The Stone Crusher

by Jeremy Dronfield

  The Paltenhoffers adapted rapidly to American life. When they arrived, Peter and Joan—aged eight and six—had been English children with “Oxford accents” (according to the New Bedford paper), but that didn’t last long.

  Determined to fit in, Richard and Edith had discarded the name Paltenhoffer and taken a new last name—Patten. For six years they lived in America as residents, but just last month, in May 1954, they had finally become United States citizens.1

  Being drafted into the army had been the first step on the road leading Kurt back to the land of his birth for the first time since 1941. Although Germany had been partitioned and made nominally independent in 1949, Austria was still under occupation, and it showed. The country had suffered badly in the postwar years, with economic depression and bad harvests. The Soviet Union and the West played out their Cold War in the area, and lately there had been fears about all‑out conflict breaking out as it had in Korea.

  Kurt strolled along the Donaustrasse and up the Grosse Schiffgasse, sur‑

  prised at how well he remembered it all. Then came the familiar turn right and left, and there it was. The Karmelitermarkt opened up before him, its stalls laid out in rows on the cobbles, the clock on its slender tower in the center, and the shops and apartment buildings of Leopoldsgasse and Im Werd on either side.

  He was an alien here now. The sense of foreignness was almost palpable—

  he couldn’t even speak the language anymore. His command of German had been gradually lost along the American journey to manhood. But paradoxically, he was an alien who had come home.

  The old building at number 11 looked the same, but it wasn’t home anymore.

  Instead Kurt entered the building next door, climbed the stairs to the second 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 318

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  floor, and knocked on the door of Olga’s apartment; the same one as all those years ago. And there was his father, older, more lined, with more gray in his hair, but still that same old smile on the lean face with its trim mustache. And there was Olga herself, loyal, wonderful Olly. She was Frau Kleinmann now, Kurt’s stepmother.

  Kurt visited many times during that summer. Sitting around the kitchen table, the four of them—Gustav and Olly, Kurt in his incongruous US Army uniform, together with Fritz—talked as best they could. As time passed, Kurt found that a little of his German came back: just enough to get by, but not enough for a proper conversation.

  It was hard to recover the lost years. His father didn’t want to talk about his time in the camps, and Kurt’s relationship with Fritz wasn’t what it had been. Raised an all‑American boy in the postwar world, Kurt was dismayed by his brother’s communist sympathies. Fritz had acquired his politics partly by inheritance from their father’s prewar socialism, and partly in the camps from heroes like Robert Siewert and Stefan Heymann. Life as a worker in postwar Austria had confirmed him in his left‑wing principles. There were also religious differences. None of the family aside from Kurt had ever been very devout in their Judaism, but Fritz had abandoned his religion entirely somewhere along the Auschwitz road.2

  “No talk about politics or religion,” decreed Gustav, and they stuck to safer subjects.

  On their return to Vienna in 1945, Gustav and Fritz had faced the problem of adjustment, not just to freedom but to the new world and their new cir‑

  cumstances within it.

  Even finding somewhere to live was a challenge in the bomb‑damaged, Soviet‑controlled city, despite the reduction of its population by war, migration, and mass murder. Gustav stayed in Olly Steyskal’s apartment, and remained there until he married her in 1948, the same year he managed to reestablish his upholstery business.

  There was still anti‑Semitism, but it had gone underground again, expressed in muttering and insinuation. Of the 183,000 Jews who had lived in Vienna in March 1938, more than two‑thirds had managed to emigrate by November 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 319

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  320 E p i l o g u e : J e w i s h B l o o d 1941: nearly 31,000 to Britain, 29,000 to the United States, 12,000 to South America, 21,000 to Asia and Australia, and just over 9,000 to Palestine. A further 21,647 had emigrated to European nations that had subsequently come under Nazi rule. Nearly all went to the camps, along with 43,421 Jews deported directly from Vienna to Auschwitz, Łodz, Theresienstadt, and Minsk between 1941 and 1944, and the uncounted thousands sent to Dachau and Buchenwald from 1938 to 1940.3

  After the Shoah, Vienna still had a Jewish community, which gradually recovered its identity and held on to its heritage, but in scale it was a mere fragment of what it had been. The synagogues had been destroyed or stood in ruins, and only a few were ever restored. The Stadttempel in the ancient Jewish quarter, where Kurt Kleinmann had sung as a boy, and which had been gutted by stormtroopers on Kristallnacht, would eventually be restored in 1949, and the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde was revived in its traditional role at the center of Jewish cultural life.

  By 1946 Fritz had managed to get an apartment in their old building, and he settled there briefly.4 He was unable to work for the first few months due to poor health and lived on a disability pension. He and his father dis‑

  cussed at length what they should do about Kurt. Should they bring him home? Edith had her own family now, but Kurt was still only fifteen, and they missed him. But what was there for him here? His mother was dead, and his father aging and poor. They concluded that Kurt was better off where he was; the Barnets were good people, and rich, and he was happy in America. So Gustav and Fritz carried on together, supporting each other as they had for so many years.

  One of the delights of those postwar years was their reunion with Alfred Wocher. The tough, courageous old German sergeant had survived the inferno of the last defense of the Reich and tracked down his old Auschwitz friends in Vienna. He visited them many times. “For us concentration camp inmates, Wocher had fulfilled more than his duty,” Fritz recalled. “Through his conduct he gave us courage and faith, and thus contributed decisively to our surviving Auschwitz. Nobody rewarded him for it. We the survivors are indebted to him.”

  While his father tried to forget what he had seen and suffered in the camps (his diary had been more an aid to helping him survive it than an attempt to record it for posterity), and would only talk about it with reluctance, Fritz was of an entirely different disposition. He remembered it vividly and deliberately.

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  And he carried a burning detestation of the former Nazis who still lived in Vienna. He heard the mutterings around Im Werd— See, the Kleinmann Jew is back again—and while his father tried to live peacefully alongside the col‑

  laborators, Fritz wouldn’t acknowledge their existence or speak to anyone who had sided with Nazis. They were mystified by this, and one of the neighbors who had betrayed them to the SS actually complained to Gustav, “Your son won’t say hello to us!” Willful ignorance about the Shoah was such that this man couldn’t grasp the evil of what he had done.

  There were occasional reprisals against collaborators by younger Jewish men, and Fritz became involved. There was an Aryan neighbor, Sepp Leitner, who’d been a member of the 89th SS‑Standarte “Holzweber,” which had been based in Vienna and had taken part in the destruction of the synagogues on Kristallnacht. Fritz confronted Leitner and beat him up. He was arrested for it by the police, but the Soviet authorities, who approved of summary justice for fascists, ordered his release.

  Fritz struggled to come to terms with what Austria had become; in Buch‑

  enwald he had listened to the Austrian Prominenten debate the future once the Nazis were defeated. They had conceived of Austria as a democratic socialist utopia, and Fritz had longed for that. But most of those men were dead now, and Austria was far from utopian. Things improved in 195
5, when the occu‑

  pying powers departed and Austria regained the independence it had lost in 1938, becoming a democracy again and resuming the constitutional system it had lost with the Austrofascist takeover in 1934.

  After working for five years as a lathe operator for a company run by the USIA—the Soviet authority that controlled the Austrian and former German factories in their zone—Fritz took evening classes, and around 1956 joined his company’s trade union. Fritz’s family life was unsettled for a while; he had two marriages, from which came a son, Peter, and a stepson, Ernst. Gus‑

  tav, meanwhile, was content to be back in his old trade and married to Olly.

  Immediately after returning to Vienna, he had considered leaving behind the painful memories altogether and had registered with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, with a view to emigrating to the United States.5 But it had come to nothing, and in 1947 the window of opportunity had closed.

  He would remain Viennese to the end of his days.

  In 1964 Gustav retired, having carried on working to the ripe age of seventy‑three. One of his last jobs was providing upholstery for the Austrian 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 321

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  pavilion at that year’s New York World’s Fair. In 1966, he and Olly visited the United States. They stayed with Edith and Richard in Hartford, Connecti‑

  cut, and spent time with Kurt and his wife, Diane. Although Gustav scarcely understood a word of English, he now had five all‑American grandchildren and three great‑grandchildren. He posed for photographs with the little ones on his knees, beaming contentedly, surrounded once more by love and family.

  Gustav Kleinmann died on May 1, 1976, the day before his eighty‑fifth birthday. He had been severely ill for some time, yet his prodigious inner strength had kept him going in his final days.

  Two years later, Fritz, who was only in his mid‑fifties, had to take early retirement; he had moved on from technical work and become first a time‑

  and‑motion officer and then a works estimator. But he couldn’t sustain a working life. The torture he had endured in the Gestapo dungeon at Aus‑

  chwitz had left him with permanent back injuries that, despite spinal opera‑

  tions, eventually caused partial paralysis. Nonetheless, Fritz Kleinmann had his father’s toughness, and he lived a long life, passing away on January 20, 2009, aged eighty‑five.

  After the war ended, the victorious Allies convened a succession of trials against the perpetrators of the Shoah, including those at Nuremberg in 1945–6 and at Dachau in 1945–7. Many criminals were executed or imprisoned, and the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity entered the statutes of inter‑

  national law.

  But once those trials were over, shadows began to fall over the atrocities perpetrated by Nazi Germany—particularly within Germany itself. Those who had lived through it and had colluded with it either actively or passively tried to draw a veil over the past and forget it. By the end of the 1950s a young genera‑

  tion of Germans had been raised on a cushion of lies—that the Jews had mostly just emigrated, that there had been atrocities on all sides during the war, and that those committed by Germany had been no worse than those by the Allies.

  These young people knew almost nothing of the Holocaust, and the names of Auschwitz and Sobibor, Buchenwald and Belsen, were obscure or unknown to them. Most of the Nazi murderers remained free, many still living in Germany.

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  That changed in 1963, when the landmark Auschwitz trials began in Frank‑

  furt. The man responsible was Fritz Bauer, a Jewish state attorney, who had himself been a political prisoner in a concentration camp. Bauer had helped trace Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, leading to his capture by Mossad. In Frankfurt, Bauer instituted proceedings against twenty‑two former SS men accused of carrying out atrocities at Auschwitz. The witnesses who gave depo‑

  sitions for the Frankfurt trials included over two hundred surviving inmates, of whom ninety were Jews.6 Among them were Gustav and Fritz Kleinmann, who were interviewed by the prosecutors in April and May 1963, giving written statements.7 Their fellow witnesses included their old friends and comrades Stefan Heymann, Felix Rausch, and Gustl Herzog. Among those on trial were members of the camp Gestapo, Blockführers, and camp administration. Some were acquitted; others received sentences ranging from three years to life. More important than the individual sentences, the Frankfurt trials forced Germany’s eyes open and ensured that the nation—and the world—would not forget the Holocaust, as did the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961.

  Fritz Kleinmann continued doing his part. In 1987 he was invited by a friend, the political scientist Reinhold Gärtner, to give a public talk about his experiences. The audience was a group about to set out on a study trip to Auschwitz‑Birkenau—young and old, from various classes and political alignments. Fritz would be one of four survivors speaking over the course of two days. “For days before it, I could not sleep; the images from my concen‑

  tration camp imprisonment welled up more intensely than ever before.” The event—which included extracts from his father’s diary read by a Viennese actor—moved Fritz profoundly, and overwhelmed the audience. He came back and gave his talk again and again to new parties for over a decade.

  A few years after that first event, Fritz was persuaded by Reinhold to explore his memories further, by writing a memoir that was later published in a book.8 Even after all the decades, Fritz still burned with indignation and anger about the atrocities visited on him and his people, but it was countered by the love he still felt for those who had helped him survive: Robert Siewert, Stefan Heymann, Leo Moses, and all the rest. He pored over the handful of old documents he had preserved. He still had the photograph of himself taken in 1939 for his J‑Karte—the identity card stamp with a large red J, although he had destroyed the rest of the detested document immediately after returning home in 1945. And he still possessed the photograph taken of him in Buchenwald 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 323

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  324 E p i l o g u e : J e w i s h B l o o d in 1940. There he was, glaring into the lens, wearing the loaned, ill‑fitting suit and incongruous shaved scalp. His mother had kept the photo and passed it on to a relative before being deported to Maly Trostinets, perhaps guessing that she would not be coming back.

  And there was the diary. His father had revealed its existence to him shortly after their reunion in Vienna in 1945. Turning back its dog‑eared cover, there was the first page, yellowed, covered with his father’s angular pencil strokes, fading now after all these years. “Arrived in Buchenwald on the 2nd Octo‑

  ber 1939 after a two‑day train journey. From Weimar station we ran to the camp . . .” The vividness of the images seared Fritz’s mind. The quarry, hauling the stone‑laden wagon up the tracks—“Left–two–three! Left–two–three!”—the corpses in the mud, a man running between the sentries and dropping with a bullet in his back, bloody streaks across a man strapped to the Bock, hang‑

  ing from the beam in the Gestapo bunker with his arms twisting out of their sockets, the weight of the Luger in his palm, the agonizing cold of the open car between Gleiwitz and Amstetten . . . and the poem, “Quarry Kaleidoscope,”

  with its unforgettable central image:

  It rattles, the crusher, day out and day in,

  It rattles and rattles and breaks up the stone,

  Chews it to gravel and hour by hour

  Eats shovel by shovel in its guzzling maw.

  And those who feed it with toil and with care,

  They know it just eats, but will never be through.

  It first eats the stone and then eats them too.

  But it hadn’t crushed them all. A few, like the tall p
risoner in the poem, had managed to outlast the machine, to keep going until the stone crusher clattered itself to a halt, malfunctioning, choked by its own appetite.

  In the end the Kleinmann family not only survived but prospered; through courage, love, solidarity, and blind luck, they outlasted the people who had tried to destroy them. They and their descendants spread and multiplied, perpetuating through the generations the love and unity that had helped them through the darkest of times. They took their past with them, understanding that the living must gather the memories of the dead and carry them into the safety of the future.

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  B i b l i o g r a p h y

  a n d S o u r c e s

  Interviews

  Conducted by the author

  Kurt Kleinmann: March–April 2016, July 2017

  Peter Patten: April 2016, July 2017

  Archived

  Fritz Kleinmann: February 1997: interview 28129, Visual History Archive: Uni‑

  versity of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute Archive and Unpublished Sources

  AFB

  Findbüch for Victims of National Socialism, Austria: www.findbuch.at/en (retrieved February 21, 2017)

  ABM

  Archives of Auschwitz‑Birkenau Museum, Oświęcim, Poland AJJ

  American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives, New York AWK

  Testimonies from Kristallnacht: Wiener Library, London: available online at www.

  wienerlibrarycollections.co.uk/novemberpogrom/testimonies‑and‑reports/over‑

  view (retrieved February 19, 2017)

  BWM

  Belohnungakten des Weltkrieges 1914–1918: Mannschaftsbelohnungsanträge No 45348, Box 21: Austrian State Archives, Vienna

  DFK

  Letters, photographs, and documents from the archive of Fritz Kleinmann DKK

  Letters and documents in possession of Kurt Kleinmann DOW

  Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstandes, Vienna: some records available online at www.doew.at/personensuche (retrieved April 14, 2017) DPP