by Jay Winik
A few ripped buttons, and all would be lost.
However once they had gone through the pockets, the Germans left his coat buttoned. Instead, they began laughing at him, taunting him, and striking his shoulder with a thick bamboo stick. Vrba visibly winced, his mind clouded with pain. With a sneer, the Germans stepped back to examine him further. They told Vrba that it was time he saw the inside of Block 11, where prisoners were taken to be disciplined. He stood still, not moving a muscle, terrified. Then, suddenly, one of the men struck him full across the face and shouted at him, “Get out of my sight!” Too stunned to think, barely able to speak, Vrba awaited their next move. Then, just as quickly, the Nazis decided they didn’t want to make the trip to Block 11. Instead, they would report Vrba to the political department and he would be picked up after roll call.
Vrba was now a wanted man, with only hours remaining before he would be pulled out of line.
Vrba raced back to his section gate, then doubled back toward the woodpile. Trying to saunter over, Vrba saw them all, waiting. The Poles were standing on top working; Wetzler was below. They gaped when they saw Vrba, but otherwise there was silence; no one exchanged a single word or a sound. They were now moving very quickly, having only seconds to complete their deception. The Poles slid the wood planks to one side and gave a tiny nod. Vrba and Wetzler stood still for a moment, then they quickly picked their way to the top of the pile, dropped their legs into the opening, and slid into the cavity. They heard the planks being wrestled back into place over their heads, and then the sound of feet as the Poles scrambled off the pile.
Inside, it was pitch-black. The air was stuffy. The two men were forced to sit birdlike, in an uncomfortable, cramped position. For about fifteen minutes, Vrba and Wetzler didn’t move a muscle and didn’t say a word.
All they could hear was the scratchy sound of their own breath.
FIFTEEN MINUTES PASSED. THERE was no commotion outside; nothing had changed. Then, Vrba got to work. To foil the dogs, he filled the narrow spaces between the planks with the powdery Russian tobacco. It required nearly an hour of painstaking work. When it was finished, Vrba and Wetzler sat alone with their thoughts. It was only 3:30 in the afternoon. The moment of truth would come at 5:30 p.m. when the roll call began and the prisoners lined up. Vrba was at once scared yet excited. Nervously he kept fingering his watch—by now his eyes had adjusted to the dark—looking at the time, holding it up to his ear to make sure it hadn’t stopped. Finally, he forced himself to put the watch away. He did not need it in the woodpile, nor did Wetzler. Both men could tell the time simply from the noises filtering in from outside. The routine was always the same. And sure enough, crouched in the gloom, they heard the tramp of boots of the prisoners returning for roll call.
By 5:25, Vrba was convinced the SS already knew they were gone, and were debating how to respond. By 5:30, Vrba’s heart was racing. For some reason, no one had sounded the alarm. By 5:45, it was still eerily quiet. Vrba expected that at any moment they would hear the planks being pulled away and would look up into the barrels of machine guns. By six o’clock, there was still no siren.
“They’re toying with us,” Vrba whispered. “They must know where we are.”
Wetzler was afraid to say a word. He nodded his head in agreement.
Then suddenly there came a high-pitched wail. The siren had sounded.
WITHIN MINUTES, AS THE half-light that precedes dusk fell over the camp, Vrba and Wetzler could hear the pounding of SS boots while their pursuers took up positions across the ground. The kennels were emptied and the two hundred specially trained dogs began combing the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau, barking frantically. It was an impressive display of force on the part of the Germans; they were crawling all over the surrounding countryside and were everywhere among the hundreds of low, single-story barracks. Thousands of men were now knocking down doors, lifting floor planks, and racing from building to building. Vrba knew what this meant: Every barracks would be promptly searched. Every building and structure, from the latrines to “Canada,” would be examined, for three days. Every prisoner would be checked and rechecked, for hours on end; many would be brutally tortured. Vrba and Wetzler were gripped alternately by exhilaration and terror. Exhilaration at the prospect of success; terror at the prospect of getting caught.
The terror only grew. At first, the Germans were far away—Auschwitz was a huge, sprawling complex—but they soon drew closer. Suddenly, the two men heard an SS officer shout, “Look behind those planks!” Vrba and Wetzler froze as they heard the Germans scrambling up their woodpile. A shower of grit and fine dust rained down on them. The two men clamped their hands over their noses, fearful that they would sneeze. The dragnet was closing in, much as they had expected. Now in addition to the hoarse wheezing of the guards, they could hear the panting and frenzied sniffing of the dogs and the scraping of their claws as they slipped from plank to plank, just overhead. Himmler himself had once boasted that the dogs of Auschwitz had been trained “to tear a man apart.”
Even through the darkness, Vrba could see that Wetzler’s eyes were gleaming and his teeth were clenched. Their luck, it seemed, had run out. Vrba clutched his knife more tightly. He had vowed not to be taken alive.
THE MEN HEARD NOTHING; the dogs smelled nothing. Somehow, the Russian tobacco had worked, and no one had thought to move aside the boards. The dogs scampered away, trailing the many scents to another sector of the camp. They were followed by the guards, until the search was little more than a distant sound. For Vrba and Wetzler, this was a triumph. But they knew it was only the beginning.
Throughout the night, the men and the dogs searched, again and again sweeping around the woodpile. And to muffle their own sounds, Wetzler recalled, he and Vrba tied strips of flannel across their mouths and pulled them tight whenever either man felt a tickle in his throat.
And then they heard another, more familiar agonizing sound: the clang and clatter of trucks carrying new victims to the gas chambers. Vrba mentally counted. First there were ten, then twenty, then thirty, then forty, then fifty, then sixty. Even in the midst of an intense search, the business of death continued apace at Auschwitz. Vrba and Wetzler could picture the line for the “showers”; they could imagine the wrenching cries and whimpers of the Jews. Then they heard nothing until the “monotonous sound” of the dead bodies being loaded one after the other into the ovens. As it happened, they were hiding right near Crematorium IV.
Hour after hour, they listened as the Sonderkommando opened the iron doors of the crematorium and slid the bodies, already shrunken and contorted, into the flames to be turned into ash. Hour after hour, they smelled burning flesh and hair. This had been a transport of Belgian Jews; 319 souls, including 54 children, had been immediately gassed.
The second day was worse. The searchers were more desperate and Vrba and Wetzler more terrified. They’d had nothing to eat or drink for over twenty-four hours. They were filthy, unshaven, and exhausted. They would nod off to sleep for a few moments, only to be snapped back to reality by more sounds of the chase. They were now hearing different noises: the Nazis restlessly exchanging passwords, the sentries pounding around the outer ring, the officers barking commands to search here and search there.
AS THE TWO MEN approached their third day in the woodpile, the intensity of the search slowed. All around them, the SS were conducting sweeps and the chase continued—until two o’clock in the afternoon. As they strained their ears to listen, Vrba and Wetzler heard two German prisoners exchanging rumors about where the escapees were. These men were convinced that, rather than being miles away, they were still in the camp, biding their time. One of the men evidently looked over toward the woodpile.
“You think they could be there?” he asked his companion.
The other man, probably shaking his head, said the dogs would surely have smelled them.
No, the first man insisted. “What if they found a way of killing the scent?”
“It’s a long
shot,” came the reply.
The two men climbed onto the pile and began yanking away the planks of wood. Vrba and Wetzler, had a sickening sense of déjà vu—this was like the first day. Once more, Vrba drew his knife. Holding his breath, he flattened himself against the wall of the cavity, as if he could somehow disappear. The Germans were now within inches of finding their quarry. Yet just before the next plank could be moved, there was a tremendous noise from the other side of the camp. The Germans raced off toward the commotion, presumably believing the escapees had been caught. Vrba and Wetzler were still safe.
For Vrba and Wetzler hiding in their woodpile, a few hours away from possible freedom, April 9 was a day of silence. But it was far from quiet at Auschwitz. As it happened, on that day the trucks once again rumbled up the road, carrying victims to be gassed and then burned; but this time they were transporting a special group of Jews: those who had been housed in the Majdanek concentration camp, the first camp that Vrba had been sent to, where he had spent two weeks before his deportation to Auschwitz. Now, with the vengeful Soviet army pushing westward, the SS had furiously evacuated the camp and was preparing to abandon it. In a triumph of Nazi perfidy, the Germans doggedly sealed up wooden cattle cars filled with the evacuees, even as they torched all their own records, and dismantled Majdanek. In a vain attempt to cover up their crimes, they also exhumed and burned the remains of eighteen thousand bodies that had been buried in the forest—the Germans had machine-gunned these victims in the woods on a single day—November 3, 1943—which lived on in Nazi lore as “the Harvest Festival.” They had not been able to dispose of the tens of thousands of shoes of other victims. These shoes rose in piles, like mounds of grain. Many were baby shoes, so tiny that two could easily be cradled in a grown man’s palm.
For eight days, the train from Majdanek had crept westward along the worn rails, whistles blaring. For the prisoners, the journey was agony. Denied water and medical help, the evacuees, thin and hairless and clad in little more than rags, were under no illusions. This time, some fought back. At a station en route, twenty of them managed to cut their way out of the train and sought to escape. The SS methodically shot them all. Meanwhile, ninety-nine of the evacuees never reached Auschwitz at all; amid the sickening stench of sweat and waste, they simply died along the way. As for the survivors? They were weak, exhausted, some all but unable to move, worse than wild animals. On arrival, they were either gassed at once or tattooed and detailed for slave labor until they could be killed later.
BUT IT WAS NOT just the sounds of death that filled the air. Early in the evening, Vrba and Wetzler heard a distant humming in the sky. The hum turned into a rumble, the sound of heavy aircraft, coming closer. Soon came a series of whistles. The woodpile shook as the ground was peppered with explosions. Vrba and Wetzler held their breath. Had the camp finally been discovered? Were the Allies at last going to bomb the watchtowers and the electrified wires? “Was this,” they wondered, “the end of Auschwitz?” For a fleeting moment Vrba entertained the delirious idea that they were being liberated. The explosions were answered by staccato bursts of antiaircraft fire, guns from the camp furiously firing into the sky. The woodpile shook, more grit rained down, and brilliant flashes bathed the cavity in a harsh, blinding light. But Auschwitz itself was not under attack; actually, it was industrial targets several miles away that were being pelted by the Allied bombs. The camp was untouched, and after the noise of the planes faded away, Vrba and Wetzler once again heard the clink of the grills and smelled the crematoriums setting flesh aflame.
They passed the day of April 10 in silence. At a little before 6:30 p.m., three days since the first siren had sounded, they heard shouts passing from watchtower to watchtower, around the camp: “Postenkette abziehen!”—“Cordon down!” It was the order calling off the internal search at Auschwitz. The guards would go back to their posts and barracks; the dogs would go back to their kennels. The search was over. Now, it would be up to the SS network outside the walls of Auschwitz to catch the escapees.
ON APRIL 9, MAJOR Hartenstein of the Waffen SS had already dispatched a telegram to Berlin with news of the escape. All Gestapo units in the east, all criminal police units, and all frontier posts were to be on the lookout for two Jews. With the same brutal efficiency that they applied in managing the camp, the Nazis sent the report over the wires, spreading their tentacles. In the event of capture, a “full report” was to be delivered to Auschwitz.
INSIDE THE WOODPILE, VRBA and Wetzler were hesitant to move, fearful that the end of the search could be a trick to drive them from their hiding place. In the chill evening air, they shivered—and waited.
By nine o’clock, the two men heard no sounds out of the ordinary, nothing to suggest that anyone thought they were still inside Auschwitz. After their days of crouching in dirt and darkness, they stood up stiffly and began to push against the remaining planks of their “roof.” They pushed and the planks did not move. “Grunting, straining, sweating” together, they brought every ounce of their strength to bear on one section of wood. They managed to raise it an inch and grip their fingers around the boards. Finally, they heaved the wood to the side and were startled to see a string of brilliant stars dangling in a “black, winter moonless sky.”
Had the two German prisoners not tried to search the woodpile and moved some of the boards, Vrba and Wetzler might have been completely trapped, unable to get out.
Carefully, the two men replaced the planks and then sat down on the woodpile to gaze back. For a fleeting moment Vrba saw Auschwitz from the outside—just as the hundreds of thousands of victims who arrived at its gates saw it. As he looked up from the flat ground, there were the bright lights ringing the camp that cast a shimmering glow punctuating the darkness. There were the dreaded silhouettes of the watchtowers, ominously rising into the sky. And behind the wire and the walls, behind that cordon of light, was mass slaughter on a scale never before witnessed in history.
Vrba and Wetzler climbed off the woodpile, lay down on their bellies, and began crawling toward a small forest of birch trees. Once there, they dropped their heads and ran. They never looked back.
4
Escape, Part 2
ON MARCH 24, FRANKLIN Roosevelt gave a statement to the press. His voice was husky and out of pitch because of the fluid filling his lungs and the slow constriction of his congestive heart failure. But if his voice was weak, his words were strong. Despite being ill, Roosevelt spoke firmly of the “wholesale, systematic murder of the Jews of Europe,” describing it as one of the “blackest” crimes of all history, a crime which “goes unabated every hour.” He promised, “None who participate in these acts of savagery shall go unpunished.” He added that knowingly taking part in “the deportation of Jews to their death in Poland” would make a person “equally guilty with the executioner.” And Roosevelt spoke specifically about the Jews of Hungary and those Jews from other nations who had found a haven inside Hungary’s borders as being “threatened with annihilation,” on “the very eve of triumph over the barbarism which their persecution symbolizes.”
The next day, 599 Jews from the Netherlands reached Auschwitz; 239, including the elderly and all the children, were gassed on arrival.
In the meantime, two weeks later, while Vrba and Wetzler were hiding in their woodpile, Roosevelt was preparing to depart for Hobcaw Barony, the Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch’s secluded 16,000-acre estate, in a desperate attempt to regain his health. Hours after Vrba and Wetzler fled Auschwitz, Franklin Roosevelt was waking up at Hobcaw Barony, in a wide, white-columned house built to resemble George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate. While the weather was a touch cool, the sun shone frequently, and Roosevelt had no doubt already joked with Baruch that it was time to round up the fish and drive them toward shore so he could get out on a boat with a hook, bait, and a fishing pole.
The barony was old, but its name was even older: Hobcaw was a Native American word meaning “between the waters.” The Spanish had fi
rst tried to settle the area in the 1500s, but they abandoned the land after three quarters of their colonists died during the first winter. Later, the British built a fort on the site during the Revolutionary War, and British gravestones still stood at the woods’ edge.
Until the start of the twentieth century, Hobcaw had been part of the great Carolina Low Country rice empire. By the 1940s, abandoned rice fields were home to ducks, turkeys, and even the occasional eagle, exactly as Baruch desired. In 1905, he had bought the land for a winter hunting retreat. A South Carolinian by birth, Baruch kept and cultivated his accent even after his family moved to New York when he was ten. From his humble start as an office boy, he rose to the pinnacles of power, becoming a financial adviser and confidant to six presidents. In Washington, he frequently held court with top officials on a bench in Lafayette Park, overlooking the White House. And now the president had come to his door, hoping to rejuvenate himself.
Hobcaw was quiet and away from the prying eyes of Washington, yet the White House was leaving little to chance. Given the precariousness of his health, for his entire stay the president would be accompanied by doctors Bruenn and McIntire. He had also brought his little terrier dog, Fala.
Preceding his arrival, there was a flurry of activity at the plantation to make the necessary accommodations. For a month the presidential railcar had sat in readiness, while marines tirelessly combed the woods and the Coast Guard patrolled the nearby inland rivers. Meanwhile, the Secret Service detail was busy hammering. The agents constructed wooden ramps to enable them to move the president around on each side of the house. They put up a sizable fence on the large fishing pier. They even jerryrigged a slide from Roosevelt’s second-floor bedroom to the outside in case of emergency, namely fire; actually, the slides traveled with the president everywhere he went and were ready to be used at the White House if the stairways ever caught fire. Roosevelt was terrified of fire.
