THE CONVERSATION – part debrief, part interrogation – would last several days. As soon as he heard the men give the outline of their story, Steiner understood that this was bigger than him: the ÚŽ’s leadership needed to hear this. He telephoned Bratislava to speak to Oskar Krasňanský, a chemical engineer by profession who was one of the council’s most senior figures. Steiner urged him to come right away. Jews were not allowed to travel by train, but Krasňanský wangled a permit and was in Žilina later that same day. The head of the Jewish council, the fifty-year-old lawyer and writer Oskar Neumann, joined them twenty-four hours later.
For the officials, the first task was to establish that these two men were who they said they were. That was simple enough: Krasňanský had brought with him the records kept by the council of every transport that had left Slovakia, for what was then destination unknown. There was a card for every deportee, including their name and photograph. So when Fred and Walter gave the date and point of origin of the transports that had taken them away, the records backed them up.
More than that, Fred and Walter were also able to name several of the others who had been jammed into the cattle trucks with them, along with specific individuals who had arrived in Auschwitz on subsequent transports. Each time, the names and the dates tallied. And each time, the escapees were able to confirm the fate of the people on those lists: with next to no exceptions, they were naming the dead.
Krasňanský found these two young men credible right away. They were clearly in a terrible state. Their feet were misshapen and they were completely exhausted; he could see that they were undernourished, that they had eaten almost no food for weeks. He summoned a doctor and between them they decided that the men should stay here, in this basement room, to recover their strength. A couple of beds were brought down.
Yet, for all their physical weakness, Krasňanský was struck by the depth and sharpness of each man’s memory. It was a thing of wonder. The engineer was determined to get their testimony on record and to ensure that it would be unimpeachable.
With that in mind, he decided to interview the two separately, getting each story down in detail and from the beginning, so that the evidence of one could not be said to have contaminated or influenced the other. In sessions lasting hours, Krasňanský asked questions, listened to the answers and wrote detailed shorthand notes. Whatever emotional reaction he had to what he was hearing – which was, after all, confirmation that his community had been methodically slaughtered – he hardly showed it. He kept on asking questions and scribbling down the answers.
Walter alternated between speaking very fast, as if in a torrent, and very slowly, deliberately, as if searching for the exact word. Before the formal, separate interviews, Fred saw how Walter strained to be strictly factual, like a witness in a courtroom, only for the emotional force of the events he was describing repeatedly to prove too much. The younger man could not help himself: he seemed to be reliving those events in the telling, every fibre of his tissue and every pore of his skin back in Auschwitz. After an hour, Walter was utterly drained. And yet he had barely got started.
For the separate interview, Krasňanský ushered him into a room which he locked. It was less a protection against interruption than a security measure, given that the Jewish old people’s home of Žilina was now harbouring two fugitives from the SS, with a Gestapo warrant out for their arrest. (That was another reason to keep them in this building, day and night, for as long as two weeks: if they went out on the street looking like this, they would be noticed. People might start to talk.) Either way, Walter began the conversation by asking for a piece of paper and a pen.
He began to draw a map, the distances as close to scale as he could make them. First, he sketched the inner layout of the main camp, Auschwitz I. Then, and this was more complicated, he drew Birkenau or Auschwitz II, with its two sections, BI and BII, and multiple sub-sections, BIIa, BIIb, BIIc, and so on. Between the two, he drew the Judenrampe, explaining what he had seen and done there. He showed where the behemoths of German industry – IG Farben, Siemens, Krupp and the others – had their factories, powered by slave labour. He showed where, at the far end of Birkenau, stood the machinery of mass murder: the four crematoria, each one combining a gas chamber and set of ovens.
For forty-eight hours, whether separately or together, Walter and Fred described it all: the transports, the ramp, the selection, during which those chosen to work were marched off while those chosen to die were ferried towards the gas. The tattoos for the living, the ovens for the dead. The two men rattled off the dates and estimated numbers of every batch of Jews that had arrived since the late spring of 1942 right up until the week they had made their escape. They spoke in particular detail about the fate of their fellow Slovak Jews and the Czech family camp. Walter admitted that the plight of the latter had been especially close to his heart, given the ties of language and background: perhaps he expected his questioners would feel the same way.
Krasňanský, often joined by Neumann, listened to it all, absorbing every word. Neumann was a lawyer by training and it often felt like a cross-examination as he pressed and pushed Walter and Fred on every aspect of their evidence. Neumann might name an old schoolfriend whom he knew to have been on a specific transport, say in September 1943, asking if the pair knew the fate of that group. They would give their answer, knowing it would be checked against what they had already said about that same transport nine or ten hours earlier. The officials of the Jewish council were looking for inconsistencies, either within the testimony of Fred and Walter or between them. But they found none.
Far Outliers 