The Stone Crusher

by Jeremy Dronfield

  What happened within block 46 only became known through rumor when the surviving prisoners were let back out. The whole truth was not revealed until much later. Dr. Ding and Hoven injected the prisoners with unknown substances; the subjects immediately fell ill, some of them gravely. They suffered bloating, headaches, bleeding rashes, hearing loss, nosebleeds, muscle pains, paralysis, abdominal pains, vomiting . . . the list went on and on. Many died, and the survivors were left in a pitiable state. The substances with which they

  * Later known as Schuler or Ding‑Schuler

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  were injected were typhus serums that were being developed in collaboration between the SS, the IG Farben chemical corporation, and the Wehrmacht, with the aim of producing a vaccine for German troops serving in Eastern Europe, where typhus was endemic.39

  At periodic intervals, more batches of prisoners were sent to block 46 to be ruined and killed in the pursuit of incompetent medical research. Eventually, the Typhus Research Station was extended, with block 50 closed off and repur‑

  posed as a Serum Institute.40 In this, prisoners were injected with typhus bacilli with the intention of extracting a serum from their blood. Several old friends of Gustav’s from Vienna—Otto Herschmann, Oskar Kurz, Hans Kurzweil, Lud‑

  wig “Max” Matzner—were among the prisoners selected for this new torment, but they were saved when a conference of SS top brass deemed it improper for Jewish blood to be used in the development of a vaccine that was to be injected into the veins of German soldiers. The very idea was outrageous, and the Jewish subjects were released from block 50.41

  Tini and Herta sat opposite each other at the table in the kitchen, plying their needles and thread. Mending had always been a part of Tini’s life; with little income and four children, there had always been socks to darn, torn pants to stitch, jackets and sweaters with elbows worn through. Now, their sewing kits were in nearly perpetual use; they had scarcely enough money to keep from starving, and what little surplus Tini had she sent to Gustav and Fritz, guessing that their need was more urgent. It was little enough; she’d been able to send them each a package of spare bits and pieces of underclothing in May, and she might be able to send them something in the next few weeks—perhaps a pair of socks or a pullover.42 Month by month her own and Herta’s clothes got shabbier and more threadbare, and their needles worked overtime to keep them in one piece.

  Their sewing today was not mending, however. On September 1, 1941, it had been announced by the Ministry of the Interior in Berlin that as of the nineteenth of the month, all Jews living in Germany and Austria must wear a yellow Star of David on their clothes—the Judenstern.

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  perceived as even more degenerate and untrustworthy than those in Germany.

  During the invasion of the Soviet Union, it was claimed that German soldiers had met “the Jew in his most disgusting, most gruesome form,” and that this had made the state realize that al Jews, including those at home, must be deprived of their ability to be camouflaged within society.43

  Along with everyone else, Tini and Herta had had to go along to one of the collection points set up by the IKG to get their stars. They were manufactured in factories, printed onto rolls of fabric, with the word Jude printed in black lettering styled to resemble Hebrew.44 Each person was allotted up to four. The final bitter insult was that they had to pay for them: 10 pfennigs each. The price was set in Berlin; the IKG bought them in huge rolls from the government for 5 pfennigs a star and used the profit to cover administrative costs.45

  Tini had fought to the very end to get Herta away from this nightmare.

  The closure of the US consulate in Vienna meant that all applications had to be routed via Berlin, which added to the already excruciating bureaucratic obstructions. There were girls Herta’s age and even younger being sent to concentration camps now. In desperation, Tini had written to Judge Barnet in America, begging for him to act on her behalf. “Regarding Herta, I am devastated that she has to stay here. I was informed by an unofficial source that relatives in the US can petition Washington to obtain a visa. May I ask you to do something for Herta? I do not want to have to reproach myself like in Fritz’s case.”46 Sam Barnet acted right away, filing the necessary papers and putting up 450 dollars to cover all Herta’s expenses,47 but it had done no good.

  The maze was too complex and the barriers impossible to surmount. Herta’s visa had not been approved.

  Their needles plied in and out, through the cheap yellow calico of the stars and the worn wool of their coats. Tini glanced across at Herta; she was fully a young woman now—nineteen, going on twenty, about the age Edith had been when she went away. Nineteen and pretty as a picture. Imagine how beautiful she could have been if there were nice clothes for her and there hadn’t been this life of constant containment and deprivation. When Herta looked at her mother, she saw lines etched by worry and cheeks sinking below the bones from hunger.

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  numbers had emigrated, and the supposedly dangerous ones had been sent to the camps—that to the less perceptive Viennese it was as if thousands of Jews now suddenly materialized in their midst, clearly marked for all to see.

  Some people were ashamed of what the state had done; they believed that it was right and proper to send Jews away and bar them from public life, but to stigmatize them in this highly visible way was wrong somehow. Shopkeepers who had been willing to sell to Jews were faced with the embarrassment of having their other customers know that they did so. Some braved it out; oth‑

  ers began to shut their doors to wearers of the yellow star. And for those Jews who had been willing—and sufficiently Aryan‑looking—to ignore some of the restrictions about where one could go and what one could do, that was now out of the question. The Gestapo, conversely, was delighted by the measure, which enabled the thorough enforcement of racial laws. Some members of the public, shocked to find so many Jews still about, began to demand that harsh action be taken.48 It seemed that life could not possibly get any worse.

  But of course it could; the bottom of the pit had not yet been reached, not by any means. On October 23, 1941, the head of the Gestapo in Berlin relayed an order from Heinrich Himmler to all Reich security police: with immediate effect, all emigration of Jews from the Reich was banned.49 From this moment on, removal of Reich Jews would be solely by resettlement to the eastern territories, where several large ghettos had been established in cit‑

  ies such as Warsaw, Łódź, and Minsk. Deportations from Vienna to the east had been going on sporadically since the beginning of the year; from now on, they would apply to all Jews. Tini’s only hope, to which she had dedicated so much time, hard work, and motherly love—of sending Herta to join Kurt in America—was snuffed out in an instant with the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen.

  In December America joined the war against Germany, and the final bar‑

  rier fell.

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  A Thousand Kisses

  9 A Thousand

  K i s s e s

  SPRING HAD COME TO Buchenwald again. The forest was alive with green‑

  ery, the singing of blackbirds in the warm mornings a counterpoint to the harsh scrawk of the crows. The breeze whispered in the leaves. Each morning, not long after the rising of the sun, would come the rasp
of saws biting into tree trunks, the grunts of the slaves wielding them, and the snapped insults and orders of the kapos and guards. Occasionally there was a yell, a long, creak‑

  ing tear, and a great beech or oak would come crashing down. The slaves set about its corpse, lopping branches, stripping twigs, reducing it to logs and a carpet of leaves.

  Gustav and his team, already tired, their shoulders raw, stood by as swel‑

  tering laborers stacked up logs for them to transport to the construction sites.

  Gustav was doing well; he was a foreman now, in charge of his own twenty‑six man team of Singing Horses. They’d had a terrible winter but had made it through. “My lads are true to me,” he wrote in his diary; “we are a brotherhood, and stick tightly together.” In February another transport of invalids had left Buchenwald—several of them Gustav’s friends, “all strong fellows”—followed the next day by the usual returning crop of clothes, prosthetics, and eyeglasses.

  “Everyone thinks, tomorrow morning it will be my turn,” he wrote. “Daily, hourly, death is before our eyes.” More of Gustav’s friends had died, includ‑

  ing haulage column kapo Willi Gross and his brother, blamed for sabotage and sent to the punishment detail. Subjected to weeks of carrying earth in the gardens, they collapsed one by one and were killed off.

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  Around the same time, the SS had murdered another old acquaintance, Rabbi Arnold Frankfurter. Formerly the Austro‑Hungarian army’s Jewish chaplain in Vienna, Rabbi Frankfurter was the man who had married Gustav and Tini in 1917. Arrested in the summer of 1938, he’d been sent to Dachau then transferred here. The SS made his life hell, flogging him on the Bock and tormenting him until his aged body could take no more. In the wreck that remained of him, it was hard to recognize the portly, bearded rabbi of the Vienna barracks. Before he died, Rabbi Frankfurter spoke with an Orthodox friend, with whom he had shared long evenings debating the Talmud. The rabbi gave him a traditional Yiddish blessing, asking him to pass it on to his wife and daughters: Zayt mir gezunt un shtark—“Be healthy and strong for me.”1

  Gustav remembered his wedding day clearly, in the pretty little synagogue in the Rossauer Kaserne, the grand army barracks in Vienna: Gustav in dress uniform, the Silver Medal for Bravery gleaming on his breast, Tini in a picture hat and dark coat, almost plump before decades of hardship and mothering sculpted her into handsome maturity.

  Taking off his cap and running a hand over the bristles of his shaved scalp, Gustav looked up into the canopy of swaying leaves. With a feeling that was like a faint ghost of contentment, he replaced his cap and sighed. “In the forest it is wonderful,” he had written in his diary. “If only we were free; but always we have the wire before our eyes.”

  During the first half of 1942, Buchenwald had completed its transforma‑

  tion. In January, Commandant Koch had been relieved of his position and replaced by SS‑Major Hermann Pister, an aging administrator who’d served time in Himmler’s motor pool. “From now on a new wind blows in Buchen‑

  wald,” he had told the assembled prisoners at roll call upon his arrival, and he meant it.2 In addition to Commando 99, the Typhus Research Station, and the invalid extermination transports, an exercise regime had been introduced, in which prisoners were roused half an hour earlier than usual for roll call and made to do exercises half‑dressed.

  For Jewish prisoners the situation had grown worse than ever. Hitler’s hatred against Jews was swelling beyond all control or constraint. The inva‑

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  and Ukraine. In the dank workings of the Nazi mind, the Jews were behind communism—therefore they were behind the communist fifth column. Hav‑

  ing caused the war in the first place, Jews were now hobbling German prog‑

  ress.3 In January 1942 the Wannsee Conference had taken place in Berlin, at which the heads of the SS had agreed at last upon the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. For several years the final solution had been thought to be mass deportation and emigration. Now they decided it had to be something far more drastic and decisive. The exact nature of it was kept secret from the public, but it transformed the concentration camp system. In Buchenwald, Jews came under even closer, even more hostile attention than before. Euthanasia of invalids, starvation, abuse, and murder whittled down the Jewish population until by March there were only 836 left, out of a total of 8,117 prisoners.4 The only thing keeping Buchenwald’s remaining Jews alive was their usefulness as workers, and that might not hold out for long under the pressure from the top to bring about a “Jew‑free Reich.”

  Commandant Pister had broken up the existing kapo appointments in the labor details and barrack blocks, replacing many of the Jewish and political kapos and block seniors with green‑triangle men—career criminals—thereby sparking a conflict between the green men and the politicals known as the

  “inmates’ war.” Forty‑eight politicals had been put into a punishment detach‑

  ment, and four were put into the Bunker.5 The atmosphere in the labor details had gone from brutal to fanatically harsh.

  Gustav’s momentary idyll, gazing up at the swaying trees, was ended by yells from the SS sergeants in charge of the logging detail. Under Gustav’s direction, his team lifted and shouldered the logs. They had no wagon for this job; the timber had to be transported by hand up the steep wooded hillside. A few of Gustav’s lads were worn out; they wouldn’t survive another step with a tree trunk gouging their shoulders. He told them to just tag on with the others; so long as they were discreet and looked like they were carrying, they should pass. Gustav shouldered his own end of a log, and they set off.

  Climbing the slope was arduous, and they had a long day of this ahead of them. It was best just to exist in the moment, to slog on, shut off the pain and weariness, not think at all. Reaching the destination was the worst part—

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  stacking of the logs had to be done at top speed. Men had been maimed and even killed by hastily stacked trunks slipping and rolling on them.6

  “What do you think you’re doing, Jew‑pigs?” SS‑Sergeant Greuel’s face appeared in front of Gustav, apoplectic with fury, brandishing a hefty cane.

  “Some of these beasts aren’t carrying anything!”7

  Gustav began to explain that some of his lads weren’t up to carrying, but he scarcely got a word out before Greuel’s cane lashed him across the face, knocking him sideways. Gustav put up his hands to protect his head, and the cane whipped furiously back and forth, battering his fingers; he twisted, and the blows fell on his back. Then Greuel turned his rage on the other men, beating them until they bled. “You’re a foreman, Jew,” he seethed at Gustav.

  “So drive your Jew animals harder. I’ll make a report about this lapse.”

  Greuel was a notorious sadist, and some said there was a sexual element in his cruelty; he occasionally held individuals back from work details and beat them alone in his room for his own pleasure.8 Once he’d fixed on a victim, he wouldn’t let up. The next day it happened again—Gustav and his men were beaten for not working hard enough. At roll call, Gustav was called to the gate and interrogated by the Rapportführer, the sergeant in charge of the SS

  Blockführers, who oversaw roll calls and handled camp discipline. Satisfied by Gustav’s answers, he tore up Greue
l’s report.

  On the third day, Gustav and his team were hauling stone from the quarry, supplementing the work of the teams on the rail wagons. Their wagon was loaded up with two and a half tonnes of rocks, and even with twenty‑

  six men at the ropes it was a killing strain to haul it step by step up the road to the top of the hill. This time Gustav was reported for not driving his team fast enough, and this time the Rapportführer passed the report on for further action.

  Gustav was given five Sundays on the punishment detail, without food. He was fifty‑one years old, and tough as he was, his body couldn’t take this treatment for much longer. Like Fritz before him, he was put on Scheissetragen—shit car‑

  rying. Each Sunday, while the prisoners not on punishment duty took it easy, he carried buckets of liquid feces from the latrines to the gardens, always at a running pace. Although his friends slipped him morsels of food, he lost 10 kilos* in the course of a month. He’d always been lean; now he was starting to become skeletal.

  * 22 pounds

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  Eventually the punishment stint was over, and his weight loss halted. He was relieved of his position as a foreman on the haulage column, but his friends managed to get him less arduous work on the infirmary wagon, car‑

  rying food and supplies, although he still had to work evening shifts in the haulage column. He began to recover from his ordeal. That he had survived Greuel’s persecution at all was little short of miraculous.

  Fritz Kleinmann had learned that even miracles couldn’t last in a place like this. Every day the circle of probability was closing in on each man, his days shortening and the odds on his surviving the hardships and the lottery of selection growing longer.

  In the spring Fritz lost one of his dearest friends, Leopold Moses, the man who had protected him, nurtured and tutored him in the art of survival, steered him toward safer work. A large transport of prisoners was being sent to a new camp the SS was building in Alsace, called Natzweiler. Leo was selected and sent off with them. Fritz never saw him again.9