1944

by Jay Winik

  Standing in the mountains, they could see a town in the valley below them. After the stench of Auschwitz, they could now take deep breaths; the air was crisp and clean. Nearby was the Sola River. As for the village, they remembered from what the captured Slovaks in Auschwitz had told them, that there was a heavy, well-armed German presence. They gazed down at the town, knowing that they could make plans to go around it. Suddenly, there was a sharp noise, like a violent clap of hands, or a firecracker. A bullet whistled directly over their heads. On a neighboring hill, they saw the glint of guns. A German patrol, with dogs barking, was coming after them—fast. Their only hope was to somehow make it to the top of the hill and then to the valley below.

  They stiffened for a moment, then ran, their feet slipping on the wet rocks and the heavy spring snow. Around them, bullets ricocheted off the rocks; the patrol was in hot pursuit and closing in fast. Wetzler found shelter behind a large boulder, but Vrba tripped and landed with his face pressing into the snow. He was too terrified to move. He heard a shout, “We’ve got him!” followed by the sounds of boots and dogs coming down the hillside. But they didn’t have him. Vrba leaped up, threw off his heavy damp overcoat, and raced for the boulder. From below, the Germans began firing again; the dogs howled. Together, Vrba and Wetzler took off, plunging into a swift, icy stream at the bottom of the valley. It was a shock to their systems—the water was freezing, and twice, Vrba slipped and was sucked under the current. Yet they were propelled through the water and the rocks by the thought that the river would wash away their scent and confound the dogs. Soaked and scared, Vrba and Wetzler then pulled themselves ashore and began to run, through thick snow that sometimes reached as high as their waists. Deep under the tree cover, when they could no longer hear the baying of the dogs, they slid, exhausted, into a ditch and buried themselves under shrubs.

  For what seemed like an eternity, their hearts pounding, they listened and waited.

  Every twig that cracked, every rustle of wind, every clump of snow that plummeted to the ground from a sagging tree limb sent waves of fear through them. But within hours, the barking died down and there were no more sounds of footsteps. The Germans had been thwarted. For the first time, Vrba and Wetzler could taste freedom. Now, they had to make it to the Polish border and somehow slip across into Slovakia.

  The nights remained cold, and they shivered while they slept. There was almost no food to scavenge, nothing to fill their stomachs but snow and icy stream water. They had barely enough to survive. And they had to be on guard constantly, keeping to darkened, out-of-the-way back roads and twisting, curving paths. By this stage, they feared everyone. They could easily imagine being shot or axed in some nameless overgrown field. Complicating matters, Vrba’s feet were grossly swollen—he had to sleep in his boots—and he had trouble even walking.

  Their best-laid plans were increasingly coming unglued. And then, while trudging through a field, they came face-to-face with an old hunched Polish woman, tending her goats. Vrba and Wetzler stared at her in silence and she stared back. All the while, Vrba was making quick calculations in his head. He didn’t have a good feeling about this woman, yet they were running out of time. He was hobbling badly. They needed food desperately, and they needed guidance to the border. And every day that they delayed announcing the news about Auschwitz, more Jews would be slaughtered. What to do? If she made trouble, they would strangle her—or use their knives. So they gambled. “We are heading for the Slovak border,” Vrba told her. “Can you show us the way? We’ve escaped from a concentration camp.” Then came the startling words; his voice trailed off as he added, “From Auschwitz.”

  For the first time, he had said it: he had spoken of the place to someone on the outside.

  Carefully studying these two filthy, sweaty stragglers, the old woman registered neither fear nor surprise. Inexplicably, she seemed as distrustful of them as they were of her. They didn’t know it at the time, but the Gestapo frequently disguised themselves as escapees or Jews, seeking to ferret out Polish partisans or Polish “traitors.” Thus, suspicion fed suspicion. Fear fed fear.

  “You’ll have to wait here,” she declared in a controlled voice. She said she would send them food “right away” and a man to help them in the evening. Vrba and Wetzler scanned their surroundings and realized that they were on a hill between a bridge and a darkened forest. They did some quick calculations: The forest was much closer than the bridge. If a German patrol came, it would have to cross the bridge, and that would give both men enough time to spot the patrol and escape into the forest, most likely before the Germans spotted them. Meanwhile, they would wait.

  After two hours a boy of about twelve crossed the bridge and skipped up the hill, carrying a wrapped package of cooked potatoes and some meat. The two men wolfed it all down, eating with their hands. A satisfied smile crossed the boy’s face. “My grandmother,” he told them, “will be back when it’s dark.” As quickly as he had come, the boy skipped away. But Vrba and Wetzler were still dubious, wondering if all of this was an elaborate ruse. They heatedly debated whether to continue waiting—or leave. Believing that they could disappear into the woods quickly if necessary, they once again decided to wait.

  The sun dipped under the horizon, and night fell. The cold returned. They counted the hours until finally the old woman arrived with a male companion, dressed in well-worn peasant clothes. He was brandishing a pistol. Vrba’s nerves were on edge, his feet throbbing; he now feared the worst.

  No one spoke until the woman gave them more food, which they again furiously ate, grabbing it with their fingers and shoving hunks into their mouths, barely taking time to chew one mouthful before swallowing and gulping another. Watching the spectacle, the Polish man let out a loud chuckle. As he put the gun away, he laughed and said only escapees from a concentration camp “could eat like that.” Then he explained his own fear that Vrba and Wetzler might have been Gestapo agents acting as “decoys.” He invited them to come to his house and stay there, and then promised that he would get them safely across the border.

  They trudged off down the hill into the valley, past carefully tended little cottages, and into the man’s home. By now, Vrba’s feet were in agony. He could not even pull off his boots. Taking his razor blade, the one he kept for suicide should the need ever arise, he carefully cut through his boots to relieve his swollen feet. The man gave him slippers to wear, and then something even more precious: an actual bed to sleep in. The next day they were in good spirits, resting and waiting in his house. After supper he informed them that it was time to go.

  They left the house, closed the door, and in a quiet single line, headed south toward the Slovak border.

  THEY WALKED IN SILENCE until suddenly the man stopped. He told them that a German patrol passed this point every ten minutes. They would have to hide in the bushes until the next one appeared and then make a dash. Within minutes, the three men heard voices and footsteps. It was the German unit, passing so close that the men could have reached out and touched them. Yet the patrol looked neither left nor right and quickly vanished. The three men continued; they still had a long way to go. After two days of walking, they came to a quiet clearing. Their guide paused, pointing a finger. “See the forest over there? That’s Slovakia.” It was only fifty yards away, but it might as well have been on the other edge of the universe. He informed them that yet another German patrol would soon appear, and that as soon as it passed, they should make their move. “I’m glad I could help,” he added, and then, looking at Vrba’s feet, he said, “I hope those slippers hold out.” With those words, their guide turned and vanished into the night.

  For two unspeakable years Vrba and Wetzler had held on to their hopes and nurtured them. They had learned to sleep virtually with one eye open, and to live day-by-day with closed hearts. They had wondered if they would or would not survive. And they had wondered if the outside world would ever come to their rescue. Now it was they who were coming to the outside world. After watchin
g the Germans march past them, they dashed as fast as they could, careening over the border to freedom. It was April 21, 1944.

  They had three weeks to warn the Hungarians, Roosevelt, and the rest of the world about the deadly truths of Auschwitz. Thus would begin an extraordinary, and at times devastating, cataract of events.

  VRBA AND WETZLER KNEW that they could no longer keep to forests. They had to make contact with local Jews. That meant they would have to walk to a town, without papers, and ask for help. They were strangers and obvious escapees, and Slovakia was a German-controlled, collaborator nation. Their opportunity came within hours. They emerged from the trees into a field, and in front of them a poor farmer straightened up and stared. Vrba and Wetzler decided to trust him. “We need help,” Vrba told him. “We must get to Cadca.” The farmer grinned, “You’d better come to my place first because you’re not going to get far in those clothes.” He allowed them to stay in his cottage, he gave them some farm clothes from his meager supply, and he told them that the best way to reach the town was by train. In three days, he would be taking the train to the local market with his pigs. “You help me along with them and nobody will ask any questions.” So for three days, until the pigs were transported and sold, Vrba and Wetzler waited. The farmer was as good as his word. He took them to the office of a local Jewish doctor named Pollack, ostensibly to get treatment for Vrba’s feet. Because there was a desperate need for medical care, the Nazis had not deported Pollack to Auschwitz. Instead he was practicing at the headquarters of the Slovak army, Germany’s ally. Actually, Vrba knew Dr. Pollack; they had almost been on the same transport out. Now Vrba was the one to tell the doctor that all his “resettled relatives,” who had presumably left for the north or the east, were in fact dead. Shaken, Pollack bandaged Vrba’s feet.

  The next morning, Vrba and Wetzler were on their way to Zilina, to meet with Jewish leaders. Vrba was still shoeless and wearing the bandages.

  At the Zilina headquarters of the Jewish Council, Vrba and Wetzler were received in luxury and comfort unlike anything they had ever experienced. The council consisted of men of countenance and erudition, with contacts in all the right places—and it showed. Meeting with the spokesmen for Slovakia’s Jews, Vrba and Wetzler ate in an intimate dining room where the table sparkled with shiny plates and cutlery, and they were served “the finest meal” they had ever eaten. After dessert, they smoked cigars, sipped sherry, and passionately talked nonstop, recounting all the sordid details of Auschwitz. In a fever of excitement they explained everything. Nevertheless, at one point the ebullient Vrba paused, looked up at his hosts, and suddenly realized that they seemed strangely moody and cautious.

  Indeed, they didn’t seem to believe a word he was saying.

  It became clear to him that they were laboring under the delusion, or at least clinging to the vain hope, that Slovakia’s Jews—indeed all the Jews of Europe—were merely slaving away in work camps or concentration camps and would be able to return home after the war. But as it happened, the Jewish Council kept methodical records; every name of every Jew taken by the Nazis in Slovakia was recorded by hand in large ledgers. The council members began by asking Vrba on what date he had left. “June 14, 1942.” The nodding began. Then the next question, “Where did you leave from?” “Novaky.” More pages in the ledger were flipped. “Can you name any of the people on the transport with you?” Vrba gave them thirty names of people in his own wagon. Every name was in the ledger.

  For hours, the incredulous men of the Jewish Council grilled Vrba and Wetzler in separate rooms, calmly checking and rechecking every detail. Vrba’s memory was phenomenal. Despite the initial setback, he flung himself into the facts. It was soon clear that these were not perverse products of his imagination; everything he said stood up to scrutiny.

  As Vrba and Wetzler painstakingly took their hosts through the hell that was Auschwitz, the council finally understood that a further crisis was coming. Pale and trembling, the members went from disbelief to horror, from horror to sadness, from sadness to urgency. By the evening’s end, Vrba and Wetzler’s report amounted to sixty single-spaced pages; it also included remarkably detailed sketches of how Auschwitz and Birkenau were organized, and drawings showing the long rows of barracks, and where the crematoriums were. It was ready for dissemination to the world. While SS trains continued to roll northward, clicking monotonously over the rails, the Jewish Council promised Vrba and Wetzler that the report would be in the hands of the Hungarians the very next day. Thereafter, it would, they believed, be only a matter of time before the report was given to the British and the Americans as well.

  That night, Vrba and Wetzler slept blissfully on soft beds, bubbling with excitement and comforted by the thought that the Hungarian Jews would be quickly alerted. It was April 25, 1944. On April 28, Oskar Krasnansky, a chemical engineer and a leading Slovak Zionist in Bratislava who had traveled to Zilina to question Vrba and Wetzler, gave their report to Rudolf Kastner, head of the Hungarian Jewish rescue committee. When Vrba asked about the report and if it had reached the Hungarians, he was soothingly told, “Yes, it is in their hands.”

  Thus would commence one of the war’s great dramas.

  MEANWHILE, ROOSEVELT’S TWO WEEKS at Hobcaw were quickly extended to three, and during the third week, the president indulged in a secret delight. His old love, with whom he had once had a passionate affair, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, drove over from her winter home at Aiken; Bernard Baruch had to give her his gasoline ration coupons for the trip. The clandestine visit, with its romantic overtones, was arranged by Roosevelt’s daughter Anna; whether it was platonic or otherwise is a fact lost to history. What has not been lost was that Roosevelt adored Lucy and she adored him. Lucy’s name never appeared on the visitors’ log at Hobcaw, but she may have stayed up to a week. Roosevelt’s son Elliott would later write, “Lucy drove over from her nearby home in Aiken to extend the care and love she had not lost for this lonely, ailing, cheerful man. Her visits were taken as a matter of course by the Hobcaw group, but Mother was not told a word . . . her trusted counselor, Bernie Baruch, was an accomplice in keeping the secret.”

  Still, Roosevelt’s stay at Hobcaw was not without its problems. On April 28, Roosevelt was informed that his good friend and cabinet member, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, had died of a heart attack; he was seventy. Clearly rattled by the news, Roosevelt then had his own scare.

  After lunch he began to sweat profusely. His entire body then began to convulse, and he felt acute pain in his abdomen. He was also nauseated. His neck hurt terribly and his blood pressure perilously rose to 240/130, a new high. With his combative spirit, Roosevelt resisted panic; so did his doctors. Dr. Bruenn diagnosed this as yet another malady, gallstones, and sent him to bed for two days. Bruenn and McIntire also decided that Roosevelt couldn’t go to Knox’s funeral in Washington, D.C., but would instead have to spend an extra week convalescing. Later that day, to dampen the gnawing pain, Roosevelt was given a hypodermic injection of codeine so that he could briefly give a statement to the press about Knox’s death. Yet the pain stubbornly persisted for three more days.

  Despite the public pronouncements by his doctors, it was clear that Roosevelt’s body was breaking down. His blood pressure was still high, and he was taking daily doses of digitalis. And he was still barely able to work.

  ON THE NIGHT OF April 27–28, while an ailing Roosevelt was writhing in pain in South Carolina, Allied assault forces were conducting their most important military exercise of the war, along a peaceful stretch of land on the southwest coast of England, known as Slapton Sands. Code-named Operation Tiger, it was the central part of a weeklong, full-scale dress rehearsal of Operation Overlord. It was held in the strictest secrecy, and measures were taken to ensure that it would be as authentic as possible, right down to the use of live ammunition and live naval fire. Even the ramparts that had been erected were patterned after the Allies’ best descriptions of Rommel’s Atlantic Wall in Normandy. Moreover,
the Devonshire shore, and the chalky cliffs in the background, bore a striking resemblance to Utah Beach itself.

  The night’s joint exercises involved large forces, some thirty thousand men all told, who were slated to go to France as a team. There were assault forces O for Omaha, G for Gold, U for Utah, J for Juno, and S for Sword. There were infantry divisions, combat engineer divisions, and the Seventieth Tank Battalion. Separately, there were Ranger battalions; naval beach battalions; the Eighty-second Airborne; and chemical battalions to decontaminate anything hit by poison gas. And there were medics and even grave registration crews to take care of the dead; on the actual D-Day, the soldiers would be instructed not to stop to help the wounded—that agonizing task was to be left to the medics and registration crews.

  During the exercise, the troops were assembled in marshaling areas, briefed on their mission, and then loaded aboard landing crafts. So were the tanks, ammunition, and other supplies. Eisenhower’s commanders were cutting no corners, or, on this evening, so it seemed. All together, 337 ships were involved. The voyage was calculated to be exactly the same length and take approximately the same time as the crossing of the English Channel to Normandy. As the men, a number of them already sleep deprived and drenched in sweat, were being ferried toward the shore for the landings, they readied themselves for the intense preparatory bombing of the coastal areas that was to come. The earlier practice for the amphibious landing operations had already involved live fire above the beaches, so that the soldiers would be prepared for whatever Rommel might have waiting for them. The beaches were supposed to have been declared clear before the men landed, but as a result of signal errors, some of the craft reached shore before the shelling had stopped. These troops rushed the beaches only to be blown up by ammunition from their own guns.