at Ravensbrück the Jewish women were locked in their barracks for nearly a month.26 But these cruelties paled beside what occurred that day at Buchenwald.
Early in the morning, all the Jewish prisoners, including Gustav and Fritz, were taken from the quarry and marched back to the confines of the main camp, along with all the Jews from the construction, farm, and other work details. They were ordered back to their barrack blocks, and when all were confirmed present and correct, SS‑Sergeant Johann Blank went to work. Blank was a born sadist, addicted to all forms of cruelty. A for‑
mer forestry apprentice and poacher from Bavaria, he was a particularly enthusiastic participant in the game of forcing prisoners to cross the sentry line and be shot, carrying out many of the murders personally.27 Blank, accompanied by other SS men, still hungover from the previous night’s Putsch celebrations, went from block to block, picking out twenty‑one Jews (including a seventeen‑year‑old boy who had the bad luck to be out‑
doors on an errand). They were marched to the main gate, where they had to stand while the SS men performed a little parade to coincide with the commemorative march taking place in Munich. When it was over, the gate was opened, and the selected Jews were herded out and down the hill toward the quarry.
Inside their tent, Gustav and Fritz knew nothing of what was going on, other than the sounds that carried their way. For a long while, there was silence broken only by the shouts of the SS and the faint sounds of the remaining work details. Then, suddenly, there came a crackle of gunfire; then another and another, followed by sporadic shots. Then silence again.28
It didn’t take long for the story of what had happened to circulate around the camp. The twenty‑one had been marched to the quarry entrance, where they had all been shot. A few had managed to run, only to be hunted down and murdered among the trees.
The day wasn’t over yet. SS‑Sergeant Blank, accompanied by Sergeant Eduard Hinkelmann, who between them were the principal tyrants of the little camp, now turned their attention to their own domain. They carried out an inspection, finding fault with everything and working themselves into a fury.
They ordered a ritual punishment. When the prisoners were mustered outside, the kapos went among them, counting, grabbing every twentieth man and shov‑
ing them forward. They came along Gustav and Fritz’s line: one, two, three . . .
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the counting finger danced along, pulsing the beats . . . seventeen, eighteen, nineteen: the finger went past Gustav . . . twenty: the finger jabbed at Fritz.
He was seized and pushed toward the other victims.29
A heavy wooden table was being dragged onto the roll‑call square. Any prisoner who had been here more than a week or two recognized it as the Bock—the whipping bench, a table with a sloping top, straps, and ankle loops.
The Bock had been introduced by Deputy Commandant Hüttig both as a means of punishment for the prisoners and of entertainment for his men.30
Every prisoner had witnessed its use and was terrified by the sight of it. Blank and Hinkelmann very much enjoyed putting the Bock to work.
Fritz was gripped by the arms and, with his insides dissolving, was rushed to the Bock. His jacket and shirt were removed and his pants pulled down.
Hands shoved him facedown on the sloping top, forced his ankles through the loops, and tightened the leather strap over his back.
Gustav watched in helpless horror as Blank and Hinkelmann prepared; they relished the moment, stroking their bullwhips—ferocious weapons of leather with a steel core. Camp rules allowed for a minimum of five lashes, and a maximum of twenty‑five. Today the rage of the SS could be sated by nothing less than the maximum.
The first lash landed like a razor cut across Fritz’s buttocks.
“Count!” they yelled at him. Fritz had seen this ritual before; he knew what was expected. “One,” he said. The bullwhip cut across his flesh again.
“Two,” he gasped.
The SS men were methodical; the lashes were paced to prolong the punish‑
ment and heighten the pain and terror of each blow. Fritz knew that he must concentrate, that if he lost count the lashes would start over again. Three . . .
four . . . an eternity, an inferno of pain . . . ten . . . eleven . . . fighting to con‑
centrate, to count correctly, not to give in to despair or unconsciousness . . .
twenty‑four . . . twenty‑five.
At last the strap was loosed and he was forced to his feet. Before his father’s eyes he was helped away, bleeding, on fire, his mind stunned, as the next unfortunate was dragged to the Bock.
The obscene ritual dragged on for hours; dozens of men, hundreds of blows. Many succumbed to the distress of the moment, miscounted their strokes and had to begin again. None walked away unbroken.
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Gustav and Fritz stood side by side at roll call—Fritz with some difficulty. Only two days had passed since the dreadful day of the shootings and the Bock, and Fritz had hardly begun to heal. But to succumb to pain or sickness here was to give in to death. Besides, he was worried about his papa. The starva‑
tion punishment had been renewed, and there had been no food for days; dysentery and fever still plagued the camp, and now Gustav, weakened by labor and hunger, had caught the disease. He was pale, feverish, and afflicted by diarrhea. Fritz watched him anxiously as they stood there and the minutes ticked slowly by. He couldn’t possibly work; he could scarcely stand through roll call. Gustav swayed, shivering, his senses withdrawing. Sounds grew faint and muffled, a black haze closed in around his vision, his extremities growing suddenly numb, and he felt himself falling, falling, into a black pit. He was unconscious before he hit the ground.
When Gustav woke, he was on his back somewhere indoors. Not the tent.
Above him floated the faces of Fritz and another man. They had carried him here—Fritz struggling with his still‑unhealed injuries. He appeared to be in one of the barrack buildings in the main camp. It couldn’t be the infirmary, which was closed to Jews. In his hazy, febrile state, Gustav was dimly aware that this must be the block set aside for Jews and hopeless cases, the one from which people rarely emerged alive. The air was thick, stifling, filled with a susurrus of groans and an atmosphere of hopeless, helpless death. But it was the closest thing there was to medical care for Jews.
There were two doctors. One, a German named Haas, was callous and stole from the sick, leaving them to starve. The other was a prisoner, Dr.
Paul Heller, a young Jewish physician from Prague, who dedicated himself to doing the best he could for his patients with the meager resources the SS
provided.31 Gustav lay helpless, running a temperature of 38.8°C,* sometimes lucid, sometimes in a fever dream, for days.
Meanwhile, in the little camp the prisoners were starving. The announce‑
ment on the loudspeakers had been heard so many times it was like a mantra:
“Food deprivation will be imposed as a disciplinary measure.” In November alone the little camp had endured eleven days of total starvation. Some of the
* 102°F
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younger prisoners suggested begging the SS for food. Fritz, who had scarcely begun recovering from his whipping, was among them. But the older, wiser prisoners, many of them veterans of the First World War, warned them against it. Taking action meant exposure, and exposure usually meant punishment or death.
Fritz talked it over with a Viennese friend, Jakob Ihr—nicknamed
“Itschkerl”—a boy from the Prater. Itschkerl was determined to do something:
“I don’t care if w
e have to die—I’m going to speak to Dr. Blies when he comes.”
SS‑Lieutenant Dr. Ludwig Blies was the camp doctor and made regular inspection visits to the little camp. He was hardly a kind man, but he was more humane—or at least less brutally callous—than some other SS doctors. He had on rare occasions intervened to halt excessive punishments.32
Fritz agreed but didn’t trust Itschkerl to do it alone. “All right,” he said.
“But I’m coming with you. And I’ll do the talking; you just back me up.”
When Dr. Blies entered the little camp for his next inspection, Fritz and Itschkerl caught his attention. Blies was, at first sight, an approachable figure: in his late forties, some found him disarmingly comical in appearance.33 Fritz, being careful not to seem demanding, made his voice quaver with weepy des‑
peration. “We have no strength to work,” he pleaded. “Please give us something to eat.”34
Blies stared at them. Fritz had hardly needed to adapt his voice; his thinness and gait said it all. It was sensible to appeal to the SS view of prisoners as a labor resource—but it was also extremely dangerous to draw attention to one’s current uselessness in that regard. This apparently went through Blies’s mind, competing with his humane streak, as he surveyed the two boys. Abruptly he said, “Come with me.”
Fritz and Itschkerl followed the doctor across the roll‑call square to the camp kitchens. Commanding them to wait, Blies went into the food store and came out a few minutes later with a large 1½‑kilo loaf of ration‑issue rye bread and a two‑liter bowl of soup. “Now,” he said, handing over this astonishing bounty, “back to your camp. Go!”
They shared the food—equivalent to half a dozen men’s rations—with their closest bunkmates. The following day the whole camp was put back on full rations, apparently on Blies’s orders. The boys’ appeal to the doctor was the talk of the camp, and from that day forward Itschkerl became one of Fritz’s best friends.
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While this was going on, Gustav still lay sick in the death block. So far, the dysentery had failed to kill him. Fritz visited when he could, but although the worst was past, it was obvious to Gustav that he would never recover in this unhealthy environment. After two weeks in the pestilential block, Gustav begged to be discharged, but Dr. Heller refused to let him go. Gustav was determined; disobeying the doctor’s orders, he asked Fritz to help him get out. Father and son slipped away and made their way back to the little camp, Fritz guiding his papa’s faltering steps. The moment he was out in the fresh air Gustav began to feel better, and even in the tent the atmosphere felt fresher than in the death block.
The following day he was given light work as a latrine cleaner and furnace stoker;35 he ate well, and regained his health a little. Fritz too was recovering from his injuries. But there was always a limit to one’s health in Buchenwald.
They were both thin; Gustav, who had always been lean, had declined to 45
kilos* during his illness, although he was regaining some weight now. On the whole, he felt that things were looking up, since they could hardly get any worse. Fritz’s new reputation for cleverness had made him popular not only with the regular prisoners but even with the camp seniors—the very highest of the prisoner functionaries, who had authority over the block seniors and ordinary kapos; they all thought highly of him.
But still the reality remained: the perks were menial and the consolations little more than a stay of death. “I work to forget where I find myself,” Gustav wrote.
The only thing that held a man together was comradeship. Fritz would often wonder, now and in later years, how he survived all this: “It was not good luck; neither was it God’s blessing.” Rather, it was the kindness of others, especially the older prisoners, many of whom were long‑term veterans of Gestapo dungeons and concentration camps; they knew nothing about Fritz, yet sometimes they would risk their lives to help him. He was just a boy, and short for his age. “All they saw was the Jewish star on my prison uniform, and that I was a child.”36
He and Itschkerl often got extra tidbits of food, sometimes medications when they needed them. Later, when systematic exterminations and transportations began, the older prisoners would help the boys evade the selections.
With winter beginning to bite, Fritz and Gustav were grateful to receive a parcel of fresh underwear from home. They were allowed to receive such
* 99 pounds
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things but could send out no communications; the SS was extremely sensitive about what went on in the camps, even though the atrocities were known throughout the world by now.
Little news accompanied the parcel. Tini was still trying to arrange for the children to leave the Reich and getting nowhere. Of Edith there was no news at all. With Germany and Britain at war, the family was entirely cut off from their eldest daughter. Where she was and what she might be doing were a blank.
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4 The Stone
C r u s h e r
THE WINTER NIGHT SKY over the north of England was deepest black, speckled with stars and banded by the mist of the Milky Way, with a bright slice of a first‑quarter moon floating in it. The city, the whole nation, was in blackout, and the heavens had all illumination to themselves.
Edith Kleinmann looked up at the same stars that tracked the skies over Vienna, where her family, God willing, were all keeping safe. She had no news at all, only fears. If only this barrier didn’t exist, if only she could know how her mother and father, sister and brothers, friends and relatives were. And she had news of her own that she was bursting to share. She had met a man; not just any man this time, but the man.
Her first few months in England had been uneventful enough. Her work placement, arranged through the Jewish Refugees Committee, was as a live‑
in maid with a Mrs. Rebecca Brostoff, a Jewish lady in her sixties who had a prominent wart on her nose and a home in the quiet suburbs on the outskirts of Leeds. Her husband, Morris, was a bristle merchant, and they were modestly well off. Both had been born in Russia in the days of the pogroms and had been refugees themselves in their youth. Their children had flown the nest, and Mrs. Brostoff took the opportunity to give something back to the world by helping this generation of Jewish refugees.1
The house, semidetached from its neighbors with yards front and back, wasn’t a mansion, but it was opulent compared with the Kleinmanns’ apartment in Vienna. Leeds was a sprawling industrial city, all soot‑blackened brick and English Victorian architecture, long streets of small, begrimed factory‑workers’
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houses, grand public buildings, and gray, smoky skies. Even the public parks seemed rustic and unsophisticated compared with the palatial gardens of Edith’s home city. The countryside north of the city was wild, wind‑blown moorland, the landscape of the Brontë novels. Street Lane, six kilometers out from the city center and blandly suburban, was neither country nor metropolis.
Not many would choose Leeds for its charms. But there were no Nazis here. No conflict, no danger, and although anti‑Semitism existed (was there any nation on Earth where that toxin hadn’t spread?) there was no Jew‑baiting, no exclusion, no scrubbing games, no Dachau.
Britain was mired in a war that was going nowhere; after months of buildup—soldiers marching, politicians talking up a storm, the people prepped with air raid drills, gas masks, sandbags, and blackouts—there had been no bombs, no gas, no Nazi parachutists shooting it out with the Home Guard in the local high street. It was all rather a letdown; wound to a high state of anxious expectation, here they we
re, still living their normal lives but with a whole new panoply of restrictive regulations. They called it the Phony War, or the Bore War.
And there were the Jewish refugees. Many British people welcomed them, but some did not, and the government was caught between the two poles. The press spoke out for and against them, arguing for the contribution they made to the economy and pleading the plight they faced in their home country while on the other hand British workers worried about their jobs, and their fears were played upon by a right‑wing press. There were claims about the criminal tendencies and shiftlessness of Jews and the threat they posed to British life.
But still, there were no actual Nazis, no SA or SS, and no repression. With the outbreak of war, the government had begun screening and interning enemy aliens; Edith, as an Austrian, was examined and placed in Category C—refugees from Nazism, exempt from internment.2 And that was that.
Mrs. Brostoff treated Edith—who wasn’t the world’s most natural domestic servant—kindly, and Edith was content on a good weekly wage of three pounds.
For eight months she wrote brisk, brief letters home—and then it came to an end. Germany invaded Poland; Britain and France demanded withdrawal and set a deadline.
In a chilling echo of Chancellor Schuschnigg’s ominous announcement of capitulation, Austrian refugees heard Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s address on the radio, the stiff, leaden voice precisely and mechanically inton‑
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ing, “I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany . . . Now may God bless you all. May He defend the right. It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against—brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution—and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.” The nation was by no means so sure. But when autumn turned to winter and the Germans didn’t invade England and no bombs fell, the British began to grow complacent.
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