The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland

Author:Jonathan Freedland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

Part IV

The Report

20

In Black and White

THE CONVERSATION – part debrief, part interrogation – would last several days. As soon as he heard the men give the outline of their story, Steiner understood that this was bigger than him: the ÚŽ’s leadership needed to hear this. He telephoned Bratislava to speak to Oskar Krasňanský, a chemical engineer by profession who was one of the council’s most senior figures. Steiner urged him to come right away. Jews were not allowed to travel by train, but Krasňanský wangled a permit and was in Žilina later that same day. The head of the Jewish council, the fifty-year-old lawyer and writer Oskar Neumann, joined them twenty-four hours later.

For the officials, the first task was to establish that these two men were who they said they were. That was simple enough: Krasňanský had brought with him the records kept by the council of every transport that had left Slovakia, for what was then destination unknown. There was a card for every deportee, including their name and photograph. So when Fred and Walter gave the date and point of origin of the transports that had taken them away, the records backed them up.

More than that, Fred and Walter were also able to name several of the others who had been jammed into the cattle trucks with them, along with specific individuals who had arrived in Auschwitz on subsequent transports. Each time, the names and the dates tallied. And each time, the escapees were able to confirm the fate of the people on those lists: with next to no exceptions, they were naming the dead.

Krasňanský found these two young men credible right away. They were clearly in a terrible state. Their feet were misshapen and they were completely exhausted; he could see that they were undernourished, that they had eaten almost no food for weeks. He summoned a doctor and between them they decided that the men should stay here, in this basement room, to recover their strength. A couple of beds were brought down.

Yet, for all their physical weakness, Krasňanský was struck by the depth and sharpness of each man’s memory. It was a thing of wonder. The engineer was determined to get their testimony on record and to ensure that it would be unimpeachable.

With that in mind, he decided to interview the two separately, getting each story down in detail and from the beginning, so that the evidence of one could not be said to have contaminated or influenced the other. In sessions lasting hours, Krasňanský asked questions, listened to the answers and wrote detailed shorthand notes. Whatever emotional reaction he had to what he was hearing – which was, after all, confirmation that his community had been methodically slaughtered – he hardly showed it. He kept on asking questions and scribbling down the answers.

Walter alternated between speaking very fast, as if in a torrent, and very slowly, deliberately, as if searching for the exact word. Before the formal, separate interviews, Fred saw how Walter strained

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