Perhaps because the job of distillation was done by an engineer overseen by a lawyer, rather than by a journalist, the document was bald and spare, free of rhetorical fire. It gave the floor to facts rather than passion. And it did not declare its most shocking news at the top. On the contrary, the word ‘gas’ did not appear until page seven, and its core revelation – that all but a small number of Jewish deportees to Auschwitz were murdered on arrival – did not come till the following page. Even then, that horrific fact was delivered with no oratory or even emphasis; it was all but slipped out as an aside. It came after a list of transports that arrived in the spring of 1942, the last made up of 400 Jewish families from France:
This whole convoy consisted of about 1,600 individuals of whom approximately 200 girls and 400 men were admitted to the camp, while the remaining 1,000 persons （women, old people, children as well as men） were sent without further procedure from the railroad siding directly to the Birch forest, and there gassed and burned. From this moment on all Jewish convoys were dealt with in the same manner. Approximately 10% of the men and 5% of the women were allotted to the camps and the remaining members were immediately gassed.
From there, the report went on to list the transports, each one denoted, and committed to memory, by the numbers that were allocated to the handful selected from each for work:
38,400–39,200: 800 naturalized French Jews, the remainder of the convoy was – as previously described – gassed.
47,000–47,500: 500 Jews from Holland, the majority German emigrants. The rest of the convoy, about 2,500 persons, gassed.
48,300–48,620: 320 Jews from Slovakia. About 70 girls were transferred to the women’s camp, the remainder, some 650 people, gassed.
It carried on in that vein, listing every transport or group of transports, until the prisoner numbers of those selected for work reached 174,000. Sometimes the entry would be terse and factual, offering no more than a place of origin and an estimate of the number of dead. But sometimes the report would offer additional information, even the names of individuals, usually fellow Slovak Jews, who had been selected for work from a particular transport. There were references to Esther Kahan from Bratislava, Miklós Engel from ?ilina and Chaim Katz from Snina, ‘now employed in the “mortuary” （his wife and 6 children were gassed）’。 An entry for a transport of 2,000 French political prisoners, communists and others reported that among them was the younger brother of the former French prime minister Léon Blum: he was ‘atrociously tortured, then gassed and burned’。
Not until page twelve did the report describe the mechanics of murder. Alongside a drawing presented as a ‘rough ground plan’， there was a description of the four crematoria then in operation at Birkenau in stark, strictly factual sentences:
A huge chimney rises from the furnace room around which are grouped nine furnaces, each having four openings. Each opening can take three normal corpses at once and after an hour and a half the bodies are completely burned. This corresponds to a daily capacity of about 2,000 bodies.
Referring to the diagram, the report took care not to leave out what, to Walter, was the heart of the matter: the centrality of deception in the Nazi method:
The unfortunate victims are brought into hall （b） where they are told to undress. To complete the fiction that they are going to bathe, each person receives a towel and a small piece of soap issued by two men clad in white coats.
All the key details were there: from the Zyklon B and how it was dropped through vents in the ceiling to the work of the Sonderkommando in removing the bodies. It detailed the typhus wave of August 1942 and the fate of the Czech family camp in March 1944. It explained that the ‘internal administration’ of Birkenau was carried out by a group of ‘specially selected prisoners’， with its own hierarchy of elders and block registrars, and identified the constituent sections that made up Birkenau II, from Quarantine Camp A to the Gypsy Camp E. It named the commandant as Rudolf H?ss. Concise as it was, it sought to be comprehensive.
It concluded with a list, billed as a ‘Careful estimate of the number of Jews gassed in Birkenau between April 1942 and April 1944 （according to countries of origin）’：
Poland （shipped by trucks）… approximately 300,000
Poland （shipped by trains）… approximately 600,000
Holland… approximately 100,000
Greece… approximately 45,000
France… approximately 150,000
Belgium… approximately 60,000
Germany… approximately 60,000
Yugoslavia, Italy, Norway… approximately 50,000
Lithuania… approximately 50,000
Bohemia, Moravia, Austria… approximately 30,000
Slovakia… approximately 30,000
Various camps of foreign Jews in Poland… approximately 300,000
TOTAL… approximately 1,765,000
Krasň ansk? showed the text to the two men whose words he had taken down verbatim and whose testimonies he had amalgamated. He wanted their approval to release it immediately. Walter read it quickly and could see its flaws. The change in first person perspective, from Fred to him, could confuse. And, given that the document was not intended solely for Slovak consumption, there was perhaps a disproportionate volume of detail on the fate of the Jews of Slovakia, down to the inclusion of those individual names.
But surely the biggest defect was contained in the words that were not there. The final text made no mention of the imminent catastrophe about which Fred and Walter had been so desperate to warn. It did not speak of the urgent threat to the Jews of Hungary.
They had certainly discussed it. In the presence of Neumann , president of the Jewish council, the pair had described the construction work they had seen in the camp and relayed the excited SS talk of ‘Hungarian salami’。 And yet in this document there was not a word about it. What was more, when the final text mentioned the planned extension of the camp, the area known as Mexico where Walter and Fred had hidden for three days and nights, there was no hint that this section, BIII in Nazi officialese, was apparently intended to contain a new influx of Hungarian prisoners. On the contrary, the report insisted that ‘The purpose of this extensive planning is not known to us.’
Why would a document written by two Jews who had escaped for the purpose of alerting Hungary’s Jews not even mention the specific threat to that community? Walter confronted Krasň ansk?: there had to be an explicit warning in the text. But Krasň ansk? was equally adamant: the credibility of the report depended on it being a record of murders that had already taken place. No prophecies, no forecasts , just the facts. Krasň ansk? was sticking to the promise he had spelled out in the foreword: this document would only be believed if it confined itself to what had happened, eliminating any intimation of what was to come. The talk of ‘Hungarian salami’， along with the words Kapo Yup had spoken to Walter, had apparently fallen foul of that standard, classified as speculation and hearsay and therefore deemed unfit for inclusion . Still, Krasň ansk? was at pains to reassure the escapees that what they had revealed about preparations for the mass murder of Hungarian Jewry would be passed on to the relevant authorities.
Walter had a decision to make. Of course he wanted the warning to Hungary’s Jews to be loud and clear. Of course he would have preferred that the report be explicit on that point and much else. But that would have meant a delay. There simply was no time for a rewrite, for correcting errors or retyping pages, not when every day, every hour, counted. Better to get a flawed report out today than a perfect one tomorrow. Walter and Fred signed their approval.