The Stone Crusher

by Jeremy Dronfield

  At least Gustav had the consolation of Fritz by his side; how Gustav would have coped if the boy hadn’t come of his own free will did not bear thinking about. The spirit of that crushed promise of long ago lived on in Fritz, in the bond that held father and son together and had kept them alive so far. If they were indeed going to die here, at least it would not be alone.

  Eventually they heard movement outside: car doors crashing open all along the line, accompanied by barked orders from the SS. Their door opened, and a blaze of flashlights and electric lanterns dazzled their eyes. “Everyone out!”

  They disembarked into a ring of light surrounded by the growling of guard dogs. They were ordered to form five ranks between the tracks. Well‑trained by years of roll calls they quickly formed up, and expecting the usual rain of abuse and beatings, the Buchenwalders were astonished—and a little unset‑

  tled—to receive neither. The guards called out an order from time to time, but otherwise they were eerily silent, walking up and down the rows, observing the new prisoners closely. Time passed, and the men grew more and more nervous. Whenever no SS men were nearby, Gustav reached out and hugged Fritz close to him.

  The last time Gustav had set foot in this station had been in 1915, when he was discharged from the reserve hospital and sent back to the front line.

  Nothing about it was familiar.

  It was a little after 10:00 pm when a tramp of marching boots along the ramp heralded the arrival of the camp standby squad under the command of SS‑Lieutenant Heinrich Josten of the detention department.24 He was a hard‑

  faced individual, middle‑aged, with a grim slant to his mouth and steel‑rimmed spectacles. Checking off the new arrivals on a list, he asked whether any man had any watches or other valuables, such as gold. “If so, you are to give them up. You will not need them now.” Then he gave the nod to his men, and they began marching the prisoners in orderly fashion along the ramp.

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  They marched down a long, straight street between what looked in the gloom like a complex of light industrial buildings and rows of wooden huts or barracks. Now, this did look vaguely familiar to Gustav.

  Turning left, they were marched along a short road to a gateway flooded with arc lights; the gates swung wide, the barrier before them lifted, and the 404 Buchenwalders marched in under the wrought iron arch with its slogan Arbeit Macht Frei— work brings freedom.25 The barrier descended and the gates clanged shut behind them. They were marched along a camp street lined by large, well‑built, two‑story barrack blocks; they were similar to the SS barracks at Buchenwald, but to Gustav’s eye there was a different kind of familiarity, more distant. He had been here before.

  Arriving at a block in the far corner of the camp, they were ordered inside.

  It was constructed as a bathing block, with changing rooms. Their names were checked off against the transport list, and they were ordered through into a changing room staffed by prisoners. Here they were ordered to strip naked; they would be given a medical inspection, showered, and their uniforms deloused before going to their accommodation.26

  Fritz glanced at his father and friends; the nervousness that had been growing among them increased still more. They knew this ritual from their first arrival at Buchenwald, but it felt different now; they had all heard the rumors of gassings at Auschwitz, and that the pretext for getting prisoners to enter the gas chamber was to tell them it was a shower room.27 Nevertheless, the men did as they were told, stripping off their old, soiled uniforms and underwear. They filed through yet another room, where they were scrutinized by a doctor, and another, where their heads were freshly shaved—right down to the scalp, without leaving the furze of stubble they normally wore. Their bodies were also shaved, including their pubic hair. There followed a louse inspection. Fritz noticed a sign painted in sinister Teutonic letters on the white wall—“One louse is your death.”28

  Next came the shower room. Fritz and Gustav and the others watched anxiously as the first batch were herded through the door.

  Minutes passed; a restlessness began to spread among the prisoners. Fritz could feel it growing and hear the low murmuring. When their turn came, would they obey and walk meekly to the lethal chamber? Suddenly, a face appeared in the doorway, gleaming wet, with water dripping from his chin, and grinning. “It’s all right,” he said, “it really is a shower!”

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  The next batches went through in much better spirits. Finally, certified louse‑free, they were issued with their deloused and disinfected uniforms and fresh underwear.29 To his relief, Gustav’s diary, with its pages of priceless tes‑

  timony, was still secreted inside his clothes.

  When they were dressed, they were inspected by SS‑Captain Hans Aumeier, deputy commandant and head of Department III—the “protective custody” sec‑

  tion, which covered most Jews. Drunk and in a foul temper, Aumeier slapped the block senior who’d been sent to collect the new arrivals for turning up late.

  Aumeier was everything that caused the SS to be feared: a walking embodiment of malevolence, a glowering martinet with a tight little slit for a mouth and a reputation for torture and mass shootings. Once he was satisfied with the new prisoners, he ordered the block senior to take them to their accommodation.

  They were placed in block 16A, in the middle of the camp. As soon as they were inside, the block senior—a German wearing a green triangle—demanded that they all hand over any contraband articles and told his room orderlies—all young Poles—to search them. The belongings taken ranged from paper and pencils to cigarette holders and pocket knives, as well as money and sweat‑

  ers—all precious items in the camps. Some of the bolder spirits, including men like Gustl Herzog who had been block seniors in Buchenwald, argued and refused to hand over their possessions and were beaten with rubber hoses.

  Any man who spoke up got a beating. Somehow, Gustav managed to keep his little notebook concealed. Others lost objects they had treasured—keepsakes that had kept their spirits alive, or in the case of warm clothing, had kept body and soul together through the previous winter.

  At last the room orderlies took the men to the bunk rooms and assigned them their places—two men to a bed, one blanket each. Gustav managed to get himself and Fritz assigned to the same bed. It was like their first night in the tent in Buchenwald, three years ago almost to the day. At least here there was a floor and a sound roof over their heads. But there was the same abuse, the same inhu‑

  man debasement, and the same prospect that life would be both cruel and brief.

  On the third day they received their tattoos. This practice was unique to Aus‑

  chwitz, introduced the previous fall. The new arrivals lined up at the registra‑

  tion office; each man rolled up his left sleeve and presented his forearm, and 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 172

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  the tattoo was laid on the skin with a needle (the SS had experimented with a stamping device at one time, but it hadn’t worked very well).30

  The men were called in and registered in the order in which they had been placed on the original list in Buchenwald. Gustav laid out his forearm, where he still bore the scar from his bullet wound of January 1915, and the number 68523 was seared into his skin in blue ink. Like most of the others he was entered as Schutz Jude—a “protective custody” Jewish prisoner—and his place and date of birth were set down, and his trade.31 Having volunteered, Fritz was near the end of the list, and he received the number 68629. His trade was listed as builder’s mate.

  All the while, the Buchenwalders wondered what would be done with them.

  Days passed, and they weren’t assigned to any
labor detail and were left more or less alone. As seasoned camp inmates, they kept their ears and eyes open and learned a lot about Auschwitz. The camp they were in was much smaller than Buchenwald, with only three rows of seven blocks. This, they learned, was the main camp, Auschwitz I.32 A couple kilometers away, on the far side of the railroad, a second camp had been constructed at the village of Brzezinska, which the Germans called Birkenau—“the birch woods” (the SS did like their picturesque names for places of suffering).33 Auschwitz II‑Birkenau was vast, built to contain over a hundred thousand people and equipped to murder them on an industrial scale.

  Auschwitz I had its own killing facility, which the new men learned about soon enough—the infamous block 11, the Death Block, in whose basement the first experiments with poison gas had been carried out, where interrogations were conducted, and in whose tiny Stehzellen (“standing cells”) prisoners were tortured by being forced to stand upright for days at a time. Most notoriously, the enclosed yard outside block 11 was the location of the Schwarze Wand—the

  “Black Wall”—against which condemned prisoners were shot.34 SS‑Captain Aumeier had overseen many such executions. Whether the Buchenwalders would be sent to Birkenau or die here was yet to be discovered.

  Day‑to‑day life during that first week was familiar yet strange. There was no square, and roll call took place in the street outside the block. Food was doled out by the Polish room orderlies and the block senior—the Blockowi as the Poles called him—and was wretched. The Poles hated and despised the Austrian and German Jews—both as Germans and as Jews—and made it plain to them that they stood no chance of surviving long in Auschwitz; they had 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 173

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  been sent here only to be killed. They took out their loathing at meal times; the Jews were made to line up, and when a man’s turn came, he was shoved forward by the Blockowi, who handed him a bowl and spoon and doled out a splat of stew from a bucket. A young Pole stood by with a spoon and quickly removed any pieces of meat he spotted in the bowl. Even the most laid‑back and phlegmatic among the Buchenwalders were aggravated by this ritual, but any man who complained received a beating.

  Gustav was a little better treated than others; he was regarded as Polish by birth and spoke the language. During those first few days he became acquainted with some of the older prisoners, and they told him about the ways of Aus‑

  chwitz—about Birkenau, the gas chambers, and block 11, and confirmed what Gustav had heard about the terrible, fatal purpose of this place.

  In daylight, the familiarity of the surroundings became clearer—the well‑

  made brick buildings and the general air of the place. He had been here before.

  Auschwitz I had been created from the old military barracks built in the hamlet of Zasole by the Austrian army before World War I. The Polish army had taken it over after 1918, and now the SS had turned it into a concentration camp by constructing extra barrack blocks and surrounding it with an electrified fence.

  The familiar‑looking huts and buildings Gustav had seen along the road from the station were the remnant of the barracks intended for migrant workers.

  This was where he had been in the hospital in 1915, in this very spot by the Sola, the river that flowed from the lake by the village where he’d been born.

  When he’d last seen it, it had been under snow and filled with soldiers, and he’d been a wounded hero. Now there was a prisoner tattoo beside the bullet wound for which he’d been treated here. It was as if this part of the world would not let him go; having birthed him, raised him, and nearly killed him once, it was determined to call him back.35

  On October 28—the ninth day since the Buchenwalders’ arrival—Auschwitz demonstrated its character. Two hundred and eighty Polish prisoners from block 3 were taken to the Death Block for execution. Realizing what was intended for them, some of them fought back in the vestibule of block 11. They were unarmed and weak, and the SS quickly butchered them and led the rest to the Black Wall. One of the doomed men passed a note for his family to a member of the Sonderkommando, but it was discovered by the SS and destroyed.36 “Lots of scary things here,” Gustav wrote. “It takes good nerves to withstand it.” There were many whose nerves were beginning to fail them; one was Fritz.

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  Fritz had come to a decision. A sense of dread had been growing in him in the week since coming to Auschwitz. He’d become so accustomed to his daily work as a builder and to the fact that he owed his survival thus far to his posi‑

  tion in the construction detail that to be without work in a place whose whole purpose was death was wearing away at his nerves. He felt that sooner rather than later, his turn would come; he would be selected as a useless eater and sent to the wall or the gas chambers. Misgiving turned to anxiety and dread, and then solidified into certainty. It preyed on his mind. He became convinced that the only way to save his life was to identify himself to the labor commander or someone else with authority and ask to be assigned work.

  He confessed his thoughts to his father and some of his close friends.

  They argued strenuously against this rash idea. It was a fundamental principle of survival that you never drew attention to yourself in the slightest way. For Fritz to single himself out in such a blatant, obtrusive way was suicidal. But Fritz was young and headstrong, and he had convinced himself that he was doomed otherwise.

  The first person he approached was the SS Blockführer. With the courage of desperation, Fritz identified himself and said he was a skilled builder and wished to be assigned work. The man stared at him, glanced at the yellow star on his uniform, and scoffed. “Who ever heard of a Jewish builder?” Nonetheless the Blockführer took him to the Rapportführer, SS‑Sergeant Gerhard Palitzsch.

  Palitzsch was a good‑looking man—one of the few SS men who lived up to the Aryan ideal of athletic, chiseled handsomeness, pleasant and serene in his manner. In fact Gerhard Palitzsch had a reputation as a murderer second to none; not even his commander Hans Aumeier was more dedicated to killing.

  The number of prisoners Palitzsch had personally shot at the Black Wall was beyond counting. His preferred weapon was an infantry rifle, and he would shoot his victims in the back of the neck with an insouciance that impressed his fellow SS men. The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, often watched Palitzsch’s executions “but never noticed the slightest stirring of an emotion in him. He performed his horrifying tasks nonchalantly, with an even temper and a straight face, and without any haste.”37 If any delay occurred, he would put down his rifle and whistle cheerfully to himself or chat casually to his 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 175

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  comrades until the killing was resumed. He was proud of his work and felt not the slightest brush of conscience. The prisoners considered him “the biggest bastard in Auschwitz.”38

  And this was the man to whom Fritz Kleinmann had chosen to make himself conspicuous. Palitzsch’s reaction was the same as the Blockführer’s—

  he had never heard of a Jewish builder. “I will put it to the test,” he said. “If you’re trying to fool me, you’ll be shot at once.” He ordered the Blockführer to take the prisoner away and make him build something.

  Fritz was escorted to a nearby construction site where the kapo provided materials and ordered him to try and make a pier—the upright section between two windows, an impossible task for anyone not properly trained. With death hanging over him, Fritz felt absolutely calm for the first time in two weeks.

  Taking his trowel and a brick, he began his task, scooping up the mortar and slapping it down deftly.

  Within two hours he was back at the camp gate, escorted by a very sur‑

  prised Blockführer. “He really can build,” the man told Pal
itzsch. Palitzsch’s impassive face registered displeasure; it went against his sense of what was proper. Nevertheless, he noted down Fritz’s number and sent him back to his block.

  Nothing changed immediately, but then, on October 30, the eleventh day since their arrival, the moment of reckoning came for the Buchenwalders. After morning rol call, all the Jewish prisoners recently transferred from other camps were paraded together for inspection by a group of SS officers. In addition to the 404 men from Buchenwald, there were 1,084 from Dachau, Natzweiler, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg, and Sachsenhausen, as well as 186 women who had just arrived from Ravensbrück—in all, 1,674.39 They were ordered to strip naked and to walk slowly past the officers so that they could be evaluated. Those who appeared old or sick were directed to go to the left, the others to the right.

  The rate of selection appeared to be about half and half. Fritz approached; the officer looked him up and down and immediately indicated the right. Gustav’s turn came. He was over fifty years old and had suffered badly that year. Several hundred other men who were Gustav’s age—some even younger—had been sent to the left. They looked him up and down carefully, the hand went up—to the right. He walked over and stood beside Fritz.

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  as unfit. Many were old friends and acquaintances of Gustav and Fritz. They were marched away to Birkenau and never seen again.40

  “So this was the beginning in Auschwitz for us Buchenwalders,” Fritz would recall later. “We knew now that we were doomed to death.”41

  But not yet. Following the selection, the remaining eight hundred men were also marched out. But instead of heading west toward the railroad and Birkenau, they were driven east. The SS had work for them; there was a camp to be built. They crossed the river, passing the town of Oświęcim, and marched on into countryside.