They both jumped to attention, startled out of their wits. Fritz answered, more than a little puzzled, “He’s my father.”
The Blockführer’s fist slammed into Fritz’s face. “He has a red triangle; he can’t be a Jew’s father.”
Fritz was stunned; in all his time in the camps he’d never been punched right in the face like that. “He is my father,” he insisted.
“Liar!” Again the Blockführer punched him. Again—either from defiant courage or sheer incomprehension—Fritz repeated his answer, and received another savage punch. Gustav stood by in horror, helpless, knowing that if he intervened it would make things worse for both of them.
Fritz was battered to the ground by the enraged SS man. At last, the Block‑
führer ran out of steam. He ordered Fritz to get up and leave. Fritz picked himself up, bruised and bleeding, and walked away. “He really is my son,” Gustav said.
The man stared at him in disbelief, as if he were a madman. It was impos‑
sible; an Aryan could not be the parent of a Jew; therefore prisoner 68629, Jew, could not be the son of 68523, Aryan, period. Gustav gave up; if he’d told the man he was in fact an Aryanized Jew, it would probably change nothing.
Indeed, it was entirely possible that the Blockführer knew that Gustav had been Aryanized by Aumeier, but would still think the same way. The racism of Nazis was beyond fathoming.
Arriving at Auschwitz‑Monowitz, turning off the main Auschwitz road that separated the camp from the huge Buna Werke, one entered through a simple gateway in the double electrified fence, passing the small Blockführers’ building.
Inside, a single street ran straight to the far end of the enclosure, a distance of just 490 meters,* with a turning circle at the end.7 Barrack blocks lined the road, end‑on; there were three rows to the left, two to the right. About halfway along, on the right, was the large open space of the rol ‑cal square, with a
* 536 yards
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smiths’ workshop and the inmates’ kitchen block to one side, and a neat grass border. The grass was carefully tended, as were the verges and flower beds in all concentration camps; the contrast between the care given to these patches of decoration compared with the abuse and murder of human beings was a paradox that drove some prisoners mad.8
A little farther along, on the left‑hand side of the street, stood block 7.
Outwardly it was no different from the others: a single‑story wooden barrack, not particularly well made, measuring 17.5 by 8 meters.* But inside it was very special, for this block belonged to the Prominenten, the prisoner VIPs. Again, these were not like the Prominenten of Buchenwald; there were no celebrities or statesmen here. Monowitz’s high‑status prisoners were the kapos and foremen and men of special skills with special duties—the Funktionshäftlinge, functionary prisoners, the inmate aristocracy. Lesser men were not allowed here.9 Gustav Kleinmann, camp saddler and newly minted Aryan, was now a Prominente and had a bunk in block 7. Having come here a despised Jew and ordinary laborer—the lowest of the low—he was now among the most privileged.
In his personal state of contentment, Gustav was becoming less conscious of the sufferings of others, or at least less disturbed by them now that they happened mostly out of his sight. On the rare occasions when he took out his notebook, it was to observe how peace had settled on the camp, and that fewer prisoners were being sent to the gas chambers—albeit because the selections at Birkenau were becoming more thorough in weeding out and murdering the weak. By Gustav’s reckoning, about 10 to 15 percent survived from each transport—“The rest are gassed. The most gruesome scenes play out.” But still,
“Everything is more peaceful in Monowitz, a proper work camp.” To Gustav’s eye, trained by terrible experience, this camp’s primary purpose was to exploit, not to break its inmates, and the horror of life within and without its fences was diminished compared with what he had seen.
Life would have been bearable in block 7 if it hadn’t been for two things.
One was separation from Fritz. The other was the man who fluttered above all the Prominenten like a malevolent, bloodsucking bat: Josef “Jupp” Windeck, the camp senior and chief of all the kapos and functionary prisoners. If the SS had designed their ideal prisoner enforcer, they could not have produced one more to their liking than Jupp Windeck.
* Approximately 57 by 26 feet
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He wasn’t much to look at—small and slight, with the look of a weakling.
But his appearance was belied by the temperament of a tyrant.10 His bland, characterless features expressed a disdain and scorn for all he saw; he loved to lord over his fellow men and trample them down to enhance his elevation.
The son of a builder from northwestern Germany, Windeck had been a petty criminal since the age of sixteen, with twenty‑two convictions to his name, and had been in and out of prisons and concentration camps since the early 1930s, including Esterwegen and Sachsenhausen. He’d been in Auschwitz since 1940 and wore the black triangle of an “asocial,” a catch‑all category that included addicts, alcoholics, the homeless, pimps, the unemployed, and the
“immoral.” He’d quickly become camp senior in Auschwitz I and was trans‑
ferred to Monowitz at the same time as the Buchenwalders.
It had taken Windeck no time at all to establish a reign of corruption and terror. He enriched himself through thievery and extortion, and bribed certain SS sergeants. “Well, so much stuff came with the Jews,” Windeck recalled later, “and we filched from it, of course we did . . . as kapos we always got ourselves the best.”11 His chief ally was SS‑Sergeant Josef Remmele, the brutal Rapportführer, who shielded him from the SS and in return benefited from Windeck’s moneymaking schemes. Windeck was permitted to dress as he liked, and favored riding boots with breeches and a dark jacket—probably in an attempt to mimic the look of an SS officer. He would stride about the camp, never without his dog whip, and in his strutting self‑importance would have been a laughable figure if it hadn’t been for the power vested in him. There were allegations that he sexually abused younger prisoners, and his temper was capricious and violent. He murdered several prisoners, beating or kicking them to death or drowning them in the washroom basins.12 It was Jupp Win‑
deck who had murdered the lyricist Fritz Löhner‑Beda, lashing the weakened, broken old man with his dog whip.13
“A little man who always was a nobody and suddenly had power” was how Windeck’s henchman Ephraim “Freddi” Diamant described him. “He particularly liked to beat up feeble, half‑starved, and sick inmates . . . When these miserable fellows lay on the ground before him, he trampled on them, on their faces, their stomachs, all over, with the heel of his boots.” He was particularly proud and vain of his riding boots: “God help the man who dirtied Windeck’s boots, for he could be murdered for that.”14
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With their conversion to Aryan status, Gustav and the other Jewish kapos and functionaries were able to hold off Jupp Windeck’s cruelties and protect their fellow Jews, who were the majority of prisoners in Monowitz now. They received aid from the communist political prisoners, with whom they formed an alliance. When Windeck’s SS ally Rapportführer Remmele was transferred to another satellite camp in May 1943, this helped their cause by isolating Windeck from his protectors.15
But the balance of power reverted to the tyrant when a transport of six hundred prisoners from Mauthausen‑Gusen arrived in Monowitz. The Mau‑
thausen concentration camp complex in Austria was reputed to be one of the regime’s harshest, with a large prisoner population who were put to extreme hard labor in a granite quarry
. The consignment of six hundred sent to Monow‑
itz in 1943 consisted entirely of green‑triangle men, and there were some real savages among them. Windeck immediately began gathering them around him, strengthening his position and steering them into powerful roles as kapos and block seniors.
The Jews and communists resisted determinedly, but Windeck and his cronies were too powerful. Any prisoner who showed resistance was beaten—
sometimes to death. The misery in Monowitz redoubled. But one by one Win‑
deck’s green men began to fall of their own accord; barbaric by nature, they couldn’t restrain their behavior. One would go on a drunken bender, another would steal from the camp, yet another would pick a fight with an SS man or a civilian worker. Those who did so were removed and sent to the purgatory of Auschwitz’s coal mining subcamps.16 As the months went by, Jupp Windeck’s new power base eroded away until eventually they were all gone.
It was Windeck’s own corruption that brought on the final crisis. Gustl Herzog, in his position as clerk in the prisoner record office, discovered evi‑
dence that Windeck had acquired a precious necklace and was intending to mail it to his wife. This intelligence found its way to the camp Gestapo at Auschwitz I. Windeck was seized and sentenced to two weeks in the block 11 bunker, after which he was sent to a punishment company in Birkenau.
Always a cunning operator and well‑liked by the SS, within a few weeks he’d wrangled himself a position as camp senior in the Birkenau men’s camp. But he never troubled Monowitz again.17
The Jewish Aryans regained their influence; the atmosphere among the prisoners became comradely again, they received their proper allowance of 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 196
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food, had showers once a week and fresh laundry once a month. There was order, and all that remained to worry about were the routine hazards of the SS, sickness, the ceaseless dangers of work, as well as the periodic selections of the ill and weak for the gas chambers. By contrast with what they had been through, it could almost be called civilization, albeit a civilization carved out with bleeding fingers inside the fences of hell.
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14
R e s i s t a n c e a n d
C o l l a b o r a t i o n :
T h e D e a t h o f
F r i t z K l e i n m a n n
THE GREAT MACHINE IN which the concentration camps were the main components was a formidable but shockingly ramshackle work of engineering.
Constructing it had been a process of extemporization—a component added here, a redesign there, parts bolted on. It ran at a juddering pace, misfir‑
ing, stuttering, consuming its human grist, pouring out bones and ashes, and ejecting an exhaust of nauseating smoke. The crusher was vast and growing all the time. The individual human, in drab blue and gray stripes, wasn’t only physical y impressed into the machine but moral y and psychological y too.
Beyond the Blockführers and kapos, the 380‑volt barbed wire and watchtowers, the SS commandants and guard dogs, beyond the roads and rail tracks, the commandeered village and construction sites, the camps, the camp system, the hierarchy of the SS, beyond all this was a nation, a government, and a society teeming with human beings whose base, animal emotions—fear, spite, lust for gain or some imagined former greatness—empowered the system that kept the stripe‑uniformed beings shut, helpless, inside the wire.
Their incarceration was intended to be the simple solution to the society’s complex problems. The removal of its human toxins—criminals, left‑wing activ‑
ists, Jews, homosexuals—was supposed to bring back the nation’s great days.
But the cure was not a cure but a poison, slowly but surely bringing their nation 198
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to the ground. The inefficient labor of starved slaves, the cost of the system that enslaved them, the weakening of science and industry by the removal of geniuses because they were tainted by race, hamstrung the nation’s economy.
Becoming a pariah among nations had cost trade. Trying to solve these further problems by wars of conquest, more enslavement, more murder of the people falsely believed to be the root cause of the nation’s woes, the crusher rattled on, day and night, grinding and destroying and slowly wearing itself out.
Fritz Kleinmann found the helplessness and hopelessness of being trapped in the machine intolerable. His father was safe for now, which lifted a great weight from his heart. But the injustices and insane cruelty of the system could make a sane man crazy, and a pious one curse God. They lived out their enslavement, and in most cases died their ignominious deaths, within fences and walls their fellow prisoners had built. Fritz himself, with meticulous skill, had raised the walls, helped create this prison out of open fields. Across the road, in the Buna Werke, other men like him made walls and roads and structures of steel, within which other slaves, male and female, would labor for the benefit of the Reich and IG Farben’s bottom line. The very bricks and stones that Fritz laid had been molded and cut by yet other prisoners in stripes in the brick works and stone quarries run by the SS.1
From his earliest days in Buchenwald Fritz had learned that the key to survival was solidarity and cooperation. Deprivation and hunger bred hostil‑
ity between prisoners, fracturing them along the lines of race, religion, and background, to the point where they would fight over an unfair portion of turnip soup, where a person might commit murder for a piece of bread.
Even fathers and sons had been known to kill one another in the extrem‑
ity of starvation. Only solidarity and friendship and acts of kindness were strong enough to keep humans alive for any length of time. Lone wolves and mavericks, or those who were isolated by their inability to understand German or Yiddish, never lasted long against the relentless terror of the SS
and the green‑triangle kapos.2
Bonding together made survival more likely, but nothing could safeguard it. Everywhere Fritz looked he saw the marks of abuse and deprivation and the signs of impending death in his fellow prisoners, even in himself.3
Even if there were no bruises or cuts or broken bones, there were sores and scabs, pallor and chapped skin, limping steps and gapped teeth. The inmates 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 199
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of Monowitz were able to shower once a week, but it was an ordeal. If a block senior was of the brutish kind and wished to get the business over quickly, his block inmates would have to strip in the bunk room then run naked to the shower block, wearing only shoes. After showering, only the first men out got dry towels; they were passed along, so if you lagged behind you got nothing but a soaking wet rag and had to walk back to the barrack dripping, even in the coldest winter weather. Pneumonia was endemic, and often fatal. There was a prisoner hospital but although it was large, taking up several barrack blocks, and well equipped by its prisoner staff,4 treatment under the SS doc‑
tors was rudimentary, and it was a fearful place, often full of typhus patients.
Nobody went there unless they had to; admissions were subject to selections, and if the patient was deemed unlikely to recover quickly, he went to the gas chambers or received a lethal injection.
Every day the prisoners lived with hunger. Food was distributed in the barrack, but there were only a few bowls provided, so the first to get their helping of soup had to wolf it down so as not to keep the others waiting.
Any man who took his time would be shoved impatiently. Each morning their acorn coffee was served in the same bowls. If you managed to acquire your own spoon, it was as precious to you as jewels; you would guard it with your
life, and as knives were unobtainable, you would extend its useful‑
ness by sharpening the handle on a stone. There was no toilet paper in the latrines, so scrap paper was another valuable commodity; torn‑up cement bags from the construction sites could be obtained from friends who worked there. Sometimes a newspaper might be acquired from a civilian—perhaps left lying around at the factory and smuggled back to camp—and pieces could be used or traded for food.
The people suffering this humiliation might be regarded by Germans as human garbage, but their nation’s war economy was increasingly dependent on their labor. This was the new age of greatness that Hitler’s Germany had brought into existence: a world in which a little square of waste paper became a currency with a tangible value, either to spend or to keep one’s ass wiped.
Each man’s body was subjected constantly to a hundred shocks and irrita‑
tions. Having a decent pair of shoes was absolutely fundamental. The wooden clogs with which many prisoners in Buchenwald had been issued ruined a laboring man’s feet in no time. But even regular shoes could be a prisoner’s 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 200
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undoing. If they were too large, they chafed and caused blisters that were prone to infection. If they were too small, the problem was even worse. Socks were rare, and many improvised with strips of fabric torn from the tails of their camp‑issue shirts. This in itself was a risk, because damaging SS property was sabotage and could earn you a period of starvation or twenty‑five lashes on the Bock. With no scissors or clippers, toenails grew and grew until they broke or became ingrown.
Heads were shaved every two weeks by the camp barber. Partly this was to prevent lice, but it also served, like the striped uniforms, to make prisoners conspicuous. The barber used no soap or antiseptic, so every man’s head and face had razor burn, pimples, and pustules, as well as ingrown hairs. Infec‑
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