Escape from Auschwitz: the most extraordinary Holocaust story you’ve never heard

Escape was lunacy, escape was death. To attempt it was suicide. That much had been taught to Walter Rosenberg early, within a week of his arrival in Auschwitz, aged just 17, at the start of July 1942. One afternoon, he and thousands of others had been forced to stand in silence and watch a public hanging, performed with full ceremony. The SS men had lined up with guns over their shoulders and marching drums strapped around their necks, while out in front stood two mobile gallows, wheeled into position, one for each condemned man.

The stars of the show were announced as two prisoners who had tried and failed to escape. Walter and the others had to watch as the men were brought out; a Kapo, one of the prisoners deployed by the SS to do the brute work of enforcement, tied their ankles and thighs with rope, then placed a noose around each of their necks. Afterwards, the inmates were kept there a full hour, forbidden even to look away. They had to stand, in silence, staring at the two dead bodies twirling in the wind. The corpses had notices pinned to their chests, written as if the words were spoken by the dead themselves: “Because we tried to escape ... ”

Walter understood that the Nazis wanted him and every other prisoner to conclude that escape was futile, that any attempt was doomed. But Walter drew a very different lesson. The danger came not from trying to escape, but from trying and failing. From that day on, he was determined to try – and to succeed.

Before long, he had made himself a student of escapology, taking lessons from some of Auschwitz’s most battle-hardened inmates – chief among them a grizzled captain in the Red Army – and forging ties with the camp’s secret underground resistance, slowly acquiring the knowhow to attempt what no Jew had done before. This yearning to break out was rooted in more than a desire to save his own skin: his aim was much larger than that. For he had come to understand something essential about the death factory that was Auschwitz: that the crime unfolding before him rested on a great and devastating act of deception.

Most Jews were sent on arrival at Auschwitz to the gas chambers, but some, like Walter, were held instead as slave workers. For nearly two years, he remained, those Jews compelled to do the most gruesome work of all – retrieving corpses from the gas chambers – but he witnessed every other stage of the process of industrialised murder.