The Stone Crusher

by Jeremy Dronfield

  After a long wait, Fritz’s and Gustav’s verdicts came through. Fritz, only fifteen years old, had been tagged Entlassung. He was free to go. Gustav was marked Zurück: back to the cells. Fritz could do nothing but watch in sick dismay as his papa was force‑marched away.

  It was evening when Fritz finally left the police station. He walked home alone, passing the familiar entrance of the Prater. He had walked this route many times before—after swimming with his friends in the Danube, after days out in the park, in a bliss of sweet cakes or abuzz with adrenaline. Now there was just emptiness.

  The streets were sullen and bloodshot, hungover after the previous night’s debauch. Leopoldstadt was devastated, the sidewalks in the shopping streets and the Karmelitermarkt carpeted with glass shards and splintered wood.

  Fritz came home to the apartment in Im Werd, to the arms of his mother and sisters. Where was his papa? He couldn’t tell them. Again the terrible names pushed to the front of their minds: Dachau, Buchenwald. They waited through that night, but no word came; they inquired tentatively, but could learn nothing.

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  Around the world, the news of the pogrom was met with revulsion. The United States recal ed its ambassador from Berlin in protest,7 the president declaring that the news “has profoundly affected the American people . . . I had difficulty believing that such things could occur in the 20th century.”8 For‑

  mer president Hoover compared the Nazis to Torquemada and said they were bringing on themselves “the condemnation of the public opinion of the world

  . . . for centuries to come.”9 In London, the Spectator magazine said that “this week’s outbreak of barbarism in Germany is on so vast a scale, is marked by an inhumanity so diabolical and bears marks of official inspiration so unmistak‑

  able that its consequences internal and external are yet beyond prediction.”10

  But the Nazis shrugged off these condemnations, dismissing the atroc‑

  ity claims as false reporting designed to distract from the real outrage—the terroristic Jewish murder of a German diplomat. They congratulated them‑

  selves on having dealt the Jews a deserved punishment, an “expression of a righteous disgust amongst the broadest strata of the German people” toward the malign influence of Judaism.11 Condemnations from abroad were dis‑

  missed as “dirt and filth fabricated in the known centres of immigration of Paris, London and New York, and guided by the Jewish‑influenced world press.”12 The Nazis declared that the destruction of the synagogues meant that Jews “can now no longer hatch plots against the State under cover of religious services.”13

  Fritz, Tini, Herta, Edith, and Kurt waited through that Friday, and could discover nothing about Gustav. Dusk fell and Shabbat began, and with it at last he came home; exhausted, famished, dehydrated, gaunter than ever, walking in through the door like a resurrection from the grave, to an outburst of joy‑

  ful relief. He told his story. The officials at the police station had taken note of his service in the Great War, and friends among the police had eventually vouched for his multiple combat wounds and Silver Medal for Bravery First Class. Even the Nazis wouldn’t go so far yet as to condemn a war hero to a concentration camp. The standing order from the top of the SS was that vet‑

  erans were excluded from the round‑up, along with the sick, the elderly, and juveniles.14 Gustav Kleinmann was free to go.

  Most were not. Over the next few days, the transports began. Fleets of Grüne Heinrich* police trucks drove in relays from police stations all over the city,

  * Green Henry: equivalent to Black Maria

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  packed with Jewish men tagged as able‑bodied—some of them war veterans too, but lacking Gustav’s decorations or acquaintances in the police. Many drove through Leopoldstadt and the city center, past the men’s homes, all headed toward the same destination: the loading ramp of the Westbahnhof train station.

  There the prisoners were herded into freight cars. Some went to Dachau, some to Buchenwald. Many would never be seen again. The camps were sprouting like toxic weeds, and the transports would grow fuller and more frequent.

  To the sound of hammering, Gustav absently twisted a strip of fabric round his fingers. An off‑cut, a scrap of waste, a remnant of his livelihood. Across the street a workman’s hammer drove nails into the planks covering the bro‑

  ken panes that had once looked in on a Jewish‑owned shop. It was Jewish no longer.

  His own business had gone months ago, and now, looking along Im Werd, the market, Leopoldsgasse, he picked out the businesses that had once belonged to Jewish friends and were now either empty or in the hands of non‑Jews.

  Like the neighbors who had turned him and Fritz over to the SA, many of the new owners were friends of his, and of the people whose shops they had taken. There was Ochshorn’s perfumery on the far corner of the market square, now owned by Willi Pöschl, a neighbor from Gustav’s building. The butch‑

  ers, poulterers, and fruit sellers had lost their market stands. Another friend of Gustav’s, Mitzi Steindl, had eagerly taken part in pushing out the Jews and seizing their businesses; she’d been poor before all this, and Gustav had often given her work as a seamstress just to help her out.

  With a whole class of people labeled as dangerous enemies of the peo‑

  ple, and the chance of an instant profit, friend had turned on friend without hesitation or qualm. These men and women who had taken Jews’ livelihoods; the old school friend who had forced Edith to scrub the sidewalk; the many old schoolmates of Fritz who were now in the Hitler Youth; they reveled in the baiting, the intimidation, plundering, beating, and deportation of Jews. In the eyes of all but a few, Jews could no longer be friends, for how can a dan‑

  gerous, predatory animal be a friend to a human being, much less an equal?

  It was inconceivable.

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  Shortly after Kristallnacht, an English journalist observed: “It is true that Jews in Germany have not been formally condemned to death; it has only been made impossible for them to live.”15 In the face of this impossibility, some took their own lives; dozens each day accepted what they saw as the inevitable, and chose to take themselves out of this hopeless nothing of a life. Many more decided to leave and find life elsewhere. Ever since the Anschluss, Austrian Jews had been trying to leave the country, and now their numbers and their desperation increased.

  For the Kleinmann family there was no easy way out. No way at all, it seemed. Leaving the Reich for a better place was impossibly difficult for a poor family. In the five and a half years since the Nazis had taken power in Germany, tens of thousands of Jews had emigrated. The Zionists and the desperate went to Palestine; others went wherever they had relatives or prospects. Failing that, they fled to any country that would let them in: France, Holland, Britain, the Americas North and South. But every nation on Earth resisted the influx of immigrants and refugees. Even Palestine, which was under British control, could take only strictly limited numbers.

  In Austria, Jewish life and emigration came under the overall control of SS‑Lieutenant Adolf Eichmann. Formerly a clerk with the SD, the intel‑

  ligence and security arm of the SS, the Austrian‑born Eichmann had made himself the organization’s foremost expert on Jewish culture and affairs.16

  Accordingly, despite his low rank and his youth (he was only thirty‑two), he had been put in charge of managing the Jewish problem in Austria. The solution to the problem was, first and foremost, to encourage Jews to leave.

  To this end, Eichmann ran the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. He reac‑

  tivated the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, Vienna’s J
ewish cultural and welfare organization, and coerced its leaders into becoming part of the apparatus of emigration. Eichmann also roped in the Palestine Office and the Zionist Association. The IKG’s role was to maintain information on Jews and to coordinate the bureaucracy—including contacts with Jewish organizations in other countries—required for their departure.

  But the Nazis, despite wanting the Jews gone, couldn’t resist making it as hard for them as possible. They intended to strip them of their wealth as they 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 30

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  passed through the system, imposing a variety of extortionate taxes and fines on them—including an “escaping the Reich” tax of 30 percent of their assets and an “atonement” tax of 20 percent (a punishment for Jewry’s “abominable crimes,” in the words of Reinhard Heydrich, who came up with the idea), plus other impositions including hefty bribes and an exchange rate for foreign currency that was positively ruinous.17 Moreover, the applicant’s tax clearance, once granted, was only valid for a few months, and securing a visa often took longer than that. Impoverished would‑be emigrants would then be flung right back to the start. As a result, the Nazi government had to lend the IKG money in order to help pay for impoverished Jews to obtain their travel tickets and foreign currency.18 In this way, the Nazis’ own hatred gummed up the work‑

  ings of the very machine they had created to carry it out.

  Finding a place to immigrate to was the hardest part. Little help came from abroad. Around the world, people—especially Jews—condemned the regime and criticized their own governments for doing too little to take in refugees. But little was done. The campaigners were outnumbered by those who did not want immigrants in their midst, taking their livelihoods and diluting their communities.

  In July 1938, President Roosevelt, who wished to help the Jews but had neither the power nor the will to force the issue under the United States’ tight, discriminatory immigration law, had called an emergency international confer‑

  ence. It had been held with a great fanfare of press attention at Évian in France.

  But the prevailing anti‑immigration mood had hobbled it before it even began, the conference invitation stating that “no country will be expected to receive a greater number of emigrants than is permitted by its existing legislation.”19

  So that was that. The German press jeered at the hypocrisy of a world that made so much indignant noise about the supposedly pitiful plight of the Jews but did little or nothing to help.

  While the right‑wing Western press advocated standing firm against immi‑

  gration, many journalists spoke out. In London, the Spectator declared, “It is an outrage, to the Christian conscience especially, that the modern world with all its immense wealth and resources cannot give these exiles a home, and food and drink, and a secure status.”20 Immigrants and refugees could be cared for without harming the settled population, and “civilised governments must accept the duty and responsibility of undertaking such a task. Anti‑Semitism, 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 31

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  the root of the refugee problem as it is now and as it is likely to develop . . .

  demands world co‑operation to overcome its evils.”21

  The same magazine had a correspondent in Vienna, who reported that

  “the city of gaiety, as everyone knows, has become a city of persecution, a city of sadism . . . no amount of examples of cruelty and bestiality, can convey to the reader who hasn’t felt it the atmosphere of Vienna, the air which the Aus‑

  trian Jews must breathe. For it is not so much individual acts of persecution as the atmosphere these produce, the terror at every ring of the‑front‑door bell, the smell of cruelty in the air, which drive elderly Jews to stay behind locked doors all day and mothers to keep their children indoors . . . Feel that atmosphere and you can understand why it is that families and friends split up to emigrate to the corners of the earth.”22

  And then had come Kristallnacht. This unprecedented atrocity galvanized the liberal press and politicians, and some of the public. It should have changed everything, but it didn’t. Governments, the conservative press, and the pre‑

  vailing democratic will continued to stand firm against letting in more than a trickle of Jewish migrants. When people in the West looked to Europe, they saw not only the few hundred thousand Jews in Germany and Austria, but looming behind them the hundreds of thousands in other Eastern European countries, and the three million in Poland; all these nations had recently enacted anti‑Semitic laws.

  Again the Nazi press jeered: “The fundamental hypocrisy of this whole staged campaign is best shown by the attitude of numerous countries on the issue of Jewish emigration. Nobody wants to take Jewish immigrants.”23 “It is a shameful spectacle,” said Adolf Hitler, “to see how the whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor tormented Jewish people but remains hardhearted and obdurate when it comes to helping them.”24

  Hitler sneered at Roosevelt’s “so‑called conscience” and while the Chicago Tribune headlined that the United States had taken in over twenty‑seven thou‑

  sand Jews that year, on the same page it reported that a proposal to open up Alaska to Jewish immigrants had met determined resistance from the local populace.25 Congressional leaders argued that Roosevelt’s proposed relax‑

  ation of immigration laws to help Jewish refugees “might cause an upset of this nation’s settled immigration policies” and “aggravate unemployment and relief problems.”26 In the British Parliament, members from all sides spoke earnestly about the need to help the Jews, but the home secretary warned of 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 32

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  anti‑Semitism in the country—“an underlying current of suspicion and anxiety about an alien influx”—and that the government must “be careful to avoid mass immigration.” On the other hand, the politicians said, there should be a concerted move to help Jewish children, to save “the younger generation of a great people” who “had never failed to make their contribution to the destinies of the nations which had befriended them.”27

  Many fine words were spoken and calls to action were made. And little changed.

  Meanwhile, the hundreds of thousands of Jews remaining in the Reich could only live out their days, queue at the consulates of Western nations, and wait and hope that their applications would be successful. Thousands were in concentration camps; for them an emigration visa was their only hope. Hun‑

  dreds in Vienna were homeless, and many were reluctant to apply to emigrate for fear of being arrested.28

  The Kleinmanns, who still had their apartment, were luckier than some, but no more free. Gustav had no money and no property, so it was difficult to raise the funds to buy his way through the bloodsucking bureaucracy. He also felt little confidence in his ability to begin a new life in a strange country.

  Tini couldn’t bear the thought of leaving; she was rooted in Vienna, born and bred. At her age, where could she possibly go without feeling torn from her natural place?

  Her children were another matter. She feared for them, especially fifteen‑

  year‑old Fritz; the Nazis had taken him once and might do it again at any time.

  It wouldn’t be long before he lost the flimsy protection of his age.

  Foreign countries were more receptive to child refugees than to adults.

  In December 1938, two parties totaling over a thousand Jewish children left Vienna for England—just part of a projected five thousand accepted by the United Kingdom government, living up to its fine words for once.29 Eventually over ten thousand would find safety in Britain through the Kindertransport.

  Yet even this was just a fraction of the children needing refuge. The UK gov‑

  ernment proposed opening up Palestine to ten thousand Jew
ish children, in addition to the numbers already migrating there from Germany. Tini heard about this proposal and had hopes of placing Fritz on one of the transports when they began;30 he was old enough to cope with being sent away and to support himself through work, which eight‑year‑old Kurt could not. Talks began in Palestine and dragged on for months with no agreement between 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 33

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  the British authorities, the Jewish Agency, and the Palestinian Arab delega‑

  tion. The Arabs feared that they would be swamped in their own land, losing the majority rights they currently enjoyed and sacrificing all their hopes of a future independent Palestinian state. The talks were doomed, and eventually broke down.31

  While the rest of her family fretted and wavered, Edith Kleinmann was absolutely determined to leave. She could never forget the abuse she had suf‑

  fered. A lively, outgoing spirit, she couldn’t bear this confinement, which amounted to a kind of captivity. Edith had her eyes on America. The applica‑

  tion process was slow and complicated, and for most people hopeless. But she had acquired the two affidavits she needed from relatives in the United States who were willing to provide her with shelter and support. Thus prepared, at the end of August 1938 she had registered at the American consulate to begin the process of applying for one of the limited number of US visas granted each year.32 Weeks turned into months, and there was no visa, no hope of escape.

  The system was flooded with applicants and was deliberately squeezed tight at both ends, by the State Department and the Nazi regime. With the end of the year looming, Edith faced the prospect of being stuck in Vienna forever. After Kristallnacht, the need took hold in earnest. She had to get out, and England looked like the best bet.

  Since the early summer, large numbers of Austrian Jews—mostly women, who passed more easily through the bureaucratic vetting process—had fixed on England as the place to try for. Hopeful advertisements had begun to appear in the classified section of the London Times (“the recognized medium for suc‑