And so he re-enacted his escape backwards. Except now, as he attempted to cross the border to go back into Slovakia, he was stopped by two Hungarian border guards, aiming their rifles directly at him. Instinct made him run – until he heard the sound of gunfire and a different instinct made him stop.
The guards approached, only for one to hit his head with the butt of his gun while the other greeted him with a hard kick in the crotch. They frogmarched him to the nearest border post, where he was punched in the mouth and propelled into a wall. A corporal arrived, eager to join the fun: he hit Walter repeatedly with his pistol.
The Hungarians were insistent that Walter was a spy, a charge they accompanied with a punch or a kick each time they made it. Walter denied it, insisting that he was a Jew from neighbouring Slovakia who had crossed the border into Hungary, looking to find refuge in the capital. He was on his way to, not from, Budapest. But he had not reckoned on the piece of paper the men found in his pocket. It did not contain the names or addresses of the contacts who had harboured him: he had relied on his memory for those. Nor did they find his money: while in Hungary, this son of an expert maker of women’s underwear had sewn the banknotes into the flies of his trousers. What they found was less valuable, but much more incriminating. It was a tram ticket. From Budapest.
The man in charge was now clear that, since Walter had lied, he must obviously be a spy. And so the man wanted to know: who were Walter’s accomplices?
The interrogation moved to a table, where it lasted for three brutal hours. But the seventeen-year-old Walter did not crack. Perhaps that convinced the Hungarian officer that he was, after all, no more than a Jewish refugee looking to escape deportation. He allowed two soldiers to take Walter away.
As the men dragged him into no man’s land, Walter was convinced they would kill him and ditch his body here. He took out the money he had hidden and gave it to them, but it made no difference. They kept dragging him to what was surely a certain death. And then, suddenly, they panicked. They realised they had messed up. They had inadvertently crossed the border. They were now in Slovakia. If they shot this boy, that would alert the Slovak border guards – along with their dogs and machine guns. For a second, they threatened to cut Walter’s throat with a bayonet, but fear seemed to get the better of them: they turned him loose.
He ran as fast as he could, but his body was too battered to get very far. He stumbled and fell. He had wanted so badly to escape but now, he knew, it was over. He lost consciousness.
When he came round, it was to the sound of someone speaking. The voice was not familiar, but the language was. ‘Jesus, he’s still alive,’ were the words he heard. And he heard them in Slovak.
Those Hungarians had been right. They had crossed the border into Slovakia and now these men, shining a torch into his face, were Slovak border guards coming across a body that they had assumed was a corpse.
They took him to an inn, where he was given brandy and a chance to wash away the blood and clean up his wounds. But the respite would not last long. He was back in the country of his birth, the only country of which he had ever been a citizen – but he was also in the country he had tried to flee, a land now run by fascists who bragged that they were world leaders in the business of hounding Jews.
So, inevitably, his welcome home included a trip to the local police station, where he was branded a ‘dirty, bloody Yid’ who had sought to escape resettlement solely because he was too lazy to work, like all those other Yids – and then shoved into a cell and locked up for the night.
The next morning, Walter’s jailers transferred him to a camp in the small town of Nováky, some sixty miles away. Walter could comfort himself that he had avoided deportation: he was still in Slovakia. On the other hand, he was a prisoner, as far away from London and from freedom as ever.
He was shoved into a huge barracks , along with several hundred other men and soon got the lie of the land. This place, he learned, had two functions. It was a transit camp, a holding facility where Jews were held before they boarded trains for the unknown, initially filled up by people just like Walter – young, single men and women who had received the summons and were selected for deportation – later taking in entire families from the surrounding mountains and villages. They had been brought there not by German SS men, but by Slovaks who had assigned themselves the task of rooting out their Jewish neighbours from their hiding places and arresting them. It turned out that, in their eagerness to be rid of the Jews, the Slovaks were paying the Germans for their work – and paying quite generously. For every Jew deported, Bratislava handed Berlin 500 Reichsmarks, officially to cover the costs of food, shelter and supposed retraining. There was an extra charge for transport, payable to Deutsche Reichsbahn, the German state railway company. It was expensive, but the Nazi deportation service came with a lifetime guarantee, a promise that in return for those 500 Reichsmarks the Jew in question would never return. Better still, the Nazis allowed Slovakia to keep any and all property confiscated from the Jews who had been expelled. If the Rosenbergs’ neighbours, or the Sidonovás’ or those of any other exiled Jew, liked the look of the home that had been left behind, they could take it.
The transit-camp section of Nováky did brisk business. From 25 March 1942, around the time Walter pitched up there, until 20 October that same year, precisely 57,628 Jews were deported from Nováky and the camps like it dotted around Slovakia. Their destination was either the Lublin region of Poland or a camp much closer to the Slovak border, constructed near the town of O? wi? cim.
But Nováky served another purpose too. It also contained a labour camp, where 1,200 or more Jews were kept against their will and used as slave workers. It did not take long for Walter to see that they were not slaves for Germany, but for the country of which they had, until now, been citizens. Some 350 Jews worked at Nováky as tailors, seamstresses and needleworkers, making uniforms for the Slovak police among other things. The products were supplied, doubtless at ultra-competitive prices thanks to the absence of labour costs, to the domestic Slovak market.
The labour at Nováky was forced and the inmates were held behind barbed wire. But the work was indoors and it was not back-breaking. The food was basic – bread and jam, pea soup and potatoes – but there was food. There was a nursery school, kindergarten and elementary school as well as a library and, every now and then, a musical recital or a show. Families were allowed to live together, in barracks sub-divided into tiny, hutch-like rooms.
All this was eyed enviously by the men in the transit camp alongside Walter who, cooped up for days, traded slivers of rumour and crumbs of uninformed speculation, asking each other questions none of them could answer. They talked about transports and dates, wondering if a train was coming to take them away today, tomorrow or never. Having failed to win a coveted place in the labour camp, they were kept here, in these barracks, two Hlinka Guards outside the door and only one thing certain: that worse was to come.
Waiting to know his fate did not suit Walter. One day, as casually as he could, he tried to chip into the barracks chatter by asking the question that had nagged at him the instant he arrived.
‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘What are the chances of getting out of here?’