Across the camp, the sound of the sirens, along with the names Wetzler and Rosenberg, brought silent rejoicing . Even though everyone knew that the escape of a Jew was next to impossible, that it had never once succeeded. And even though they knew that it would come at a price for those left behind.
At the evening roll call, Kommandant-Lagerführer SS-Untersturmführer Johann Schwarzhuber issued a new order: all Jewish registrars were suspended from their duties and would do hard labour, starting tomorrow. Schwarzhuber then summoned all the Jewish clerks to come to the front, where they were each given twenty-five lashes. The blows were administered by a special instrument, said to have been fashioned from the tails of bulls for extra hardness and elasticity. It cut through the flesh especially easily.
The SS were enraged by the 7 April escape. It was a humiliation. And they took out their frustration on their Jewish captives, inflicting punishment and pain on the slightest pretext. Any association with the escapees brought extra attention and suffering. Arno?t Rosin, for example, had been the elder at an earlier block of Wetzler’s and was a fellow Slovak Jew: he was interrogated and tortured by SS men who assumed he must have been in on Fred and Walter’s escape plan. Rosin insisted that he had had no inkling of it: in fact, he said, he was furious that the pair had not taken him with them. It was a recklessly brave thing to say, not least because it was only partly true: Rosin was one of the few people who did know of the planned escape. He had even helped the two of them prepare for it. But Fred and Walter had told him none of the details, so that he would have nothing to reveal under torture . Somehow Rosin’s gambit worked. The Nazis did not kill him. Instead they beat him and sentenced him to hard labour, in the gravel pit.
Mordowicz had been given the same punishment, assigned to that same detail. During one shift, the two made a discovery. In a steep sidewall of the pit, there was a short, narrow passageway, one that had clearly been carved out as a hideaway by other would-be escapees. It had been filled in with broken stones, presumably by prisoners, perhaps to prevent it from collapsing. If the stones were removed, there was no reason it could not be used again. Over the next two weeks, when the coast was clear, the two men took turns, one acting as lookout at ground level, the other taking a spade and digging out the space. When it was done, it was like a double grave, with room enough for two people to lie still, side by side. Mordowicz stashed a can of water there, along with some bread and two pairs of overalls , and waited for the right moment.
It came on 27 May 1944 when Mordowicz and Rosin repeated the trick pulled off by Rosenberg and Wetzler. They hid in the crawl space planning to wait three days and nights, though they would rely on turpentine rather than petrol-soaked tobacco to ward off the dogs, whose numbers had increased following the 7 April escape. But their hideout was not as well made as the one that had housed Fred and Walter. Gravel crumbled in, and the makeshift ventilation pipe did not work. They felt sure they would suffocate, if they were not buried alive. They could not hold out for seventy-two hours. Instead, after around half that time, they took the risk and emerged from the hole. Whether from lack of oxygen, lack of movement or the exertion required to clamber out, they both promptly fainted.
When they came round, they found a camp that was not focused on finding two missing Jewish prisoners but rather entirely preoccupied with the job of mass murder. Two transports had arrived that night packed with Hungarian Jews, and the SS was devoting its resources, including its dogs, to that task. As the SS corralled their victims just a few hundred yards away, Mordowicz and Rosin were able to creep off into the darkness. They crawled between the watchtowers, embarking on a journey that would see them swim across the So?a, climb on to the roof of a crowded passenger train, jumping off as it slowed on a bend, wade across the ? ern? Dunajec river, then trudge through a forest until they found a matchbox whose Slovak label confirmed they had at last crossed the border. It was 6 June 1944, the day of the D-Day landings.
They heard about that event from a peasant and, coupled with the euphoria of being back on what, for Rosin, was home soil, it led them to drop their guard. They went to toast what they assumed was their imminent freedom at a local watering hole and, before they knew it, they were under arrest: someone had reported two suspicious-looking men.
While they were held in a cell, a couple of local Jewish community activists had the wit to visit and slip a few dollars into their pockets. Now, rather than be exposed as Auschwitz escapees, the pair would be charged with the crime of smuggling, which entailed transfer to a different court. The pair were sent by train to Liptovsk? Sv?t? Mikulá?, which just happened to be the same small mountain town where Vrba and Wetzler were in hiding. When Mordowicz and Rosin pulled into the station, they were stunned to see Rudolf Vrba – still Walter Rosenberg in their eyes – on the platform. The men hugged. To Rosin, it felt like the most sincere embrace of his life.
After they had served eight days in jail, with Rudi in the unlikely role of prison visitor , it was the turn of Mordowicz and Rosin to sit down with Oskar Krasň ansk? and tell what they knew. Their testimony fell into two parts. First, they described the Auschwitz-Birkenau set-up, corroborating fully what Krasň ansk? had already heard from the first two escapees. But then the pair told of what they had witnessed in the camp after the others had got away, describing a death factory that had dramatically increased production.
They reported the transport that had come from Hungary on 10 May and the ones that had followed from 15 May onwards, arriving with such frequency that, they estimated, some 14,000 to 15,000 Jews were reaching Auschwitz daily. Of those, they reckoned only 10 per cent were registered as prisoners in the camp; the rest, they said, were immediately gassed and burned. They described the streamlined efficiency of the operation, aided by the new ramp and the railway spur whose initial construction Vrba had seen a few months earlier. It now ran right through the middle of Birkenau, bringing deportees to the very threshold of the gas chambers.
Once again, Krasň ansk? took it all in, cross-checking and summarising their testimony to produce a seven-page addendum to the Vrba–Wetzler text, focused chiefly on the seven weeks that separated the first escape from the second. Now Krasň ansk? and the Working Group could speak of the Auschwitz Reports or Protocols in the plural, a set of papers documenting a newly intense slaughter in the present tense. The bloodbath was happening at this very hour. Krasň ansk? gave Mordowicz and Rosin money, fake papers and new names, and sent the new, updated document to his contacts – and out, he hoped, into the world.
Rudolf Vrba could find no peace. Yes, he was well fed. Yes, his feet had healed. Of course it was good to be with comrades who had travelled from the same distant planet he had. And it was a joy to taste normality again: to get a haircut, drink in a bar, meet women . But the news Mordowicz and Rosin had brought suggested his escape had been futile. He and Fred had got the word out, but it had done no good: twenty days had elapsed between their completion of the report and the arrival of the 15 May transport and in that time the future victims had clearly received no word of warning. The Jews of Hungary remained utterly ignorant of their imminent fate. They were boarding the trains that would take them to the doors of the crematoria, just as Rudi had feared they would.