It was all part of the plan, cooked up with the approval of an SS official, Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny, who had been despatched to Bratislava from Berlin nearly two years earlier. The strategy was simple enough: starve the Jews of funds by confiscating their property, seizing their assets and denying them the ability to earn a living – and then denounce them as an economic burden on the hard-working, long-suffering Slovak nation. It had been easy to cast Jews as parasites when they had wealth; it was easier still now they had nothing. The Hlinka government, their German patrons at their side – brothers in national socialism – had calculated that, once the Jews were beggared, the Slovak public would be only too glad to see them dumped over the border. And of course it made sense to start with young men like Walter. If the Hlinka government were to rid the nation of an entire minority, better to remove first the fit and strong, those who would form the heart of any future resistance .
Walter stared at the letter that had come through his door, telling him when and where he should present himself. The one thing he knew, as the winter of 1942 gave way to the first intimations of spring, was that he would refuse to be removed from his own country. It struck him as a stupid instruction . No, he would not allow himself to be packed off in a train, destination unknown. Of course, he would do no such thing. He had been born in Slovakia; Slovak was his native tongue. He was a Slovak. He would not be picked up and thrown out like a piece of garbage, leaving his mother defenceless. While she cooked her perennial evening meal of Wiener schnitzel and apple strudel, Walter told her of his decision.
‘I’m going to England,’ he said. ‘To join the Czechoslovak army in exile.’
She looked at him as if he were mad. They argued about it for an hour, him in one room, she in the kitchen next door. At intervals, over the din of clanking pots and pans, she would let out a new expression of derision at the very idea.
‘Why not slip up to the moon and cut yourself a slice of green cheese ? But be back in time for supper!’
For Ilona, this was typical of her son and his hare-brained schemes, on a par with that crazy business of teaching himself English and Russian.
‘Russian! Why can’t you settle down like everyone else and learn a decent trade?’
These days there was a man in Ilona’s life and he was a locksmith . Surely, she said, that was a perfectly respectable occupation. But no, Walter had to do it his way.
‘I don’t know where we got you . You’re certainly not like any of my side of the family.’
Besides, she wanted to know how, exactly, he proposed to reach England.
‘Through Hungary,’ he said. True, the government in Budapest was allied to the Nazis, but at least Hungary was not deporting its Jews. ‘Then to Yugoslavia.’
That sparked another round of argument, with Walter unable to specify precisely how he would criss-cross occupied Europe, whether by land or sea, and how he would finally reach England. But if he could not get beyond Yugoslavia, he had a contingency plan. He would sign up with the partisans led by Josip Tito and become a resistance fighter.
More crashing of saucepans. Round and round they went, Ilona convinced that this was madness, as lunatic a mission as heading to the stars, and just as doomed. But Walter would not back down. Finally, he faced her and said in a calm, steady voice: ‘Momma, I’m not going to be deported like a calf in a wagon.’
The crashing and shouting stopped. Ilona Rosenberg understood that her son’s mind was made up.
After that, she became his co-conspirator, assembling the clothes he would need and scrabbling together what little money she had. And coming up with a solution to his most immediate problem: how to get out of Trnava and to Sered’， the town that five years before would have been deep in the Slovak interior but which now hugged the Hungarian border.
‘You’ll have to take a taxi ,’ she said.
Now it was Walter’s turn to point out the absurdity. Who ever heard of someone hailing a cab to freedom?
And yet he could see there was no other way. There was a driver they knew who might just do it, despite the risk to himself: ferrying a Jew that kind of distance was strictly forbidden. Still, there were some in Trnava who had not forgotten those they once regarded as neighbours, some who still remembered the debts of friendship.
Which is how, one night in early March 1942, the young Walter Rosenberg came to be crouched on the worn leather seats of one of the few cars in Trnava, a town where a horse-drawn wagon was the norm, heading for the Hungarian border. He did not look back. He was not thinking of the past, nor imagining the future, but rather attending to a task that had to be completed right now, in the present.
He looked down and ripped the yellow star from his coat.
2
Five Hundred Reichsmarks
O N THAT NIGHT in March 1942, the future consisted only of the empty darkness that stood between him and the frontier separating Slovakia from Hungary. After half an hour, the taxi driver had dropped him off; it was not safe to get any closer. Walter would do the rest on foot. He checked his pockets: a map and compass, a box of matches and some money. Two hundred crowns, given to him by the mother he had left behind.
He walked through the night, down narrow lanes and across flat, empty fields. He was excited. True, he was leaving one fascist-ruled country for another; he was hardly taking a short walk to freedom. But this was the first step. And at least in Hungary they were not loading Jews on to trains sending them who knew where.
As he walked, what had been a gentle snowfall grew heavier. He kept marching, but the cold was gnawing into his bones. The adrenaline had insulated him at first, but it only lasted so long. The teenage bravado was fading too. Now he felt alone and frightened; he was a boy in the dark.
The hours of night passed, punctuated by the crunch of his boots on the freshly settled snow. At around five o’clock in the morning, with sunrise still an hour away, he saw another cluster of lights. Fewer than he had seen in Sered’， because this was the slightly smaller town of Galanta. That’s when he knew he had done it. There had been no formal frontier, no sentried fence, but he had crossed the border. He was in Hungary.
From there, he had an address: relatives of a schoolfriend. They were shocked to see a boy on their doorstep at dawn, his clothes covered in mud. But they took him in, gave him a bath and breakfast and explained that he had to leave right away: for a Hungarian to be caught helping a Slovak refugee was to risk a prison sentence for harbouring a spy.
They got him to the station, armed him with a ticket and a conspicuous copy of a nationalist, antisemitic newspaper – just to be on the safe side – and put him on a train to Budapest. He had an address there too, given to him by resistance-minded friends in Trnava. It was for a contact in Hungary’s socialist underground, who let Walter stay with him as Walter tried, and failed, to secure false documents and, with those, a job. Without them, he could not stay in Budapest for long; eventually someone would turn him in to the police.
After ten days, the comrades of the underground came to an unlikely decision. The best bet, they concluded, was for Walter to retrace his steps and head back to Trnava where contacts would be standing by with false Aryan papers. Once armed with those, he could resume his original escape plan.