The Stone Crusher

by Jeremy Dronfield

  For Edith Kleinmann, that first winter in England was marked not by war but by romance. She had known Richard Paltenhoffer in Vienna but only as an acquaintance. He was the same age as she and had lived with his mother in an apartment in Novaragasse, a long street between the Augarten and the Prater, and had moved in the same circles as Edith and her friends. In England they met again, and fell in love.

  Richard had been through hell since Edith had last seen him. In June 1938, only three months after the Anschluss, by sheer bad luck he’d been picked up by the Vienna SS. The Nazi regime in Berlin had instituted what they called Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich—Action Work‑Shy Reich. It was intended to sweep the “asocial” element in German society off the streets and into the concentra‑

  tion camps, the “useless mouths” and “community aliens”: the unemployed and work‑shy, beggars, drunks, drug addicts, pimps, and petty crooks. Around nine and a half thousand people were caught up this way and despatched to Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald. The “asocial” category was loosely defined, and local police, especially in Vienna, swept up many Jews and Roma who had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.3 On June 24, 1938, Richard Paltenhoffer, nineteen years old and ejected by the Nazis from his job as an apprentice bookbinder, was one of the unlucky victims of Action Work‑Shy Reich.

  Arrested by the security police—the Sipo—Richard was sent to Dachau, where he remained for three months; then he was transferred to Buchenwald.4

  At that time Buchenwald was an even worse place than when Fritz and Gustav Kleinmann arrived there a year later. Its facilities were even more rudimentary, with no proper water supply, and with the arrival of the thousands of Jews arrested in Vienna after Kristallnacht, conditions became truly diabolical. It was then that the ramshackle tents of the little camp were put up (although Richard, accommodated in one of the regular blocks, never experienced those).

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  led to dehydration and disease, especially among the “November Jews,” who were so numerous that work and uniforms couldn’t be found for them and they had to live in their increasingly soiled civilian clothes.5

  Richard, although spared the ordeal of the November Jews, endured the nightmare of a Buchenwald winter, with its regime of terror, violence, and grueling labor. On one of the regular punishment parades that usually followed evening roll call, a man standing in front of him was bayoneted by an SS guard.

  The blade passed right through the man, who fell back against Richard, and impaled Richard’s leg. The wound gave him trouble for months afterward, but luckily he didn’t succumb to infection.

  In April 1939, Richard’s life was saved by an extraordinary stroke of luck.

  The SS had been relieving pressure inside the camps by releasing Jews who had emigration papers. There was no chance of that for Richard, who didn’t have the means. However, to mark Adolf Hitler’s fiftieth birthday on April 20, Himmler agreed to a celebratory mass amnesty of nearly nine thousand concentration camp prisoners.6 Among them was Richard Paltenhoffer, who gained his freedom on April 27.

  He had more sense than to return to Vienna, where he would likely be picked up again before long. Instead he crossed the border into Switzerland.

  Through his involvement with the Österreichischer Pfadfinderbund—the Aus‑

  trian Boy Scouts—he obtained the necessary travel permit to go to England.

  By the end of May he was in London and on his way to Leeds, where friends of his had already found refuge. Lodgings had been arranged for him by the JRC, as well as a job as an apprentice baker in a factory making kosher crack‑

  ers. The same committee promised to arrange for his bayonet wound to be treated at a Jewish hospital. He was eager to get to Leeds and start raising the money from friends to pay for the treatment.7

  Richard’s lodgings proved to be a room in a house close to the city center, in a cobbled street of tall townhouses that had once been genteel but were now run‑down, with cracked window panes and soot‑blackened bricks.

  There was a large and thriving Jewish community in the city, which had its own active branch of the JRC run by David Makovski, who ran a tailoring business. He was known for a sometimes irascible temperament and a belief that each person should know his or her place in society and stick to it. With a tiny budget of £250 a year, Makovski and his small staff of volunteers helped hundreds of Jews find homes and work in Leeds.8

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  It was through a social club for young Jews that Edith and Richard were reunited. Although they’d only been acquaintances before, they quickly became much more than that. Soon they were dating, and by Christmas 1939 they were deeply involved. In Edith’s eyes, Richard Paltenhoffer was a reminder of home and the life she had lost—the lively society, and a career in fashion rather than in sweeping carpets. Richard was a genial, attractive figure. He had a beaming smile and liked to laugh, and he dressed sharp—nicely cut chalk‑stripe suits and a fedora to match, always with a handkerchief tucked just so in the breast pocket. Among the regular Yorkshire working men in their serge, woollen scarves, and flat caps, Richard stood out like an exotic bloom in a potato field.

  A war, even a phony war, was a time of possibility for the young, and with two high spirits far from home it was almost inevitable that they would enjoy themselves to the fullest. They met at a dance and swept each other off their feet. Christmas came, and the New Year celebrations, and January was scarcely through when Edith discovered that she was expecting a baby.

  Hectic romances and whirlwind marriages were a fixture of wartime life, and in February Edith and Richard started making arrangements for a wed‑

  ding. It wasn’t a simple business—they were refugees, and any change of status had to be registered with the government. At 9:30 sharp on Monday, February 19, they presented themselves at the office of Rabbi Arthur Super at the Leeds New Synagogue, and from there they all went to the police station to fill out the required forms. Then, with help from the United Hebrew Congregation in Leeds, David Makovski’s Control Committee, and a Rabbi Fisher, late of the Stadttempel in Vienna, now based in Leeds, the prospective marriage was arranged with the Registrar General.9

  With bureaucracy satisfied, on Sunday, March 17, 1940, Edith Kleinmann married Richard Paltenhoffer at the New Synagogue in Chapeltown Road, a remarkable modern building of green copper domes and brick arches in the heart of Leeds’ own equivalent of Leopoldstadt.

  Two months later, on May 10, Adolf Hitler launched his long‑anticipated invasion of Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. The British Expeditionary Force and its French ally were driven back and divided by a German spear‑

  head. In the last week of May and the first week of June, the remainder of the British force, with its back to the sea, was evacuated from the beach at Dunkirk by a fleet of hundreds of warships, merchant vessels, fishing smacks, and private boats.

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  The Phony War was over. The Germans were on their way, and seemingly unstoppable. The English Channel was an obstacle, but one way or another, Hitler was coming.

  “Left–two–three! Left–two–three!”

  The rasping voice of the kapo barked out the time as the team pulled the quarry wagon up the rails. It was relentless: “Left–two–three! Left–two–three!”

  Their shoes slithered on the ice and loose stones, their hands and shoulders raw on the ropes or numbed on the bare metal of the wagon. Winter had come savagely to the Ettersberg, but the kapos could always be relied on to outdo it. “Pull her, dogs! Left–two–three! Onward, pigs! Isn’t this fun?” A man who flagged was kicked and beaten. The wheels
squealed and scraped, the men’s feet thumped and ground on the stones, their hot breath clouded in the bitter air. “At the double! Faster or you’ll be in the shit!”10 A dozen backbreaking wagonloads to be drawn up this slope to the construction sites every day, an hour’s round trip. “Forward, pigs! Left–two–three!”

  “The men‑beasts hang in the reins,” Gustav wrote in his diary, turning his daily hell into a series of stark poetic images. “Panting, groaning, sweating . . .

  Slaves, cursed to labor, like in the days of the Pharaohs.”

  There had been a brief respite in the new year; in the middle of January, Dr. Blies, concerned about the extreme death rate from disease in the little camp, and with the SS worrying that it might spread to them, ordered that the survivors be moved to blocks in the main camp.11 They were showered and deloused, then put into quarantine in block 8, a wooden barrack close to the roll‑call square. So began a remarkable and most welcome eight days of rest and recuperation. The barrack seemed almost luxurious after the tents, with waxed wooden floors, solid walls, toilets, a washroom with cold running water, and tables to eat off. Everything was kept immaculately clean; the prisoners even had to remove their shoes in an anteroom before entering the barrack. Severe punishments were inflicted for dirt and disorder. During that one blessed week they got regular food, and every day was relaxed. Gustav had regained his strength, while Fritz was put to light work doing odd jobs. “He’s doing well,” Gustav had recorded in his diary.

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  Of course it couldn’t last. On January 24 the quarantine period ended.

  Gustav was transferred to a block near the camp stores and kitchens while Fritz was placed in block 3, the “youth block,” with the other young boys.12

  The newer inmates got to know the main camp better—the ordered ranks of barrack blocks radiating down the hill with streets between them, and the centerpiece: the Goethe Oak. This venerated tree stood next to block 29, near the kitchens and bath block, and was reputed to have been a landmark in Goethe’s walks from Weimar up the Ettersberg. So potent were its cultural associations that the SS had been obliged to preserve it and build the camp around it.13 They put it to use for punishments. One of their favorite techniques, used throughout the concentration camp system, was to tie a man’s hands behind his back and hang him by his wrists from a beam. The Goethe Oak made a spectacular venue for this abominable ritual. The hanged men would be left for hours—enough to cripple them for days or weeks—and often beaten bloody while they hung. Two of Gus‑

  tav’s workmates were among those suspended from the Goethe Oak for not working hard enough.

  Fritz and his father, having absorbed the whispers about the camps that had spread in Vienna, were surprised on emerging from quarantine to learn that Jews made up only a fraction of Buchenwald’s prisoner population; Fritz estimated a tenth, although it was actually closer to a fifth.14 There were criminals, Roma, Poles, Catholic and Lutheran priests, and homosexuals, but political prisoners—mostly communists and socialists—made up the larg‑

  est group. Many had been transferred here from other camps, having been prisoners for years, in some cases since the beginning of the Nazi regime in 1933. However, it was for the Jews and the Roma that the SS reserved its harshest treatment.

  “Left–two–three! Left–two–three!” A dozen loads a day, up the hil , a dozen dangerous high‑speed rolls back to the quarry. Fingers burning with cold on the metal, scorched by ropes, minds numbed, shoes and wooden clogs skit‑

  tering on the ice and stones, abuse and battery from the kapos.

  After a few months, Gustav and Fritz were taken off wagon duty and put to work within the quarry, carrying stones. Although it appeared initially to be less dangerous work, it was, if possible, even worse. Carriers had to pick up stones and boulders from where they were hewn out of the rock face and carry them in their bare hands to the waiting wagons. Palms and fingers were 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 65

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  chafed and quickly blistered and bled. The shift lasted ten hours, with a short break at midday. That was just the baseline of laboring in the quarry—on top came the abuse for which the place was infamous.

  “Every day another death,” Gustav wrote. “One cannot believe what a man can endure.” He could find no ordinary words to describe the living hell of the quarry. Turning to the back pages of his notebook, he began composing a poem, titled “Quarry Kaleidoscope,” translating the chaotic nightmare into precise, measured, orderly stanzas.

  Click‑clack, hammer blow,

  Click‑clack, day of woe.

  Slave souls, wretched bones,

  At the double, break the stones.15

  In these lines he managed to find a midpoint between the experiences he lived each day and how it was perceived through the eyes of the kapos and the SS.

  Click‑clack, hammer blow,

  Click‑clack, day of woe.

  Hear how all these wretches moan,

  Whimpering while they tap on stone.16

  The slave‑driving, each endless day, and the murderous abuses, all trans‑

  muted into poetic imagery. “Shovel! Load it up! Think you can take a breather?

  You think you’re some kind of celebrity?” Hands slipping, grazing on the boulders, staining the pale limestone with rust‑red blood; struggling, laden, to the wagons. “On, you shirkers—wagon number two! If you don’t have it full soon, I’ll beat you to a pulp!” The stones clattering and banging into the hollow iron belly of the wagon. “Finished? You think you’re free now? D’you see me laughing? Wagon three, at the double! Faster, or you’ll be in the shit.

  On, pigs!” Driven along with kicks and curses; the filled wagon wheeling slowly away up the steep rails: “Left–two–three! Left–two–three!”

  The kapos and guards entertained themselves with the prisoners. One of Gustav’s fellow carriers was made to take a huge rock and run with it in circles, uphill and down. “But be funny, understand?” the kapo ordered him.

  “Or I’ll beat you crooked.” The victim tried to run in a frolicsome manner, and the kapo laughed and applauded. Around and around he ran, chest heaving, 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 66

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  straining for breath, bruised and bloodied. At last, overcome by sheer fatigue, the droll performance faltered; yet he kept moving, struggling around the circle twice more. But the kapo was bored now; he pushed his victim to the ground and delivered a savage, fatal kick to the head.

  A favorite game was to snatch the cap off a passing prisoner and hurl it away—up a tree, in a puddle, always just beyond the sentry line. “Hey, your cap! Go get it, there by sentry four. Go on, mate, go get her!” This would often be a new prisoner, who didn’t know the game. “And the dumbass runs,” Gustav wrote. Past the sentries— bang! —and he was dead. Another entry in the guards’ escape register, another credit toward an SS man’s bonus vacation time: three days for each escapee shot. An SS sentry named Zepp was in cahoots with several kapos, including Johann Herzog, a green‑

  triangle prisoner whom Gustav described as “a murderer of the worst sort.”

  A former Foreign Legionnaire, Herzog had been arrested on his return to Germany; he was a killer and a brutal sexual sadist.17 Zepp would reward Herzog and his fellows with tobacco each time they sent a man into the line of his rifle.

  Some men despaired and ran of their own volition across the line to death.

  But most of the prisoners would not give up, couldn’t be tricked. And some seemed unbeatable, no matter what abuses the guards and kapos inflicted on them. A blow with a rifle butt:

  Smack!—down on all fours he lies,

  But still the dog just will not die.18

  In the middle of the quarry, dominating everything, st
ood a machine. A massive roaring engine drove a series of wheels and belts connected to a great hopper, into which stones were shoveled. Inside, heavy steel plates worked up and down and side to side, a colossal iron jaw chewing the stones, crushing them down to gravel. On the machine’s footplate, a kapo worked the throttle and gears. When the quarry laborers were not filling the wagons, they were feeding this monstrous machine.

  For Gustav, the stone crusher seemed emblematic not just of the quarry but of the camp and the entire system in which Buchenwald was just a compo‑

  nent—the great engine in which he and his fellows were both the fuel driving it and the grist that it ground.

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  It rattles, the crusher, day out and day in,

  It rattles and rattles and breaks up the stone,

  Chews it to gravel and hour by hour

  Eats shovel by shovel in its guzzling maw.

  And those who feed it with toil and with care,

  They know it just eats, but will never be through.

  It first eats the stone and then eats them too.19

  Some men tried to resist being consumed. One prisoner on the crusher‑

  filling detail, a comrade of the man who had been made to run in circles, kept his head down and shoveled the stones, anxious to avoid the attention of the kapos. He was a tall, powerfully built man, and he shoveled well. The kapo on the footplate of the stone crusher saw the opportunity for a game; he edged the throttle up until the machine was running at double speed, rattling and banging diabolically. The prisoner shoveled faster. Man and machine labored: the man panting, muscles straining; the crusher grinding and clattering fit to explode. Slaves working nearby left off their labors to watch, and the kapos, also enthralled, let them. On and on the contest went, shovel by shovel, clattering plates, roaring gears, the man dripping with sweat, the crusher thundering and defecating a cascade of gravel. The man seemed to have tapped within himself a threefold seam of strength and will. But the crusher’s strength and stamina were limitless, and little by little the man weakened and slowed. Summoning his will, he rallied for one more titanic effort, stretching his muscles to shovel as if for his life; the machine would win, it always won, but still he tried.