The Stone Crusher

by Jeremy Dronfield

  † Caracho: an exclamation of surprise (Spanish) 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 76

  05/04/2018 14:02:06

  T h e R o a d t o L i f e 77

  was over he was ordered to put his prison uniform back on and run back to the camp. He obeyed, puzzled but also relieved to still be in one piece. His surprise increased when he was informed that he didn’t have to work for the rest of that day.

  Fritz sat in the empty barrack wondering what this could possibly be about.

  Clearly the jacket and tie had been intended to give the impression that he was living as an ordinary civilian, not as a prisoner, but beyond that he couldn’t imagine.

  That evening, when the work details marched back to their blocks, weary and gaunt, Gustav, who had been in a state of sick anxiety all day, slipped away and went across to Fritz’s block. When he looked in through the door and saw him there, alive and well, the relief was immense. Fritz described what had happened, but neither they nor any of their friends could tell what it meant.

  Anything that involved being singled out for attention by the Gestapo surely couldn’t be healthy.

  A few days later, the same thing happened again; Fritz was summoned from roll call and taken to the Gestapo office. A copy of his photograph was put in front of him, and he was ordered to sign it: Fritz Israel Kleinmann, in his strong, confident hand. The image of himself was unsettling: his eyes glowering into the camera, and the mockery of the oversize jacket and the brutally cropped hair. If this was meant to give the impression that he lived a normal life, it was miserably unsuccessful; nobody living normally in the world could look like that.

  At last he was told the purpose of it all, and it was wonderful. His mother had obtained the affidavit she needed from America and had applied for Fritz to be released so that he could emigrate.

  Hope glimmered in the back of Fritz’s mind while he went on enduring the sick fever dream that passed for life in Buchenwald. It was troubling that the hope did not include his papa, who was being slowly worn down in the quarry.

  Fritz’s life and his father’s were diverging; first through his being trans‑

  ferred to the youth block, and then through his move from the quarry detail to 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 77

  05/04/2018 14:02:06

  78 B u c h e n w a l d

  the gardens. Fritz was discovering a wider world through the older prisoners who helped and befriended him.

  Foremost among them was Leopold Moses, who had helped Fritz survive in the early months and had remained a friend. Fritz had first encountered him in the quarry. During the early days, there had been almost no water supply, and none at all in the little camp. Workers in the quarry would drink from puddles, which had caused the epidemic of dysentery and typhus. Leo‑

  pold Moses had offered Fritz some little black pills: “Swallow them,” he said,

  “they’ll prevent the shits.” Fritz showed the pills to his father, who recognized them from his time in the trenches in World War One; they were veterinary charcoal, and they did help.

  Leo Moses took Fritz under his wing when he was transferred to the youth block, and Fritz learned his story. Aged thirty‑nine, he’d been in the concentra‑

  tion camps since the very beginning. A laborer from Dresden, Leo had been a member of the German Communist Party and had taken part in the so‑called March Action, an attempted communist revolution in 1921. As a known com‑

  munist, Leo Moses been arrested as soon as the Nazis came to power—long before his Jewishness became an arrestable crime. At first he’d been held in the notorious Columbia Haus, the Gestapo prison in Berlin, and then he spent years in Oranienburg and Lichtenburg concentration camps. When the latter became a women’s camp in 1937, Leo had been transferred to the newly opened Buchenwald.14 As a well‑behaved camp veteran, he’d been made a kapo on the haulage column—one of the first kapos in Buchenwald with a Jewish star. But he hadn’t been able to live with being a slave‑driver, and the SS soon demoted him and subjected him to twenty‑five lashes on the Bock.

  Through Leo Moses, his first friend and protector, Fritz got to know some of the other veteran Jewish prisoners, all of whom befriended this slight, frail‑

  seeming boy, took care of him, and did what they could to keep him and his fellow youngsters in block 3 safe. Despite being known as the youth block, it was mostly occupied by adults, with just forty or so boys. Many came from the ghetto at Tomaszow, Poland, and spoke Yiddish or Polish; Fritz and the other Viennese boys could scarcely communicate with them, but they ate together and stuck by one another.

  Among their patriarchs was Gustav Herzog, the block senior, the man who had employed Fritz’s father as a room orderly and given him his brief reprieve from the quarry. At thirty‑one, Gustl was young for a block senior.15

  294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 78

  05/04/2018 14:02:06

  T h e R o a d t o L i f e 79

  He was the son of a wealthy Viennese family, owners of the Herzog interna‑

  tional news agency, and Gustl himself had been a journalist and a keen hockey player. He’d been arrested in the Kristallnacht pogrom and had failed to secure emigration papers.

  The appointment of Gustl Herzog and a number of other Jews as block seniors had helped to break down the dominance of the brutal green tri‑

  angle men.16 His deputy was Stefan Heymann, who made a strong impact on Fritz’s young mind. A decade older than Herzog, Stefan had the face of an intellectual: high‑browed, bespectacled, with a narrow jaw and sensitive mouth.17 He had been an officer in the Germany army in the last war and been wounded several times. As an active communist and a Jew, he’d been among the first arrested in 1933, and after years in Dachau he had ended up in Buchenwald.

  Stefan and Gustl obtained extra soup for the boys, and on evenings when there was no night work, Stefan would tell stories to take their minds off their plight. One evening he read to them from a treasured book, a forbidden work of communist origin: Road to Life by the Russian author Anton Makarenko.

  It told the story of Makarenko’s work at two Soviet rehabilitation colonies for juvenile offenders. In the pages of the book, as Stefan conjured it, his voice low in the barrack gloom, the boys’ camps were brought to life as magical idylls, a universe away from the daily reality of Buchenwald: We transferred to the new colony on a fine, warm day. The leaves on the trees not yet begun to turn, the grass was still green, as if at the height of its second youth, freshened by the first days of autumn. The new colony itself was at that time like a beauty of thirty years—lovely for itself as well as for others, happy and calm in its assured charm . . .

  The whispering canopy of the luxuriant treetops of our park spread generously over the Kolomak. There was many a shady mysterious nook here, in which one could bathe, cultivate the society of pixies, go fishing, or, at the lowest, exchange confidences with a congenial spirit. Our principal buildings were ranged along the top of the steep bank, and the ingenious and shameless younger boys could jump right out of the windows into the river, leaving their scanty garments on the window sills.18

  294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 79

  05/04/2018 14:02:06

  80 B u c h e n w a l d

  The boys listened, enraptured. Most were alone, their fathers having been killed already, and many had grown increasingly apathetic and listless; but hearing this story of another, better world brought them back to life, enthused and cheered.

  Other cultural delights were to be had under the tutelage of their seniors.

  One evening Stefan and Gustl came into the barrack with an air of conspirato‑

  rial mystery. Urging the boys to be quiet, they led them across the camp to the clothing store, a long building adjacent to the shower block and kitchens. It was quiet and still, the hanging racks and shelves stuffed with uniforms, boots, and underwear, and the clothing confiscated from new prisoners, deadening the echo of the boys’ footsteps. Within, some older prisoners had gathered; they
gave each boy a piece of bread and some acorn coffee, and then four prisoners appeared with violins and woodwinds. There, in the midst of this musty, cloth‑lined room, they played chamber music. For the first time Fritz heard the jaunty, impudent melody of “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.” Like him, it was a Viennese composition; the cheerful skipping of the bows on the strings brought the room to life and smiles to the lips of the men and boys gathered round. So the evening passed in music and joy, a memory Fritz would treasure forever: “For a very short time we were able to laugh again.”19

  Outside these walls, outside these few borrowed hours, there was no laugh‑

  ter. Working in the vegetable gardens, whose produce was sold in Weimar market and to prisoners in the canteen, was an improvement on the quarry but tougher than the boys had expected.

  Fritz and his friends had anticipated being able to pilfer a few of the car‑

  rots, tomatoes, and peppers they planted. But it hadn’t turned out that way; they never had the chance to get close to the ripened crops. The gardens were under the overall authority of an Austrian officer, SS‑Lieutenant Dumböck, who had spent time in exile in Germany with the Austrian Legion during the period when the Nazi Party was outlawed and now took a special pleasure in persecuting Austrian Jews. “You pigs ought to be annihilated,” he yelled repeatedly at them, and he did his best to make it come true; Dumböck was later reported to have murdered forty prisoners with his own hands.20

  While some garden workers did general labor as backbreaking and injuri‑

  ous as in the quarry, others were put on the loathsome task of Scheissetragen—

  shit carrying.21 Fritz was among them. They had to collect the slop of feces from the prisoner latrines and sewage plant in the main camp and carry it in 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 80

  05/04/2018 14:02:07

  T h e R o a d t o L i f e 81

  buckets to the vegetable beds. Every trip, there and back, had to be done at top speed, running as fast as one could bear with the noisome, glooping pails of filth. The only job worse than shit carrying was that of the so‑called 4711 detail, named after a popular German eau de cologne; their job was to scoop out the feces from the latrines—often with their bare hands—to fill the shit‑carriers’

  buckets. The SS typically allotted this task to Jewish intellectuals and artists.22

  Fritz and the other boys had some of the pressure taken off them by their kapo, Willi Kurz. A former amateur heavyweight boxing champion, Willi was a disillusioned soul; having once been on the board of an Aryans‑only sports club in Vienna, he had been deeply hurt when the authorities branded him a Jew. But it was his position as an officer in the militia wing of Schuschnigg’s Fatherland Front that had condemned him; within weeks of the Anschluss he’d been arrested and sent to the camps. Willi was kind to the boys on his detail; he let them ease off the pace and take a rest if no SS were around. Whenever a guard appeared, Willi would make a show of driving the boys along at full pace, yelling savagely at them and brandishing his cudgel, but he never beat them. His performance was so convincing that the guards never bothered inflicting beatings themselves if Willi was in charge.

  “Left–two–three! Left–two–three!”

  Gustav, with his shoulder to the ropes, heaved. There was no release, no pause, no reprieve from the daily ordeal—just heave, step, heave, step, into eternity. On either side the other cattle heaved and stepped, sweated in the burning sun, dappled by shade from the trees. Twenty‑six men with Jewish stars on their uniforms, twenty‑six half‑starved bodies hauling the wagon with its load of logs from the forest, up the slope, along the dirt road, wagon wheels groaning under the load, men sweating at the ropes.

  For Gustav, transfer to the haulage column had been a lifesaver, and he owed it to Leo Moses. The quarry had become intolerable, worse than ever.

  Sergeants Blank and Hinkelmann, along with a notorious kapo named Vogel, had taken to chasing prisoners over the sentry line every day. Hinkelmann had invented a new torture; if a man collapsed from exhaustion, Hinkel‑

  mann would pour water into his mouth until he choked. Blank, meanwhile, entertained himself by standing on the high ground at the top of the quarry 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 81

  05/04/2018 14:02:07

  82 B u c h e n w a l d

  and throwing rocks down on the prisoners as they left at noon break or at the end of the day; men who failed to get out of the way quickly enough were hit and killed. The SS men also took up extortion against those Jewish quarry workers who received money from home; every few days, each had to pay up five marks and six cigarettes or risk being beaten and tormented.

  With two hundred prisoners, the guards made a good little income from their “paydays,” although the sum declined week by week as the prisoners died or were murdered.

  Leo Moses had stepped in and saved Gustav’s life. On Leo’s advocacy, in July Gustav was transferred out of the killing ground of the quarry to the haulage column, in which Leo had once been a kapo. Gustav and twenty‑five other Jews were hitched to a wagon and hauled building materials around the camp complex all day long—logs from the forest, stone from the quarry, cement from the stores. The kapos forced them to sing as they worked, and the other prisoners referred to them as the singende Pferde—singing horses.23

  “Left–two–three! Left–two–three! Left–two–three! Sing, pigs!”

  Whenever they passed an SS guard, he would lash out at them. “Why don’t you run, you dogs? Faster!”

  But still it was better than the quarry. “It is hard work,” Gustav wrote, “but one has more peace and is not hunted . . . Man is a creature of habit, and can get used to everything. So it goes, day after day.”

  The wheels turned, the man‑horses sang and heaved, the kapos yelled time, and the days passed.

  SS‑Sergeant Schmidt screamed at the group of men as they ran in circles around the roll‑call square. “Run! Faster! Run you pigs, run! Faster, you shits!” While all the other prisoners walked back to their barracks, Fritz and the other block 3 inmates had been made to stay. Schmidt, their Blockführer, had found fault in his inspection again—a bed not properly made, a floor insufficiently pristine, belongings not stowed away—and it was punishment time once more— Strafsport, it was called. Thickset and flabby, like so many of his fellows, Schmidt was a notorious sadist and killer, as well as a noted goldbrick; he held a post in the prisoners’ canteen and skimmed off tobacco and cigarettes in large 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 82

  05/04/2018 14:02:07

  T h e R o a d t o L i f e 83

  quantities. Fritz and the other boys called him “Shit Schmidt” for his favorite word, which decorated virtually every sentence.24

  “Faster, you Jew‑shits!” Fritz and the other boys, who were at the front, stepped up their pace to avoid the blows Schmidt aimed at any man going too slowly. Some of the runners struggled with painful stomachs or testicles where Schmidt had kicked them for answering too slowly at roll call.

  “Run! March! Lie down . . . get up . . . lie down again. Shit! Now run!”

  Thwack went his bullwhip on the buttocks of some poor man who couldn’t keep up. “Run!”

  For two hours the ordeal went on, as the hot sun went down and the square cooled, the men sweating and laboring for breath. At last Schmidt dismissed them with a curse and they limped back to their barrack.

  Starving, they sat down to the only warm meal of the day: turnip soup. If they were lucky there might be a little scrap of meat. When they had finished and were about to get up, Gustl Herzog, the block senior, told the boys to stay where they were. “I have to talk to you,” he said. Once the older men had gone, he said, “You boys mustn’t run so fast during the Strafsport. When you run fast, your fathers can’t keep up and they get beaten by Schmidt for lagging behind.”

  The boys were ashamed, but what could they do? Someone would get beaten for going too slow. Gustl and Stefan Heymann showed them the solu‑

  tion. “Run
like this—lift your knees higher, take smaller steps.” That way, they would give the illusion of running flat‑out, but still go slowly enough for the others to keep up. It would be enough to fool Shit Schmidt.

  As time went on, the old hands taught the boys all the veterans’ little tricks—absurd things, some of them, but they could mean the difference between safety and pain, or between life and death.

  And all the while, as Fritz labored in the gardens and Gustav hauled with the singende Pferde, the war went on in the world outside, the months dragged by, and all hope of release slowly waned.

  His mother’s application to have him released, which had sustained Fritz’s hopes for a while, came to nothing. She went on applying for all her family—

  especially the children—but with each month passing by, the prospect receded.

  294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 83

  05/04/2018 14:02:07

  6 A Favorable

  D e c i s i o n

  AFTER MONTHS OF LIMBO, at the start of June 1940 Britain was launched into an all‑out shooting war. The quiet home front began to transform into a place of bombs and blood and death.

  Before a seaborne German invasion could take place, Goering and Hitler had to break the Royal Air Force. The Bore War gave way to the Battle of Britain. Every day, Luftwaffe bombers flew in swarms from their bases in France and Belgium to attack Britain’s airfields and factories, and every day the Spitfire and Hurricane fighters scrambled to oppose them. The RAF had become a coalition force, its British and Commonwealth pilots joined by exiles from Poland, France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and even some volunteers from the United States defying their country’s Neutrality Act.

  During that hot early summer, the Luftwaffe’s targets were military, and the cities were mostly left alone. The press fixated on two things: the prog‑

  ress of the battle, and growing fears about a German fifth column infiltrat‑

  ing Britain—spies and saboteurs paving the way for the main invasion. The rumors had begun in April, before the Battle of France had even begun.