The Auschwitz Escape

by Joel C. Rosenberg

“Because we know what we’re doing, and you don’t,” Otto said frankly. “We’ll get you ready. We’ll help you develop a plan and teach you everything we’ve learned and tell you whom to contact when you get out—if you get out—and what to tell them. But you’ll have to pull together all the supplies. And you’ll need to agree to do exactly what we say, no questions asked.”

  What? They had to be joking, Jacob thought. “I can’t agree to that,” he said bluntly. “Not yet. I have questions first. Then I’ll give you my answer.”

  “There’s only so much we can tell you before you say yes,” Abe warned.

  “Nevertheless,” Jacob insisted.

  Otto and Abe looked at each other, said nothing, then turned back to Jacob. So far, Jacob had not touched his tea. But he did now, sweetening it with a few drops of honey and savoring every ounce. He was battling conflicting emotions and trying to keep his thoughts in order. Coming into the meeting, he had been ready to pounce on these two. He’d been angry that they had left him out to dry and run the very real risk that he could have dropped dead from starvation or exposure or exhaustion or been randomly beaten or shot by one of the crazed guards who ran this insane asylum. Now, however, he could see their rationale. If he was being watched, they obviously needed to wait. He was new. They needed to see him be tested through many trials and find the will and wisdom and craftiness necessary to survive. Now they had brought him in because he had passed all their tests. He just wished someone could have bothered to tell him any of this ahead of time so he could have known what was happening.

  “Okay, I guess I have just one question for now,” Jacob said at last.

  “What is it?” Otto asked.

  “Did Luc tell you what I’ve learned about the Hungarians, and have you heard the same things, and is it all true, and what can we do about it?”

  Abe laughed. “That’s four questions.”

  “Consider them one,” Jacob said with a newfound assertiveness that sounded more like his uncle Avi than like him or his father.

  “Fair enough,” Abe replied. “Yes, we’d heard some vague rumors about the Hungarians. We’ve been hearing them for several months, but we’re impressed you picked up on it as well and that you were able to get us such specific information. That was good work, and that’s why we’ve got to move now. Piotr and his team got out. But we don’t know what happened to them. Ever since they left, we haven’t heard anything from the Resistance on the outside. We have no idea why. Maybe Piotr and his men were eventually captured and killed. Maybe they’re still in hiding and never reconnected to the Resistance. Maybe they told the Resistance and the leadership doesn’t believe them or didn’t have the resources to come liberate us. Or maybe it’s something different altogether. We don’t know. But we can’t wait around any longer.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Jacob said.

  “Good, but that’s not all.”

  At this point, Otto picked up the story. “As best we can tell, the Hungarian Jews will be rounded up in June or July and shipped here. There won’t be a selection process when they get here—‘You go left; you go right.’ They’ll get off the trains and be marched straight into the gas chambers. So as you’ve been saying to Luc, this is why we absolutely have to go now. We have to warn the Jewish council in Budapest to keep their people off the trains. But time is running out. We have to get to them soon. And here I must make a personal confession, Jacob.”

  “What is it?” Jacob asked.

  “For almost two years, from the moment I set foot in this wretched place, I have thought of nothing but escaping,” Otto said. “At first, it was just selfish. I wanted my freedom. Over time, though, that changed. The more I saw here, the more I developed an objective reason. I wanted to escape to tell the world what was happening at Auschwitz. But now I have an urgent, imperative reason. It’s no longer a question of reporting a crime. Now it’s a matter of preventing a crime. A terrible crime. The act of genocide. We must warn the Hungarians. We must rouse them. We cannot change the evil that has been done so far. But I will never be able to live with myself if I don’t do everything possible to stop the genocide yet to come.”

  63

  For the next two nights, the three men again gathered secretly after dinner.

  Otto and Abe laid out their plans for Jacob. They walked through their carefully developed checklist of what they needed to do—day by day, step by step—and what supplies they needed to gather.

  They had not committed any of this to writing, of course. Even if they’d had access to paper, pens, or pencils, to do so was far too dangerous. But they methodically walked Jacob through the reasoning behind each step and the lessons they had learned in developing the plan over several years. And one of the things they made clear right up front was their deep trust in Jean-Luc Leclerc.

  “Work closely with Luc,” Abe told Jacob. “Get his input. Listen to his advice. Use the bakery as a staging area to store all the supplies you’ll be gathering. Luc’s a good man. He’s going to be an invaluable asset for you.”

  Jacob readily agreed. He had no problem with Luc. The man wasn’t Jewish, but then again, Leszek hadn’t been Jewish either. And Luc clearly was a useful ally. He seemed a sober, focused, and trustworthy man. In a place like this, that was an incredible thing.

  The entire process that unfolded from this point forward was electrifying for Jacob. He had dreamed of a time like this for so long and then given up on it, then gotten excited again, only to see his hopes fade. But now, finally, the moment of truth had come. Maybe Abby was right. Maybe it was all a matter of divine timing.

  One of the most interesting things Jacob learned was that while there had indeed been close to eight hundred escape attempts from Auschwitz since the camp opened in May of 1940, not all of them had been unsuccessful. In fact, there had been a number of successful escapes. Not all of the stories were applicable to the present circumstances, of course. After all, each time someone had gotten out, Hoess and his men had figured out the holes the escapees had exploited and made sure to plug them. Steinberger and Frenkel weren’t going to be able to copy precisely what had worked in the past. But each of the successful getaways—including Leszek’s—had provided proof that it was possible to get out of this hellhole, and that was the most important thing. Auschwitz-Birkenau was not impenetrable. When it came to foiling the camp’s defenses, Jacob now knew it could be done, and as he listened to the stories—each as exciting as it was harrowing—he grew increasingly confident it could be done again.

  The first successful escape occurred in the summer of 1940 when a Polish shoemaker named Tadeusz Wiejowski broke free with the help of five Polish citizens who lived near the camp. They helped Wiejowski cut through the fence wires and then provided him normal clothes and shoes, food to eat, water for his trip, and money to take a train far away. Otto noted that the local Polish population hated the Nazis who had invaded and raped their country. They didn’t know all that was happening in the camp, but at the very least they could see men were starving to death behind the fences.

  Then Abe noted that while Hoess’s men never caught Wiejowski, they did eventually hunt down and capture the five Poles who had assisted his escape. Four of the five later died in Auschwitz. After that, the Nazis forcibly removed every Pole from every house in a forty-kilometer radius around the camps. Some houses remained empty. Others now housed Nazi officials or families of Nazi guards.

  This intelligence was critical, Jacob saw. It meant that even if a man could slip through all of Von Strassen’s security measures, he still was in grave danger far beyond the guard towers and searchlights, and he could never trust help from any civilian he met.

  The most dramatic escape, to Jacob at least, was the one that had occurred on June 20, 1942. That was the day that four men—three Poles and a Ukrainian—brazenly stole Nazi uniforms from a storage closet. They suited up as SS officers, walked into the motor pool—miraculously without setting off any alarm bells—and got into Rudolf Ho
ess’s personal staff car, a Steyr 200. To their astonishment, the keys were in the ignition. They started the car and drove out of the garage and on toward the main gate. As they approached, the guards were startled to see Hoess’s car. They hadn’t been notified about his departure. But the driver started shouting at them to wake up and open the gate.

  “What happened?” Jacob asked.

  “What do you think?” said Otto, who was telling the story. “They opened the gate.”

  “And the men just drove away?”

  “They just drove away.”

  “What happened to them after they got out?”

  “We have no idea. But you’ll like this. They were carrying a report written by Leszek explaining what was happening here.”

  “And they really made it?” Jacob asked.

  “So far as we know,” Abe said.

  “Unbelievable.”

  “I know.” Otto began to chuckle. “Can you imagine? I mean, wouldn’t you have loved to have seen the look on Hoess’s face when he came down for a drive the next morning and found his precious car missing, along with four prisoners?”

  They were all smiling now.

  This is really happening, Jacob thought to himself. I’m not just going to escape from Auschwitz. I’m being trained for it by people who really know what they’re doing.

  But then came the countervailing thoughts: Why me? Am I really ready for this? What if I fail? I will never forgive myself.

  64

  The next day at work, Jacob said nothing to Luc.

  He wanted to, but he had been given strict orders not to say anything to anyone—including Luc—at least for now.

  And then, two days later, Jacob was transferred out of the bakery. This was Otto and Abe’s doing. Luc was part of their plan. Indeed, they needed Luc and Jacob to be allies, Abe said. But for operational security, they didn’t want the two men to be physically in such proximity. Plus, they had a new mission for Jacob now, and that required him to have new responsibilities and new freedoms.

  Jacob was now to be a registrar. Like Otto and Abe, both of whom were also registrars, Jacob would keep careful statistics on all the goings-on of the prisoners in the block to which he was assigned and run errands for his block senior.

  Otto’s advice echoed what Leszek had said months before. “As long as you keep your ledger under your arm and you walk around looking annoyed and worried and in a hurry, you’re basically free to go anywhere in the camp you want to. No one’s going to stop you. No one’s going to ask you pesky questions. Just constantly mutter to yourself and look harried, and you’ll hardly be noticed.”

  This was a significant development, for now Jacob had not only the cover he needed to make critical preparations for Otto and Abe to escape, but also the access he needed to key people and key buildings. Within a few days he had begun to acquire the supplies they had assigned him, and inwardly he smiled, noting that their list was for the most part the same one he had compiled for himself months ago. They wanted a backpack, a sweater, a jacket, two civilian shirts, a pair of trousers, sturdy walking shoes, a half-dozen pairs of clean wool socks, a flashlight, a Swiss Army knife, a wristwatch, a small pot for making coffee, and a box of matches.

  Then they asked for something Jacob would never have imagined: large amounts of Russian tobacco, soaked in petrol. That part seemed odd. They didn’t say why they needed it, and Jacob did not ask. He had to get moving.

  It was dangerous to be looking for such things. It was even more dangerous to be gathering such items and stashing them away. But Jacob wasn’t supposed to merely take the risks necessary to get enough supplies for Otto and Abe. He was supposed to get a second complete set of supplies for a backup team and a third set for himself and whoever was eventually recruited to escape with him. The entire concept was terrifying. It would call on him to remember every detail of every lesson he had learned since arriving at the death camp and would require him to use every trusted relationship he had developed thus far.

  Everything began with storage, he decided. Even if he could gather the needed items, if he didn’t have a safe and secure place to hide them, what was the point? This, in turn, led him back to Luc and the bakery. Abe had told him to use the bakery as a staging area, and Jacob had to agree that it was perfect. While cleaning every nook and cranny of that place day after day, Jacob had found plenty of places to hide bits of bread that fell to the floor that he couldn’t eat fast enough or the extra apples Luc might toss his way.

  There were loose floorboards in the workroom in the back. Jacob could hide the clothing beneath them. There was a narrow crawl space behind the ovens. He might be able to hide the backpacks there. Or better still, he had once helped Luc hide a whole box of carrots by pushing up some ceiling tiles and storing the box in the rafters.

  There was, of course, always the risk the Czechs could stumble upon the contraband. Jacob liked the Czechs, but he was not entirely certain he could trust them on something like this. When he discussed the matter with Luc, the Frenchman said he was certain they could trust the Czechs. He didn’t think they should tell them specifically what they were doing or show them the supplies they were hiding. But Luc was confident that if the Czechs stumbled upon the hidden goods, they wouldn’t steal them or squeal.

  It was settled, Jacob decided. The bakery was ground zero.

  In their planning, Jacob realized that Abby was also going to be critical because she still worked at the medical clinic and because the clinic was in the main camp, Auschwitz-I. After all, most of the things that Otto and Abe and the rest of them needed could only be gotten from inside the Canada warehouse, which of course was at the original camp. But as Jacob noted, they could not simply carry their stolen supplies over to Birkenau in a single shipment, or even several shipments. Even after acquiring what they needed from Canada, it would likely take several weeks to hide the items in otherwise-legitimate boxes of medical supplies moving between the two camps. Where was Jacob going to keep the rest in the meantime? The medical clinic seemed best.

  It would create an enormous risk for Abby, and he worried about that. But then an idea occurred to him. When it was time for him to make his break, why not take Abby with him? She was young and healthy and smart, and she had been a loyal member of Leszek’s team, had she not? With the death of Max, hadn’t she suffered faithfully for the cause of the Resistance? Otto and Abe said they wanted a team of two. Why not Abby? For now, however, Jacob kept this thought to himself.

  As February unfolded, Jacob focused his mind solely on the highest priorities: safely gathering three full sets of the necessary supplies and getting them into position at the bakery without being caught. He would approach Otto and Abe with the “Abby question” once he had proven himself faithful in these central things.

  Jacob’s original plan was to gather the three backpacks first, then the six sets of civilian clothing, then the six sets of shoes, and so forth. But Otto demurred. He and Abe were analyzing several different escape routes and also monitoring the weather. When conditions were perfect, Otto said, they would have to move quickly. He and Abe insisted, therefore, that Jacob compile one full set of supplies immediately, and only then gather a full second set, and then the third. Jacob argued that this was more dangerous, as it required him to go back to each source three times. But Otto refused to budge. They had to have one full set ready by April 1, he said. The second set could be ready by May 1, the third by June 1.

  Jacob pushed back one last time. “Once you two escape, assuming they don’t catch you, Von Strassen and his thugs are going to crack down hard,” Jacob argued. “You said it yourselves. They’re going to look for the holes, and they’re going to plug them. That means the rules for the guards will be changed. That means our methods of operating will have to change. Searches of prisoners going back and forth from Auschwitz to Birkenau will be intensified. Boxes of medical supplies will be scrutinized more carefully. Anyone connected with you two will be interrogated thoroughly. It
’ll be ugly.”

  “What’s your point?” Otto asked.

  “My point is that once you guys go, the next two teams need to be ready to roll,” Jacob insisted. “When one of them sees an opportunity to move, they need to be just as ready then as you want to be by April 1.”

  Otto and Abe listened carefully to the argument. Jacob was certain they were going to say no. To his surprise, however, they ended up agreeing with his logic.

  “Okay, everything needs to be ready for all three escapes by April 1,” Otto said. “That’s going to put a lot of pressure on you, Jacob. It’s going to be a lot more dangerous. But let’s make one thing clear.”

  “What?”

  “You still have to assemble the supplies team by team, starting with Abe and me.”

  Jacob reluctantly agreed.

  “Good,” Abe said. “Any more questions?”

  “Yes,” Jacob said bluntly. “I have two. First of all, who is on the second team?”

  Otto looked uncomfortable. “Why do you want to know?” he asked.

  “I need their sizes to get the right shoes and clothes for them.”

  Otto and Abe stepped away for a moment to confer. When they came back, they conceded that Jacob was right. They had been holding the names tightly for obvious reasons, to reduce the risk of their leaking out. But they agreed to tell Jacob the names to allow him to make his final preparations.

  “The men on the second team are Judah Fischer and Milos Kopecký,” Abe explained. “Do you know either of them?”

  Jacob shook his head.

  “That’s probably better for now,” Abe said. “Kopecký is a Slovak Jew. Fischer is Polish. Kopecký has been here a couple of years. He was originally assigned to be a Sonderkommando, but he managed to get out of it by bribing somebody and got himself transferred. Eventually he became a block senior. He’s over in Barrack 24. Fischer got here in December of ’42. His mother and sister were killed in the gas chambers. All he had was his father. When his father died too, he got sent to a work detail in Buna. It nearly killed him. One of our men got him transferred back to an inside job, a registrar in Barrack 18. We fed him, watched out for him, helped him get his strength back. Both are good men. And they’ve been very resourceful, to say the least. I’ll tell you more later. Now, what’s your second question?”