The Stone Crusher

by Jeremy Dronfield

  placed persons was simply not feasible. Kurt’s message to his father via the Red Cross was the best hope.2 Weeks went by, and no further messages came.

  In the days following liberation, the US Army began bringing medical aid to the survivors of Mauthausen and Gusen. Thousands who were beyond saving died in those first days.

  Fritz Kleinmann was among those whose grip on life still held, despite his desperate condition. When the medical assessments began, he was interviewed by an American officer. To Fritz’s surprise, he revealed that he had been born in Vienna, in Leopoldstadt. Pleased by this connection between them, the officer 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 310

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  found Fritz a place on an emergency evacuation transport. He was taken first to the town of Gallneukirchen, near Linz. After a night there, he was put on another transport to Regensburg in southern Bavaria, where there was an American mili‑

  tary hospital. He arrived around the same time as the news that Germany had surrendered; Hitler and Himmler were dead, and the war in Europe was over.

  Regensburg was a beautiful, ancient city that had come through the war with little harm. Allied bombing had raised an inferno in the surrounding region, but only a few bombs had fallen on Regensburg itself. The US Army’s 107th Evacuation Hospital had arrived just over a week before Fritz’s arrival and was housed in tents and buildings on the bank of the Regen where it flowed into the Danube. As well as serving the US forces advancing into Aus‑

  tria, it treated German civilians injured by mines, a fair number of GIs who’d wounded themselves fooling around with captured German weapons, and at least one survivor of Mauthausen‑Gusen concentration camp.3

  When Fritz was checked in, he was scarcely alive; his weight was recorded as only thirty‑six kilograms.* The hideous, miraculous, haphazard chain of events that had allowed him to evade death for five and a half years had nearly finished him off at the end.

  Resting on his cot in the hospital tent, Fritz knew it was all over; the ordeal that had begun on that day in March 1938 when the Luftwaffe dropped their snowstorm of propaganda leaflets all over Vienna, when the Nazi troops marched into the city, when the days of terror for the Jews began, was finished.

  Except it wasn’t. The journey that had begun that day would not be complete until he returned to Vienna and discovered whether it was still his home. And as for the nightmare—why, that would never end so long as life and memory lasted. The dead remained dead, the living were scarred, and their numbers and their histories would stand for all time as a memorial.

  Leaving the future to take care of itself for the moment, Fritz focused on regaining his strength. The American doctors gave him a diet of cookies, milk pudding, and a strength‑building concoction whose ingredients he never knew. By the end of two weeks he had gained ten kilos.† He was still severely underweight, but he felt strong enough to travel and could feel the pull of home.

  The hospital—which was a mobile unit—was already packing up to move to

  * Seventy‑nine pounds

  † Twenty‑two pounds

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  a new station, and his request to be discharged was granted. He went to the city hall in Regensburg, where he was issued with civilian clothes and listed for a transport back to Austria.

  On May 26, Fritz Kleinmann passed through Linz and arrived at the demar‑

  cation line between the American and Soviet zones of occupation at the small town of Enns, which stood on the south bank of the Danube, opposite Gusen and Mauthausen. At St. Valentin he caught a train. Yet again he took the railroad journey through Amstetten, through Blindenmarkt, and through St.

  Pölten. This time he met no interference.

  At last, on Monday, May 28, 1945, Fritz set foot in Vienna: five years, seven months, and twenty‑eight days since leaving it on the transport bound for Buchenwald. His train came in at the Westbahnhof, the very same station from which he had departed on that terrible day. Fritz later discovered that of the 1,035 Jewish men who had been on that Buchenwald transport, only twenty‑six were still alive.

  Vienna hadn’t suffered in the recent fighting the way Budapest, Berlin, or Stalingrad had. There had been no all‑costs defense, no wholesale destruc‑

  tion, no savage fight from street to street. It had fallen in just a few days, and although there were pockets of battle damage and areas that had been bombed, much of the city was scarcely touched. However, it was Fritz’s luck that the route he walked from the station to the city was one of the worst hit, giving him the disconcerting impression that Vienna had been mostly destroyed.

  It was late in the evening, and the darkness of a summer night was set‑

  tling over the buildings when he reached the Danube Canal. The buildings on the Leopoldstadt side were badly damaged by bombs, and the once handsome Salztor bridge was just a jagged stump protruding from the bank. Fritz crossed by another bridge and eventually found himself in the Karmelitermarkt, the hub and heart of his former life.

  The stalls had been packed away, the cobblestones were bare, and it was as it had been on those evenings long ago when he and his friends had played here in their innocence, kicking a rag ball around, watching out for the police, being warned off by the lamplighters for climbing the gas lamp poles. He could recall the cream cakes, the pink Mannerschnitte wafers, the bread crusts and ends of sausages, the shopkeepers and stallholders, Jews and non‑Jews driving their trade side by side, thriving without hate or hostility, their children playing in a single rushing, laughing society. Now half of that world, half of what had made this 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 312

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  place alive, was gone. They were ashes from the Auschwitz ovens floating down the Vistula, bones in the soil under the pine needles of Maly Trostinets, or scat‑

  tered to the world—Palestine, England, the Americas, the Far East. Aside from a tiny handful like Fritz, they would never come back to the Karmelitermarkt.4

  When he reached the old apartment building at Im Werd 11, he found the outer door locked. There was a Soviet‑imposed curfew that began at 8:00 pm, and all buildings were closed up. He hammered on the door, and it was opened by the familiar figure of Frau Ziegler, the building caretaker. She greeted him with amazement. Everyone had thought him and his father dead. She let him in but wouldn’t allow him up to the old apartment; there were new people living there now who had been bombed out of their home. There were no Klein‑

  manns here anymore.

  On his first night back in Vienna, Fritz slept on Frau Ziegler’s floor. When he rose the next morning and went out, he found that the news of his return had preceded him. The Kleinmann boy is back. He didn’t find Olly Steyskal or any of his other loyal friends that morning, but he did run into Josefa Hirschler, the caretaker of Olly’s apartment building. She greeted him warmly and invited him to take his first Viennese breakfast with her and her children, Fritz’s old friends Helli and Fritzi. He was begrimed from his journey across Austria, so she sent him out to the back courtyard to clean up. He found a bowl waiting for him filled with hot water.

  As he splashed his face and scrubbed at his neck, he felt that a new life was beginning for him. But it was a new life alone, without any family. His little brother in America, his sister in England, his mother and Herta gone, almost certainly dead in the east, and as for his father—where in the world was he?

  Gustav had found himself a good life in Bad Fallingbostel; he had work and was eating well. He’d made friends with a German woman from Aachen and she gave him extra food. He had additional work making rucksacks for some Serbian army officers who had been prisoners of war. They seemed well sup‑

  plied and gave him lots of cigarettes.5

  Despite his comfortable existence, he wasn’t quite
content. “I feel much stronger,” he wrote, but “Dear Lord, if only I were in Vienna with my son.”

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  Gustav still doggedly believed that Fritz must have made it home after jump‑

  ing from the train.

  Several other liberated Viennese had drifted into Fallingbostel and formed a tiny community. They all felt homesick. When the news came that the war had ended, there was nothing more to hold them here. So, less than two weeks after his arrival, on May 13 Gustav and his new Viennese friends left Fallingbostel and began the long trek. They were joined by two women from Aachen; the first leg of their way home lay on the same southward route.6

  The first day they walked only as far as Essel, on the road to Hanover, where they found a barn to sleep in. They went slowly, finding food and shelter wherever they could, passing to the east of Hanover to the forested, mountainous country south of Hildesheim. Gustav appreciated the slowness of the journey, relishing the freedom and the beautiful scenery. They had been four days on the road when they reached the town of Alfeld, northwest of the Harz mountains, where they paused. Gustav was delighted to bump into an old friend, Fritz Scholz, who’d been a political prisoner in Buchenwald and was now chief of police in Alfeld, no less. Hearing about the long journey Gustav had before him, Scholz gave him a bicycle.

  The next day Gustav and his friends traveled on, walking, cycling, hitching rides as chance offered. They altered their direction; if they continued south, they would soon reach Nordhausen and the environs of Mittelbau and Ellrich.

  Instead they struck out southeast, passing to the north of the Harz mountains and avoiding the scene of some of Gustav’s most unpleasant memories.

  In Stapelburg, Gustav spent his first night in a decent bed. The pace picked up, and at noon on May 20 the traveling party reached the city of Halle in Saxony, where they registered at the police station to receive an allocation of food. In Halle Gustav was unexpectedly reunited with many more old com‑

  rades from both Monowitz and Buchenwald.7 Among the latter was his good friend and Fritz’s mentor Robert Siewert, who had survived in Buchenwald right to the end and had come back to his old hometown to begin rebuilding its communist party.

  Halle proved to be something of a gathering place for concentration camp survivors, and Gustav decided to stay for a while. They received good care and plenty to eat, and there was an established Austrian committee. Robert Siewert gave a public talk on conditions in Buchenwald—beginning his lifelong task 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 314

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  of helping to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive and in the forefront of public awareness.

  Pleased to be in the company of so many comrades, Gustav stayed in Halle for a month. On June 20, the journey resumed. He and his companions passed through the city of Leipzig, which was in ruins; bombed heavily by both the British and Americans, it had lost tens of thousands of historic buildings and thousands of human lives. Gustav and his friends hurried on to Zwickau, which was in American hands but about to be handed over to the Soviets.

  Having swept in a wide easterly arc (thereby avoiding Weimar and Buch‑

  enwald), the route now veered a little west of south, passing by the Czech border and heading into Bavaria. Cycling through forest and mountains, Gustav exulted in the beauty of nature. “This area is glorious,” he wrote in his diary during one of their frequent halts. “Nothing but mountains everywhere. I feel as if I have been born again.”

  On June 29, they reached Regensburg, where they had a friendly recep‑

  tion. Gustav had no idea that Fritz had been here just over a month earlier.

  After staying a couple days, they moved on to Passau, on the confluence of the Danube and the Inn, right by the Austrian border. On July 2 Gustav rode his bicycle over the Danube bridge and passed into Austria, welcomed home by the pealing of church bells striking noon.

  The next day the Austrian exiles reached Linz in pouring rain, after dark.

  It was too late to find accommodation, so they spent the night in an air raid shelter. The next day they registered at the government office and received their ration cards. Provided with an apartment belonging to a Dr. Klemenz, who had fled, they spent several days in the city.

  Although he was on home soil and Vienna was only a train ride away, Gustav’s footsteps slowed again. After traveling so far, he suddenly felt no great urgency to reach home. He was enjoying himself, and although he never confessed as much to his diary, there must have been nagging at the back of his mind the thought that he might find distressing news there, including the full truth about what had happened to Tini and Herta. And what if his faith was mistaken, and Fritz wasn’t there?

  In truth, Gustav was enjoying his freedom. For the first time ever—not only since the camps but for the first time in his whole life—he was completely at liberty, without responsibility or cares or fear, free to go as he pleased and take his time drinking in the sights and smelling the flowers.

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  One day, taking advantage of the beautiful weather, he took a day trip up into the mountains with one of his companions.8 Acting on an impulse, they went to the village of Mauthausen, where yet another old camp comrade, Walter Petzold from Auschwitz, was now chief of police. They walked up the hill and had a look at the concentration camp, its formidable stone enclosure now deserted. Gustav was curious to see the place from which the inmates of the death train had been turned away. Had he known that Fritz had spent three months here, and that it had nearly killed him, he might have regarded it in a different light.

  They stayed in Mauthausen two days before moving on. Like Germany, Austria was divided into occupation zones, and on July 11, they crossed the

  “green border” for the first time, passing from the American into the Soviet zone. Gustav found the Russians “very courteous to us concentration camp survivors.” He made friends with a Soviet officer who had fought at Stalingrad.

  Weeks went by, and still he was in no mood to hurry home. Through the rest of July and August, he lingered in central Austria, and it was only when the summer began to wane that he finally steered his bicycle toward the final homeward leg.

  On a day in September, Gustav Kleinmann entered Vienna. He saw the areas of devastation, the massive concrete flak towers looming over the pretty parks, and he saw all the familiar landmarks. The Karmelitermarkt was still there, and the apartment buildings of Im Werd overlooking it, and his old workshop on the first floor of number 11, under new occupancy now. He went into number 9, up to the second floor, and knocked on the door of Olly’s apartment. And there she was, his dearest, truest friend, smiling at him in astonished joy, welcoming him home.

  In the same building Gustav found the person he had most longed to see, living in an apartment he had been allowed to occupy until its owner returned—his boy, his Fritzl, his son, his companion, his pride and delight.

  Gustav enfolded his boy in his arms. Out of their shared hardship, out of their separation and suffering, out of the nightmare, of all the millions who had perished, blind fortune had played a large part in singling them out and preserving them, but it was solidarity, love, and faith that had got them through it and brought them safely home again.

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  E p i l o g u e : J e w i s h B l o o d Vienna, June 1954

  An American GI stood by the west bank of the Danube Canal, looking across the water toward Leopoldstadt. He wore dress uniform, with the chevron of a private first class on his sleeve, below the division shoulder patch. He was a soldier of the 1st Infantry Division—the Big Red One, whose troops had been among the first to hit Omaha Beach on D‑Day. This soldier was way too young to have been there
on that day: he’d been just a schoolboy in 1944. Now he was grown tall and handsome, the very image of a United States soldier. He was stationed in Kitzingen, Bavaria, with the Allied occupying force, and had taken advantage of a one‑week furlough to take a look at Vienna, the city where he’d been born.

  It was familiar yet different. The city was bringing itself back to life, healing its wounds. Most of the bridges had been destroyed in the war, and even nine years on only a few had been rebuilt. The one before him, the Augartenbrücke, was one of them. It stood right by the boundary between the American zone—which covered the northwest city and suburbs—and the International sector in the city center. Across the canal, Leopoldstadt lay in the Soviet zone.

  The GI approached the Soviet checkpoint and showed his identification.

  They waved him through, and Private First Class Kurt Kleinmann walked out across the broad bridge, under the shadow of the grand old Rossauer Kaserne, the Austrian military barracks where his parents had been mar‑

  ried in 1917, toward the old Second District that had once been his home and his world.

  Many of the familiar buildings were scarred, and some were covered in scaffolding, still under repair. But the place was all still recognizable, still as 317

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  318 E p i l o g u e : J e w i s h B l o o d fresh in his mind as the day he’d left. How his life had changed since then, and how it had changed him.

  After high school, Kurt had gone to college in Providence, Rhode Island, to study pharmacy. He’d graduated in 1952, and after studying toward a degree in pharmacology at Ohio State in 1953, he’d been drafted into the army. He was a product of America as much as of Vienna now. His family was there—not only the Barnets, who had become family in all but name, but also his sister, who now lived in Connecticut. Edith and Richard had stayed in London for three years after the war, but in 1948, with sponsorship from Judge Barnet, they had finally made it to the United States, leaving England behind for good.