The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

Kapos tattooed Auschwitz numbers onto each prisoner. For the next two and a half years, SS guards used the number 44070 to identify Walter rather than using his name. Walter and the other new arrivals were also given Auschwitz prison clothes. They were now indistinguishable from the other prisoners.

At this time, Walter met SS-Oberscharführer Jakob Fries, the brutal head guard at Auschwitz. Fries’s infamous inspection of the prisoners determined whether they lived or died. He would “test their strength with his stick or boot. If they could withstand the blow or the kick, then they might be allowed to carry on working. If they could not, their fate was sealed” (53).

Walter’s first assignment alongside Josef Erdelyi—his new co-conspirator—was in construction. He and the other prisoners were tasked with building Buna, a mammoth network of plants and factories where SS officers intended to use prisoners as slave labor to make synthetic rubber. Mortality rates were high in Buna. Most prisoners assigned to Buna died from the grueling slave labor, starvation, exhaustion, brutal beatings, and executions. Walter and Josef survived because they worked for a civilian for several months. The civilian told the two men that he could protect them in his section, but they were at the mercy of the SS officers and Kapos beyond it.