The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland

How strongly I recommend this book: 9 / 10

Date read: June 18, 2023

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Thoughts

Incredible biography of Walter and his survival under dire circumstances. His story is one of high-agency and pure determination. Read this and your modern struggles will feel trivial.

Favorite Quotes and Chapter Notes

I went through my notes and captured key quotes from all chapters below.

P.S. – Highly recommend Readwise if you want to get the most out of your reading.

Highlights and Notes

Author’s Note

• What soon became clear as I listened, and as I immersed myself in the official documents, testimonies, memoirs, letters, contemporary reports and historical accounts on which this book is based, was that this was more than the true story of an unprecedented escape. It was also the story of how history can change a life, even down the generations; how the difference between truth and lies can be the difference between life and death; and how people can refuse to believe in the possibility of their own imminent destruction, even, perhaps especially, when that destruction is certain. Those notions were stark and vivid in the Europe of the 1940s. But they seemed to have a new, fearful resonance in our own time.
• I also came to realise that this is a story of how human beings can be pushed to the outer limits, and yet still somehow endure; how those who have witnessed so much death can nevertheless retain their capacity, their lust, for life; and how the actions of one individual, even a teenage boy, can bend the arc of history, if not towards justice then towards something like hope.

1. Star

• He had held on to one of the two volumes on inorganic and organic chemistry by the Czech scientist Emil Votoč ek. Thereafter Walter and Erwin would pore over that single text, teaching themselves in secret the knowledge their country was determined to deny them. The self-teaching continued wherever the teenagers got together. Sometimes they gathered in a meadow known after its previous incarnation as ‘the pond’, sitting around, trying to make sense of the world that seemed to have turned upside down. Walter soon established himself as a dominant presence, his intelligence setting him apart.
• The Tiso regime was determined to impoverish and isolate Jews, first banning them from government jobs, then imposing a quota on the numbers allowed to work in the professions. Later Jews were banned from owning cars, radios or even sports equipment. Each new ordinance would be posted on a bulletin board in the centre of town: the Jews would check it every day, to see what new humiliation awaited them.
• Gerta’s father tried to keep his butcher shop alive by handing it over to an assistant who had been shrewd enough to join the Hlinka Party. They called that ‘voluntary Aryanisation’, by which Jewish-owned businesses would surrender a stake worth at least 51 per cent of the company to a ‘qualified Christian candidate’.
• From 1940, as Londoners were enduring the nightly air raids they would soon call the Blitz, Slovak gendarmes took the policy of expropriating Jewish property to a more direct, more literal level. They would enter Jewish homes and loot them, while the children could only stand and watch. They might grab a tennis racket or a coat, a camera or a treasured family heirloom or even, as in at least one case, a full-sized piano. Sometimes they would venture out of town, finding a Jewish-owned family farm and taking away the animals. It was open season. If a Jew had it, a Slovak could take it.
• But the change which had the most immediate, most visible effect on Walter was also the crudest. From now on, any Jew in Slovakia over the age of six had to identify themselves by means of a yellow Star of David, six inches across and attached to their outer clothes.

2. Five Hundred Reichsmarks

• 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.

3. Deported

• They had been on the train for twenty-four or forty-eight hours by then, maybe longer, and yet it was that moment that perhaps shook Walter most. The Jews in the wagon were not only being degraded in front of each other, they were being rejected by the outside world. That driver could see and hear sick children begging to drink and he could not even look in their direction. Bastards, he had called them, while he stared into the middle distance.
• ‘All men between fifteen and fifty, out!’ What? That made no sense. They had been told over and over that families would not be separated, that they would be resettled in these new villages together. They had had the word of the Slovak president, Father Tiso, himself. That’s why those newly-weds had rushed their marriage. Perhaps it was not an actual separation; maybe it was just a matter of sequencing: the men between fifteen and fifty would get off the train first, and the women, the children and the elderly would follow. Could that be it? The answer came swiftly. No sooner had the younger men hauled themselves out of the wagons, clambering down as best as their legs, stiff with immobility, would allow, forming a line by the railway tracks as instructed, than the doors of the cattle trucks were pulled shut.

4. Majdanek

• Walter was told the following day that Sammy had been moved to another field. There would be no night-time meet-up. In fact, Walter would never see his brother again. But the memory of that brief salute in the evening light, each raising their arm to the other, brother to brother– that memory would stay with him for ever.
• Walter understood immediately why this change of costume was necessary. They were about to be marched to Lublin station, back through the streets of the city. The SS men clearly did not want the locals to see the way they kept their slaves. Hence the caps, to cover up their shaven heads.
• At their first stop, twenty-four hours into the journey, when the doors were opened for the first time, the SS man in charge barked out another briefing. There was to be a headcount, here and at every stop to come. If any man was found missing, ‘ten men in his wagon will be shot’. That put an end to it. It was one thing to risk his own life. But to take the lives of ten others? No. And if there was one thing Walter had learned these last few months, the SS did not make empty threats.

5. We Were Slaves

• For the next two and a half years, he would not use his name officially again. From that day on, he was 44070. Before long he would learn the importance of numbers in Auschwitz, how a low, ‘old number’ marked you out as a veteran, putting you closer to the top of the camp hierarchy whose strictures and privileges inmates strictly observed.
• Walter was tasked with shifting bags of cement. A sack was thrown on to his back and he had to run as fast as he could with it, dodging his way through an assault course of Kapos prodding him to move ever more quickly, whipping or hitting him every ten or fifteen yards. Walter saw fellow prisoners fall, only for a Kapo to crush their skull, leaving a corpse Walter had to take care not to trip over. Once he had reached the mixing machine, there was no rest. He had to run back, double time, to get another bag. And then another and another. For hours, it went on, in the heat and the dust, without food or drink or pause.
• Walter barely had time to look up. Still, he could not help but notice a further element to this already deranged picture, one that took it from the cruel to the outright surreal. For the prisoners and their tormentors were not the only players in this drama. Dispersed among them were civilians: besuited men carrying notebooks and folding rulers, for all the world like a team of well-heeled architects inspecting the construction of a new office building or concert hall. These men who appeared not to see them– indeed seemed able to look right through them, even as they threaded their way through a minefield of dead bodies– were not SS officers or Kapos but the engineers and managers of the site’s proprietor, the German industrial conglomerate IG Farben.
• When the time came, he lined up with the others, ready to be judged. It took all his strength to stand at full height, keep his back straight and hold the pose. He was desperate to control himself, not to let his expression give him away. Even if he wanted to scream, these men would not see his swollen feet or the intense pain he was in. Two hundred men failed that test. They were sent immediately to the adjoining camp at Birkenau. But Walter was not one of them. His performance had worked; he had mastered the pain. He was still alive.

6. Kanada

• The work of the toothpaste squeezers, or rather the thinking behind their work, was how Kanada got its name, at least according to one theory. It was said that German-speaking members of the clearing squad could often be heard asking, as they sorted items, ‘Kann er da nicht was drin’ haben?’(Might there be something [of value] inside?). Kann er da became Kanada. Alternatively, it was because in the years before the war large numbers of Slovaks, and Poles too, had emigrated to Canada. The legend grew that even a peasant who could not make a living at home could find a plot of land and make a better life for themselves in Canada. In the central European imagination, Canada was a mythic land of untold wealth.
• Until now, had he told himself that the smoke from the crematorium in the main camp was generated by the dead who had fallen by the wayside at Buna, or collapsed on the march back to the camp from a day’s work in the gravel pit, or withered through hunger, or succumbed to a Kapo ’s blow, or failed Fries’s typhus test, or simply expired in the darkness of the barracks? Had he failed to realise that more bodies were burning than even that grim tally could account for? Had Walter seen the two plus two that was in front of him, but failed to make four, either because he was diverted by pain and hunger and the need to stay alive, or because some truths are too hard to digest? It cannot have been easy to believe in such a thing as a death factory, a round-the-clock facility designed and operated for the chief purpose of murdering human beings. After all, no place like it had ever existed before. It was outside human experience and, perhaps, outside human imagination. Walter was eighteen– his mind sharp and quick to adjust. But now he faced things almost impossible to fathom.

7. The Final Solution

• But it was Auschwitz, with its excellent transport links and proximity to Silesia’s coal mines, that, by October 1940, Himmler had decided should be the engine of the effort, a throbbing generator of wealth for the new Nazi empire, fuelled by the involuntary labour of the people it now ruled. Their work was all. Hence the slogan, borrowed from the concentration camp at Dachau: Arbeit Macht Frei
• Walter’s arrival coincided with the haphazard integration of the camp in July 1942 into what the Nazis were now calling the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. The goal had been formally adopted, the decree sealed, six months earlier in the tree-lined Berlin suburb of Wannsee, where the heads of the multiple German government agencies tasked with handling the Jews gathered at lunchtime on 20 January 1942 in a splendid house by the lake, with Reinhard Heydrich in the chair, and set about organising the ultimate stage of their war against this one, small people: elimination. By the time Walter was shipped off, the effort had already been under way for nearly a year following Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. It happened in the forests of Lithuania and the woods of Poland, in the fields of Belarus or in a ravine by the name of Babyn Yar outside Kyiv, where mobile killing units, Einsatzgruppen, would gather Jewish civilians in their hundreds and shoot them from inches away, usually in the backs of their heads or necks, their bodies falling into trenches and pits. By the end of 1941, some 600,000 Jews across the freshly conquered east had been murdered that way.
• Auschwitz was not like those first three camps, built for the sole purpose of murdering Jews. From the start it had always had several missions, only adding the destruction of Jewish life to its portfolio relatively late. It acquired that function gradually, incrementally, even erratically. The process was a story familiar to any industrialist: steady expansion, as capacity grew and grew to cope with demand.

8. Big Business

• What Walter saw in Kanada was proof that Auschwitz had not lost its founding ambition, the one nurtured by Heinrich Himmler. Even if it were now tasked with the business of mass murder, its Nazi proprietors were clearly determined that Auschwitz should continue to serve as an economic hub, that even in its new mission it should turn a profit. For Kanada was a commercial enterprise. Every item that was not broken was collected, sorted, stored and repackaged for domestic consumption back in the Fatherland. In one month alone, some 824 freight containers were transported by rail from Auschwitz back to the Old Reich, and those were just the ones carrying textiles and leather goods.
• Some of these goods would be distributed for free to Germans in need, perhaps via the Winterhilfeswerke, the winter relief fund. A mother in Düsseldorf whose husband was off fighting on the eastern front might have her spirits lifted by the arrival of a thick winter coat or new shoes for the children– so long as she did not look too closely at the marks indicating the place where the yellow star had been torn off or think too hard about the children who had worn those shoes before.
• Not all the gold shipped off to enrich the non-existent Herr Heiliger came from wedding rings, bracelets and necklaces, and not all of it passed through Kanada. There was another source too. The Nazis resolved that merely plundering the belongings of those they murdered was not enough: there was wealth to be extracted from their bodies too. The men of the Sonderkommando, already tasked with removing the corpses from the gas chambers minutes after death, were given an extra duty. They were to shear the hair off the dead. It had both a commercial value– bales of cloth made from human hair found their way to German factories– and a military one– hair could be used in delayed-action bombs, as part of the detonation mechanism. Ideally, it would be women’s hair, which was thicker and longer than men’s or children’s. Any artificial limbs found on a corpse were also unscrewed and collected, for reuse or resale. Still, the more lucrative asset was an internal one. It fell to some men of the Sonderkommando to prise open the mouths of the dead, often still foaming, and check for gold teeth. If they spotted any, they ripped them out with pliers. It was hard work, interrupted by regular breaks as the ‘dentists’ paused to vomit. But all those gold teeth added up. Between 1942 and 1944, an estimated six tons of dental gold were deposited in the vaults of the Reichsbank. Overall, an internal and top-secret ‘List of Jewish property received for delivery’ compiled at the start of February 1943 estimated that over the preceding year the haul from the archipelago of Nazi-operated death camps across Poland had reached 326 million Reichsmarks : in the US currency of the early 2020s, that would be $2 billion.
• Delicacies and luxury goods could buy whatever was needed, even if the rate of exchange was often perverse. A diamond ring might be swapped for a cup of water; a bottle of champagne traded for quinine tablets; a precious gem for an apple, to be passed to a sick and hungry friend.
• Which is not to say that he did not find things he valued in Kanada. Among the most poignant discoveries in the luggage of the victims were textbooks and exercise books: confirmation that the Nazis had successfully tricked the Jews into believing the ‘areas of resettlement’ would be genuine communities, complete with schools for their children. All papers had to be burned of course, but one day Walter came across a children’s atlas. Instinct made him flick through the pages until he found a map of Silesia: he remembered from his own schooldays, which now seemed a lifetime ago, that that was the region that took in the triangle where the borders of Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia met– or used to meet, at any rate. He ripped out the page and hid it under his shirt.
• In the Auschwitz financial system, Kanada played the role of central bank: it was where the wealth was stored. And yet there was a perverse paradox: Jewish prisoners who worked there had better access than either their Kapo overseers or their Nazi masters. Most SS men could not simply stroll in, browse the wares and help themselves to what they fancied. They needed an inmate to pilfer the item for them. In return, the prisoner needed to be sure no SS man would check him on his way out. Precious wares in return for a blind eye. That exchange would form the basis of a set of transactional relationships that developed between members of the SS and the handful of Auschwitz prisoners who could get anywhere near Kanada. Those relationships soon created a hierarchy among the prison population. Inmates with access to Kanada’s riches could bribe Kapos and SS men for better workplaces for themselves or for their relatives or friends.

9. The Ramp

• Some would have been destroyed seeing what Walter saw, others driven mad by it. Neither response was unknown in Auschwitz. Walter was indeed brought low, low enough that fellow prisoners noticed a change in him. The brashly confident, even cocky teenager who had arrived at Auschwitz began to show signs of nervousness and depression. Some found him emotionally volatile. And yet Walter did not succumb and he did not lose his mind. On the contrary, he applied that precocious brain of his– the brain of the boy who had taught himself chemistry from a single forbidden textbook– to what he saw. Perhaps it was his way of coping, a kind of willed detachment, but where others might have tried to avert their gaze, Walter watched all the more acutely.
• There was so much to take in, especially for one still so young: that he was both a witness to and a target of a programme of industrialised, continent-wide murder, and that this project aimed both to eradicate an entire people and to turn a profit for the murderers. But now he was coming to see another dimension that enabled all the rest. Slowly at first, he realised that the Nazis were engaged in a great and devastating trick, that the crime unfolding before him rested on a single, essential act that made the entire enterprise possible: deception. The Nazis lied to their victims at every step of their journey towards destruction, step after step after step. Those people falling out of those stinking cattle trucks had boarded them believing they were being taken to new lives in a new place: ‘resettlement in the east’, they called it.
• If time permitted, the pretence would continue as the new arrivals climbed on to the trucks that would take them to the killing sites. SS men, their manners impeccable, might help the sick clamber aboard, offering a helping hand. For those heading to the death chambers on foot, there was more reassurance in the form of enquiries about the Jews’ professional qualifications or trades back home. Why would they ask such things if they did not intend to make use of the deportees’ skills? If anyone asked where they were being taken, the answer came back: ‘For disinfection.’
• When the Jews were finally pushed inside the gas chamber, the trickery did not end. The sign on the doors read, ‘To the Baths’. In the gas chambers that came later, in Crematorium II, the ceiling was dotted with fake showerheads.(Even the gas itself was part of the deception: the manufacturers of Zyklon B had altered their product, ridding it of the almond smell which, previously, had acted as a warning to anyone who got within inhalation distance. Now there was nothing to give it away.) Walter soon understood that all this was not some cruel and elaborate joke. It had a clear and rational purpose. That much was plain from his own work on the ramp.
• Other prisoners tried to give gentler warnings, and valuable advice, as the selection loomed. Say you’re sixteen, they might whisper to a young teenager. Tell them you’re thirty-five, they might urge a man the wrong side of forty. Look fit. Act healthy. Be strong. Hardest of all was the counsel blurted out in a second to mothers: Give up your children, let the old folks take them. What was any parent to make of such an instruction? How was it possible to understand advice whose premise was: your children will die anyway, so save yourself?
• If the Nazi plot to destroy the Jews relied on keeping the intended victims entirely ignorant of their fate– to ensure they were lambs, not scattered deer– then the first step towards thwarting that murderous ambition was to shatter the ignorance, to inform the Jews of the capital sentence that the Nazis had passed on them. It was the only way to stop the killing. Somebody had to escape and sound the alarm, issuing the warning that Auschwitz meant death.

10. The Memory Man

• It meant that he would have to keep on working the ramp, seeing Jews sent to their deaths, taking mental notes of everything he saw, in preparation for the day he would tell the world. Later he would realise that, in some ways, he needed the mission he had given himself. It helped him get through each day, enabling him to endure what he was seeing unfold and, though it was harder to articulate, what he was seeing in himself.
• For at eighteen years old Walter would witness events so harrowing they could change the life of the person who glimpsed them. He was witnessing such moments not once or twice, but day after day after day. He was in Auschwitz, a place where moral boundaries had dissolved long ago, where everything was permissible. This was a place where Dr Mengele once punished a Jewish woman by making a dog of her young son, because she had, in self-defence, killed an SS attack dog: he had the boy trained at the point of a whip to run on all fours, bark without pause and attack and bite Jews. Walter was in a place where one inmate might steal bread from another, even when that prisoner was dying and when the bread was covered in faeces. He was in a place where, after an execution by firing squad, prisoners might rush up to the warm corpses and eat what they could of their bodies, one reassuring another that a human brain was so delicate it could be eaten raw, without cooking.
• And yet, like so many young, intelligent men before him and since, Walter yearned for there to be some meaning to his life, some meaning especially to his own enforced silence and inaction in the face of extreme evil. If he could live long enough to escape and warn the Jews of their fate in this accursed place, might that not justify the fact that he had stood by impotently as mass murder was committed in front of him? If he were able not merely to observe this horror, but eventually to testify to what he had seen, might that not justify his own survival ? He did not yet know the phrase survivor guilt, but the teenage Walter intuited it and sought to pre-empt it.
• It was around then, and with this new self-instructed mission in mind, that Walter set about a task that would both provide a meaning to his own descent into the underworld and change the course of history. He would record what he was seeing. Not in a diary full of sharp, human observation nor in mental sketches and notes that would one day blossom into great works of art; as it happened, and unbeknown to him, there were others in Auschwitz doing that. No, Walter was a student who had thrived in mathematics and the natural sciences. His language was numbers and hard facts. He would collect the data of industrialised murder. And then he would memorise it. The number of trains, the number of wagons per train, the approximate number of passengers, the point of origin. He had no idea how he would get this information out, but he knew as a matter of instinct that if it was to be effective– if it was to be believed– it would have to be detailed and accurate. He soon devised a method, which worked like a child’s memory game. Each day he would say to himself everything he already knew, before adding whatever new nugget of information he had acquired that day. The trick was to keep surveying the mountain of facts that was accumulating in his head, scaling it once more every single day, becoming ever more familiar with each layer of it, adding to it only incrementally. In that effort, the Nazis helped him.
• Still, that wail, too brief though it was, gave Walter hope. It proved that, once the bubble of delusion was burst, people would respond, if only as a reflex. He had drawn a conclusion that would become an article of faith, an unshakeable creed that would drive every decision he took next. He now understood that the difference between knowledge and ignorance, between truth and lies, was the difference between life and death. It was clear to him from then on that the Jews destined for destruction could defy their fate here only if they knew of it, incontrovertibly and before it was too late. Somehow Walter had to get out of this place and tell the world what was happening.

11. Birkenau

• He had gone earlier to thank the orderly who had marked him down for a supposed day off. Now the man, a Polish prisoner, told him the truth: that he had registered Walter for the hospital where he would be lethally injected with phenol. In a gesture of generosity that made no rational sense, the man agreed to take Walter’s name off the list.
• In his feverish, drained state, even those ten paces demanded deep strength; but he did it.
• That remark had to pierce a haze of fever and illness before Walter understood it. Us? Who was ‘us’? But finally it sank in and when it did, Walter felt an elation he had not known since he arrived in this desolate place. Us. It could only mean that there was a resistance organisation in Auschwitz, an underground. And by the use of that small, single word– us– had he not announced that eighteen-year-old Walter Rosenberg was in it?
• It made sense that the resistance was so deeply embedded in Block 4, home of the Kanada command. They had access to the currency essential to any functioning underground. The necessities and luxuries, the clothes and the cognac, that were in abundance in Kanada could be used to extract favours and ensure the blind eyes that were a prerequisite for any kind of secret network. The underground in Auschwitz could organise because they could ‘organise’. What’s more, they exerted a powerful hold over those Nazis who were themselves drawn to Kanada and its riches. Walter had seen for himself the corruption of the SS, how tempted they were by money. All that cash stuffed into a trunk, bound for the Reichsbank? Not all of it made it to Berlin. Some of it tended to stick to the pockets of the Germans charged with its transfer. Prisoner members of the resistance witnessed those acts of petty theft, or learned of them, and then used that knowledge to blackmail their Nazi masters.
• Once the battles with Wiegleb and the typhus louse were over, he devoted himself less to mere survival and more to his survival’s newly determined purpose: the gathering of information. That this was among Auschwitz’s most precious commodities seemed obvious to him. He had only to look at how jealously the SS guarded it. So he set to work as a self-appointed researcher of the Auschwitz killing machine, taking every opportunity to expand his knowledge of the death plant that surrounded him. When the camp authorities looked for volunteers to work in Birkenau, Walter offered himself, so that he could take a closer look.
• It was a sight that confirmed Auschwitz-Birkenau as the corner of earth where the human race had finally turned its perennial fantasies of hell into material reality. There, at the bottom of the smouldering pit, the flames now shrunk and spent, were human bones. Among them– not burned, but only charred– were the heads of children. Later he would learn that the head of a child contains too much water to burn easily. The bodies of their parents had been incinerated, but the children remained. Walter committed the sight to memory. Perhaps it was the only way to carry that image once he had glimpsed it, to lock it away in a secure mental file of which he would be the eventual courier. If he had to be a spectator to horror, then he would make himself a witness. He would be a reporter.
• But by May 1943, the mortality rate had fallen drastically. For the underground, this was considered a great victory. Admittedly, the change in the weather had helped. But they had also succeeded in thinning the Kapo ranks of club-wielding criminal brutes, replacing them with German-or Austrian-born political prisoners who were not only recognised as fellow Aryans and therefore human beings by the SS, but also aspired to behave with dignity, even inside the inferno of Auschwitz. They wanted to humanise the prison camp and, judged by that narrow criterion, they were succeeding. But Walter could see, from his unending shifts on the ramp, that they were having next to no impact on what, to him, was the only issue that mattered: stopping or slowing the organised murder of the Jews of Europe.
• Besides, had Walter not already understood that order and calm was what the SS desired most, that it was, for them, an essential condition for the smooth running of their corpse factory? Granting a few privileges here and there, loosening the leash by which it held its inmates, was surely a small price for the Nazis to pay if, in return, their Auschwitz killing centre was buttressed by the presence of a settled, orderly concentration camp behind it.

12. ‘It Has Been Wonderful’

• That was the first clear benefit of this new job. As a clerk of the camp, Walter had a measure of free movement. So long as he looked purposeful, perhaps carrying a sheaf of papers, he could walk around the place without much risk of being challenged. Obviously that was helpful in his work for the underground, but it also made life much more bearable for him. True, the place in which he had now won the right to roam was a killing field, but his was better than the lot of the ordinary prisoner: confinement, surveillance and the permanent threat of physical violence.
• In Auschwitz, a newborn baby would know only a few moments of life before being poisoned. No record would ever be kept, the child’s existence erased so that the bereaved mother could appear once more at roll call, apparently fit and ready for slave labour.
• And so Walter and his fellow inmates would look on in baffled awe as Camp B maintained a vibrant Jewish life, complete with music performances, drama productions and, above all, classes for the children. On one side of the fence were the inmates of Camp A, bald and thin in their uniform stripes, while on the other energetic youth leaders were instructing their charges in the glories of European history and culture, the battle of Thermopylae and the novels of Dostoevsky, reciting passages by heart from books they did not have.
• Nevertheless, and like many of the men of Camp A, he fell in love. Her name was Alicia Munk, and she was one of the youth workers over the fence. Three years older than Walter, tall and dark, she was, to him, unfathomably beautiful. Slowly, they got to know each other, she telling of her life in a town north of Prague, he recounting the odyssey that had brought him here. They could not kiss; even their fingertips could not touch. The fence stayed between them. But in those conversations, which became daily, Walter felt his heart dissolve.
• But 8 March was getting nearer. Walter was asked to take soundings, to see how many inside the family camp might be willing to revolt. Surely there would be many volunteers, given that they possessed what every other Auschwitz arrival had lacked: advance knowledge of what happened to Jews in this place. They could see the chimneys, they could smell the smoke. But few stepped forward. The problem was, too many of the Familienlager inmates could not accept that the SS would murder the very children they had played with, whose names they knew. This was a problem Walter had not anticipated. These Jews had the information. The trouble was, they did not believe it. It was on the eve of the dreaded day when, at last, Walter and Alicia spent a night together. They were in the small bedroom, partitioned off from the rest of the stables-cum-barracks, that, as a registrar, he could call his own. It was the first time he had ever had sex and he was hesitant, needing encouragement from Alicia. But together, in a place of relentless death, they clung to each other and insisted on life. As 8 March dawned, the effort to organise some kind of resistance grew desperate. There was an attempt to recruit a leader for the family camp, someone who would set off an uprising that, yes, was doomed but which might just throw a wrench into the killing machine, perhaps even allowing a few dozen to escape into the forest. The chosen candidate, a much loved youth leader by the name of Fredy Hirsch, was approached, but he could not bear that the certain casualty of any attempt at insurrection would be the youngest children: they would not be able to fight, they would not be able to escape and fend for themselves. They would be left behind, to be butchered. Hirsch knew that those children would be gassed anyway, but he could not face it. He poisoned himself. And so there was no uprising. The trucks arrived at the appointed hour. Kapos drafted in from elsewhere in Auschwitz wielded their sticks and whips, driving the Czech Jews into the gas chambers. The SS had been so confident of their victims’ compliance that they had not even bothered to bring their dogs. The only sound was the crying of children. The only resistance was the occasional, desperate plea from a mother to a Kapo, begging for her child’s life. But it was all in vain. The doors were sealed, the Zyklon B pellets dropped, and the screams began. Within minutes, it was over. The bodies were removed, the gas chambers cleaned, and the next transport was already arriving. The Familienlager was empty. Walter and Alicia had survived, but at what cost? The memory of that night would haunt them forever.
• Later, Walter would discover the truth of the Familienlager. It had existed for the same reason as the concentration camp-ghetto Theresienstadt itself: as a showpiece, a macabre Potemkin village that could be displayed before the inspectors of the International Red Cross, should they ever demand to come, as proof that rumours of the Nazi slaughter of Jews were untrue.(Ahead of such a hypothetical visit, it would not be hard to empty out the neighbouring sub-sections, to preserve the illusion.) The family camp, with its regular clothes for the adults and sweets for the children, was simply an elaborate extension of the same pattern of deception that characterised the entire Nazi endeavour to rid the world of Jews.
• But the heartbreak was accompanied by confusion. His faith had been firm that, once people knew that death awaited them, they would not walk quietly towards it. Now he understood that information alone was not enough. The inmates of the Czech family camp had had the information. They could see the crematoria with their own eyes; the chimneys were just a few hundred yards away. They had known that the Nazis were murdering the Jews they had brought to Auschwitz. The trouble was, they never believed this scheme applied to them.
• Now, surely, the remaining Jews of the Familienlager, those who had been shipped to Auschwitz in December 1943, would be stripped of any delusions of specialness. They had to know that their death was a certainty, scheduled for six months to the day after they arrived. They had seen what had happened to the others, how they had been driven to the gas chambers, never to return. They knew they were going to die. And yet life in the family camp went on as it had before. The musicians staged concerts, the amateur actors put on plays. The rival political factions kept debating the ideal future, even though the only certainty was that they had no future. Walter concluded that even incontrovertible knowledge of one’s fate was not enough. If people were to act, there had to be a possibility, even a slim one, of escaping that fate. Otherwise it was easier to deny what was right in front of you than to confront the reality of your own imminent destruction. The surviving Czech Jews of the Familienlager knew they were doomed, but they were already prisoners in Auschwitz: what else could they do but live each day as best they could? Even so, the Jews outside, the people of the world: they would be different. They would still have options for action so long as they did not board those trains, which they would not if they knew the fate that awaited them. They just had to be told. Walter would tell them– and he would do it soon. He would escape.

13. Escape Was Lunacy

• The first step, he understood, was education. His schooling had been interrupted, but now he would become a student of escape. His primary texts would be the failures of others. Small lessons came every day. He saw a political prisoner hang for the crime of wearing two shirts under his tunic, which the SS took to be preparation for an escape. Walter had made a similar mistake himself once, when those two pairs of socks had given him away. He made a mental note: no outward changes.

• Central to the scheme was the help of an SS man whom Fero had known as a schoolboy back in Slovakia, an ethnic German by the name of Dobrowolný. Fero said he trusted him like a brother. Indeed, it had been this Dobrowolný who first came up with the idea. Langer’s fellow Jews were sceptical, but Bullo insisted he was not relying on trust or human kindness: he had also promised the man a reward, in the form of food and valuables from Kanada, in addition to the diamonds, gold and dollar bills his rescuer would need to bribe assorted SS men. The

• Unglick was determined to use his position to escape and, like Bullo, he believed he had found an SS man who would help him. And not just any SS man, but an ethnic German who had been adopted and raised by a Jewish family in Romania and was now deployed in Auschwitz as a driver. To Walter’s astonishment, this Nazi spoke to Unglick in Yiddish.

• Walter was wary. Trusting an SS officer was surely an elementary error; they had all seen what had happened to Bullo. And yet Unglick’s confidence, his certainty, was hard to resist. Had Walter not dreamed of escape from the start? Was this not, at last, his chance? He said yes and the two men drank a toast to liberty.

• At the appointed hour and at the appointed place, Unglick’s barracks, Block 14, Walter stood and waited. But there was no sign of Unglick or the truck. The minutes kept passing. Walter paced around, trying to look as natural as he could. A friend approached, inviting him to share a bowl of soup with a fellow underground member. Walter felt compelled to accept: it would look too strange to say no. Looking over his shoulder, back at the meeting point, he slipped into Block 7. His mood was bleak: he had thrown away his shot at freedom. Around 8 p.m., there was a commotion down by the gate. Soon enough, Walter saw it: the bloodstained corpse of Charles Unglick. It did not take long for the SS to sit the body on a stool, once again propped up with a pair of spades. They kept him that way for two full days, as yet another warning. The Birkenau bush telegraph soon revealed what had happened. Unglick had been running late. He had looked for Walter everywhere, only reluctantly giving up. After that, it was a re-run of the death of Fero Langer. The SS Yiddish-speaker had parked up, as agreed, and had concealed Unglick, as agreed. Except he had driven not to the border but to an empty garage. There he unlocked the toolbox and shot his co-conspirator dead. It was a profitable evening’s work. He had gained both Unglick’s diamonds and gold and the esteem of his SS masters, who admired his courage in foiling yet another attempted getaway. As for Walter, he was left numb by an hour that had included abject disappointment at missing his chance to break out, bereavement at the loss of a friend and a strange kind of relief. Had he not accepted that spontaneous invitation to share a bowl of soup, he would have kept his appointment with Unglick and shared his fate. Instead, he had narrowly escaped death. Afterwards, and in keeping with what had become a custom in the camp, the prisoner elite, including some of Birkenau’s most brutal Kapos, gathered to hand out the dead man’s clothes to the living. Normally, this was done in order of seniority, but this time they made an exception: in honour of the friendship the pair had shared, Walter could take whatever he wanted. He asked only for the belt. On the inside he inscribed in ink Unglick’s prisoner number and the place and date of his death: ‘AU-BI’ for Auschwitz-Birkenau, ‘25.1.1944’. It would remind him, again, of the importance of trusting only those who deserved to be trusted. The masters of Auschwitz made the most of these failures, ensuring they were known, betting they would sap their captives of all hope. But the attempts kept coming. From the creation of the camp in 1940 until 1942, only fifty-five prisoners had broken free. In 1943, the number of successful escapes rose to 154. Except most of those were Polish non-Jewish prisoners, whose conditions in the camp were better and who, crucially, had the bulk of the jobs, whether in the hospitals, specialised work details or bureaucracy, that made escape more feasible. The rest were Soviet prisoners of war. No Jew had ever got out alive.

• That torn-off page from the children’s atlas he had found back in Kanada had allowed him to orientate himself further. He had worked out, in those few stolen minutes in the latrine, that Oś wię cim sat about fifty miles north of Slovakia’s northern border.

14. Russian Lessons

• 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

• 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.

• 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 deported to Auschwitz from Slovakia 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.

• And perhaps their states of mind were similar too. Fred had already seen the toll the permanent stench of death was taking on his friend, the signs of anxiety and depression. The massacre of the thousands from the Familienlager, including Alicia, had clearly shaken Walter badly. Fred had endured his own shocks to the system, even beyond the loss of his father and brothers. In the summer of 1943, in a rare example of a transport away from Auschwitz, the SS had shipped a group of prisoners from Birkenau to Warsaw, to work on ‘fortifications’. Those transports took away most of Wetzler’s remaining Slovak friends. After they left, he felt lonely and alone. His mind turned more seriously to escape.

• Walter, still mindful of the disciplines of the underground, sought the approval of his contact in the resistance leadership, David Szmulewski. It seemed obvious that an unauthorised breakout aimed at revealing the secrets of Auschwitz had less chance of success than one with the underground’s backing. On 31 March 1944 Szmulewski gave Walter the leadership’s answer. It came as a grave disappointment. They had concluded that Walter’s ‘inexperience, personal volatility and impulsiveness ’, as well as some unspecified ‘other factors’, made him ‘unreliable’ for this mission. What’s more, they thought it highly unlikely that the outside world would believe him. Nevertheless, Szmulewski offered the leadership’s assurance that, though they would not help the planned escape, they would not stand in its way. For his own part, Szmulewski stressed that he was sorry about the ‘higher decision’, which Walter assumed had been taken by the command group in Auschwitz I rather than in Birkenau. The underground leader then added a request. Should Walter and Fred fail, it was the underground’s wish that they ‘avoid interrogation’. If they did not, it would spell disaster for anyone who had spoken to either of them before the escape. Avoid interrogation. At that, Walter doubtless remembered Volkov and his recommended razor blade.

15. The Hideout

• It was the only break in what was otherwise a watertight seal. If a prisoner could somehow hide in that outer area, waiting out those three days and nights after the alarm had been raised, even while the SS and their murderous dogs combed every inch of the terrain, he would emerge on that fourth night into an outer camp that was deserted and unwatched. He would have his chance to break free. This, then, was the premise of the attempt that Walter would mount. He and Fred would inveigle their way into the outer camp. Once there, they would secrete themselves in a designated hiding place and wait for three days and nights. Only when it was clear that the SS had called off the search and the outer camp was restored to empty silence would they come out.

• It was while on their travels that they entered a new Auschwitz territory, a land fast becoming known as Mexico. The camp there was under construction: it was to be Birkenau III, ready to house the expected surge of Hungarian prisoners, and the inmates quartered in this unfinished site had been given no clothes at all. All they could do was wrap themselves in coloured blankets: to the long-time Auschwitz population, they looked like indigenous, ‘Indian’ Mexicans. Hence: Mexico

16. Let My People Go

• On the morning of Thursday 6 April, they were ready to make their fourth attempt. Except this time too the plan had to be aborted. The explanation was something neither Fred Wetzler nor Walter Rosenberg had ever allowed for, a story so unlikely that if they had not known of it first hand they would have dismissed it as a fantasy. It turned on love. SS-Rottenführer Viktor Pestek was a strikingly handsome man. In his mid-twenties, he had something in common with the SS man who had tricked Bullo Langer: like him, he was a Volksdeutsche, an ethnic German, in his case originally from Romania. More unexpectedly, he also had something in common with Walter: as a Blockführer in the family camp, he had fallen in love with one of the young Jewish women imprisoned there. Her name was Renée Neumann, and Pestek was besotted. He had resolved to save her from the gas chambers, which meant spiriting her away from Auschwitz. Renée had been adamant that she would not leave without her mother. That meant the SS man would have to find a safe house where he and the two women could wait out the war. Seemingly, that would require the help of anti-Nazis on the outside, people who would be prepared to lend a hand to two Jews in hiding. It was a wildly unlikely scheme, but Pestek had made up his mind to try.

• In nearly two years, he had never been stopped like this. To have come so close only to be thwarted here, in this way, over some lousy cigarettes. Walter cursed the fates that were clearly bent on keeping him in Auschwitz until his last breath. And then he felt it, the thwack of a cane on his shoulder, a firm, stinging blow, followed by another. One of the SS pair was thrashing him with a bamboo stick, abusing him as a ‘dressed-up monkey’ and a ‘bastard’. Yet Walter felt not pain but relief. For though the SS man was beating him, he was not inflicting what would have been a far greater punishment: he was not searching him any further. ‘Get going,’ he said eventually. ‘Get out of my sight.’ Walter was incredulous. It made no sense. A moment earlier, this man had threatened to send him to Block 11, and if he had wanted to do that he could have: the hundred cigarettes alone would have been sufficient grounds. Perhaps he and the rest of the SS were thrown by word of Lederer’s escape, and the first rumours that one of their own officers had been involved. Or maybe it was sheer laziness. The Unterscharführer had said something about having ‘better things to do’ than frogmarching a lowly, if uppity, Jew across the camp. Easier to administer a beating and leave it there. Maybe it was as simple, and as random, as that: the man in the uniform could not be bothered to perform a chore that would have taken perhaps ten or fifteen minutes out of his day, but which would have cost Walter Rosenberg his life. Given all he had seen, it was hardly a surprise to be saved by the whim of one of his captors. In a way, every Jew still breathing in Auschwitz-Birkenau had been saved the same way. From that initial flick of the finger on the selection ramp– to the left, to the right– through to the hundred moments of caprice that played out every day, from the Kapo deciding he could win a bet by killing someone else rather than you, on the spot with a single punch, to the doctor in the infirmary deciding whether you could stand on your own two feet or were too weak to be allowed to live, the difference between life and death often came down to a fickle split second, a decision that was not even a decision but rather an impulse, one that could just as easily have gone the other way.

• It was 2 p.m. on 7 April 1944. Some of the SS men may have been in spiritual mood that day; perhaps they had been in church that morning, closing their eyes in prayer as they honoured the solemnity of Good Friday. But as Walter Rosenberg and Fred Wetzler lay still and silent in a hole in the ground, and as the daylight faded into evening, they did not know that this was also the night of the Seder, the start of the Jewish festival of Passover. On this night, the date shifting each year according to the lunar calendar, Jews were called to celebrate their liberty, to give thanks to a wise and mighty God for not forgetting his people, for rescuing them from an evil ruler and for delivering them from bondage. As Fred and Walter crouched in the dark, the instruction of ancient tradition was clear: this was the night Jews made their escape from slavery to freedom.

17. Underground

• T HOSE WERE THE longest three days and nights of Walter’s life. In that tiny hole, the hours lasted for weeks. Contracted by space, time seemed to expand. When it was light outside, he would picture his fellow inmates just beyond the woodpile, a matter of yards away, working as slaves from dawn till dusk. He

• Walter knew, there would be another roll call. If any other prisoner were missing, if anyone else had attempted an escape, he and Fred would be back to the beginning: the outer perimeter would stay manned for another three days. So they waited, desperate that there be no new siren. The hands on the watch crawled so slowly, it seemed time itself had stopped. But no alarm was sounded.

• Not until 9 p.m., after fully eighty hours concealed in that small hole in the ground, did Walter and Fred decide it was safe to move. Opening up their hideaway was harder than they had bargained for, and not only because of the weight of the boards, stacked above their heads. Those three days spent lying still had taken their toll. Their muscles had atrophied. The boards now seemed unnaturally heavy, shifting them all but impossible. Each shove brought a fierce, tingling pain. Their legs trembled; they seemed unable to support their own weight. Habit and caution– because there might still be a regular patrol passing nearby– made them want to do the work silently. Which made it harder still. They looked at the bread and coffee they had set aside, safer to consume now. They were both painfully hungry and desperately thirsty. But when they attempted to take a sip, or eat even a little, both men found the same trouble: they were not able to swallow. It was as if their bodies had turned in on themselves, as if their innards had coiled up and closed.

• At about two o’clock in the morning, crossing open moorland, they reached a signpost with a warning to those coming in the opposite direction: Attention! This is Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Anyone found on these lands will be shot without warning! It had taken them far too long, but they had at last reached the end of the vast ‘zone of interest’ that enveloped the camp. For a moment at least, they could congratulate themselves. On 10 April 1944 they had each achieved what no Jew had ever done before: they had broken out of Auschwitz.

18. On the Run

• The universe outside Auschwitz contained almost as many perils as were held within. That was especially true for two Jewish escapees. From the day they arrived back in 1942, the two of them, like all Jewish prisoners of the camp, had been cut off from the world. They had no network of comrades they could contact. There was no resistance organisation waiting for them to emerge, armed with food or clothes or false papers or indeed arms. While non-Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz had been allowed to receive food parcels and the like, thereby retaining at least a connection to the rest of the human race, the Jews had been very deliberately isolated. Just nineteen and twenty-five years old, Walter and Fred were entirely on their own.

19. Crossing the Border

• The water was ice cold and moving fast. The opposite bank was so near, but the current was tugging at their clothes, pulling them under. Walter lost his footing and sank into the water, not once but twice. Immersed in the glacial liquid from head to toe, he felt the cold bite into his bones. Somehow they made it to the other side, but that brought little respite. The ground was covered in snow so deep their legs sank into it. Soaked from the stream, they were in snow up to their waists. But they kept on, determined to make it to the trees. They looked over their shoulders to see that the soldiers were still giving chase, scrambling down the hillside towards the water. Walter and Fred were in the wood now, running in a zigzag pattern, hoping to confuse their pursuers, running and running until one of them noticed the sound that they could not hear: there was no more barking, no more baying of dogs. Drained and drenched, they fell into a ditch. They lay as still as they could, shivering from the cold, listening for the sound of human tread. After a while they realised that in the scramble to escape their pursuers they had lost both their meagre provisions and their overcoats

• ‘We’re heading for the Slovak border,’ he said. ‘Can you show us the way? We’ve escaped from a concentration camp. From Auschwitz.’ Why did he need to say that? Why identify themselves that way? Even if the pair did not know there was an international warrant out for their arrest, Walter would have known that, once prisoners had escaped from Auschwitz, the entire region would be on the lookout. So why take the risk of saying the word out loud? Perhaps, he thought, it was because there was no point trying to hoodwink this woman. She was not going to be fooled by some tall tale; anyone could see who they were. Perhaps it was because her tatty clothes and worn hands did not look like those of a police agent. Maybe it was a gamble on human kindness, a bet that it still existed despite everything they had seen. It might have been all those things. But it also crossed Walter’s mind that his mission, the reason he and Fred had broken out, was to tell the world outside Auschwitz of the camp and what happened within it or, failing that, at least to speak of Auschwitz’s existence, and so far they had told no one. In that moment, some kind of small, absurd weight lifted from his shoulders. He had told one person. He had uttered the word out loud and beyond the perimeter. He had said it: Auschwitz.

• At one point, their guide signalled for them to stop. A German patrol passed through this area every ten minutes, he warned. They would hide, watch it pass, and then they would have a nine-minute interval to get clear. This, he explained, was the Nazis’ great flaw: they stuck to routine so faithfully, their movements were predictable. Walter and Fred could nod to that: their entire escape plan had been predicated on it.

• Tiso had not reckoned with the fact that, though Jews made up only a small portion of Slovakia’s population, they accounted for a big share of the country’s doctors. The president reprieved those Jewish medics who had not already been deported, despatching them to small towns and villages. Given

20. In Black and White

• Yet, for all their physical weakness, Krasň anský 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.

• If he had asked the men across the table to defend themselves, doubtless they would have insisted that they had been forced into an impossible position. A Nazi edict in 1940 had banned every Jewish organisation in Slovakia, replacing them with this single Jewish council, the ÚŽ. The country’s Jewish leaders had debated in a fever the moral rights and wrongs of taking part in such an entity. Some took Walter’s view: that to serve in the ÚŽ was to do the devil’s work for him and to bless it with the credibility of the Jewish community’s own leaders. Others had feared that Jewish refusal would only mean that the fascist devil would perform that work himself and do it more brutally. At least if Jews were involved, there might be a chance to cushion or delay the blow that would soon come raining down on Jewish heads. In the argument that raged, it was the second group that had prevailed.

• Referring to the diagram, the report took care not to leave out what, to Walter, was the heart of the matter: the centrality of deception in the Nazi method: The unfortunate victims are brought into hall(b) where they are told to undress. To complete the fiction that they are going to bathe, each person receives a towel and a small piece of soap issued by two men clad in white coats.

• Why would a document written by two Jews who had escaped for the purpose of alerting Hungary’s Jews not even mention the specific threat to that community? Walter confronted Krasň anský: there had to be an explicit warning in the text. But Krasň anský was equally adamant: the credibility of the report depended on it being a record of murders that had already taken place. No prophecies, no forecasts, just the facts. Krasň

• Walter had a decision to make. Of course he wanted the warning to Hungary’s Jews to be loud and clear. Of course he would have preferred that the report be explicit on that point and much else. But that would have meant a delay. There simply was no time for a rewrite, for correcting errors or retyping pages, not when every day, every hour, counted. Better to get a flawed report out today than a perfect one tomorrow. Walter and Fred signed their approval.

• Walter and Fred were given money to live on and, far more precious, false papers certifying them as pure Aryans of at least three generations standing. That status would give them complete freedom of movement around Slovakia. If they were on a train or in a restaurant that was raided by the police, there would be nothing to fear: these bogus documents were flawless. Naturally, they were not in the name of Alfréd Wetzler or Walter Rosenberg. Those men were Jews and the subjects of an international arrest warrant. Instead, the papers verified the identity of two new men. Fred was to be ‘Jozef Lánik’, while Walter Rosenberg would be reborn as ‘Rudolf Vrba’. For Fred, the move would prove temporary: he would revert back to his original name as soon as he could. But for his friend, this was a change for good. Rudolf Vrba was not an entirely new creation. There had been an influential Czech Catholic priest of that name who had died five years earlier, having built a reputation as an energetic antisemite: he had proposed a set of measures to secure the exclusion of Jews from Bohemian life. But the new Rudi, as he was to become, was not bothered by that association, if he was aware of it at all.(Nor, apparently, was he much fazed by sharing his new first name with the commandant of Auschwitz.) All that mattered was to be free of what, to him, was the Germanic taint of ‘Rosenberg’. He wanted to sever every connection with that supposedly ‘civilised’ nation. Walter Rosenberg was no more. From now on, and for the rest of his days, he would be Rudolf Vrba, with a name that was impeccably Czech, carrying no hint of German or, for that matter, Jew.

21. Men of God

• Serédi was silent for a long time. The air seemed to thicken as the delegation waited for his answer. Finally, he tore his biretta from his head and threw it to the ground. ‘If the pope himself does not undertake anything against Hitler, what can I do?’ he said. He cursed in exasperation: ‘Hell! ’ The cardinal picked his biretta off the floor and apologised for his loss of control. He wanted to help, but he could not. His hands were tied.

• If I could do anything, I would, the cardinal said. But any plan we might come up with, the Germans would thwart. At that moment, the sirens sounded. The city was under attack. The group rushed to the basement, where the archbishop sank to his knees and began to pray. He stayed like that, praying, until the air raid was over, two hours later. He might have used that time to thrash out a strategy with the other three or, failing that, to write a rousing public address to his flock, one that would have spelled out what the Nazis were about to do to their Jewish fellow Hungarians and demanded they rise up to prevent it. But the cardinal stayed on his knees. Apparently, the Catholic church would not move unless the pope himself was moved. If only he or one of his aides could hear from Vrba and Wetzler directly, then, surely, Rome would act. In the middle of June, nearly two months after his escape from Auschwitz, Rudi would have precisely that chance.

22. What Can I Do?

• The priest looked at the two men. ‘I promise you,’ he said. ‘I will do it.’ But if they hoped for an instant and public statement from the pontiff, one that would send the word ‘Auschwitz’ around the world, they were to be disappointed. There was nothing the next day or the day after that. On 27 June, one week after the priest had collapsed in grief– moved to that state, admittedly, by the deaths of his fellow Catholic priests rather than by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews– four separate transports arrived in Auschwitz, all from Hungary. From Debrecen, 3,842 Jews. From Kecskemét, 2,642. From Nagyvárad, 2,819. From Békéscsaba, 3,118. They totalled close to 12,500 people, in a single day. Almost all of them were gassed on arrival.

23. London Has Been Informed

• ‘I personally feel that the handling of such material as the enclosed reports cannot be considered as a positive contribution to real relief or rescue activities,’ he wrote, in words that would have incensed Rudolf Vrba. Rudi had escaped because he believed that secrecy was the Nazis’ most lethal weapon. Yet at his desk in Geneva a senior official of the US government was musing on whether shattering that secrecy was of any value.

• In fact, the words of Rudolf Vrba and Fred Wetzler would not be officially published in English and in full until a press conference in Washington on 25 November 1944, exactly seven months after the pair had completed their testimony to Krasň anský in that cramped room in Žilina. It had come so late that, on that same day, the Nazis had been hard at work demolishing Crematorium II and its gas chamber, after killing the last thirteen people who would be murdered on that spot on 25 November.

• the best hope for the victims of Nazism was that Nazism be defeated. The US military would not so much as look at any proposed operation that might require a ‘diversion’ from that effort. On 3 July, McCloy instructed his aide to ‘kill’ the idea. And yet bombing Auschwitz or the train tracks that fed it would hardly have required a diversion at all. As it happened, American bombers were in the skies over Auschwitz a matter of weeks later. On 20 August, the 15th US Air Force unloaded more than thirteen hundred 500-pound bombs on Monowitz, the place Rudi had known as Buna when he worked there as a slave during his first few weeks in Auschwitz: that’s how close the US bombers would come. To have struck the gas chambers and crematoria would have entailed diverting those aircraft all of five miles.

• McCloy did not budge. In that, he perhaps took his lead from the president himself. It seems Roosevelt had discussed the rights and wrongs of bombing Auschwitz with McCloy, expressing his concern that it would simply see Jews killed by American bombs, leaving the US ‘accused of participating in this horrible business ’. Neither man seemed to consider that, for one thing, that logic did not apply to destroying the railway tracks to Auschwitz, rather than the camp itself or, for another, plenty of those calling for military intervention believed that any such deaths were a price worth paying, to stop the future killing of much greater numbers of Jews. Such thoughts apparently did not register. The inaction came from the very top.

• Perhaps Churchill and Eden were thwarted by their subordinates. Or maybe their determination to act was more apparent than sincere, the determination to be documented demanding action stronger than the urge for action itself. Either way, the Allies never did bomb Auschwitz(except once, and that was by accident). The Vrba–Wetzler Report had reached the very centre of Allied power and yet the inmates of Auschwitz would keep looking up at the sky, praying for a deliverance that would never come.

24. Hungarian Salami

• Kasztner returned to Budapest, where he read and reread Fred and Rudi’s testimony. He did not sleep that night. The next day, 29 April, he presented the report to the members of the Jewish Council when they met at their headquarters on Sip Street, holding nothing back. And yet the men at that meeting did not rush out on to the streets or start hammering on doors, urging the Jews to save themselves. In fact, they said and did nothing. Part of it was incredulity. Samu Stern, the president of the council, had doubts whether the report could be believed: was it not more likely to be the product of the fertile imagination of two rash young men ? If that was right, then it would be reckless to disseminate it: council members themselves would be arrested by the country’s new masters, the Nazis whose occupation of Hungary was just six weeks old. They would be charged with spreading false information. The leaders resolved to do nothing that might spread alarm

• Even so, the nature of the bargain would soon seem clear enough. The offer to spare all of Hungary’s Jews receded; now the SS man held out a much smaller prize: exit permits for 600 Jews. That number rose to a thousand when Eichmann authorised the sparing of several hundred Jews from, tellingly, Kasztner’s home town of Kolozsvár. The figure would rise again with the addition of nearly 200 ‘prominent’ Jews from various ghettos around the country until eventually the number singled out for rescue would stand just short of 1,700. They would board a train– Kasztner’s train, as it would become known– that would, ultimately, ferry them to Switzerland and to safety. What the SS wanted in return was money– the Jewish rescue committee handed over $1,000 per head for every passenger on the Kasztner train, a total of $1,684,000 in cash and valuables– and, more precious still, a Jewish community that would be sufficiently pliant and passive to enable the deportations to proceed smoothly. Eichmann made clear that he did not want ‘a second Warsaw’, meaning no repeat in Hungary of the resistance the Nazis had met in that ghetto a year earlier. The Nazis wanted Kasztner’s silence. And they got it. Rezső Kasztner kept the Vrba–Wetzler Report to himself and the small leadership circle around him. He would issue no urgent warnings to his fellow Jews to stay away from the trains and resist deportation. He would not say that waiting for them at the other end were the ovens of Birkenau, that they should run for their lives or pick up whatever meagre weapons they could find. Instead, he would give Eichmann and the SS the one thing they deemed indispensable for their work, the one thing whose importance the teenage Walter Rosenberg had grasped as he stood on the Judenrampe through those long days and nights: order and quiet. The

• Worse than that, they were actively steered in the wrong direction by those they trusted. Kasztner kept the Auschwitz Report hidden away, but he did order the distribution of the notorious postcards which purported to offer greetings from those who had been supposedly ‘resettled’ in new homes. In fact, those messages were written under duress by new arrivals in Auschwitz hours before their deaths. Even when Kasztner’s colleagues suspected that the cards were a trick to deceive the Jewish public and urged him not to pass them on, he ordered that a batch of around 500 such cards, brought to the Jewish Council by the Nazis, be delivered. In late June, just as the Vrba–Wetzler Report was finally becoming public thanks to its circulation in Switzerland, Kasztner did something curious. He wrote to his own contacts in Switzerland, letting them know that thousands of postcards had arrived with a ‘Waldsee’ postmark, in which Jewish deportees reported that they were alive and well. This was nearly two months after Kasztner had had it confirmed from the SS that Waldsee was a fiction and from the Vrba–Wetzler Report that Auschwitz was a death factory. Eichmann himself had told Kasztner that the Jews were being gassed in Auschwitz. And yet on 24 June, the very day that the Swiss press began publishing information from the Auschwitz Report, Kasztner was spinning an opposing tale, contradicting the word of Fred and Rudi with bogus evidence that Hungary’s deported Jews were safe. If the SS had ordered a misinformation campaign tailored to blunt the impact of the Vrba–Wetzler Report, it would scarcely have looked any different. Whether Kasztner truly believed that his negotiations with the SS might eventually save the Jews of Hungary, or whether he did the Nazis’ bidding solely to preserve the friends, relatives and ‘prominents’ he had handpicked for rescue– abandoning the many to save the few– the result was the same. While his talks with Eichmann went on, with his silence the apparent price, the Nazis conducted their largest and swiftest deportation operation. Starting on 15 May 1944 and over the course of fifty-six days, 437,402 Jews were transported from the Hungarian countryside, crammed into 147 trains. Almost all of them were gassed on arrival in Auschwitz. Next in the Nazis’ sights were the 200,000 Jews of Budapest.

• On 30 June, the king of Sweden, Gustav V, wrote to Horthy with a warning that, if the deportations did not stop, Hungary would become a ‘pariah among other nations’. But it was that US warning, that war criminals would be held to account, that seemed to concentrate the regent’s mind. ‘I shall not tolerate this any further!’ Horthy told a council of his ministers the day Roosevelt’s message arrived. ‘The deportation of the Jews of Budapest must cease !’ Tellingly, that exhortation did not apply to the deportations outside Budapest. Those continued. The next day, 27 June, would see 12,421 Jews shipped to Auschwitz in four separate transports. The deportations would continue the next day and the next. Despite his royal title, Horthy was not the master of his kingdom: issuing a command did not make it happen. There

• On 2 July, the 15th Air Force of the United States dropped 1,200 tons of bombs in or near Budapest, killing 136 people and destroying 370 buildings. The bombs’ targets were, in fact, factories south of the capital, but that was not how it looked from inside Hungary’s ruling circles. To them, it seemed as if Roosevelt was making good his threat to hold the Hungarian political leadership responsible for the slaughter of the country’s Jews. Those at the top trembled at the prospect. By 5 July, Horthy had installed a loyalist as the chief military commander in the capital and instructed him to take ‘all measures necessary to prevent the deportation of the Budapest Jews’. That same night, he sent in the tanks. As the army moved in, the provincial police, there to round up Jews, were pushed out.

• The Jews of the capital city were saved, for now. There were many explanations– starting with the shifting calculus of Hungarian politics, as Germany began to look like the losing side in the war– but a crucial role was played by a thirty-two-page document, written by two men, one of them a teenager, who had done what no Jews had ever done before and escaped from Auschwitz. They had crossed mountains and rivers, they had hidden and starved, they had defied death and the most vicious enemy the world had ever seen. Their word had been doubted, it had been ignored and it had been suppressed. But now, at last, it had made the breakthrough they had longed for. Rudolf Vrba and Fred Wetzler had saved 200,000 lives.

25. A Wedding with Guns

• Rudi saw at least two of his comrades fall beside him, but that did not dilute the euphoria that coursed through him. He found himself laughing with the joy of it; he was weeping with happiness. He heard the screams of the SS men inside that building, he heard them die, and it delighted him. Volkov, the Soviet prisoner of war, had been right. The Germans were not superhuman, they were not invincible: they died like anyone else.

• He got himself discharged and, without pause for breath, he was soon back in Bratislava, thirsty for the elixir that had been snatched from his lips when he was barely fifteen years old: knowledge. By May he was enrolled in a special school for military veterans, allowing them to catch up on the studies they had missed thanks to the war. In five months he made up at least three years of ground, passing the exam that secured him a place to study at the Czech Technical University in Prague, in the department of chemical technology.

• Many survivors of that camp, and of the event that would gradually become known as the Holocaust, would vow never to set foot in Poland again. For them, that country would forever be associated with the mass murder of their fellow Jews; they could not bear to tread on soil they imagined to be drenched in blood. Others managed it, but only after an interval of many decades. Yet Rudi went back cheerfully and within just four years of his escape. What’s more, he boarded a train to get there. In the summer of 1948, he and Gerta travelled to Poland on holiday.

• He refused. It would be discrimination, he said, at odds with the entire ethos of a scholarly institution. The committee told him that, if he did as he was asked, he would be committing no ‘moral offence’. He could say he was simply obeying ‘higher orders’. Rudi replied that that was the excuse used by the Nazis. He would not do it.

• That was wise advice even beyond the lab. The climate had become much colder in Prague, with the authorities cracking down on those who did not fit the new socialist paradise. Friends of Rudi’s had disappeared overnight, never to be seen again. A queasy feeling of déjà vu struck in 1952, when Rudolf Slánský and thirteen other senior officials of the Czechoslovak communist party were arrested and charged with ideological deviation. They were accused of straying into ‘Titoism and Zionism’. Ten of them, including Slánský, were Jews. Eleven, including Slánský, were hanged.

26. A New Nation, a New England

• The following January, the five-judge panel of the Supreme Court delivered what was now a posthumous decision. They ruled in Kasztner’s favour by four to one. They held that it was unjust to judge a man with knowledge that was only available in hindsight. They accepted that Kasztner had in good faith believed that he was engaged in an effort to save the many, rather than just the few, even if that belief proved fatally misguided. The presiding judge said: ‘Judge not thy neighbour until thou art in his place.’

• By 1964, he was working with mice, injecting them before killing them at fifteen-minute intervals, once more dropping them into liquid nitrogen. Each time, he was asking the same question, one that he had himself faced long before he ever set foot in a laboratory: what happens to a living creature when confronted with extreme, mortal stress?

• Soon that led to a book. The prompt was a conversation between Rudi and his Sutton milkman. The man had read the Herald series and confessed that he did not like it. He believed Dr Vrba was spreading lies about the Germans and that it was not right. Of course, the man knew that Hitler was a menace: he himself had lost a leg fighting in the war. But the stories Rudi had told in the paper could not possibly be true. The Jews were clever people, the milkman said: it beggared belief to imagine they would take their children by the hand and board trains that would deliver them to the gas chambers. Such a thing was inconceivable. Rudi understood then that he would have to do much more to explain how the Nazis had pulled off perhaps the greatest crime in human history.

28. I Know a Way Out

• What might explain this relative lack of recognition? It certainly did not help Wetzler that he was out of sight of western writers and historians and, therefore, mostly out of mind. As for Rudi, while he was accessible, and a model interviewee, he was not an easy sell in Israel or in the mainstream Jewish diaspora. Those audiences would have thrilled to hear the story of his escape and his mission to tell the world of Auschwitz, but he never left it at that. He would not serve up a morally comfortable narrative in which the only villains were the Nazis. Instead he always insisted on hitting out at Kasztner and the Hungarian Jewish leadership, as well as the Jewish council in Slovakia. He faulted them for failing to pass on his report and, in the Slovak case, for compiling the lists that had put him on a deportation train in the first place.

• In other words, the Zionist movement, like every other, produced both saints and sinners while under the Nazi jackboot. The human responses to the horror of the Third Reich were varied and seldom ran on ideological lines. Nevertheless, Rudi tended to use the word ‘Zionism’ sweepingly, as shorthand for those Jews in authority who he believed had done him, and Jews like him, wrong. He never advanced a substantial argument for why Zionist ideology might have led the likes of Kasztner to act the way they did, beyond a hinted suggestion that Zionism was prepared to sacrifice the mass of European Jewry in order to salvage a remnant that would then establish a Jewish state in Palestine.

• Rudi’s best-known critic was the doyen of Israeli Holocaust historians, Yehuda Bauer. Though he would later describe Vrba as ‘a genuine hero of the Holocaust ’, Bauer also found him ‘arrogant ’ and believed Rudi’s ‘deep hatred for the Jewish leadership, Zionism, etc.’ coloured his judgement. He strongly objected to Rudi’s insistence, maintained over many decades, that the leadership in Budapest could have made all the difference if they had only passed on what they knew to the ordinary Jews in the Hungarian provinces who, being uninformed, climbed aboard trains that took them to their deaths. Bauer’s view was that those Jews in the Hungarian countryside were not uninformed: even without sight of the Vrba–Wetzler Report, there were enough fragments of information around, including via soldiers returning from the front, for them to have worked out that deportation meant death. The problem, he argued, was not inadequate publication of information so much as inadequate absorption of it. Hungary’s Jews had not internalised the information they had received in such a way that it became converted into knowledge. They had not turned it into a conviction that might be a spur to action.

• He corresponded with the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, and in The World at War TV documentary his contribution appeared straight after a clip of Primo Levi. But he did not have their fame. Some of that is because they were writers and he was not. But some of it is down to something subtler. Rudolf Vrba refused to conform to what the world expects of a Holocaust survivor. You can see it in the Lanzmann film, Shoah. The other speakers look like old men, bent and broken by experience. They speak in soft voices, as if awed by what they have witnessed. But Rudi is tanned, fit and vigorous. His voice is loud and confident. He seems a generation younger than all the others; it is hard to believe he had lived through the same events thirty-five years earlier. He deploys sardonic, sarcastic humour. And he smiles, as if amused by the lunatic absurdity of what he is describing, even when speaking about the unspeakable. Lanzmann, as interviewer, remarks upon it. ‘Why do you smile so often when you talk about this?’ he asks. ‘What should I do?’ Rudi says in reply. ‘Should I cry ?’ Rudi knew that he was refusing to fit what he called ‘the survivor clichés manufactured for the taste of a certain type of public’: he would offer no uplifting aphorisms, reassuring his audience that, ultimately, human beings were good. He was unforgiving and he was angry. The result was to make Rudolf Vrba, for the best part of three decades, a peripheral figure even in the small world of Holocaust remembrance in Vancouver. His message was awkward and he was a discomfiting messenger.

29. Flowers of Emptiness

• Rudi was quite clear that ‘Helena’s death was the worst experience in my life.’ Yes, he explained in a letter to his surviving daughter, whom he would address as Zuzinka, he had faced death, starvation and torture in Auschwitz and, yes, he had witnessed the murder of more than a million people. But the suicide of his firstborn child hit him harder. Because now he was ‘facing a horrible catastrophe without any possibility to fight back’. Even against the Nazis, he did not feel as powerless as he felt at that moment.

30. Too Many to Count

• Now it was Rudi alone who carried the memory of their mission. The escape had been predicated on three assumptions. First came the belief that the outside world had no knowledge of the horrors of the Final Solution, that Planet Auschwitz was in a permanent state of eclipse, with those who lived on earth always in the dark. Second was the related conviction that, since the only reason the Allies had not acted to halt the killing was their ignorance of it, the instant they knew of the slaughter they would surely move to end it. Third, and most important for Rudi especially, was an iron faith that once Jews themselves understood what Auschwitz meant, they would refuse to board the deportation trains and, by that refusal, they would gum up the Nazi machinery of death that had, until then, been lubricated by deception and secrecy. In the last decades of his life, all three of those certainties would be shaken.

• Of course, the Nazi ambition to rid the world of Jews was scarcely a secret. The front-page headline of the Los Angeles Examiner on 23 November 1938, a fortnight after Kristallnacht, had proclaimed: ‘Nazis Warn World Jews Will Be Wiped Out Unless Evacuated by Democracies’. Adolf Hitler himself had all but announced it on 30 January 1942 when he declared that ‘the result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews ’. Over the next year, the Allies saw and heard enough evidence to know that this was no mere aspiration. By December 1942, as Rudi and the other prisoners were forced to sing ‘Stille Nacht’ to their SS captors, the Polish government in exile had published an address to the embryonic United Nations titled, ‘The Mass Extermination of Jews in German-Occupied Poland’. The most powerful Allied leaders had received direct, eyewitness testimony of the Nazis’ war on the Jews. By 1943 both Anthony Eden and Franklin Roosevelt had sat with Jan Karski, a non-Jewish Pole of aristocratic bearing who had gone undercover into the Warsaw Ghetto(twice) as well as into the Izbica transit camp, and whose reports had formed the basis for that address to the UN. Karski described mass shootings, as well as the loading of Jews on to goods trucks which were then sent to ‘special camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor’, purportedly for the sake of resettlement. ‘Once there, the so-called“settlers” are mass murdered,’ Karski wrote. In December 1942, Eden took to the floor of the House of Commons to read a declaration agreed by all twelve Allied nations, condemning the ‘bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination’ pursued by the Nazis, one that had now been confirmed by ‘numerous reports’. Members of parliament stood in silence to show their support. Soon afterwards, in 1943, the Vatican learned that the toll of Jewish victims of the Nazis was running into the millions: Rome had been kept informed by its apostolic nuncio in Istanbul, Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII.

• And yet the officials and others who were informed about Auschwitz did not act on what they knew, usually for the same reasons that Gilbert had already identified: the focus on other wartime goals, an impatience with the Jews, often shaped by bigotry, and a scepticism that such horrors could really be happening at all. When Churchill wrote to his deputy to ask, ‘What can we do? What can we say?’ it is at least conceivable that he was expressing not speechless horror, but rather a politician’s practical need for advice now that what was once secret knowledge was becoming public.

• Rudi had an answer to all of that. Jews did not need to organise a formal resistance to thwart or slow the Nazi operation: even a chaotic, panicked refusal to go, a stampede on the railway platform, would have been enough. It would have forced the Nazis to hunt deer rather than sheep. But there was one objection which struck with greater force, partly because of its source. Not long after the release of Shoah, Rudi met a man who had seen him in the Lanzmann film and who travelled to Vancouver all the way from his home in Sweden to thank him personally. This man believed Rudolf Vrba had saved his life. His name was Georg Klein. More than forty years earlier he had been György Klein, working as a junior secretary for the Jewish Council in Budapest. A turning point had come in late May or early June 1944, when Klein’s boss, a rabbi member of the Judenrat, had told him of a ‘highly secret document’ that the council had received. It was a report written by young Slovak Jews who had escaped from one of the annihilation camps in Poland. The rabbi would show it to György, on condition that his young aide tell no one but his closest friends and family what it contained. He then handed György a copy, in Hungarian and on carbon paper, of the Vrba–Wetzler Report. As he read it, Klein felt a mixture of nausea and intellectual satisfaction. The former because he now knew the fate of his grandmother and uncles who had been deported, and the latter because he knew that what he was reading was the truth. ‘The dry, factual, nearly scientific language, the dates, the numbers, the maps and the logic of the narrative,’ Klein would write later, ‘it made sense. Nothing else made sense.’ Klein went immediately to see his uncle, a rheumatologist whose practice was just across the street. Klein, who was still a teenager, told him what he had read. His uncle’s reaction astonished him. The older man became so angry, he came close to hitting his nephew. ‘His face got red; he shook his head and raised his voice.’ How could György believe such nonsense? It was unthinkable, impossible. György visited other relatives and friends, passing on what he had read in the Auschwitz Report. Soon a pattern emerged. Those who were young believed it and began to make plans to evade the deportations. But the middle aged, those who, like his uncle, had dependants, careers and property– those who had much to lose– refused to believe what they were hearing. The idea of abandoning all they had, of going underground, of living on false papers or making for the border in the dead of night– the very idea of it seemed to prevent them from believing. György himself only finally made his escape when he was taken to a railway station and could see the cattle trucks waiting for him. He remembered the words he had read on those sheets of carbon paper and, even at the risk of being shot, he made a run for it. More than four decades later, Klein was sitting in the faculty club of the University of British Columbia with his unknowing saviour. Georg told Rudi that he, Georg, was proof that, even if the Vrba–Wetzler Report had been distributed as Rudi had wanted, it would not have brought the result he craved. Of the dozen or so middle-aged people Klein had warned, not one had believed him. The two men argued the point back and forth. Rudi insisted that Georg had been disbelieved because he was young: it would have been different if the Auschwitz Report had been circulated by the trusted Jewish leadership. Georg countered that those who were not young would never have taken action, no matter who had given the warning. They were used to obeying the law. To disobey meant exposing their children, in the critical moment on the railway platform, to the certainty of being gunned down. No parent would risk that, even if they had been told that death awaited them at the end of the line. ‘Denial was the most natural escape

• As it happened, the argument made by Georg Klein was not wholly new to Rudi. He had had reason before to contemplate this difficult but stubborn fact: that human beings find it almost impossible to conceive of their own death. After all, one of Rudi’s fellow Auschwitz escapees had encountered this phenomenon directly and within months of his escape. In a desperate turn of events, Czesław Mordowicz was caught by the Gestapo in late 1944 and put on a transport that would send him back to Auschwitz. Inside the cattle truck, he told his fellow deportees that he knew what awaited them. ‘Listen,’ he pleaded, ‘you are going to your death.’ Czesław urged the people jammed into the wagon to join him and jump off the moving train. They refused. Instead they began shouting, banging on the doors and calling the German guards. They attacked Mordowicz and beat him so badly, he was all but incapacitated. He never did leap off that train, but ended up back in Birkenau. All because he had given a warning that the warned could not believe and did not want to hear. Even among the prisoners inside Auschwitz, where the air was choked with the smoke of incinerating human flesh, there were those who refused to believe what they could see and smell. A former slave to Josef Mengele described how prisoners who knew only too well what happened in the gas chambers repressed that knowledge when the hour came to line up for their own execution. Even the young Walter Rosenberg had done it, when he first handled the suitcases and clothes of the dead in Kanada, pushing out of his mind his ‘vague suspicions’ about the owners of those stolen goods and their fate.

• A horror is especially hard to comprehend if no one has ever witnessed anything like it before. When Jan Karski, the undercover operative, visited Washington to brief President Roosevelt on the Nazis’ assault upon the Jews, he also met Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter. Karski told the judge what he had seen in Poland. Frankfurter listened for twenty minutes before finally saying, ‘I do not believe you.’ A diplomat in the room began to defend Karski’s credibility, prompting the judge to explain himself. ‘I did not say that he is lying. I said that I don’t believe him. These are different things. My mind and my heart are made in such a way that I cannot accept it. No. No. No.’

• Walter’s escape had been built on his initial conviction that facts could save lives, that information would be the weapon with which he would thwart the Nazi plan to eliminate the Jews. Witnessing the fate of the Czech family camp, and its residents’ immovable faith, despite the evidence all around them, that they would somehow be spared, had led him to understand a more complicated truth: that information is necessary, to be sure, but it is never sufficient. Information must also be believed, especially when it comes to mortal threats. On this, if nothing else, he and Yehuda Bauer might eventually have found common ground: only when information is combined with belief does it become knowledge. And only knowledge leads to action. The French-Jewish philosopher Raymond Aron would say, when asked about the Holocaust, ‘I knew, but I didn ’t believe it. And because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.’