And so by the early spring of 1944 there was a double urgency to Walter’s determination to escape. Those 5,000 or so Czechs who had entered the family camp in the second wave, arriving on 20 December 1943, would be put to death exactly six months later on 20 June. That was beyond doubt; it was the hardest of deadlines. But now there was the prospect of an even more imminent, and much larger, slaughter: hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews would board trains for Auschwitz in a matter of weeks, trains that would take them to the very gates of the gas chambers.
Walter had his motive and now he acquired a mentor. After the Poles, the most successful escapees from Auschwitz were Soviet prisoners of war. Many thousands had been brought to the camp at the start, dying in the cold and dirt as they worked as slaves to build Birkenau. But there was another group, Walter estimated there were about a hundred of them, known to the Auschwitz veterans as the ‘second-hand prisoners of war’. Captured in battle, they had been sent initially to regular PoW camps but then despatched to Auschwitz as punishment for bad behaviour, including attempted escape. Among them was one Dmitri Volkov.
Not for the first time, Walter had reason to be grateful for the Russian he had taught himself back in Trnava. It meant he could talk with the second-hand PoWs as he registered them, even those whose appearance was forbidding. To Walter, Volkov was a bear of a man from the land of the Cossacks, Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine. Enormous and with dark, deep-set eyes, and still in his Red Army uniform, he looked like someone to be approached with care.
But with time they got to know each other, eventually striking an unspoken bargain not dissimilar to the high-school deal that had seen Walter trade lessons in Slovak for tuition in High German. Volkov allowed Walter to practise his Russian. In return, the young pen-pusher handed over his allocation of bread and quasi-margarine, honouring a vow he had made to himself much earlier: that he would not take his official ration so long as he had access to food from elsewhere. He noticed that Volkov did not eat even that meagre portion, instead cutting it into quarters, to be shared with his comrades.
They began talking. Not, at first, about the camp, but about the great Russian literary masters Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, moving on to the Soviet writers Gorky, Ehrenburg and Blok. Eventually, Volkov began to lower his guard.
He revealed that he was no mere conscript but a captain in the Red Army. In making this admission, Volkov was taking a huge risk: it was Nazi practice to shoot all Soviet officers. But he had decided to trust Walter, and not only with that information. He also told him of his own experience of escape, for the captain had once broken out of the Nazi concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. As his teenage pupil listened, and over several days, Volkov proceeded to give Walter a crash course in escapology.
Some lessons were intensely practical. He told him what to carry and what not to carry. In the second category was money. Kanada might be overflowing with the stuff, but it was dangerous. If you had money, you would be tempted to buy food from a shop or a market, and that meant contact with people which was always to be avoided. Better to live off the land, stealing from fields and remote farms. Also not to be carried, at least when making the initial escape, was meat: the SS Alsatians would sniff it out immediately.
So: no money, no meat. As for what he would need, that category was larger, starting with a knife for hunting or self-defence, and a razor blade in case of imminent capture. That was a cardinal rule for Volkov: ‘Don’t let them take you alive.’ Also: matches, to cook the food you had stolen. And salt: a man could live on salt and potatoes for months. A watch was essential, not least because it could double as a compass.
The tips kept coming. All movement was to be done at night; no walking in daylight. It was vital to be invisible. If they could see you, they could shoot you. Don’t imagine you could run away; a bullet would always be faster.
Keep an eye on the time, hence the watch. Don’t be looking for a place to sleep when dawn breaks; make sure you’ve found a hiding place while it’s still dark.
But some of the advice belonged in the realm of psychology. Trust no one; share your plans with no one, including me. If your friends know nothing, they’ll have nothing to reveal when they’re tortured once you’re gone. That advice fitted with what Walter already knew for himself: that there were others eager to give up your secrets. The Politische Abteilung, the Political Department of the SS, had built up quite a network of informers among the prisoners, always listening out for talk of escape and revolt. (They were recruited by a threat from the SS that, if they refused to betray their fellow prisoners, their relatives back home would be murdered.) You never knew who you were really talking to. Best to say little.
Volkov had more wisdom to impart. Have no fear, even of the Germans. In Auschwitz, in their uniforms and with their guns, they look invincible. But each one of them, on his own, is just as small and fragile as any other human being. ‘I know they can die as quickly as anybody because I’ve killed enough of them.’ Above all: remember that the fight only starts when you’ve broken out of the camp. No euphoria, no elation. You cannot relax while you are on Nazi-ruled soil, not even for a second.
Walter did his best to take it all in, to remember it along with the mountain of numbers and dates that was piling ever higher in his mind. But there was one last bit of advice, for the escape itself.
The Nazis’ tracker dogs were trained to detect even the faintest odour of human life. If there was a single bead of sweat on your brow, they would find you. There was only one thing that defeated them.
Tobacco, soaked in petrol and then dried. And not just any tobacco. It had to be Soviet tobacco. Volkov must have seen the gleam of scepticism in Walter’s eye. ‘I’m not being patriotic,’ he said. ‘I just know machorka. It’s the only stuff that works.’
Volkov let Walter know that he had his own plans for escape and that he would not be sharing them with Walter or anyone else. He was happy to serve as the younger man’s teacher. But he would not be his partner.
For that role, there could only ever be one person. Someone whom Walter trusted wholly and who trusted him, someone whom he had known before he was in this other, darker universe, someone who, for that very reason, had an existence in Walter’s mind independent of Auschwitz: Fred Wetzler.
More than 600 Jewish men from Trnava had been sent to Auschwitz in 1942. By the spring of 1944, only two were still alive: Walter Rosenberg and Alfréd Wetzler. All the rest had either been swiftly murdered, like Fred’s brothers, or suffered the slow death in which Auschwitz-Birkenau specialised, worn down by disease, starvation and arbitrary violence, a group that almost certainly included Fred’s father. Fred and Walter had grown up with those 600 boys and men – as teachers and schoolmates, family friends and acquaintances, playground enemies and romantic rivals – and now every last one of them was gone. From the world they had both known, only Fred and Walter were left.
Far Outliers 