as a dominant presence, his intelligence setting him apart. One girl, thirteen-year-old Gerta Sidonová, became steadily more enraptured by him, hanging on his every word. Her parents took him on as a personal tutor , though she doubtless found it hard to concentrate on what he was saying. She hoped he considered her his girlfriend, though the signals could be mixed. One time, they had agreed to meet for a date but he stood her up. Afterwards, Gerta confronted him. He had gone to meet her, he told her. But as he approached he had seen that she was wearing a hat with pom-poms . That had prompted him to turn straight around and head in the opposite direction. She looked like a nine-year-old in that hat, he said. He was fifteen: he could not be seen with a child.
And yet the Jewish teenagers of Trnava had few options beyond each other. They, along with their families, were steadily excluded from the life of the town they had called home. It was the same story across the country. The Tiso regime was determined to impoverish and isolate Jews, first banning them from government jobs, then imposing a quota on the numbers allowed to work in the professions. Later Jews were banned from owning cars, radios or even sports equipment. Each new ordinance would be posted on a bulletin board in the centre of town: the Jews would check it every day, to see what new humiliation awaited them.
Walter and his mother had no assets to speak of, but those Jews who did were stripped of them, bit by bit: first their land was seized, then their businesses expropriated. Aryanisation, the authorities called it. Gerta’s father tried to keep his butcher shop alive by handing it over to an assistant who had been shrewd enough to join the Hlinka Party. They called that ‘voluntary Aryanisation’， by which Jewish-owned businesses would surrender a stake worth at least 51 per cent of the company to a ‘qualified Christian candidate’。 The name of the programme was a stretch, because the Nazis did not regard the Slovaks as Aryans, but rather as a category of Slav. As such, they were firmly Untermenschen , an inferior people. Still, they were deemed superior to the Jews, and that was what mattered.
Beatings became commonplace, mainly of Jews but sometimes of those non-Jews who showed insufficient zeal in tormenting their Jewish neighbours. The national socialist paramilitaries pressured the people of Trnava and every other Slovak town or city to boycott Jewish businesses and Jews in general.
There was no hiding place, not even once your front door was closed and you were in your own home. From 1940, as Londoners were enduring the nightly air raids they would soon call the Blitz, Slovak gendarmes took the policy of expropriating Jewish property to a more direct, more literal level. They would enter Jewish homes and loot them, while the children could only stand and watch. They might grab a tennis racket or a coat, a camera or a treasured family heirloom or even, as in at least one case, a full-sized piano. Sometimes they would venture out of town, finding a Jewish-owned family farm and taking away the animals. It was open season . If a Jew had it, a Slovak could take it.
But the new republic had barely got started. As Walter turned seventeen, in September 1941, Tiso’s government introduced its own version of the Nuremberg laws, the Jewish Codex. Now, Jews were barred from public events, clubs and social organisations of any kind. They were allowed to venture out or shop only within prescribed hours. They could travel for only limited distances. If they wanted to buy property, they were subject to a 20 per cent surcharge: a Jew levy. There were limits on where they could live; they were to be confined to a few streets, an early step towards the ghetto. The headline on a pro-government news sheet bragged that, in the undeclared contest among fascist states, ‘The strictest laws against Jews are Slovakia’s’ .
But the change which had the most immediate, most visible effect on Walter was also the crudest. From now on, any Jew in Slovakia over the age of six had to identify themselves by means of a yellow Star of David, six inches across and attached to their outer clothes. If Walter and the other Jewish kids pitched up at Trnava’s skating rink or cinema, one glimpse of the yellow star and they would be turned away. While the friends they once knew were out late on the high street, the Jews were bound by a curfew. They had to be out of sight by 9 p.m.
Walter did not rebel against any of these rules. He was not even that shocked by them. Perhaps it was because the ratchet had tightened slowly, over time, so that each new turn did not seem so extraordinary considering what had come before. Whatever the explanation, Walter wore the yellow star, just as he accepted that, with his education terminated, he needed to find work. He picked up what he could as a manual labourer, but employers only hired Jews if there was no one else available. Any Jew lucky enough to get a day’s shift would be paid at the lower rate: there were two wage scales, a lower one for Jews, a higher one for everyone else.
This was life for the teenage Walter Rosenberg. Eating Wiener schnitzel and fried potatoes in the cramped kitchen of the home he shared with his mother; attempting to teach himself new languages – in addition to the German, Czech and Slovak he already spoke, along with some rudimentary Hungarian – usually from a dog-eared textbook; meeting with his friends at the pond, debating the competing merits of the -isms of the age, arguing over whether it was socialism or communism, liberalism or Zionism, that would come to their rescue. On the one hand, Zionism’s message of Jewish pride and possibility was balm to young Jews bruised by daily humiliation and exclusion . On the other, surely Zionism was another nationalism doomed to fail in a world that could be healed only by universal brotherhood, and was it not the socialists who were leading the fight against Nazism? They thrashed it out in the long hours they spent huddled together, shunned by their neighbours, branded by the yellow stars on their chests.
And yet, despite it all, they were still teenagers. There was time for laughing and flirting, for boys to chase girls, girls to chase boys and for both to break each other’s hearts. Walter was not tall – not much more than five foot six inches – but he carried himself as if he were. Those dark eyebrows, his thick head of hair and wide, mischievous smile, meant he was never short of attention.
Then, in February 1942, the letter arrived. It looked like a court summons or military draft notice, instructing Walter to present himself on this day at this time and at this place, bringing with him baggage no heavier than twenty-five kilograms and containing no gold. The message was clear enough. Walter’s country was no longer content merely to corral him and his fellow Jews in ever shrinking spaces, with no work and no opportunities. Now it wanted to banish them altogether. Jews were to be stripped of their citizenship, despatched across the border to Poland to live in what Walter and the others imagined were ‘reservations’， like those fenced-in lands they had heard about in America, set aside for ‘Indians’。
The order came wrapped in gentle, even genteel, language. Jews were not to be deported , still less expelled. No, they were to be resettled . And not all the Jews. Only the men, only the able-bodied, only those aged between sixteen and thirty. If they would agree to go voluntarily, quietly and without fuss, then nothing would happen to their families, who would be allowed to stay behind and follow later . As for the prohibition on gold, why surely that was obvious: gold could only have been acquired through Jewish knavery and deviousness, not through hard work, and therefore any gold that Jews might have in their possession was the rightful property of the Slovak nation, to which, no matter their place of birth or erstwhile citizenship, Jews no longer belonged.