… and fellow prisoner Fred Wetzler together hatched a daring plan to escape. He was never one of the Sonderkommando, 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.
For nearly two years, he remained a prisoner – kept alive by a series of random, accidental twists of fate – and in that time he saw almost every aspect of the Auschwitz slaughterhouse in action. Most Jews were sent on arrival at Auschwitz to the gas chambers, but some, like Walter, were held instead as slave workers. 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. This yearning to break out was rooted in more than a desire to save his own skin: his aim was much larger than that. From that day on, he was determined to try – and to succeed.īefore 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. The danger came not from trying to escape, but from trying and failing. Walter understood that the Nazis wanted him and every other prisoner to conclude that escape was futile, that any attempt was doomed. The corpses had notices pinned to their chests, written as if the words were spoken by the dead themselves: “Because we tried to escape. They had to stand, in silence, staring at the two dead bodies twirling in the wind. Afterwards, the inmates were kept there a full hour, forbidden even to look away. 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.
The stars of the show were announced as two prisoners who had tried and failed to escape. 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. One afternoon, he and thousands of others had been forced to stand in silence and watch a public hanging, performed with full ceremony. 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.
And I enjoy the surprise of it." That's the effect Winter was going for with the audience, too, and it was partly made possible by actors who were committed to authenticity on every level, including the historical one.E scape was lunacy, escape was death. Not every "Boardwalk Empire" cast member was immersed in heavy research Michael Shannon, for one, told NPR, "I never know where I'm going to wind up. "Boardwalk Empire" allowed Charlie Cox, Bobby Cannavale, and other future stars to break through to the mainstream, and the approach that it took to its period storytelling - using history as a jumping-off point for a fictional narrative - is one that we've seen other gangster shows like "Peaky Blinders" adopt in the years since. It's a really interesting playground to play in." It's interesting because you're able to connect the dots with the real characters through the fictional characters. That's what we're playing with, real characters by name playing within a fictional world. "That was a fictional character that Terry came up with on his own accord.
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