He found Pollack’s room and, as soon as he was inside, he saw that, yes, this doctor was the same man he had known in Nováky. Except he was not alone. There was a female nurse at the doctor’s side. Thinking on his feet, Walter said he had come about a ‘gentleman’s disease’ and would prefer it if the woman were to step out.
Walter could see that Pollack did not recognise him. No wonder: Walter was dressed as a peasant and, only two weeks out of Birkenau, there was stubble on his head instead of hair.
So he explained who he was and where he and the doctor had first met. And then he spoke about Auschwitz. He did it as briefly as he could; still, Pollack paled and began to tremble . Walter understood why. He, Walter, was an emissary from the grave. He was the first of the 60,000 Jews who had been deported from Slovakia between March and October 1942 – half of them to Auschwitz – to have returned to the country. He was bringing the dread news that, of all those thousands, only sixty-seven Slovak Jewish men were still alive in Auschwitz, along with 400 Slovak Jewish women.
‘Where are the rest?’ Pollack asked.
‘The rest are dead ,’ Walter replied.
He explained that they had not been ‘resettled’， as those who stayed behind had been told and desperately wanted to believe. They had been murdered.
Pollack himself had been spared back in the spring of 1942, along with his wife and his children. But his parents, his brothers and sisters and their families had all been deported. The doctor had heard nothing from his relatives since 1942. They and the rest of the deportees had disappeared, leaving only silence. And yet Walter’s words still made the doctor shake. Because now he knew.
Collecting himself, Pollack asked what he could do. Now it was Walter’s turn to ask the questions. Was anything left of the organised Jewish community of Slovakia? Did any groups still exist, anything approaching a leadership?
The doctor answered that the ??, the ?stredň a ?idov, the Jewish Centre, or council, in Bratislava, still functioned. It was the only Jewish organisation the regime permitted, tasked now with representing the 25,000 Jews like Pollack who had evaded deportation and lived on. But the ?? had to work discreetly. The doctor could arrange a contact immediately. He then handed over an address where Walter and his friend could stay the night in ? adca: they would be under the roof of a Mrs Beck, apparently a relative of Leo Baeck , the eminent rabbi.
There was one last task to complete. They had been talking for fifteen minutes; the nurse might get suspicious. Better if Walter left with bandages on his feet , to explain what had kept them so long （though the woman might have been mystified as to exactly which ‘gentleman’s disease’ affected that part of the anatomy）。
The next morning, still disguised as peasants, the pair walked a careful distance behind Dr Pollack as he led them to the railway station of ? adca. He peeled away, and they boarded the train.
They were heading for the much larger town of ?ilina. Their only instruction was to be in the park in front of the railway station at ten o’clock. By way of cover, Fred and Walter sat on a bench and knocked back slivovitz. In their peasant shirts and with their heads shaved, drinking early and in public, they could pass for new recruits to the Slovak army. No one bothered them, until Erwin Steiner, representative of the ??, approached. He nodded to indicate that they should follow him, and they walked the seven or eight minutes to the strikingly modern building on Hollého Street that stood as a monument to the confidence of the community that had put it up less than a decade earlier. It was the Jewish old people’s home of ?ilina, though since 1940 it had found new purpose as the ?ilina branch of the Jewish council. Steiner led them straight down the stairs to the basement.
They passed the boiler room and the laundry and went through the last door off the corridor. Few people would come across them here, in the bottom corner of the building. There were windows on to the street, but the glass was opaque and at the level of any passing pedestrians’ feet. With luck, no one would know they were here.
There was some food – salami, eggs, salad – and water to drink. Soon Steiner’s wife, Ibolya, joined them: she would later act as typist .
And so, there, in that building, Walter Rosenberg, with Fred Wetzler at his side and the bandages still on his feet, began to fulfil the dream that had sustained him through the agony of the previous two years. He began to reveal the truth of Auschwitz.
PART IV
The Report
20
In Black and White
T HE CONVERSATION – part debrief, part interrogation – would last several days. As soon as he heard the men give the outline of their story, Steiner understood that this was bigger than him: the ??’s leadership needed to hear this. He telephoned Bratislava to speak to Oskar Krasň ansk?, a chemical engineer by profession who was one of the council’s most senior figures. Steiner urged him to come right away. Jews were not allowed to travel by train, but Krasň ansk? wangled a permit and was in ?ilina later that same day. The head of the Jewish council, the fifty-year-old lawyer and writer Oskar Neumann, joined them twenty-four hours later .
For the officials, the first task was to establish that these two men were who they said they were. That was simple enough: Krasň ansk? had brought with him the records kept by the council of every transport that had left Slovakia, for what was then destination unknown. There was a card for every deportee, including their name and photograph . So when Fred and Walter gave the date and point of origin of the transports that had taken them away, the records backed them up.
More than that, Fred and Walter were also able to name several of the others who had been jammed into the cattle trucks with them, along with specific individuals who had arrived in Auschwitz on subsequent transports. Each time, the names and the dates tallied. And each time, the escapees were able to confirm the fate of the people on those lists: with next to no exceptions, they were naming the dead.
Krasň ansk? found these two young men credible right away. They were clearly in a terrible state. Their feet were misshapen and they were completely exhausted ; he could see that they were undernourished, that they had eaten almost no food for weeks. He summoned a doctor and between them they decided that the men should stay here, in this basement room, to recover their strength. A couple of beds were brought down.
Yet, for all their physical weakness, Krasň ansk? was struck by the depth and sharpness of each man’s memory. It was a thing of wonder . The engineer was determined to get their testimony on record and to ensure that it would be unimpeachable.
With that in mind, he decided to interview the two separately, getting each story down in detail and from the beginning, so that the evidence of one could not be said to have contaminated or influenced the other. In sessions lasting hours, Krasň ansk? asked questions, listened to the answers and wrote detailed shorthand notes. Whatever emotional reaction he had to what he was hearing – which was, after all, confirmation that his community had been methodically slaughtered – he hardly showed it. He kept on asking questions and scribbling down the answers.
Walter alternated between speaking very fast, as if in a torrent, and very slowly, deliberately, as if searching for the exact word. Before the formal, separate interviews, Fred saw how Walter strained to be strictly factual, like a witness in a courtroom, only for the emotional force of the events he was describing repeatedly to prove too much. The younger man could not help himself: he seemed to be reliving those events in the telling, every fibre of his tissue and every pore of his skin back in Auschwitz. After an hour, Walter was utterly drained. And yet he had barely got started.