The Stone Crusher

by Jeremy Dronfield

  For all his stern appearance, Robert Siewert had a kind heart. He took a liking to Fritz and couldn’t stand to see such a young, slightly built boy being worked into the ground. He took Fritz off carrying and reassigned him to mixing mortar. He also taught Fritz how to gain favor with the SS. “You have to work with your eyes,” he told him. “If you see an SS man coming, work fast. But if no SS are about, then you take your time, you spare yourself.” Fritz became so adept at watching for the guards and making a show of intense productive labor that he acquired a reputation for industriousness. Siewert would point him out to the construction leader, SS‑Sergeant Becker, and say,

  “Look how diligently this Jewish lad works.”

  One day Becker arrived at the building site with his superior, SS‑Lieutenant Max Schobert, deputy commandant in charge of protective custody prison‑

  ers. Siewert called Fritz away from his work and presented him to the officer, extolling his performance. “We could train Jewish prisoners as bricklayers,” he suggested. Schobert, a brutal‑faced individual with a perpetual sneer, looked down his large nose at Fritz. He didn’t like this suggestion at all; all that expense to train Jews! Nonetheless, a seed had been planted which had the potential to grow into a lifeline.

  During that summer a large unit of SS troops arrived at Buchenwald to bump the garrison up to full strength. Their barrack buildings weren’t complete, and work had to be accelerated—a task beyond the capacity of the construction detail. Robert Siewert took the opportunity to press his case again, complaining to the camp administration that he didn’t have enough bricklayers. The only solution would be to train young Jews for the job. Commandant Koch’s reac‑

  * 110 pounds

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  tion was the same as Schobert’s. But Siewert insisted that he simply couldn’t provide the labor force in any other way. Eventually Koch relented.

  Fritz Kleinmann was the first apprentice. Siewert began by having him taught to lay bricks to build a simple wall under the supervision of Aryan work‑

  men. With a string laid out as a guide, he pasted on the mortar and laid down brick after brick, neatly and correctly. Fritz had inherited his father’s aptitude for manual craft, and he learned quickly. Having mastered the basics, he was taught how to do corners, pillars, and buttresses, then lintels, fireplaces, and chimneys. In wet weather he learned plastering. Every day Siewert would come to talk to him and check on his progress. In double‑quick time Fritz became a fully trained mason and builder—the first Jew in Buchenwald to do so.

  His progress was so impressive, and the need so urgent, that the SS allowed Siewert to start up a training program for Jewish, Polish, and Roma boys. They would spend half of each day working on‑site, and half in their block in the camp being taught construction theory and science.

  In Fritz’s young mind, Robert Siewert became a hero, representing the spirit of resistance to the Nazis and the ethos of humane kindness. The young were his greatest concern, and he had set himself the goal of doing whatever he could to equip them with skills and knowledge that could save their lives.

  “He spoke to us like a father,” Fritz would recall, “with patience and kindness, to which we had grown unaccustomed.”28 Fritz wondered where Siewert got the strength, at his age and after so many years of Nazi imprisonment.

  Robert Siewert’s Jewish apprentices wore green bands on their sleeves with the inscription “Bricklayers’ School” and enjoyed certain privileges. A particular delight was the heavy laborers’ special food allowance; twice a week, they shared an extra ration of 2½ kilos of bread and half a kilo of blood pud‑

  ding or meat pâté, which was brought to the construction site for them. This was on top of their standard daily ration of 2½ kilos of bread, 250 grams of margarine, a spoonful of curd or beet jam, acorn coffee, and three quarters of a liter of cabbage or turnip soup with little bits of meat in it.

  When winter began to set in, Siewert got permission to set up oil drums as braziers on the construction site, on the pretext that the plaster and mortar was liable to crack in freezing conditions. His real purpose was the welfare of his workers, who labored all day in the bitter cold with only their thin prison uniforms to protect them. A humane and courageous man from heart to backbone, Robert Siewert was absolutely devoted to the well‑being of his 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 93

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  fellow men, and never failed in that duty, knowingly putting himself at unthink‑

  able risk by interceding with the SS on behalf of Jews, Roma, Poles, and other oppressed people.

  But Siewert’s influence did not extend far beyond the limits of the construc‑

  tion site and the bricklaying school. As soon as the day’s work ended and the prisoners returned to the main camp, they returned to the direct jurisdiction of the camp guards and the regime of enforced singing parades long into the night, random beatings, food deprivation, and capricious murders. Fritz would look at his fellow prisoners and silently give thanks that at least he ate better than they did and was not beaten at work or at risk of being driven over the sentry line or kicked to death. He ached for his papa, who slaved each day on the haulage column. Fritz saved what he could from his additional rations to give to him when they met in the evenings.

  Extra morsels of food came to Fritz from an unexpected source. While working on the construction of a heating plant for the SS barracks, he was befriended by an Austrian prisoner who worked as a welder in one of the SS

  technical facilities.29 All Fritz knew of him was that he spoke in the dialect of Styria in southern Austria. He would meet Fritz every few days behind the heating plant and give him a piece of bread. Fritz never knew his name, only that he pitied the young Jewish boys in the camp and helped others besides Fritz, stealing from the SS food store to provide for them. Fritz asked Robert Siewert about the Styrian; he reluctantly gave his approval, warning, “Boy, be careful you don’t get caught.” To be apprehended by the SS would mean punishment for both of them—and death for the Styrian. Fritz’s heart was warmed by these gifts of food, and by the sense of solidarity.30

  Gustav’s mind was eased by his son’s new status and the safety it brought.

  “The boy is popular with all the foremen and kapo Robert Siewert,” he wrote.

  “From Leo Moses we get our greatest support, which gives us further confi‑

  dence.” To Gustav’s indomitably optimistic mind, it was beginning to seem that they might survive this ordeal. Meanwhile, for the poor men in the quarry their hell had no end, and they died in dreadful numbers every day. The fear of being sent back there was constant.

  During his time on the construction detachment, Fritz was moved out of the youth block and transferred to block 17, which was on the same north‑

  south street as his father’s block. It was painful to part from his friends. But the move proved formative; block 17 was where the Austrian VIP and celebrity 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 94

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  prisoners—the Prominenten—were housed. Most had been incarcerated for their political activities but were of a higher status than most of the red‑triangle men in the camp.31 Some of their names were familiar to Fritz, his father hav‑

  ing known them—or at least known of them—during his time as an activist in the Social Democratic Party.

  Fritz was welcomed into this new community by one of the room seniors, Josef Jellinek, who was in his forties and a veteran of left‑wing politics. Along with his sister Adele, Josef, or Seppl as he was known,* had been a writer and editor with the Viennese social‑democratic newspapers Das Kleine Blatt and Der Arbeiter-Sonntag. It was Seppl Jellinek who introduced the starstruck Fritz to the society of block 17.

  They included Robert Danneberg, a
Jewish socialist who had been president of the Vienna provincial council, a member of the National Assembly, and one of the leading figures in “Red Vienna”—the socialist heyday that had lasted from the end of the First World War until the right‑wing takeover in 1934.

  Contrasting with Dannenberg’s sober presence was the droll, round‑faced Fritz Grünbaum, star of the Berlin and Vienna cabaret scenes, conférencier,†

  scriptwriter, and movie actor. He had also written librettos for the operetta composer Franz Léhar (who was one of Hitler’s favorite composers despite having a Jewish wife). As a prominent Jew and a political satirist, Grünbaum had been taken by the Nazis soon after the Anschluss. Aging and slightly built, with his bald, shaved pate and bottle‑bottom spectacles he resembled Mahatma Gandhi. He had survived periods in the quarry and latrine details. His health and spirit had been broken by it, and he had attempted suicide. Even so, he managed to keep up a semblance of his old persona and would, on occasion, perform cabaret for the other prisoners. His comment on his plight as a Jew was simple and to the point: “What does my intellect benefit me when my name damages me? A poet called Grünbaum is done for.” He was right; he would be dead within months.32

  Fritz got to know other artists in block 17, including another prominent librettist, the bespectacled, somber‑looking Fritz Löhner‑Beda. Like Grün‑

  baum he had written librettos for Léhar’s operettas and operas. Also like Grünbaum, as a famous Jew living in Vienna, Löhner‑Beda had been arrested

  * Seppl: Austrian diminutive of Josef

  † Cabaret emcee

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  in April 1938 and sent to the camps. He always hoped that Léhar, who had influence with both Hitler and Goebbels, would be able to have him freed, but he hoped in vain. To add to his torment, songs from Léhar’s operettas Giuditta and The Land of Smiles were often played over the camp’s loudspeakers, the SS

  apparently unaware that Löhner‑Beda had authored the librettos for those very works. Even more hurtfully they played the popular song “I Lost My Heart in Heidelberg,” for which he had written the lyrics. Another of his works was sung every single day in the camp, for it was Fritz Löhner‑Beda who had written the poignant, defiant lyrics of the “Buchenwald Song” to music by his friend and fellow prisoner, the composer and cabaret star Hermann Leopoldi. Leopoldi at least had managed to escape this miserable place; he’d been released in early 1939 and was now living with his wife in America.

  One of the brightest of the block 17 Prominenten was Ernst Federn, a young Viennese Jew from a family of intellectuals and academics; his father, Paul Federn, was a well‑known psychoanalyst who had studied under Freud, and Ernst himself had followed his father into the profession. He was also a Trotskyist, and wore the red‑on‑yellow star of a Jewish political prisoner.

  Ernst was a little forbidding to look at, with heavy features set in an almost thuggish‑looking expression beneath his cropped scalp. But he was a soul of kindness. He had become known as the prisoners’ psychoanalyst, and anyone could come to him to talk about themselves or their problems. His irrepress‑

  ible optimism gave marvelous encouragement to the other prisoners, some of whom regarded him as a little crazy for it.33

  There were other men too who had been active social‑democrats, Christian‑

  socialists, Trotskyists, communists. In their free time in the evenings, young Fritz would sit and listen to their conversations about politics, philosophy, the war . . . Their talk was intellectual, sophisticated, and Fritz, keen to learn, strained to comprehend what they said. One thing that came through clearly was the strength of their belief in the idea of Austria. Despite their own hopeless situation, their country’s obliteration as an independent state, and its relega‑

  tion as the mere “Ostmark” of the German Reich, they shared a vision of a future Austria, free from Nazi rule, renewed and beautiful. These men believed firmly that the Nazis must lose the war in the end, even though the trickles of news that found their way into the camp indicated that right now they were winning it on all fronts.

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  Fritz felt his faith and his courage grow in the light of these men’s vision of a better future. What he did not know, but could easily guess, was that few of them would live to see it. “The camaraderie I learned in block 17 changed my life fundamentally,” he would recall. “I became acquainted with a form of solidarity unimaginable in life outside the concentration camps.”34 Fritz would always recall Fritz Grünbaum’s birthday celebration, it being the same day as Fritz’s sister Herta’s. The other blockmates saved portions of their rations to give old Grünbaum a decent dinner, and a little extra was stolen from the kitchens. After their meal, Löhner‑Beda gave a speech and Grünbaum himself sang a few verses. As the youngest inmate present, Fritz was permitted to congratulate the humbled star.

  Dozens of men—politicians, intellectuals, entertainers, from Vienna, Sile‑

  sia, Bohemia, Brno, Prague, and one young apprentice upholsterer from Leop‑

  oldstadt, a playmate of the Karmelitermarkt—what could they possibly have in common? That they were Austrians by birth or by choice, and that they were Jews. In here, they had the whole world in common; they were a tiny nation of survivors surrounded by a poison sea.

  And the deaths went on.

  One of the first from block 17 was Hans Kunke, a young Jewish politi‑

  cal radical and writer. Square set and good‑looking, Hans was a musician by nature and a revolutionary by calling. In the days of Red Vienna he had been active in the Socialist Workers’ Youth organization, and even after socialist parties were suppressed after 1934, he and his wife, Stefanie (who was now in Ravensbrück concentration camp), had remained members of the central committee of the illegal Revolutionary Socialist Youth. Hans, who ate at the next table to Fritz, had a fine baritone voice and was said to be an accomplished pianist. He was only thirty‑four years old, but his experiences in Buchenwald had damaged him severely, and he had been assigned to the sock‑darning detail, a labor allotted to invalids. The SS would not let him be. One morning at roll call, a week after Fritz Grünbaum’s birthday celebra‑

  tion, Hans Kunke was called out and transferred to the quarry. He endured six months there as a stone carrier under the torment of kapos Vogel and Johann Herzog and the SS overseers Blank and Hinkelmann. On the last day of October 1940, Hans Kunke, utterly broken and driven by despair, ran across the sentry line and was shot.35

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  Another fatality was Rudi Arndt, a young Jewish communist from Berlin, who was block senior in block 22 (originally designated the “Jewish block”

  and still known by that name even though the Jewish prisoner population had long since overflowed it). Rudi organized secret musical performances and Jewish cultural celebrations. The SS called him the Judenkaiser because he had no fear of remonstrating with them on behalf of the other Jews when their rations were cut or they were barred from the prisoners’ infirmary. He conspired to steal medicines from the stores to treat sick Jews, smuggled them into the infirmary and hid them from the SS doctors, and set up an improvised hospital in block 22. To Stefan Heymann, who was his friend and assistant, and to Fritz and to every other Jew in Buchenwald, Rudi was a hero. But he was betrayed to the SS by a group of green‑triangle prisoners and sent to the quarry, where he met the usual fate on the sentry line.36

  The killings in the quarry were growing more frequent, and many of the dead were friends of Fritz’s or Gustav’s, some from the old days in Vienna.

  That year—the first full year of the war—across all the Nazi concentration camps prisoner deaths through murder and suicide increased tenfold,
from around thirteen hundred to fourteen thousand.37 The atmosphere of war was the cause of it. While their fellows in the Waffen‑SS and the Wehrmacht fought and conquered Germany’s enemies in Poland, France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Great Britain, the Totenkopf SS in the concentration camps felt their blood stirring and their tempers fired up, and they ramped up their war against the enemy within. News of military victories triggered spurts of triumphal aggression, and setbacks—such as the failure to subdue Britain, the only enemy still fighting—inspired retribution.

  With the numbers of corpses needing to be disposed of rising beyond its ability to cope, in 1940 the SS began to equip all its concentration camps with their own crematoria.38 Buchenwald’s was constructed in a corner of the main camp, immediately beyond the now‑defunct little camp. It was a small, unremarkable square building with a yard surrounded by a high wall. From the roll‑call ground the square spike of its chimney could be seen rising, brick upon brick, until it was complete; then it began pouring out its first acrid smoke. From that day on, the smoke would scarcely stop. Sometimes it blew away across the treetops, often it drifted over the camp. But always there was the smell of it; the smell of death.

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  A change was coming to the concentration camps. Its first tremors had been felt during 1940; during the coming year of 1941 they would grow louder.

  In the New Year, after endless months of frustration, a result came at last from the United States consulate in Vienna.

  For more than a year Tini had struggled through every obstacle the authori‑

  ties could throw in her way. Since March 1940, there had been a standing summons for an interview for emigration, but Tini had been advised that she needed to wait until Gustav and Fritz had been freed if she wanted the family to be able to go together.39 But since the SS would not release concentration camp prisoners unless they had all the necessary papers to emigrate, this was a hopeless dead end. Accordingly, Tini had registered her children separately from herself and Gustav, so as to give them the best chance.