The Stone Crusher
Page 24
As they marched, driven in the familiar fashion with curses and blows from SS rifle butts and kapos’ canes, the Buchenwalders felt a sense of relief not at all in keeping with their circumstances. They were alive, and that was everything.
Whether Fritz’s intervention had precipitated this move, nobody knew, but Gus‑
tav believed it was so. “Fritzl came with me willingly,” he wrote in his diary.
“He is a loyal companion, always at my side, taking care of everything; everyone admires the boy, and he is a true comrade to all of them.” In at least some of their minds, Fritz’s rash action had saved them all from the gas chamber.42
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12 Auschwitz-
M o n o w i t z
IF AN AIRPLANE WERE to fly east over southern Poland on a day in November 1942—over the mountains and rolling hills smoothing to broad river plains and marshes—from it one would see little trace of the German occupation. Just small country towns and ancient mercantile cities straddling winding roads and bending rivers.
Flying high toward the gray scar of the city of Cracow, one would see a shape emerging from the woods and fields near the brown pen‑stroke line of the railroad—a vast rectangle over a kilometer long and nearly a kilometer wide, filled with row after row after row of oblong barracks. Flying lower, one would make out the dots of the watchtowers in the perimeter fence, streets between the barracks, and on the near edge, among some trees, several buildings set apart, pouring out acrid smoke.
With the camp and crematoria of Birkenau passing out of sight, a dense cluster of buildings on the other side of the railroad would come into view.
The Auschwitz camp, sitting beside the river Sola, would only be distinguished among the gray mass of workshops by the russet‑colored roofs of its barrack blocks and its perimeter fence. To the right, the Sola winds away southward, a silver line fringed with the deep green of woods, meandering through the farmlands toward the old garrison town of Kenty and the green Beskid moun‑
tains. Beyond them, just out of sight, the lake and the village of Zablocie bei Saybusch, where Gustav Kleinmann was once a boy. To the left, the Sola bows north and east, cutting off the town of Oświęcim from the camp that has 178
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usurped its name and stained it forever. There the Sola flows into the Vistula and continues east toward Cracow and Warsaw.
Flying on, several kilometers beyond Oświęcim, another new scar emerges from the landscape: a massive, dark blight against the southern edge of the Vistula, edging out the once sleepy hamlet of Dwory: an area three kilometers long and over a kilometer wide, gridded with roads and tracks and filled from end to end with construction sites, vacant plots, dotted with offices, work‑
shops, a few ridged roofs of factory buildings and the shells of many more, half‑built, laced with cages of pipework, silos, and shining steel chimneys.
This is the Buna Werke, belonging to chemical company IG Farben, under construction and already way behind schedule.
Tucked up beside it, at the far end where the little village of Monowitz stood until the SS emptied it, the beginnings of a new camp. A simple oblong marked out among the fields—minuscule beside the spread of the factory complex, with just a handful of barrack blocks, a few incomplete roads, and a grid of construction sites, speckled with the dots of prisoners hard at work.
His hands moving with the quick deftness of experience and the urgency of fear, Fritz sliced mortar from the bucket and slapped it onto the first course of bricks, snaked the tip of the trowel through it, spreading the gray sludge, swiping the excess from the edges with quick strokes. He picked up a brick, buttered it, and laid it end‑on to the last one, swiped off the mortar, then another. His mind focused on the task, as if that was all that existed, his whole world in that layering of mortar and brick.
“Tempo, tempo! Faster, faster!” The familiar voice of the Polish kapo, Petrek Boplinsky, cut into his thoughts. The man knew only a few words of German, and the only one they ever seemed to hear was schneller! as he strode around the site with his cane, urging on the brick and mortar carriers. The drive to build the camp was furious, and only the toughest and fittest could survive the pace. Few of the half‑starved prisoners were up to it. “Pięć na dupe! ”* Boplinsky yelled, followed by the thwack of the cane lashing some
* Polish: Five on the ass!
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poor carrier five times across the buttocks. Without looking up, every other man put on a little extra speed.
A couple weeks had passed since Fritz and the others had arrived in the Monowitz camp.1 It had been a living hell, as bad as the worst of Buchenwald, and many had not survived the initial onslaught. After the three‑hour march from Auschwitz I, the new men had been herded into the barracks, where again they had to share bunks. Fritz and his father stuck together. The barracks were primitive and incomplete, with no lights, no washing facilities, and the only water supply a few faucets outside in the field. Jews weren’t allowed in the barrack day rooms, which were reserved for Polish prisoners and Aryan kapos. The camp had no kitchens yet, so food was delivered each day from Auschwitz I.
Although work at Monowitz had begun in the summer, there was still almost no camp—just flat, open fields with a few wooden barracks, no fence, and only a sentry line to keep the prisoners in.2 At first the new men were put to digging roads. It rained frequently, and the ground turned to mud that was hell to dig and bogged down the wheelbarrows. They would all return to the barracks each evening soaked to the skin and exhausted. There was no heating, but the SS Blockführers and Rapportführer still expected them to report each morning at roll call with clean, dry clothes and shoes. During those first days, Fritz had regarded his older and less fit comrades with concern—especially his papa. They wouldn’t be able to stand this for long.
The camp was taking shape, with fences and the foundations for guard towers being laid, and more barracks. Fritz kept an eye on the progress; salva‑
tion lay in getting transferred to the construction detail.
One day as they were digging, SS‑Sergeant Richard Stolten, Monowitz’s labor manager, happened to pass near. It was doubly risky to attract the atten‑
tion of the SS in Monowitz; there were no guard barracks yet, and they were trucked in from Auschwitz I each day in two shifts. The SS hated doing duty at Monowitz and could be particularly violent tempered. But Fritz reckoned it was worth the risk; he laid down his shovel and hurried after him. “Number 68629. I’m a bricklayer,” he said, and indicated his workmates. “We’re from Buchenwald; many of us are skilled construction workers.”
Stolten stopped and looked him up and down, then called the kapo over.
“Find out which of these Jews are builders,” he said, “and take their numbers.”
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It had been as simple as that. The Auschwitz SS were under enormous pressure to complete the camp so that the labor force for the Buna Werke could be moved to full capacity. Fritz was transferred to construction along with several of his friends. As an upholsterer Gustav had some woodworking skills, and he passed himself off as a carpenter. While Fritz worked on laying foundations and floors, his father was put to work on the prefabricated wooden sections from which the barrack blocks were constructed.
The haste of the SS was such that they had to bring in paid outside workers from the German Plassmann construction company. For the first time since entering the concentration camps, Fritz and Gustav worked alongside civilians.
On the other side of the main Oświęcim–Monowitz road, the hulking shadow of the Buna Werke loomed. It repr
esented the zenith of German indus‑
trial collaboration with the Nazi regime. The works belonged to the chemical giant IG Farben and was designed to produce synthetic fuel and rubber, as well as other chemical products, for the German war effort, and to do so at a healthy profit for the company.3 Their deal with the SS allowed IG Farben to draw on an unlimited supply of slave labor from Auschwitz, for which they paid the SS three to four marks per day (which went straight into the SS coffers).
This was less than the going wage for civilian workers and gave the company additional big savings on worker facilities, sickness benefits, recreation, and all the other usual costs of labor. Productivity was bound to be lower because of the poor physical condition of the maltreated, starved prisoners, but the company considered the savings worth it on their bottom line.4 Any workers who were too sick or broken down to work could simply be sent to the gas chambers at Birkenau and replaced from the fresh intakes constantly arriving from all over Germany’s conquered territories.
By the time the Buchenwalders arrived, there were around two thousand prisoners at Monowitz, mostly working on construction of the factory complex.5
Previously, the construction workers for the Buna Werke had been brought in by train from Auschwitz I each day; with the labor requirement ballooning, having a satel ite camp on‑site had become imperative. The management of IG
Farben, way behind schedule in getting their factory operational, were under pressure from Himmler and Goering to make progress. The war was proving far more intense and difficult than had been expected in early 1941, and the demand for fuel and rubber was frantic. The company wanted the number of prisoners more than doubled, and the Auschwitz SS were struggling to oblige.6
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While some of the slaves were transferred from other concentration camps, a large proportion were Jews brought directly from the Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Poland. On arriving at Auschwitz, the vast majority went straight to the gas chambers, and a small number were selected as fit to work and sent to Monowitz. These people hadn’t been through the winnowing process of the camps; they were less toughly made than the veteran prisoners and lacked their survival skills. Gustav, whose job was less skilled than Fritz’s, worked along‑
side men from these transports. They were rapidly broken by the pace of the labor, the abuse, the starvation, and the lack of care for the sick. By Gustav’s reckoning, between eighty and one hundred and fifty of these poor wretches disappeared from Monowitz each day, sent to the gas chambers. Nobody could survive this for long, and even the veterans were destroyed by it sooner or later.
Among the new arrivals Fritz met two old friends from Buchenwald: Jule Meixner and Joschi Szende, who had been transferred to Natzweiler a few months earlier and now transferred again to Auschwitz. From them he learned the heartrending news that Leo Moses had been murdered in Natzweiler. After surviving eight years in the camps, the SS had finally finished him off. The tragic injustice of it was agonizing. Fritz recalled that first encounter in the stone quarry, when Leo had offered him the little black pills to counter the endemic diarrhea; he remembered the influence Leo had used to have him moved to safer work details. Fritz owed his survival thus far to several people, but Leo Moses, the hard‑bitten, gentle‑hearted old communist, was the dearest, and Fritz would always grieve for him.
Fritz discovered that kindness could be found in unexpected places. The German civilian construction workers were too wary of the SS to talk openly with the prisoners, which was forbidden. But once some of the blocks had been built and the work detail moved indoors to install washbasins and fittings, they became a little more communicative. Fritz learned that they weren’t dedicated Nazis, but neither were they hostile to the Nazi cause. When he tried to probe them about what they thought of the brutal slave‑driving of the prisoners, they clammed up. And yet, some of them at least betrayed a little sympathy; their manner became a little warmer, and they began to leave pieces of bread lying around after eating their lunches, and the cigarette butts they discarded were longer than before, with a good deal of smoking left in them. The civilians’
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the prisoners, and his manner influenced kapo Boplinsky, who became more approachable and used his cane less on the carriers.
This slight relaxation of the labor regime did nothing to offset the hunger, and gifts of bread crusts did not take away the fact that every man was being ground down, some quicker, some slower, but all to the same terrible end.
The older prisoners were usually the quickest. Fritz, seeing his father at work, could only marvel at his will to live.
Gustav had a short reprieve from outdoor labor once the first few barrack blocks had been completed. Trucks arrived loaded with bunks and bales of straw. Prisoners, including Gustav, were set to stuffing straw into jute sacks to make mattresses. Aside from working in the DAW factory at Buchenwald, this was the closest he had come to being back in his old trade, and he rather enjoyed himself, stuffing and stitching up the mattresses faster and more neatly than any of the others.
It didn’t last, and before long he was back outdoors. Now that the erec‑
tion of the barrack walls in their part of the camp was complete, he was faced with the prospect of being put to hard labor. Even worse was the possibility of being assigned to the Buna Werke sites. Some of his block‑mates worked there and came back each evening exhausted, telling dreadful stories about the behavior of the SS guards and kapos. It was like the Buchenwald quarry all over again; there were constant beatings merely to alleviate the boredom and bad tempers of the SS. Often the prisoners came back to their blocks on stretchers. Any man whose productivity wasn’t sufficient for the company was sent to Birkenau.
In Gustav’s mind, it was imperative to avoid being transferred there. Each morning, when SS‑Sergeant Stolten called out that day’s skilled worker require‑
ments, Gustav came forward. It didn’t matter if Stolten wanted roofers or glaziers or carpenters, Gustav was there, swearing that he had that skill. And he managed to pull it off, day after day, bluffing his way on the roofs and windows or any other building work required. Fritz worried about the con‑
sequences if the SS found out that his father didn’t really possess these skills.
Gustav shrugged it off. He was smart, and good with his hands; he believed there was no craft he couldn’t master sufficiently well to evade notice by the SS.
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As more barracks were completed, they were filled with newly arrived transports of prisoners who were sent to work on the factory sites. Conditions in the camp were horrible beyond imagining, even for veterans: overcrowded, freezing cold, and dirty. The sanitary facilities still weren’t completed, and dysentery began to spread. Prisoners died in frightening numbers every day.
And yet it was mild compared with what was occurring at Birkenau. Three or four rail transports came to Monowitz each day filled with Jews who had survived the selections at Birkenau. They told awful stories about the plun‑
dering of victims by the SS. “In Birkenau they are sleeping on dollar bills and pound notes,” Gustav wrote angrily, “which the Dutch and others bring with them. The SS are millionaires, and every one of them abuses the Jewish girls.
The attractive ones are allowed to live; the others go down the drain.”
The Polish winter set in fiercely, freezing the ground. There was still no functioning heating in Monowitz, and the cooking facilities were ramshackle.
At Christmas the cookers broke down, and the prisoners were wi
thout food for two days. They didn’t even get the usual crusts from the civilian workers, who were on holiday. Eventually, food was delivered from the kitchens at Auschwitz I.
Fritz and Gustav were moved to separate blocks. They met in the evenings and talked about their situation. Fritz was losing hope. It was January 1943, and after only two and a half months in Auschwitz‑Monowitz, most of their comrades from Buchenwald were already dead. The Austrian Prominenten had all been murdered: Fritz Löhner‑Beda, lyricist of the “Buchenwald Song,”
beaten to death in December for not working hard enough; Robert Danne‑
berg, the Social Democratic politician, the same fate; the lawyer and author Dr. Heinrich Steinitz . . . the list went on, all dead. Worst of all the deaths to Fritz was Willi Kurz, the boxer, who had been kapo in the Buchenwald garden detail and helped Fritz and his young friends survive their ordeal there.
Unable to see any hope in their situation, Fritz poured out all his fears to his papa when they met one evening. Gustav told him not to give up. “Hold your head up high,” he said. “Lad, the Nazi murderers will not beat us!” Fritz wasn’t reassured; his friends had all lived by the same philosophy, and most of them were dead.
In the privacy of his own thoughts, Gustav struggled to live by his own motto. “Every day the departures. Sometimes it is heartbreaking, but I tell myself, Keep your head high; the day will come when you are free. You have 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 184
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good friends by your side. So don’t worry—there are bound to be setbacks. ” But how many setbacks could a man take? How long could he go on holding up his head and avoiding death?
Even the fittest had little chance, because the daily tide wrack of deaths was not due to chance or negligence or random outbreaks of malice, as had been the case in the early years at Buchenwald; the Final Solution was being enacted, and even the Jews who were useful laborers were being deliberately, methodically worked to death. If one died, well, that was one less Jew to trouble the world. There were a dozen more to do his work. If a person was to survive, it must be by skill, companionship, and an extraordinary portion of luck.