For the separate interview, Krasň ansk? ushered him into a room which he locked . It was less a protection against interruption than a security measure, given that the Jewish old people’s home of ?ilina was now harbouring two fugitives from the SS, with a Gestapo warrant out for their arrest. （That was another reason to keep them in this building, day and night, for as long as two weeks : if they went out on the street looking like this, they would be noticed. People might start to talk.） Either way, Walter began the conversation by asking for a piece of paper and a pen.
He began to draw a map, the distances as close to scale as he could make them. First, he sketched the inner layout of the main camp, Auschwitz I. Then, and this was more complicated, he drew Birkenau or Auschwitz II, with its two sections and multiple sub-sections, A, B, C and so on. Between the two, he drew the Judenrampe , explaining what he had seen and done there. He showed where the behemoths of German industry – IG Farben, Siemens, Krupp and the others – had their factories, powered by slave labour. He showed where, at the far end of Birkenau, stood the machinery of mass murder: the four crematoria, each one combining a gas chamber and set of ovens.
For forty-eight hours, whether separately or together, Walter and Fred explained it all: the transports, the ramp, the selection, during which those chosen to work were marched off while those chosen to die were ferried towards the gas. The tattoos for the living, the ovens for the dead. The two men rattled off the dates and estimated numbers of every batch of Jews that had arrived since the late spring of 1942 right up until the week they had made their escape. They spoke in particular detail about the fate of their fellow Slovak Jews and the Czech family camp. Walter admitted that the plight of the latter had been especially close to his heart , given the ties of language and background: perhaps he expected his questioners would feel the same way.
Krasň ansk?, often joined by Neumann, listened to it all, absorbing every word. Neumann was a lawyer by training and it often felt like a cross-examination as he pressed and pushed Walter and Fred on every aspect of their evidence. Neumann might name an old schoolfriend whom he knew to have been on a specific transport, say in September 1943, asking if the pair knew the fate of that group. They would give their answer, knowing it would be checked against what they had already said about that same transport nine or ten hours earlier. The officials of the Jewish council were looking for inconsistencies , either within the testimony of Fred and Walter or between them. But they found none.
The tenor of the questioning irritated Walter. He could see that these men were interested in what they were hearing, that they were deeply engaged in it, but they were hardly brimming with human sympathy. They were officials, bureaucrats , in the business of seeking precision rather than showing compassion. Of course, Walter affected not to care – who wanted compassion from a bunch of fat Jewish lawyers and administrators anyway, he would say – but it needled him all the same.
Walter’s resentment predated this encounter in ?ilina. He had harboured a grudge against the Jewish council ever since that day in February 1942 when he had received his deportation summons, sealed with the stamp of the ??. No wonder they had had his name and photograph on file all this time, along with the records of the deportations and lists of names: they had been the ones to draw them up.
If he had asked the men across the table to defend themselves, doubtless they would have insisted that they had been forced into an impossible position. A Nazi edict in 1940 had banned every Jewish organisation in Slovakia, replacing them with this single Jewish council, the ??. The country’s Jewish leaders had debated in a fever the moral rights and wrongs of taking part in such an entity. Some took Walter’s view: that to serve in the ?? was to do the devil’s work for him and to bless it with the credibility of the Jewish community’s own leaders. Others had feared that Jewish refusal would only mean that the fascist devil would perform that work himself and do it more brutally. At least if Jews were involved, there might be a chance to cushion or delay the blow that would soon come raining down on Jewish heads. In the argument that raged, it was the second group that had prevailed.
To Walter, that was not good enough: in his mind, anyone associated with the ?? was a despicable enabler of Nazi rule. But there was something Walter did not know. There was a resistance cell within the ??, a secret council within the council known as the Working Group ready to go to extreme lengths to rescue as many Jews as it could. Among its key members were the very people Walter and Fred were talking to in ?ilina, Neumann chief among them.
Walter knew nothing of that, just as he did not think too hard on what other options Jewish leaders might have had when confronted with a fascist Slovak government bent on deporting its Jewish minority, backed by a Nazi superpower. But he was in no mood to give his inquisitors the benefit of the doubt. It even annoyed him that these officials were reliant on the word of two young men who had risked bullets and starvation to make the trek across the border. Why, he wondered , had they not despatched one of their number to Auschwitz to see first hand the fate visited upon their fellow Slovak Jews who had been shipped out of the country? That seventy-five-odd mile journey was hard and perilous, to be sure; no one knew that better than him and Fred Wetzler. But they had just proved it was not impossible, and they had been two young men with no map, no money and their names on an international arrest warrant. Surely, Walter thought, Neumann and the others could have sent a single undercover operative with the right papers and the required resources. The Jewish council had heard rumours about what ‘resettlement’ really entailed: why had they not done more to discover the truth?
Walter and Fred kept talking nonetheless, answering every question that was put to them. Finally, Oskar Krasň ansk? took away the notes he had assembled, the words directly from the mouths of the two men, and, at rapid speed, with Mrs Steiner at the typewriter, merged the pair’s accounts, distilling them into a single text. Written in Slovak, it ran to thirty-two, single-spaced pages. It included a series of professional drawings, setting out the ground plans for Auschwitz I and II and the basic layout of the crematoria buildings, rendered by an architect but based on Walter’s rough sketches and the testimony he and Fred had provided. The opening page was a foreword written by Krasň ansk?, though his name did not appear. It explained that the report had been written by two young Slovak Jews ‘whose names will not be disclosed … in the interest of their own safety’。 It briefly set out the separate deportation history of both men, before declaring that the document would not tell of the men’s entire experience but would include ‘only what the one or both together underwent, heard or experienced at first hand. No individual impressions or judgements are recorded and nothing passed on from hearsay.’
Then came the crucial line, confirmation that Fred and Walter had passed the rigorous, forty-eight-hour oral examination to which they had been submitted: ‘The declarations tally with all the trustworthy yet fragmentary reports hitherto received and the dates given with regard to transports to various camps agree with the official records. These statements can therefore be considered entirely credible.’
The report was written in a shifting first person plural: its first paragraphs referred to ‘our’ deportation from Sered’ to Auschwitz; later it spoke of ‘our’ convoy from Nováky to Majdanek, without spelling out that the first experience belonged to one escapee, the second to the other. It then described the life of an Auschwitz prisoner and the topography of the camps: the initial journey by cattle truck, the shaving of heads and bodies, the tattooing of numbers, the colour-coded triangles that marked the different categories of prisoner, the barracks, the inner and outer chain of watchtowers, the roll call, the sign saying Arbeit Macht Frei , the slave factories, the hanging of attempted escapees, the starvation, the casual beatings, the twice-weekly selections at the infirmary, all of it.