by Alex Kershaw
ALICE AND ERWIN had known each other less than a year, first meeting as medical students in the pathology department at the Jewish General Hospital in Budapest in the fall of 1943.28 “The first thing she did was try to kick me out of the laboratory,” recalled Erwin. “But then I explained to her that I was studying the same subject. We talked. She was brilliant, very fast thinking, well informed. She loved classical music and lived and breathed medicine.”29
It was not long before Erwin, with his dark, swept-back hair and fine Slavic features, had fallen in love with Alice. Then came the German occupation of March 19, 1944, and everything the future promised was stolen. The Nazi war machine held Hungary firmly in its vice, and Alice had begun to worry about her family, who lived in a small town near the Czech border. All she had wanted was to be with them, even if that meant she might not see Erwin again. “I tried to console her [Alice],” remembered Erwin, “but the repeated screams from a nearby police station, heard clearly from [Alice’s] apartment, meant that somebody was being beaten, which did not mitigate her worries [about her family].”30
Alice had decided to return to her family. With heavy heart, Erwin had kissed her goodbye at a train station in Budapest.31 “I was very worried what would happen to her,” he remembered. “I realized that the Jews in Budapest were in a better situation because of the sheer number of them, over one hundred thousand, plus a lot of illegal people who had come from various countries. But in Kormend, a small little town with just three hundred Jews, it would be so easy to round them all up and put them on a train to Auschwitz.”
Erwin’s worst fears were soon confirmed: A few weeks after Alice returned to Kormend, she and her family were taken to a ghetto.
Erwin had acted fast. With a friend of his, he had stolen a letterhead and rubber stamps from his university—these had been crucial because with the officious yet uneducated Hungarian gendarmes, Erwin recalled, “any piece of paper, even toilet paper with a stamp on it, became unbelievably important. We wrote a letter that was so stupid that we laughed at it. It ordered Alice to immediately report in Budapest in the national interest because of the need for medical staff. We placed all kinds of stamps all over it.”32
It worked. Alice was allowed to return to Budapest at the end of April. She joined Erwin and his family in their new home: an apartment building, marked by a large yellow star, in a run-down part of Pest that had been designated for the Jews. Gone forever was the stylish, elegantly furnished home that Erwin had grown up in, its huge garden filled with more than three thousand sweetly-scented rose bushes.33 Reunited, Erwin and Alice discussed marriage. “My mother and Erwin’s parents also talked about me and Erwin getting married,” recalled Alice. “Everybody thought it was better, safer to be married. We had ten days to marry—then I could legally stay in Budapest. At this time, boyfriends were not just boyfriends.”34 They were potential saviors for young women from the provinces.35
Erwin’s mother had told Alice that she would care for her as if she were her own daughter. “I will love you my girl,” she had said. “You will be my daughter. I will be your mother.”
“I don’t need a mother,” Alice had replied. “I have one.”
But in the end, Alice agreed to become Erwin’s wife. And so she and Erwin were married in a rushed civil ceremony at City Hall. To celebrate, they had gone to one of the few restaurants in Budapest where Jews were still permitted. For a honeymoon, recalled Erwin, they had sipped an “espresso coffee.”36 Not long after, Alice had somehow learned that her family was going to be deported from Kormend. “My whole family—all my friends, everybody I knew,” she recalled. “I was desperate. So I decided to go to Eichmann’s place.”37
ALICE GOT OFF THE COGWHEEL RAILWAY at a stop a few hundred yards from the Majestic Hotel. Gray-uniformed German soldiers patrolled the winding, steep streets lined with elegant mansions. Not far from the heavily guarded entrance to the Majestic, a German soldier approached Alice. To her amazement, he did not want to spit on her or kick her. He smiled at her and appeared friendly, even though she was wearing a yellow star on her coat.
It was soon clear to Alice from the German soldier’s polite questions that he had taken a fancy to her. “It’s such nice weather,” the German said. Alice was too afraid to turn her back on him. So they talked. The German soldier explained that he had been a teacher before the war, and for a few minutes they had a “nice conversation.” As they approached the entrance to the Majestic, Alice told the German soldier it would be embarrassing for him to be seen with her. Guards were watching. She was a Jew, after all.
The German held out his hand.
“Thank you for the nice company.”
They parted and Alice then walked fearlessly right up to the SS guards outside the Majestic.
“I would like to talk to Colonel Eichmann.”38
Alice was ushered inside the entrance, across a small bridge, and into Eichmann’s luxurious headquarters. To her surprise, the guards did not search her. Clearly, she must have been summoned by Eichmann himself; all sorts of Jewish and Hungarian riffraff turned up at his office these days. Why else would a young Jewish woman be asking to go inside the Majestic?
“Go in,” a guard said.
One of Eichmann’s men opened a door. Eichmann was in his office. Alice stepped inside. The thin-lipped, chain-smoking Eichmann was sitting at a table with several of his aides. A window behind his desk allowed a magnificent view of Budapest.
Eichmann looked up.
“What’s this about?”
Alice nervously tried to explain that she needed a travel pass to Kormend.
“What’s she saying?” said Eichmann. “What’s she saying?”
Eichmann clearly couldn’t understand what she was doing there. “He could have just shot me, but he was so astonished,” she later recalled. “He was very ordinary looking. He had a gun and he was wearing a gray uniform.”
“Out! Out!” snapped Eichmann. “Out! Out!”
Alice left quickly. Amazingly, she was seen out of the Majestic by Eichmann’s own guards. She was not harmed. Then she began to walk down toward Pest, back to the small, cramped apartment where there was no privacy, no place even to sit alone with one’s fears.
Soon, the episode with Eichmann seemed like a dream. She had so desperately wanted to go home to Kormend and be with her friends and family. But now she knew there was no way she could get to them. Her visit to Eichmann had failed. “It was a terrible time,” she recalled. “Every day I woke up and decided ‘this is the day I am going to die. I don’t want to live.’”39
Part Two
DARKNESS AT NOON
5
Escape from Auschwitz
THE TWO MEN, wearing suits taken from murdered Dutchmen, scrambled out from their hiding place beneath a pile of wood and into the cold Polish night. For a second or so, the two men sat on the pile of wood and looked back at the most notorious death camp in history—Auschwitz. “The brilliant lights painted a soft yellow patch in the darkness,” recalled one of the men, twenty-year-old Rudolf Vrba, “giving the whole place a mysterious aura that was almost beautiful. We, however, knew that it was a terrible beauty, that in those barracks, people were dying, people were starving, people were intriguing, and murder lurked around every corner.”
The two Slovak Jews finally turned their backs to the camp. They dropped to the ground, lay flat, and began to crawl slowly on their stomachs, away from the watchtowers and toward the first cover they could find, a copse of birch trees. “We reached it, rose, and ran, stooping through it until we came to open ground again and began to crawl once more,” recalled Vrba. “It was dark and, if we did not keep going, the dawn would catch us in the open. We moved on; and then, when we least expected it, we came to an entirely unexpected obstacle. At first I thought it was a river. It was about eight yards wide, with a whitish ribbon stretching as far as I could see on either side.”1
Vrba bent down to investigate. It was sand. If they stepped in
it, their footprints would tell the Germans where they were headed. But they had no choice but to continue, so they sprinted through the miniature desert, then across a field of ferns.
They slowed down to read a sign:Attention! This is Auschwitz concentration camp.
Anyone found on these moors will be shot without warning!2
BEFORE TRYING TO ESCAPE, Vrba had worked on the Canada ramp as part of the cleaning up detachment. It had been his job to sort new arrivals’ possessions and search them for precious objects and money. He had himself been part of the selection process, going to the right rather than the left on his arrival in 1942. He knew now that he had been saved only so he could help Germany profit from the industrial slaughter of his fellow Jews, by scavenging among their cast-off possessions and the piles of rags and clothes for objects and materials that could be put to use. He would forever bear the evidence of his slave labor for the Third Reich—a tattoo with his number, 44070.
Cursed, or perhaps blessed, with a photographic memory, Rudolf Vrba had kept a tally of how many other Jews had arrived at Auschwitz since he had been there. He was able to make reasonable estimates because his job meant he was on the ramp when transports unloaded and when they left. He could tell by looking at the belongings of new arrivals that they did not know they were about to be exterminated. These Jews had believed the Nazis’ lies about being resettled to the East, the same lies Eichmann repeated that April to the gullible in Budapest.
Someone had to warn people about Auschwitz, and Vrba was determined to try. There had come a point that winter of 1943-44, he recalled, when “it was no longer a question of reporting a crime, but of preventing one; of warning the Hungarians, of rousing them, of raising an army one million strong, an army that would fight rather than die.”3 In January 1944, Vrba saw that a new railway line was being built. This would mean that transports could be taken from sidings in faraway communities, such as Kormend, right to the gas chambers, a significant improvement in the machinery of death.
Vrba had thought about escape since the moment he arrived. But he had soon become aware of just how difficult it would be and therefore had planned his attempt meticulously. “Auschwitz was the most heavily guarded camp in Europe,” he recalled. The camp was a “secret which the Nazis were determined would never be revealed, for once even a whisper about it escaped, the sheep would no longer walk quietly into the slaughterhouse.” 4
Since arriving in Auschwitz, Vrba had befriended a twenty-two-year-old called Alfred Wetzler, who came from his hometown in Slovakia. Wetzler had a job in the Birkenau mortuary, where among other tasks he counted the amount of gold taken from dead Jews’ teeth. That winter of 1943-44, the two men had agreed to try to escape together. The date they had set for their escape was April 7, 1944, on the eve of Passover.
Unknown to both men, just four days before, on April 3, U.S. aircraft had photographed Auschwitz and its crematoria. There would soon be strident calls for the camp to be bombed, not simply photographed, but Allied strategists decided that history’s greatest death factory was a “secondary war target” and did not do so, a failure that continues to ignite fierce debate to this day.5
WETZLER AND VRBA PASSED BY the warning sign. They knew they had to reach the cover of the nearest forest before it got light. By dawn, they were crossing a cornfield. Suddenly, they saw a group of women guarded by SS men. They threw themselves to the ground, hearts racing, then crawled on their stomachs through the field. Two hours later, they reached the forest. They stopped to rest for a few minutes before continuing onward, through the tightly bunched firs. But then they heard children’s voices. Peeking through bushes, they saw a large group of Hitler Youth, chattering away innocently, as they wound through the forest. The children sat down only thirty yards from the men. “We were trapped,” recalled Vrba, “not by the SS this time, but by their children!”
For around an hour, the men lay in the bushes. It began to rain. The children quickly left to escape the downpour and the men hurried onward, boots sinking into the now soggy ground. Several miles from Auschwitz, exhaustion caught up with them. “It’s time we slept,” Vrba said. “Let’s find somewhere to hide, somewhere that not even the SS would bring women.” They looked around and found some bushes. “A watery sun filtered through the branches,” recalled Vrba. “The more enthusiastic birds twittered over our heads; and Fred lectured me amiably on the finer points of chess until we fell asleep.”
They awoke a few hours later and headed toward the Slovak border, several miles away. On a mountainside near the border, as they again lay resting, there was a rifle shot. They had been spotted by a German patrol with dogs. “We ran, scrambling, stumbling up our hill through the snow,” recalled Vrba. “If we could reach the top and disappear into the valley on the other side, we had a chance, but we had to cover that ground under fire and the Germans were blazing away.”
Fred was ahead of Vrba and dived behind a large rock. Vrba followed him but then fell. Bullets ricocheted off stones nearby. Vrba pressed his face to the dirt and tried to remain still.
“We’ve got him!” shouted a German. “Cease fire!”
As the Germans moved toward Vrba, he made a dash for it. The Germans opened fire again, but he reached the rock and took cover.
“C’mon!” said Fred. “Head for the trees.”
They made it to a tree line, across a cold stream and into a forest. It seemed as though they had thrown the Germans off their scent by crossing the stream because the baying of dogs became more and more distant. On they trudged. The next day, Vrba and Fred Wetzler crossed into Slovakia. It was April 21, 1944. A local farmer helped the two men reach a Jewish doctor in a town called Cadca who guided them to Zilina. By April 25, 1944, Vrba and Wetzler were drinking sherry in the headquarters of the Jewish community in Zilina, celebrating their escape.
Then they began to tell the Jewish leaders in Zilina about their time in Auschwitz. “For hours I dictated my testimony,” recalled Wetzler. “I gave them detailed statistics of the deaths. I described every step of the awful confidence trick by which 1,760,000 in my time in the camp alone had been lured to the gas chambers. I explained the machinery of the extermination factory and its commercial side, the vast profits that were reaped from the robbery of gold, jewelry, money, clothes, artificial limbs, spectacles, prams, and human hair, which was used to caulk torpedo heads. I told them how even the ashes were used as fertilizer.”6
Vrba stressed that there was no time to lose.
“One million Hungarians are going to die,” he said. “Auschwitz is ready for them. But if you tell them now, they will rebel. They will never go to the ovens. Your turn is coming. Now it is the Hungarians’ hour. You must tell them immediately.”
“Don’t worry,” one of the Jewish leaders assured Vrba. “We are daily in contact with the Hungarian leaders. Your report will be in their hands first thing tomorrow.”
Every day that spring, Vrba asked for news from Hungary, hoping to hear about an uprising. But the Jewish leaders there, including Rudolf Kasztner, did not warn the Hungarian Jews about Auschwitz. In their defense, they later claimed with some justification that they wanted to avoid an uprising, which they believed would be savagely repressed, as one had been in the Warsaw ghetto. With the Soviets advancing fast toward them in the East, the Jewish leaders in Budapest decided to try instead to buy time by negotiating with Eichmann. It was a terrible gamble, for in doing so they played right into Eichmann’s hands. By now, he had finalized transport schedules for the swift and massive deportation of Hungary’s Jews.
Kasztner would later be shot dead on a street in Israel after a trial in which he was accused of collaborating with the Nazis and roundly criticized for failing to warn Hungary’s Jews about Auschwitz, even though he had read the Vrba report.a Indeed, it emerged that he had even discussed it with Eichmann while trying to negotiate for the safe passage of a train of Jews, which included his own relatives, to Switzerland. In a meeting in Eichmann’s office at the Maj
estic, recalled Kasztner, he showed Eichmann a German translation of the so-called Auschwitz Protocols. He hoped it would increase pressure on Eichmann to slow down deportations.
“How long?” asked Kasztner, “will it take for the Jewish Agency, for American Jewry, for the world, to find out about this?”
Eichmann smiled as he flicked through the report. Then he threw it across his desk at Kasztner.
“Herr Doktor, do you really believe this nonsense?”
Kasztner did not reply.
“I had thought better of you,” continued Eichmann. “Surely you recognize this as another fairy tale. I warned you people to stay clear of horror stories. This is the kind of bullshit that will get your slandering body in front of a military judge. It’s treason to spread this kind of nonsense, Kasztner—the kind of treason that would see you and your stupid little bunch hanged!”7
6
The Cruelest Summer
THAT MAY OF 1944, newlywed eighteen-year-old Alice and her husband, Erwin, tried to continue their studies, still determined to become doctors. But it was practically impossible. New laws restricting the movement of Jews meant they could leave the “crowded, seedy hole” they shared with Erwin’s parents in an apartment block only between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.1
Like all other Jewish men of arms-bearing age, twenty-year-old Erwin now worked in a forced labor battalion. By an order of the Jewish Council, shortly after Eichmann’s arrival, he had been transferred to a group that was building an air-raid shelter in Budapest’s leafy suburb of Schwabenberg, where Eichmann had set up his headquarters at the Majestic Hotel.