One evening in June, Fritz was sitting in his regular spot at the table in block 17, having finished up his small ration of turnip soup and piece of bread, listening to the conversation of his elders. He would be nineteen in a couple weeks, still a boy in years and, by comparison with some of these men, a child in intel ectual development and understanding of the world. He always listened, always keen to learn. His attention was taken by the appearance of his kapo and mentor Robert Siewert’s distinctive figure in the doorway, beckoning.
Fritz went to him and found him looking grave, his heavy brows frowning.
When they were outside, Siewert spoke softly and quickly: “There’s a letter from your mother in the mail office. The censor won’t let you have it.” Through a contact in the mail room—which employed prisoners as staff—Siewert had managed to learn the letter’s contents. It was like a stab to the heart. “She and your sister Herta have been notified for resettlement. They’ve been arrested and are waiting for deportation to the east.”10
The words sank in. Arrest . . . resettlement . . . deportation. Fritz hurried down the street to block 29, with Siewert following behind. He asked one of the block inmates to tell his papa that he wanted to see him urgently. (Prisoners were 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 137
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forbidden from entering barracks other than their own.) After a few moments, Gustav came out, and Siewert repeated what he recalled of Tini’s letter.
They could only speculate what it meant. They received news and rumor all the time and had acquired an acute sensitivity to the truth about Nazi actions, no matter how euphemistically they were named. It would be impossible to live three years in a concentration camp and not develop a fine nose for evil. But deportation? Resettlement? This was what the Nazis had wanted all along—to send the Jews away from the Reich. Perhaps they really had designed a way to do that. And yet Fritz, his father, and Robert Siewert all knew too well what was being done to the Soviet POWs and had heard whispers about the SS massacres in the Ostland, the conquered region east of Poland.11 Only one thing could be known for certain—there would be no more packages, no more letters, no more link with their dear ones once they were gone from Vienna and sent to Russia or who‑knew‑where.
Tini stood by the gas cooker in the kitchen. That day when they took Fritz and she threatened to gas herself if Gustav didn’t run away and hide was still a vivid memory. And now they had come for her.
She turned off the main gas tap, as she was required to do. The detailed list of instructions issued by the authorities lay on the kitchen table, along with the keyring with which she had been provided, with the apartment key attached to it.
Tini looked at Herta, who stood in her coat with her little suitcase by her side. That was all they were permitted—one or two cases per person, total not to exceed 50 kilos. There was little chance of that; all they possessed between them wouldn’t come close. Everything was gone—taken from them or sold. They had clothes and bedding—as required in the resettlement instructions—along with plates, cups, spoons (knives and forks were forbidden), and food to last for three days’ travel. Those who were able were required to bring equipment and tools suitable for establishing or maintaining a settlement. Tini would be permitted to keep her wedding ring, but all other valuables had to be sur‑
rendered. She’d never possessed many treasures, and they were all gone now, anyway; neither could she have conjured up more than a fraction of the 300
marks in cash the deportees were allowed to take to the Ostland.12
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Tini picked up her small case and bulky pack of bedding, and, with a last look around the apartment, closed the door and locked it. Wickerl Helmhacker and his friends—the same men who’d been given authority over the building and its tenants and who had taken Fritz and Gustav—were waiting there on the landing. Tini handed Wickerl the key, and turned away. Their slow footsteps echoed mournfully in the stairwell as they descended.
Escorted by policemen, they crossed the Karmelitermarkt, passing between the stalls, conscious of eyes on them. Everyone—even those who didn’t know them personally—knew where they were going, and why. Wearing the Jewish star, carrying luggage, accompanied by police—they were being sent away, like the thousands who had preceded them. “Evacuation” of Jews had begun the previous fall. After an interruption during the winter, they had resumed in May.
The evacuees went once a week, hundreds of people at a time, and nobody knew quite where their destination was, other than that it lay somewhere in the vast, vague regions of the Ostland.13 No news ever came back, and neither did any of the settlers; presumably they were too busy making new lives for themselves in the land that the Reich had established for them.
After passing through the market, Tini and Herta knew where to go: a few steps along Hollandstrasse, then left into Kleine Sperlgasse, where the Sperlschule—the local elementary school—stood. The cobblestones were as familiar as the soles of their own feet—especially for Herta. All the local chil‑
dren had attended the Sperlschule: Edith, Fritz, and Herta herself had spent a large part of their lives in its halls and classes. Kurt had been a student here when the Nazis came. He’d been barred for a while along with all the Jewish children but had returned later when the Sperlschule was redesignated as a Judenschule. It had no students at all now—the SS had closed it down in 1941
and turned it into a holding center for deportations.
Tini and Herta passed through the guarded gateway and walked along the alleyway between the tall buildings. The school consisted of a group of four‑story buildings set back from the street, surrounding a large L‑shaped schoolyard. Where children had once run and played bal on the cobblestones, SS guards now stood sentry. Trucks were parked, loaded with crates and bundles. Tini and Herta presented their identity cards and papers and were taken into a building.
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well as strangers from more distant parts of the district. Most were women, children, and men over forty. There were very few young men; most had gone to the camps. There weren’t many elderly people either; those over sixty‑five were slated for separate deportation to the ghetto for elderly Jews at Theresienstadt.*
Tini and Herta were put in a room and left to join in with its little com‑
munity. News was exchanged among them, little snippets of information and grapevine gossip, inquiries about relatives and mutual friends. The news was almost never good. Nobody knew for certain what their own fate was to be.
Their resettlement in the Ostland had been presented to them not as a pun‑
ishment or imprisonment but as an opportunity for a new life. Tini abhorred the very idea of being taken from her native city and was innately suspicious of the future. From the very beginning she had expected the worst from the Nazis, and they hadn’t proven her wrong so far.
She had written to Fritz and Gustav but could tell them little other than the bare, devastating fact of their selection. Mistrusting the future, Tini had given some possessions to a non‑Jewish relative, including her last photograph of Fritz—the one taken in Buchenwald—and had given a package of spare clothing for him to her sister Jenni, who lived around the corner in Blumauergasse. Two years older than Tini and unmarried, Jenni was in as precarious a position as Tini herself, but so far she’d been omitted from the deportations.14 The same was true of their elder sister Bertha, who also lived nearby in Haidgasse. As a widow of the First World War who had never remarried, Bertha also lived alone.15
After a day or two, the detainees were alerted that they would be depart‑
>
ing imminently.16 Everyone was ordered out into the yard. Those who had brought equipment and materials were ordered to load it up onto waiting trucks. People crowded the corridors, spilling out through the doors, all car‑
rying luggage and bundles. Some had come from Im Werd, many dozens of others from the streets around the Karmelitermarkt, and hundreds from all over Leopoldstadt. In all, they numbered just over a thousand. Their identity cards were inspected again, each one stamped Evakuiert am 9. Juni 1942,† and they climbed aboard the trucks.
The convoy passed down Taborstrasse and the broad avenue alongside the Danube Canal. Herta looked down at the water, drifting, gleaming under
* Now Terezín, Czech Republic
† Evacuated on June 9, 1942
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the summer sun; come the weekend it would be teeming with pleasure boats and dotted with swimmers. She recalled the time she and her papa had challenged each other to a swimming race, as Fritz and his friends always did. Her beloved Papa, gentle and warm. Those had been good days. Sometimes her mother, who loved to row, would take the kids out in a boat, all of them together. It was like a dream now, vivid but remote. Jews weren’t allowed to use the Danube Canal anymore, or to walk on the broad, verdant banks under the trees.
After crossing the canal, the convoy drove another three kilometers through the streets and pulled in at the Aspangbahnhof, the train station serving the southern half of the city.
There was a small crowd of spectators gathered around the entrance, held in order by dozens of police and SS troopers. Tini and Herta climbed down from their truck and joined the crush slowly filtering in through the doors into the gloom of the station interior.
Waiting at the platform was a train made up of sixteen passenger cars in the attractive cream and crimson livery of the Deutsche Reichsbahn. Well now, this didn’t look so bad. Everyone knew of the awful cattle cars in which their menfolk had been taken away to the camps. This seemed much more promising.
The evacuees were ordered to load their luggage into a boxcar at the rear of the train; food supplies and medicines had already been stowed. It was a long, slow process, and the evacuees had been at the station several hours when there was a loud whistle and a voice boomed: “One hour to departure!”17 The announcement was repeated all along the platform, and people began hurrying to their places. Each person had been assigned a car to go to. Tini, holding tightly on to Herta, pushed through the milling crowd to their assigned place, where a car supervisor equipped with a list and an air of flustered importance was marshaling his charges. He was an official appointed by the IKG, not a police officer or SS, and his presence was also reassuring.
The sixty or so people assigned to his car gathered about him. Tini rec‑
ognized some of them: an elderly lady from Im Werd, all alone; a woman about Tini’s own age from Leopoldsgasse, also unaccompanied; many of the women were on their own, their husbands and sons having gone to the camps.
Their children—the fortunate ones—had been sent to England or America.
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grandchildren. The youngest, a boy named Otto, was about Kurt’s age, and the eldest was a girl of about sixteen.18 Gray‑bearded men in rumpled hats, fellows with pouchy cheeks and jowls, neat, careworn wives in headscarves, mingled with young women whose faces were prematurely lined, and the disorientated children, some as young as five, staring about in wonder and confusion. The car supervisor called their names from his list, checking them off against their transport numbers.
“One‑two‑five: Klein, Nathan Israel!” A man in his sixties held up his hand. “Here.”
“One‑two‑six: Klein, Rosa Sara!” His wife answered.
“Six‑four‑two: Kleinmann, Herta Sara!”
Herta raised her hand.
“Six‑four‑one: Kleinmann, Tini Sara!”
“Here,” said Tini.
The list went on: Klinger, Adolf Israel; Klinger, Amalie Sara . . . Along the length of the platform the fifteen other car supervisors were calling the rolls of their own sections of the list of 1,006 men, women, and children who were going on the journey.
At last they were told their destination: the city of Minsk, where they would either join the ghetto and work in the various local industries, or farm the land, depending on their skills.
When the car supervisors were satisfied that nobody was missing, the evacuees were finally allowed to board, with the stern instruction that they were to do so in silence and keep to their designated seats. The passenger cars were second class and divided into closed compartments—comfortable enough, if a little overcrowded. As Tini and Herta took their seats, it was almost like the old days, when they had been free to travel. For a long while now it had been illegal for Jews to venture outside their districts, let alone leave Vienna.
It would be interesting to see a little of the outside world again.
Smoke and steam poured across the platform, and the axels squealed as the long train began to move, slowly snaking out of the station, heading north.
It crossed the Danube Canal and rolled past the west end of the Prater on the bridge over the Hauptallee, past the Praterstern and the street where Tini had been born, and in a few moments reached the Nordbahnhof.19 This would have been a more convenient station for the Jews of Leopoldstadt to depart from, but the Aspangbahnhof was more discreet and out of the way.20 A few minutes 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 142
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later the broad River Danube passed beneath the compartment window, then the final suburbs and the rolling farmland northeast of Vienna.
The train went briskly, and although it stopped occasionally at stations, the evacuees were strictly forbidden to get off unless they had an extremely good reason. The hours of the long June day dragged by. People read, talked, slept in their seats. Children grew restless and fretful in their confinement, others catatonic with exhaustion, staring. At regular intervals the car supervisor came along and peered into each compartment to check that his charges were behaving themselves and had no problems. A doctor—also appointed by the IKG—was on hand if anybody felt unwell. It was a long time since any Jew had been looked after so solicitously by strangers.
They passed through what had once been Czechoslovakia and entered the land that had been Poland. It was all Germany now. To Tini and Herta the southern Polish landscape was of particular interest; this region had once been part of the kingdom of Galicia, in which Gustav had been born during the great days of the Austro‑Hungarian Empire, when the Jews had enjoyed a golden age of emancipation. While Tini had experienced that era in Vienna, Gustav had spent his childhood here, in this beautiful landscape, in a little village called Zablocie bei Saybusch,* by a lake at the foot of the mountains.
The train didn’t go there, but it passed nearby, through countryside Gustav himself would have recognized if he were here, not just from his childhood but from his military service in the war, when he had fought for these same fields and towns against the army of the Russian tsar.
The train also passed near but did not visit another small town, about fifty kilometers north of Zablocie, named Oświęcim. The Germans called that town Auschwitz, and the SS had established a new concentration camp there.
The Vienna train chugged in a wide arc to the west, then resumed its north‑
eastward route.21
The sun sank behind them, dusk gathered, and the train steamed on, leav‑
ing the mountains of southern Poland and passing into rolling plain. The evacu‑
ees spent the night in comfortless dozing, with aching backs
and dead limbs.
The next morning they passed through the city of Warsaw, where there was a great Jewish ghetto, but they didn’t halt there. Beyond Bialystok they crossed the border, leaving Greater Germany behind and entering the Reichskommissariat
* Now Zabłocie in Żywiec, Poland
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Ostland, formerly part of the Soviet Union. About forty kilometers farther on, the train reached the small city of Volkovysk.*
Here it stopped.
For a while it seemed no different from any previous stop. Tini and Herta, like everyone else, glanced out the window, wondering where they were. The car supervisor looked in on the compartment, then moved off. Somehow there was a sense that something wasn’t quite right. There was a sound of raised voices at the far end of the corridor, car doors opening, and heavy boots coming briskly along from both ends. Armed SS troopers appeared at the compartment door, and it was flung open.
“Out! Out! All out!” Although shocked and confused, the people had been conditioned by years of experience not to hesitate. They stood, grabbing for their belongings, mothers and grandmothers clutching their children. “Come on, Jew‑pigs! Out now!” Tini and Herta found themselves in the corridor, crushed by people hastening to get to the doors. Any who were slow were kicked or shoved with rifle butts. They poured on to the platform, where there were more Waffen‑SS troopers.
The SS men were like none that Tini had ever seen in Vienna: fiercer and with the Death’s Head insignia of the concentration camp division on their collars.22 They were accompanied by men in the uniforms of the dreaded Sipo‑SD, the Nazi security police.23 They yelled and cursed at the Jews, driving them along the platform—men and women, elderly and children; those who stumbled or fell, or who couldn’t go fast enough, were kicked and beaten, some so badly that their unconscious bodies were left lying on the ground.24
The Stone Crusher Page 19
