The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

by Jeremy Dronfield

  Tini’s worries were increasing constantly. Since the invasion of France in May, a curfew had been imposed on Jews in Vienna.1 One might think that there were no further ways in which the Nazis could blight the lives of Jews, but one would be wrong. There was always another stick with which to beat them.

  In October the previous year, not long after Gustav and Fritz had been taken away, two transports of Jews had left Vienna bound for Nisko in occupied Poland; they were to be resettled there in some kind of agricultural community.2 The programme stuttered out, but it added to the sense of insecurity among the Jews remaining in Vienna. When the survivors returned home in April, they brought back dreadful stories of abuse and murder.3

  For Tini, the mission to get her children to safety had become more urgent than ever. With Britain now out of bounds, America was the only hope. Tini’s chief concern was to have Fritz released while he was still a minor and eligible for higher priority emigration. She had lodged applications for him, Herta and Kurt. Each needed two affidavits from friends or relatives living in America, pledging to provide shelter and support. The affidavits were easy enough, as Tini had cousins in New York and New Jersey,4 and an old and dear friend, Alma Maurer, who had emigrated many years ago and lived in Massachusetts.5 Support was plentiful – it was the bureaucracy of the Nazi regime and the United States that presented a problem.

  President Roosevelt – who wanted to increase the number of refugees taken in – could do nothing against Congress and the press. The United States had a theoretical quota of sixty thousand refugees a year, but chose not to use it. Instead, Washington employed every bureaucratic trick it could dream up to obstruct and delay applications. In June 1940, an internal State Department memo advised its consuls in Europe: ‘We can delay and effectively stop … immigrants into the United States … by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way … which would postpone the granting of the visas.’6

  Tini Kleinmann trekked from office to office, queued, wrote letter after letter, filled in forms, suffered the abuse of Gestapo officials, lodged enquiries, and waited and waited and waited, and feared every new message in case it was a summons for deportation. Her every move was blocked by obstacles specifically designed to pander to congressmen and newspaper editors, businessmen, workers, small-town wives and storekeepers in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Chicago and New York, who objected stridently to a new wave of immigrants.

  Fritz was approaching manhood. Herta was already eighteen and miserably confined without work or opportunity. Ten-year-old Kurt was a worry. Tini fretted all the time about his behaviour – he was a good boy, but he had a lot of volatile energy. She worried that he would do something – some trivial act of naughtiness – that would jeopardize all of them.

  Keeping her worries to herself, Tini replied to Fritz’s and Gustav’s brief letters with news of home. She scraped together money to send them, received through charity or earned from occasional illegal work. She wrote that she missed them, and pretended that all was well.7

  בן

  Kurt crept down the staircase to the ground-floor hallway. The street door stood open, and he peeped out. Some boys were playing on the edge of the marketplace – old friends of his from before the Nazis came. He watched them enviously, knowing it was impossible for him to join them.

  They had been a happy band, the children from the streets around the Karmelitermarkt. On a Saturday morning his mother would make sandwiches and pack them in his little rucksack. Off he would go with his pals, hiking across the city like a band of pioneers to some distant park, or to the Danube to swim. A perfect society of friends, with no notion that some of them bore a stigma.

  Kurt’s awareness that some children were not like others had come on him violently. One day during the first winter, a boy from the Hitler Youth had called him a Jew and pushed him down, shoving his face hard into the snow.

  When the hate came from an actual friend – that was when the injustice of it stuck in Kurt’s heart. He’d been with a small group of friends in the marketplace – those same boys he was watching now – playing as they had always done. The dominant boy had suddenly decided that he needed to pick on somebody – as such boys will – and singled out Kurt, calling him by the anti-Semitic slurs he’d heard adults use. Then he began pulling off Kurt’s coat buttons. Kurt wasn’t easily bullied; he hit the boy. Shocked, the boy pulled a metal bar off his little scooter and laid into Kurt with it, battering him so badly that his mother had to take him to the hospital. He remembered her looking down at him as the cuts and bruises on his head were treated. She guessed what would follow. A complaint was made to the police by the boy’s parents; Kurt, a Jew, had dared to strike an Aryan. That was a matter for the law. Probably because of his age, Kurt was let off with a caution. After that he understood the malevolence and injustice of this new world.

  It was a bewildering place, and the memories it would leave behind were sporadic, vivid impressions.

  His mother struggled perpetually to keep him and Herta warm and fed on the little money she could scrape together. There were soup kitchens, and in the summer they went to a farm owned by the IKG to pick peas. There were still a few wealthy Jewish families in Vienna, eking out their remaining money, supporting those who were destitute. Kurt had once gone to dinner with such a family. His mother had coached him strictly: ‘Sit up straight, behave yourself, do as you’re told.’ Kurt enjoyed a magnificent meal. Except for the Brussels sprouts. He’d never had them before, and hated them, but was too scared not to eat them. He threw up straight after.

  His social world had shrunk down to his aunts, uncles and cousins. His favourite was Jenni, his mother’s elder sister.8 Jenni had never married; she was a seamstress and lived alone with her cat. She told the children the cat spoke to her: Jenni would ask it a question, and it would say mm-jaa. Kurt was never sure whether she was joking. Jenni had a childlike sense of humour and loved animals. She would give him money to buy caps for his pistol so that he could stalk the city pigeon catcher; when the man was about to net some birds, Kurt would fire his pistol, sending them up in a flapping grey cloud, leaving the catcher with an empty net.

  Some of Kurt’s relatives had married out to non-Jews and now lived in a state of uncertainty, their children classed as Mischlinge – mongrels – under Nazi law. One of these cousins was his best friend, Richard Wilczek, whose gentile father had sent him and his mother to the Netherlands for safety after the Anschluss. The Nazis were there too now, and what had become of Richard, Kurt didn’t know. Looking out at the street now, it was no longer the same world.

  ‘There you are!’ said his mother, and Kurt turned guiltily to face her. ‘How many times must I tell you not to go outside alone?’ Her face was drawn and anxious, and Kurt didn’t point out that he hadn’t actually stepped outside. ‘We have to go now. Run and put your coat on.’

  One of the periodic orders had come down from the Gestapo for all the Jews in the district to report for some inspection or registration or selection. Kurt had picked up on his mother’s and Herta’s fear, and as the only remaining man in the household, had a plan to protect them. He had a knife. He’d obtained it from another Mischling cousin, Viktor Kapelari, who lived in the suburb of Vienna-Döbling. His mother was another of Tini’s sisters, who had converted to Christianity when she married. Viktor and his mother were fond of Kurt, and often took him fishing. Mingled with the pleasant memories of these trips, Kurt would always retain a haunting image of Viktor’s father the last time he saw him, dressed in the sinister grey uniform of a Nazi officer. After one of their fishing trips, Kurt had come home with a bone-handled hunting knife belonging to Viktor, which he had pocketed.

  Putting on his coat while his mother and Herta waited, Kurt slipped the knife into his pocket. The Nazis had taken his father and Fritz away, tormented his sisters, pushed him down in the snow, beaten him and made it into his crime. There was nothing they would not be allowed to do. He was determined to defend his mother
and Herta against them.

  Kurt took his mother’s hand and they set out for the police station. He fingered the knife blade in his pocket as he walked. He could sense his mother’s anxiety, knowing that when Jews were ordered to report, they were sometimes sent away. He guessed that that was what she was afraid of, and felt her distress growing as they approached the police station. To soothe her fears, he showed her the knife.

  ‘See, Mama, I’ll protect us.’

  Tini was appalled. ‘Get rid of it!’ she hissed.

  Kurt was astonished and dismayed. ‘But—’

  ‘Kurt, throw it away before someone sees it!’

  There was no convincing her. Reluctantly, he tossed the knife away. They walked on, Kurt almost heartbroken.

  As it turned out, the Gestapo didn’t do anything bad to them that day. But someday they would. How in the world was he to defend the people he loved now? What would become of them?

  בן

  Another dawn, another roll call, another day. The prisoners in their stripes stood in ranks in the cool summer air, motionless except to take the sustenance doled out, soundless except to answer to their numbers. Any breach of roll-call discipline meant punishment, as did any infraction of the immaculate neatness and cleanliness of one’s barrack block: a veneer of precise order glued over a morass of bestial barbarism.

  At last the slow ritual drew to a close. The ranks began to dissolve and re-form into labour gangs. Fritz, looking through the milling crowd, saw his father joining the main quarry detail.

  Gustav had had a reprieve during the second half of the winter when Gustav Herzog, one of the younger Jewish block seniors, employed him as bunk-room orderly. As an upholsterer he had skill with mattresses, and a knack for keeping things in order. It was illegal, and would have led to punishment for both of them, but it helped the block pass inspections and kept Gustav safe for two months. Eventually, though, the assignment had had to end, and Gustav had been sent back to the murderous task of stone-carrying.

  Fritz no longer shared his labour; he’d been transferred to the vegetable gardens attached to the farm complex – hard labour still but infinitely better and safer than the killing ground of the quarry.9

  Now that they were neither living nor working together, Fritz saw little of his papa, although they met when they could. Money from home enabled them to buy occasional comforts from the prisoner canteen, which helped brighten their days.

  As Fritz made his way through the crowd towards his comrades in the garden detail, the camp senior bellowed: ‘Prisoner 7290 to the main gate, at the double!’

  Fritz’s heart froze, as if he’d been physically gripped. There were only two reasons for a prisoner to be summoned to the gate at roll call: punishment or assignment to the stone quarry, expressly for the purpose of being murdered.

  ‘Prisoner 7290! Let’s have you! Main gate now, at the double!’

  Fritz pushed through the mass of prisoners and ran to the gatehouse. Gustav watched him go with his heart in his mouth. Fritz reported to the adjutant, SS-Lieutenant Hermann Hackmann, a clever, slender young man with a boyish grin which concealed a cynical, brutal nature.10 He looked Fritz up and down, swinging the hefty bamboo cudgel he always carried. ‘Wait there,’ he said. ‘Face the wall.’

  He walked off. Fritz stood by the gatehouse in the approved manner, staring at the whitewashed bricks in front of his nose, while the work details marched out. Eventually, when everyone had gone, SS-Sergeant Schramm, Fritz’s Blockführer,fn1 came to fetch him. ‘Come with me.’

  Schramm led him to the administrative complex which straddled the near end of the Blood Road. Fritz was escorted into the Gestapo building and left standing in a corridor for a long time before being called into a room.

  ‘Cap off,’ said a Gestapo clerk. ‘Take off your jacket.’ Fritz did as he was told. ‘Put these on.’

  The clerk handed him a civilian shirt, tie and jacket. They were rather large for him, especially in his half-starved condition, but he put them on, knotting the tie neatly into the rumpled collar. He was led before a camera, and mugshots were taken from all sides. Utterly unable to imagine any reason for this strange proceeding, Fritz stared with deep, hostile suspicion into the lens, his large, beautiful eyes blazing.

  When it was over he was ordered to put his prison uniform back on and run back to the camp. He obeyed, relieved to be in one piece but still with no idea of the purpose of what had just happened. His surprise increased when he was informed that he didn’t have to work for the rest of that day.

  He sat alone in the empty barrack, wondering. Presumably the clothing had been intended to give the impression that he was living as an ordinary civilian, not as a prisoner, but beyond that he couldn’t guess.

  That evening, when the work details marched back to their blocks, weary and gaunt, Gustav, who’d been in a state of sick anxiety all day, slipped away to Fritz’s block. When he looked in through the door and saw him there, alive and well, the relief was immense. Fritz described what had happened, but neither they nor any of their friends could tell what it meant. Anything that involved being singled out by the Gestapo surely couldn’t be healthy.

  A few days later, it happened again; Fritz was summoned from roll call and taken to the Gestapo office. A copy of his photograph was put in front of him. It was a bizarre image: his face with its shaven scalp and the incongruous suit and tie. If this was meant to give the impression that he lived a normal life, it was preposterous. He was ordered to sign it: Fritz Israel Kleinmann.

  At last he was told the purpose of it all. His mother had obtained the affidavit she needed from America and had applied for Fritz to be released so that he could emigrate. The photo was required for the application file.

  He walked back to the camp on air, feeling hope for the first time in eight months.

  בן

  ‘We transferred to the new colony on a fine, warm day. The leaves on the trees had not yet begun to turn, the grass was still green, as if at the height of its second youth, freshened by the first days of autumn.’

  Stefan’s voice filled the room, the only other sound the rustle as he turned a page of the book from which he read.

  Fritz and the other boys listened, rapt, to the story of a place which sounded so like and yet so unlike the one in which they lived. Being read to by Stefan was one of the few distractions. Hope still glimmered in the back of Fritz’s mind, although it troubled him that the application did not include his papa. Their lives were diverging; Fritz was discovering a wider world through the older prisoners who helped and befriended him.

  Foremost among them was Leopold Moses, who had helped Fritz survive in the early months and had remained a friend. Fritz had first encountered him in the quarry, during the dysentery epidemic. Leo had offered Fritz some little black pills: ‘Swallow them,’ he said, ‘they’ll prevent the shits.’ Fritz showed the pills to his father, who recognized them from his wartime service in the trenches; they were veterinary charcoal, and they did help. Leo Moses had taken Fritz under his wing when he was transferred to the Youth Block, and Fritz learned his story. He’d been in the concentration camps since the very beginning. A labourer from Dresden, Leo had been a member of the German Communist Party, and been arrested as soon as the Nazis came to power – long before his Jewishness became an arrestable offence. He’d been briefly a kapo on the haulage column – one of the first Jewish kapos in Buchenwald – but didn’t have what it took to be a slave driver; the SS soon demoted him, signing him off with twenty-five lashes on the Bock.

  Through Leo, Fritz had been befriended by some of the other veteran Jewish prisoners. Here was the key to survival: ‘It was not good luck; neither was it God’s blessing,’ he recalled later. Rather, it was the kindness of others. ‘All they saw was the Jewish star on my prison uniform, and that I was a child.’11 He and the other boys often got extra titbits of food, sometimes medications when they needed them. Among their patriarchs was Gustav Herzog, who had employed Frit
z’s papa as a room orderly. At thirty-two, Gustl was young for a block senior.12 The son of a wealthy Viennese family who’d owned an international news agency, he’d been sent to Buchenwald after Kristallnacht. Fritz’s greatest respect was reserved for Gustl’s deputy, Stefan Heymann.13 Stefan had the face of an intellectual: high-browed, bespectacled, with a narrow jaw and sensitive mouth. He’d been an officer in the German army in the last war, but as an active communist and a Jew, he’d been among the first arrested in 1933, spending years in Dachau.

  On evenings when there was no night-work, Stefan would tell stories to take their minds off their plight. This evening he was reading to them from a treasured, forbidden book: Road to Life by the Russian author Anton Makarenko. It told the story of Makarenko’s work in Soviet rehabilitation colonies for juvenile offenders. As Stefan read, his voice low in the barrack gloom, the boys’ camps were brought to life as magical idylls, a universe away from the daily reality of Buchenwald:

  ‘The whispering canopy of the luxuriant treetops of our park spread generously over the Kolomak. There was many a shady mysterious nook here, in which one could bathe, cultivate the society of pixies, go fishing, or, at the lowest, exchange confidences with a congenial spirit. Our principal buildings were ranged along the top of the steep bank, and the ingenious and shameless younger boys could jump right out of the windows into the river, leaving their scanty garments on the window sills.’14

  Most of the boys listening were alone, their fathers having been killed already, and many had grown increasingly apathetic and listless; but hearing this story of another, better world brought them back to life, enthused and cheered.