The Stone Crusher

by Jeremy Dronfield

  Word was passed to the partisans, and at the beginning of May a five‑

  man team of escapees was chosen by the resistance leadership. First up was Karl Peller, one of the old Buchenwalder Jews, a thirty‑four‑year‑old butcher.

  Then there was Chaim Goslawski, the senior in block 48 who had looked after Fritz after his staged death. Goslawski was a Polish‑born Jew who had arrived in Auschwitz from Sachsenhausen at the same time as the Buchenwalders.1

  He was a native of this region; if anyone could find a way to the partisans, it would be him. There was also a Jew from Berlin whose name Fritz never knew, plus two Poles known only to Fritz as “Szenek” and “Pawel,” who worked in the camp kitchen.2

  Fritz was brought into the circle by Goslawski. He wouldn’t be among the escapees, but his help would be needed. He and Goslawski obtained civil‑

  ian clothes from the Canada store, which the escapees would wear concealed 246

  294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 246

  05/04/2018 14:02:14

  R e s i s t a n c e a n d B e t r a y a l 247

  under their camp uniforms. Meanwhile, other preparations were made, about which Fritz knew nothing.

  On May 4, before morning roll call, Goslawski handed Fritz a small pack‑

  age, about the size of a loaf of bread, and instructed him to pass it to fellow conspirator Karl Peller, who worked on one of the Buna construction sites. As a block senior and functionary, Goslawski didn’t go out with the labor details.3

  Fritz secreted it inside his uniform and they hurried off to roll call.

  Later that morning, on his curtain‑fitting rounds, Fritz managed to get to the site where Peller was at work and slipped the package to him. At noon, Szenek and Pawel arrived in the Buna Werke with the lunchtime soup for the prisoners. Fritz noticed that Chaim Goslawski had found some pretext to accompany them.

  At roll call that evening, all five men—Peller, Goslawski, Szenek, Pawel, and the Berliner—were missing. They had walked out of the Buna Werke wear‑

  ing their civilian disguises and disappeared. While the SS launched a search, an order was given that all prisoners were to remain standing on the roll‑call square under guard.

  There they remained as the hours ticked by, weary, aching. Midnight came and went, and the early hours of the morning wore away. Dawn found them still standing to attention, surrounded by a chain of armed sentries. Breakfast time approached, but there would be no bread or acorn coffee this morning.

  A whisper passed through the ranks; the SS were not only seeking the five missing men but also an unidentified prisoner who had been seen talking to Karl Peller on the construction site the previous morning. Fritz’s heart shrank in his breast; if he were identified, it would be the bunker for him this time, and the Black Wall. But despite his fear, he inwardly rejoiced. The escape had been a success. Eventually the prisoners were ordered to march off to work, and away they went with empty bellies, exhausted, but uplifted by hope.

  Days went by and it seemed that Fritz was safe. Nobody identified him to the SS. Three weeks passed with no word, and then the blow fell. The two Poles, Szenek and Pawel, along with the Berliner, were brought back to the camp. They had been arrested by a police patrol in Cracow on May 26, twenty‑

  two days after their escape.4 It was a shock and a mystery to the resistance, as Cracow was nowhere near the Beskids—almost in the opposite direction in fact. And where were Goslawski and Peller?

  294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 247

  05/04/2018 14:02:14

  248 A u s c h w i t z

  At roll call that evening, the three recaptured men were put on the Bock and lashed. And that, astonishingly, was the end of their punishment. Some time later, when a transport of several hundred Poles was sent from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, Szenek and Pawel were put on it.5 The Berlin Jew remained in Monowitz.

  There the matter seemed to end, with a question mark over the fates of Goslawski and Peller and whether they were now with the partisans. Eventually, having been too scared to speak while the two Poles were still in the camp, the Berliner revealed what had happened after the escape. The package Fritz had conveyed from Goslawski to Karl Peller had been at the root of it. It had been stuffed with cash and jewelry stolen from the Canada store, which was intended as a payment to the partisans to secure their assistance. A rendezvous had been prearranged, but Goslawski and Peller never got there; on the first night after their escape, both men were murdered by Szenek and Pawel. The motive was the fortune they were carrying. The Berliner had been too terrified to intervene. The next day, instead of cutting loose with their booty, the three decided to head for the rendezvous after all. When they got there, the partisans were waiting for them. They weren’t happy; they’d been told to expect five men—where were the other two? Szenek and Pawel feigned ignorance, but the partisans weren’t satisfied with their excuses and evasions. They sheltered the three men for a week, but when Goslawski and Peller still didn’t show up, they called off the deal. Szenek, Pawel, and the Berliner were driven to Cracow and set loose. Lost and helpless, they simply wandered the streets until they were picked up by the police.

  The Berliner’s confession was passed to Paul Kozwara, the camp senior. “P.

  K.,” as he was popularly known, was a tyrant, but a relatively benign one com‑

  pared to the infamous Jupp Windeck (Kozwara liked to taunt the Muselmänner, for instance, but would whip any block senior he caught not distributing food fairly).6 Kozwara passed the confession on to the SS administration.

  Nothing happened for a few weeks. Then one day Szenek and Pawel reap‑

  peared in Monowitz, brought back from Buchenwald on SS orders. A gallows appeared on the roll‑call square and the prisoners were ordered out on parade.

  Fritz and his comrades marched into the square as if it were roll call, but this was different. Lined up in front of the gallows was a cordon of SS troopers with machine‑pistols leveled at the ranks of prisoners. Commandant Heinrich Schwarz and SS‑Lieutenant Schöttl stood on the podium as the two Poles were 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 248

  05/04/2018 14:02:14

  R e s i s t a n c e a n d B e t r a y a l 249

  marched in. “Caps off!” came the order over the loudspeakers. Fritz and eight thousand others whipped off their caps and tucked them under their arms.

  Schöttl read the sentences into the microphone: both prisoners were sentenced to death for escape and for two counts of murder.

  First Szenek was led up to the gallows, then Pawel. In typical SS fashion there was no drop; they were strung up, legs kicking and bodies jerking, twitch‑

  ing with diminishing force as the minutes passed and they slowly strangled.

  Eventually they were still. Fritz and the others had to stand motionless through‑

  out the spectacle, a stark warning to anyone who dared resist or escape.7

  The whole affair not only weakened the resistance through the loss of Goslawski and Peller but also revived al the old tensions and mistrust between the Poles and the German Jews.

  And it sowed suspicion in the SS. Not long after the hanging, they claimed to have uncovered an escape plot among the roofing detail in the construction command. The prisoners were taken to the Gestapo bunker and subjected to horrific torture. On Commandant Schwarz’s orders, three of the suspects were hanged in a repeat of the same dreadful ritual. One of the victims was the brother of Freddi Diamant, the youngster who had been an unwilling sidekick of Jupp Windeck and was a friend of Fritz.8

  More hangings followed—including three Russians accused of looting dur‑

  ing the chaos following an air raid. In reality they had been searching for food in one of the bombed‑out factory buildings. IG Farben’s own security guards had caught them and turned them in to the SS. Attacks from the air were a new thing in summer 1944 and gave new heart to the resistance, a sign that the Allies were getting closer.

  In the late afternoon of Sunday, Au
gust 20, 1944, the first bombs fell out of clear blue sky. They exploded in the central and eastern end of the Buna Werke, close enough to shake the ground under the feet of people in the Monowitz camp. One hundred and twenty‑seven American B‑17 Flying Fortress bomb‑

  ers, flying from a base in Italy, drawing a comb of vapor trails across the blue five miles above Auschwitz, rained 1,336 bombs, each one a quarter‑tonne of steel and high explosive.9

  294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 249

  05/04/2018 14:02:14

  250 A u s c h w i t z

  The terrified SS hid in their bunkers, but the prisoners were not provided for. In the camps they watched the pillars of black smoke, heard the titanic roar of the explosions, and felt the concussion through their bodies. The Luft‑

  waffe flak batteries around the perimeter plumed smoke in answer, flinging up shells toward the distant bombers. Prisoners working in the factories threw themselves to the floor and rejoiced.

  “The bombing was really a happy day for us,” one of them recalled years later. “We thought, they know all about us, they are making preparations to free us.” Another prisoner recalled, “We really enjoyed the bombing . . . We wanted once to see a killed German. Then we could sleep better, after the humiliation never to be able to answer back.”10

  When the last echo died away and the bombers had gone, the ground in and around the Buna Werke was pocked with smoking craters. The buildings were dispersed over a vast area, and most of the bombs had failed to hit any‑

  thing, but some found a mark. Buildings in the synthetic oil and aluminum production plants had been torn apart, as had various sheds, workshops, and offices. Some outlying bombs had landed in the various labor camps around the factory complex, including Monowitz. Altogether, around seventy‑five prisoners were killed in the raid, and over one hundred and fifty injured.11

  Seeing the SS terrified, seeing their invulnerability challenged by the Ameri‑

  can bombs, heartened many Jewish prisoners; on others it had the opposite effect. The young Italian Primo Levi, who had arrived in Monowitz in Febru‑

  ary, believed that the bombing hardened the will of the SS and brought about a solidarity between them and the German civilians in the Buna Werke; he even perceived it among the German green‑ and red‑triangle prisoners: the criminals and politicals, some of whom recalled the Nazi propaganda about the influence of Jews on American and international policy. Levi despaired at the destruction in the factories, which he and his fellow slaves had to repair, and the interruption of the water and food supplies in the camp.12

  The resistance did not despair, but they were disappointed. The appearance of bombers had prompted speculation that the Allies would start parachuting in soldiers and weapons. But they never came. In the days following the air raid, American airplanes were seen high overhead on a few occasions, but neither bombs nor parachutes fell; they were reconnaissance flights, carefully photographing the IG Farben works and the Auschwitz complex.

  294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 250

  05/04/2018 14:02:14

  R e s i s t a n c e a n d B e t r a y a l 251

  What particularly concerned the resistance was the relentless advance of the Red Army from the east and the prospect of the SS carrying out a last‑minute mass liquidation of the whole camp, murdering all the prisoners before they could be liberated. Prisoners evacuated to Auschwitz from Majdanek before its liberation reported that all Jews in that camp had been murdered before the Red Army got there. Stefan Heymann and Gustl Herzog, who had planned in terms of a bloodless rescue, were shaken by this information.

  The resistance drafted a letter addressed jointly to camp director Schöttl and Walther Dürrfeld, director of the IG Farben Buna Werke. It purported to be from a group of Polish partisans and informed the two men that their names were on a list of German war criminals that had been smuggled to the Allies.

  Their treatment after the war would depend on how they behaved toward the prisoners from now on, and they were explicitly warned against any liquida‑

  tion attempt. The letter was smuggled out by a Czech civilian, Jiri Hubert, and mailed from the local post office.13 It prompted a search for the letter’s author by the Gestapo, who guessed that it originated in the camp. The search yielded nothing. Whether the letter had any effect or not remained to be seen.

  Despite the executions, escape attempts didn’t stop. In October four Monowitz prisoners on an outside work detail overpowered their SS guard, seizing his rifle, and destroying it before making their escape.14 Other escapes were more elaborate. Fritz Sonnenschein was a relative newcomer to Monowitz, one of the Viennese Mischlinge; he was highly intelligent, and Gustl Herzog managed to maneuver him into a position doing clerical work in Schöttl’s office.

  There he picked up information about upcoming selections, which enabled the resistance to conceal vulnerable prisoners. Sonnenschein was a man of extraor‑

  dinary resource and courage. One day he walked out of the camp disguised in a stolen SS sergeant’s uniform. He managed to get all the way to Vienna before the Nazis caught up with him, and he died in a shootout with Gestapo officers, defiant to the last.

  Individual actions were inspiring, but the Jewish resistance needed more.

  Now that relations with the Polish prisoners had been soured, any further attempts to hook up with the partisans would be impossible. Instead, it was suggested that they try to make contact with the Soviet Red Army, which by winter 1944 had temporarily halted its advance, consolidating on a line run‑

  ning through Warsaw, west of Lublin, and about seventy to eighty kilometers east of Cracow. To stand any chance of contacting them, the resistance would 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 251

  05/04/2018 14:02:14

  252 A u s c h w i t z

  need to establish a relationship with the Russian POWs held in Monowitz.

  There were several obstacles. The Russians were in a fenced‑off section of the camp, in which they were subjected to “re‑education” by the Nazis. But they worked in the Buna Werke, so they could be approached there via some of the Russian Jews who were known to the resistance. Another problem was that there were no loyal communists or Jews among them—they had all been shot immediately on capture—so there was little common ground. Nonetheless, Fritz Kleinmann and the others made the effort. Rudi Kahn, a German Jew who had been one of those Aryanized at the same time as Gustav, was a block senior in the Russian enclosure, and he helped. Eventually Rudi and some of his Russian friends succeeded in escaping. Everyone waited anxiously for news, and when none came they guessed he had evaded recapture.

  This gave the resistance a glimmer of hope, but only a faint one. Listening to their discussions at meetings, gathering and weighing snippets of intel igence, Fritz felt a growing impatience. “It seemed to me too little to procure food, write letters, or to talk about resistance. If we were to be slain, we should at least take a few SS men with us.” He turned this thought over and over in his mind, but with no idea how to accomplish it, he kept it to himself and said nothing to his friends.

  There was a second air raid by the Americans on September 13. They came for the oil plant in the Buna Werke, which was proving to be one of Germany’s most productive producers of synthetic fuel and therefore an important stra‑

  tegic target. Some of the bombers went off course and dropped their bombs mistakenly on Auschwitz I, where by good luck they hit the SS barracks, kill‑

  ing or badly injuring forty‑three SS men; tragically a bomb fell on a sewing workshop, instantly killing forty prisoners, of whom twenty‑three were Jews.

  Other stray bombs injured dozens more prisoners; a few fell on Birkenau, slightly damaging the rail tracks near the crematoria and killing about thirty civilian workers.15 Only slight damage was done to the oil plant, but bombs injured around three hundred prisoner workers, who as always were barred from entering the shelters. They had to find their own hiding places or take their chances in the open.


  294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 252

  05/04/2018 14:02:14

  R e s i s t a n c e a n d B e t r a y a l 253

  Many of them were glad to do so. Weekly in Monowitz prisoners were selected for the gas chambers—around two thousand of them on October 17

  alone.16 In some prisoners’ minds, the American bombs symbolized resistance, in some imminent liberation. How long could it be now?

  “We are coming to winter again—already our sixth,” Gustav wrote as the frost began to bite. “But we are still here, still our old selves.” News from the outside kept reporting the same thing—the Russians were at a standstill near Cracow. “I keep thinking that our stay here will soon come to an end,”

  wrote Gustav. How long could it drag on?

  “I want you to get me a gun.”

  Fredl Wocher was taken aback. He and Fritz often met up in the factory; normally Wocher would pass his friend some food or, on rare occasions when he’d been to Vienna, a letter or a package. This request was right out of left field.

  “Can you do that for me?” Fritz asked urgently.

  Wocher hesitated—he would have to think about it, he said relucantly. It was an extremely dangerous request.

  “Think of all you’ve done for me,” Fritz insisted. “This is no more danger‑

  ous than any of that.”

  Wocher wasn’t convinced. A decorated German soldier smuggling guns for a Jewish prisoner? That wasn’t merely dangerous, it was insane. Fritz was insistent; if there was a liquidation in Monowitz—as seemed increasingly prob‑

  able—he wanted to be able to defend himself and his father.

  A few days went by, and then they met again. To Fritz’s disappointment, Wocher didn’t have a gun for him. Instead he had an even more stunning suggestion. “We should escape together, you and I,” Wocher said. He had it all planned out. Once free of the camp, they would head west and south, making for the mountain country of the Austrian Tyrol. It would be easy to hide out there. As a Bavarian, Wocher knew the region; he would be able to arrange a safe sanctuary among the peasant mountain farmers. Besides being a secure place to hide, it was right at the nexus between the two Allied fronts: American and British forces were pushing hard into northern Italy, while Patton’s Third Army was driving through Alsace‑Lorraine toward the Rhine and the German 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 253