1944

by Jay Winik

  And they had good times, too. While gaunt, terrified Jews shuffled into the gas chambers, or ate insects to relieve their hunger, or at the wave of an SS man’s hand watched their loved ones prepare to die, the SS forces gathered nightly at the German House, a boisterous local pub directly opposite the Auschwitz station. On one side of the road, Mengele and his medical staff were overseeing the selection process; on the other side, the SS men drank thick beer, bedded willing young females in an adjoining hotel, and swapped jokes until midnight. Drunkenness was commonplace.

  Indeed, the Nazi administration seemingly spared no expense to provide distractions and amusements for the “hardworking” SS. In the camp itself, they gathered for sing-alongs, music, and an assortment of entertainments (during the Christmas season, Jews in a chorus were compelled to sing “Silent Night”). The camp had its own concert wing, and enthusiastic bands from Germany regularly journeyed east to entertain the SS. Auschwitz also had its own theater, which featured carefree plays (what the Germans called “thief comedies”) like Disturbed Wedding Night and A Bride in Flight and such belly-laughing amusements as Attack of the Comics. There was high culture as well, as when the Dresden State Theater presented Goethe Then and Now. And as if to dispel the lengthening shadows of the gas chambers, the Nazis brought in garden designers, landscape architects, and botanists to beautify the camp; these experts included a distinguished professor of landscape design from the agricultural college in Berlin.

  In 1943, just a few weeks before a group of Hungarian Jews would be transported to Auschwitz, the Nazis held a raucous New Year’s celebration at the Ratshof Pub in the town’s market square. Dance bands had been brought from Berlin, and a renowned host from Austria. The celebratory feast consisted of an array of delicacies—goose liver and oxtail soup, “blue carp in aspic,” roast hare and biscuit roulade, Sekt and pancakes and a jelly-roll cake. The revelry went on deep into the night, whereupon dessert was served (three different kinds), accompanied by a herring salad and rich coffee. And when the music stopped, the entertainment was hardly over. The camp had also provided a comedian.

  WAS THERE EVER ANY sense of shame at Auschwitz? Or pangs of conscience among the Nazis? Or basic abhorrence? No. Nor were the Nazis hapless nobodies or simply cogs in a vast bureaucracy of death. At Auschwitz, the appetite for blood was never sated. With icy determination, the Nazi killers even complained about loopholes that prevented the deportation of some Jews to Auschwitz. By contrast, even during the long heyday of European and American slavery, some of the most eloquent thinkers of the time—like the young British prime minister William Pitt, often considered “the best brain that ever graced English politics,” or the author Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose “little book” helped incite the American Civil War—raised their voices ever louder and more furiously in defense of common humanity. And against all those who sought to profit from slave labor, there were also some like the master potter Josiah Wedgwood, who embossed on a series of his famous plates the image of a chained Negro on bended knee pointedly asking, “Am I not a man and a brother?” There was almost none of this at Auschwitz or within the larger German administration or even among the German people themselves. Instead, the Germans took a line from one of Hans Christian Andersen’s fabled tales, “everything looked as if it were outlined in flames, everything was enveloped in magic light,” and grimly turned it on its head. Here the flames were consuming the slaughtered, and the magic light was the cruel glow as flesh met fire and was turned into ashes.

  In Hitler’s Manichaean worldview, the conflict between the forces of good and evil—namely, the Aryan race and the Jews—was destined to reach a climax. Whatever happened on the battlefield, there could be no relenting in the struggle to wipe out European Jewry. “Towards Jewry,” Hitler once said, “there can be no talk of humanity.” Thus, Adolf Eichmann would one day rue that the Nazis didn’t “do more.” Thus, Heinrich Himmler would boast that the SS remained “morally decent” in the mass murder of Jews, and would lament that this planned annihilation was “a glorious chapter” that would never be written.

  But while the vast Allied armada was gathering in Britain for the D-Day invasion, and President Roosevelt was convalescing, one inmate at Auschwitz was determined that its story would be written, and read by the world. He was determined to warn Roosevelt and the Allies about the impending massacre of the Hungarian Jews and rally the forces of rescue and rebellion.

  And he was determined to do something that had never been accomplished before: to escape from Auschwitz.

  NO MAN APPEARED LESS suited to foil the Nazis or to carry the fate of Europe’s remaining Jews on his shoulders than Rudolf Vrba. Indeed, at age nineteen, he was arguably less a man than a naive adolescent. What is not in question, however, is that by this young age he had lived more than a lifetime, and seen as much suffering as anyone on earth. He was born in 1924 in Topolcany, Slovakia. In 1944 he changed his original name, Walter Rosenberg, to the more dashing and less Semitic-sounding Rudolf Vrba; to his friends he was known affectionately as Rudi. He came from modest beginnings. His father owned a sawmill; his mother was a dressmaker and homemaker, and quite proud of her cooking. She liked to tease him, and he liked to tease back. Physically, he was impressive: strikingly handsome with a mane of jet-black hair, he had a squarish build and seemed large despite his slender frame. Bushy eyebrows framed his lively dark eyes, and his face had a boxer’s chin. He was at once sentimental yet calculating, hardheaded yet softhearted, and by the admission of others, “impetuous” and “impulsive.” And since the age of seventeen, he had been either on the run or in a death camp.

  His formal education was negligible, having been cut short. In Slovakia, owing to the Nuremberg laws restricting Jews, he was forced to leave his Gymnasium (high school), at age fifteen; his name was simply struck off the roll. Yet he never lost hope with regard to learning, or to anything else for that matter. Instead of giving up, he found work as a laborer and became something of an autodidact, teaching himself Russian and English. He also spoke German fluently, and eventually Polish and Hungarian as well. In the worst of times—and virtually all of his later adolescence had been the worst of times—he somehow always maintained his infectious grin and winning ways. They would serve him well when he needed them.

  After the school doors were closed to Jews, there were other creeping restrictions. At first Slovakian Jews were unable to move and could live only in certain towns, and even there, in certain sections within those towns. Then travel was curtailed. Ghettos sprang up, and Jews were required to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing. Then came the deportation laws; Slovakia’s Jews were informed that they would be sent to work on reservations inside Poland. However, as the Nazi vise tightened around his country, Vrba was determined to make his way to freedom. In March 1942, while snow was still falling, he ripped the Star of David off his clothes, stuffed the equivalent of 10 pounds sterling into his pocket, hopped into a taxi driven by a family acquaintance, and headed not east, like so many others, but daringly west, for Britain, where he planned to join the Czech army-in-exile. Just before dawn, he crossed the border into Hungary and made his way to the house of a school friend. Within four hours, he was again sent on his way. He had tried to look the part of a gentile: he wore a business suit and carried the local Fascist newspaper under his arm. Using a second-class ticket, he had boarded an express train for Budapest. Yet the closer he got to freedom, the closer he drew to danger. After nearly being turned over to the police by a Zionist organization in Budapest (ironically, he received more help from a pragmatic Fascist, whose name he had been given by his schoolmate’s family), Vrba tried to return to Slovakia as an Aryan. Instead, he was caught and savagely beaten by Hungarian border guards, who derided him as “a dirty, bloody Yid” and put him into a transit camp in Novaky. There he quickly learned the code of a concentration camp: bribes, greed, deceit.

  Somehow, he escaped within a few weeks, wandering frantically through a thick forest
, and making his way back to the town of his birth, where he stayed for several days until he was caught again. This time, he was handed over to the SS and sent to a dreaded death camp, Majdanek.

  At Majdanek he saw row upon row of ugly barracks, ominous watchtowers, and electrified barbed wire. And he saw countless people from his hometown: librarians and schoolteachers, garage owners and shopkeepers, all in ragged striped uniforms, all with their heads shaved, all slated for slaughter. Then the shooting began. While loudspeakers blared dance music or martial songs, the SS marched men and women into separate lines at the edges of ditches, before mowing them down with machine guns. Dumbfounded, Vrba watched it all. He saw some who died with their eyes open, frozen in an expression of incomprehensible agony. He saw some who tried to crawl away after being shot. And he saw some who crumpled instantly, dying where they stood. Seventeen thousand died that day. Vrba’s brother, Sam, was among them.

  Just two weeks later, on the evening of June 30, 1942, Vrba was transferred southwest, to Auschwitz. At first, he naively thought Auschwitz would be a less dangerous place than Majdanek. He was quickly enlightened. Here, in his own words, he encountered “neatness and order and strength, the iron fist beneath the antiseptic rubber glove.” His head was shaved, and he had a number tattooed on his arm—Rudolf Vrba was now prisoner 44070.

  Whatever hope he had for survival was soon dispelled. Auschwitz was, he realized, a reeking slaughterhouse. But while some other prisoners reached the last extreme of loneliness, or spent their waning days in a robotic stupor, Vrba always kept his wits about him. While some shrieked and begged before their execution, Vrba always kept his emotions in check. While other survivors were heartbroken after their loved ones had been marched off, naked and shivering, to death, he somehow was able to summon up in his mind the remaining echoes of his former life. Driven, secretive, and iron-willed, from the outset he came up with a strategy for survival. Knowing that food meant strength—even if the tea tasted like sewer water and the lumpy bread contained sawdust—he resolved to eat as well as possible. He rapidly learned about the black market in the camp, a market that kept a lucky few alive—a person here and a person there—and brought countless others to unspeakable torture and death.

  Vrba was fortunate. To start with, he was strong, so he was a desirable worker. Then, in August 1942, he was assigned to the special slave labor unit that handled the property of the gassed victims. He was now working in the camp’s legendary storehouse, nicknamed “Canada” by inmates who imagined the actual Canada as an almost magical land of riches. Here, he sorted the possessions of the Jews transported to Auschwitz. He went through their bags after they had left the trains, and sometimes he entered the empty trains to clear away the bodies of the dead. Working in “Canada,” Vrba had access to the SS food store, with its tall stacks of cans—marmalade, nuts, jam, vegetables, ham, beef, and fruit—assembled for the enjoyment of the SS and nearly all available to be pilfered. He learned that lemons were highly prized because they contained vitamin C. There was even, for the enterprising, steak.

  When not plotting his survival, Vrba took careful notice of the apparatus of death. For the next eleven months, he had a rare vantage point of not only living in the camp, but of also being present for the arrival of most of the transports. He was stunned to see just how little the dazed and disoriented newcomers knew about Auschwitz as they feebly climbed off the trains. Sorting through their luggage, he learned that they had packed sweaters for the winter, shorts for the summer, sturdy shoes for the fall, cotton shirts for the spring—in short, clothing for a full year. They had brought gold and silver and diamonds to pay for goods or to make bribes. They also brought with them the basics of domesticity, items like cups, cutlery, and other utensils, an obvious indication that many believed they were simply being “resettled” somewhere in the east.

  Not a day passed that Vrba didn’t dream of escaping. He was always conscious that, although he had managed to survive so far, every day brought him “nearer to death in one form or another.” Still, in the summer of 1943, he dramatically improved his position at Auschwitz when he was appointed a registrar at Birkenau’s quarantine camp. There, he was provided with normal clothes, was afforded relative freedom to move about the camp without hindrance, and had access to better food. He made further contacts with a fledgling camp underground—which remained fledgling because its members were continually being killed off.

  And patiently and diligently, he began to compile statistics of the mass murders being committed daily. His memory was phenomenal. He made a mental note of each transport that arrived, and carefully recorded the number of people. He committed to memory the sequence of tattooed identification numbers allocated to each group of victims on arrival. And by conferring with other registrars, he was able to calculate the amount of fuel burned, and hence the number of bodies being cremated. He also questioned the Sonderkommando, the group of strong, young male Jews picked by the Nazis to remove the bodies from the gas chambers and crematoriums (those chosen for the Sonderkommando who did not accept were gassed or shot). In this way he learned the details of how the gas chambers worked. Finally, though young, he became a courier for the resistance inside the camp.

  If survival is a test of ability, he was the most able of all, maneuvering safely through crisis after crisis, escaping death and beatings and discovery; he seemed to have nine lives and bartered and sold them all. Once, he almost died; but he managed to be, for lack of a better term, “promoted” repeatedly, to the point where he became almost “a semi-permanent fixture” in the camp. Earning the trust of the Germans, to the extent that this was possible, he never went hungry; and while others cruelly starved to death, he was able to nibble on a piece of chocolate here and there, eat sardines from Portugal, or wash down a piece of yellow cheese with lemon-flavored water.

  In another rarity, people even began to call him by his first name.

  How did he deal with the suffering and death all around him? To have known that such things existed and to have withstood them must have been an inexpressible horror. And now, in the late summer of 1943, Vrba had remained alive in Auschwitz for over one year. He had, by his own admission, become “a little numb to suffering.” This was an understatement. But then the world of Auschwitz turned. On September 7, four thousand Czechoslovak Jews from the Theresienstadt ghetto arrived. They came as families, men carrying luggage, children clutching dolls and teddy bears. The SS men joked with these newcomers. They played with the children. The prisoners were neither sent off to the gas chambers nor dispatched to the work camp. Nor were the families separated. And their heads were not shaved. They were allowed to keep their own clothes and to live in relative comfort in an adjoining camp built especially for them. Far from being beaten, they were pampered.

  Gazing across the barbed wire, Vrba and the other starving survivors watched in amazement. While each day thousands of inmates wasted away, dragging their feet when it became too difficult to walk, and spitting up blood or black saliva, these Czechs seemed to lead an almost idyllic life. The children had a playground where the SS organized games for them. A little school had been set up in a wooden stable; it was run by a former Berlin sports instructor. The families were provided with soap and medicine and better food. And periodically guards, while tussling with them gently, would bring sweets and fruit for the frolicking children. The question, of course, was why.

  The more Vrba dug, the more he learned. First came a little shock. Sleuthing around in the registrar’s office, he realized that the Czech prisoners’ tattoos bore no relationship to Auschwitz. Then came a bigger shock. He also saw that each prisoner was registered with a unique card that stated: “six months quarantine with special treatment.” Special treatment was code for extermination.

  Vrba soon figured it out. The Theresienstadt ghetto and its Jews were a distorted fantasy of the Third Reich. Theresienstadt was one place where the Nazis periodically allowed access for the observers of the foreign division
of the German Red Cross, to dispel increasingly widespread rumors of mass executions. Indeed in late February 1944, Adolf Eichmann himself showed the Auschwitz family camp to the head of that Red Cross division as proof of Germany’s humane treatment of these Jews. The Czechs were being used as pawns in the Nazis’ fiction that the millions of Jews were not being exterminated in death camps, but merely being resettled in work camps in the east. Thus, these four thousand were kept separate—separate from the gassings and the systematic beatings, separate from the misery and monstrous cruelties. For six months, the four thousand thrived. They made friends, taught their children, had family suppers, fell in love, carried on life almost normally, and dreamed of freedom. But the end came as quickly as the beginning. On March 3, they were instructed to write postcards home faithfully reporting the comfort in which they were living—but the Nazis shrewdly stamped these cards with the address Neu Berun, a small town five miles northwest of the actual death camp, thereby preserving Auschwitz’s secrecy. To complete the deception, the inmates were instructed to ask their relatives to send them parcels of food. And all the cards were to be postdated by three weeks.

  Then suddenly, on March 7, six months to the day after their arrival, footsteps could be heard as SS guards surrounded the special camp.

  Already, the Sonderkommando had been told to stoke the fires of the crematoriums.

  In mid-afternoon, the trucks came. Immune to the cries of the children and flailing the prisoners mercilessly with clubs, a small army of Kapos (trusties) forced them onto the transports and headed for the gas chambers. At the sight of the undressing room, the enormity of their fate became clear. They had smelled the smoke from the crematoriums for months. They knew what awaited them. Too late, they set upon the guards and fought back with their fists. But the end came as quickly as the beginning. The SS men were ready. Moving with quick, firm strides, they clubbed their recalcitrant victims with rifle butts, and when that didn’t fully work, used flamethrowers. The naked prisoners, heads smashed and bleeding profusely from their wounds, were driven into the chamber. As the gas pellets clinked down through the roof, they began to sing first the Czechoslovak national anthem and then the Hebrew song Hatikvah until they gave themselves over to their execution.