The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

by Jeremy Dronfield

  Other forbidden cultural delights were to be had in Buchenwald. One evening Stefan and Gustl came into the barrack with an air of conspiratorial mystery. Urging Fritz and the other boys to be quiet, they led them across the camp to the clothing store, a long building adjacent to the shower block.

  It was quiet and still, the hanging racks and shelves stuffed with uniforms and the clothing confiscated from new prisoners, deadening the echo of the boys’ footsteps. Within, some older prisoners had gathered; they gave each boy a piece of bread and some acorn coffee, and then four prisoners appeared with violins and woodwinds. There, in the midst of this musty, cloth-lined room, they played chamber music. For the first time Fritz heard the jaunty, impudent melody of ‘Eine kleine Nachtmusik’; the cheerful skipping of the bows on the strings brought the room to life and smiles to the lips of the prisoners gathered round. It was a memory Fritz would treasure: ‘For a very short time we were able to laugh again.’15

  Outside these few borrowed hours, there was no laughter.

  Working in the vegetable gardens, whose produce was sold in Weimar market or to prisoners in the canteen, was an improvement on the quarry, but tougher than the boys had expected. They had anticipated being able to pilfer a few of the carrots, tomatoes and peppers they planted, but they were never allowed near the ripened crops.

  The gardens were under the overall authority of an Austrian officer, SS-Lieutenant Dumböck. Having spent time in exile with the Austrian Legion when the Nazi Party was outlawed, Dumböck now dedicated himself to persecuting Austrian Jews in revenge. ‘You pigs ought to be annihilated,’ he told them repeatedly, and did his best to make it come true. He was reckoned to have murdered forty prisoners with his own hands.16

  Fritz was assigned to Scheissetragen – shit-carrying.17 They had to collect the liquid slop of faeces from the prisoner latrines and the sewage plant and carry it in buckets to the vegetable beds. Every trip, there and back, had to be done at top speed, running as fast as one could with the noisome, glooping pails of filth. The only job worse than shit-carrying was the so-called ‘4711’ detail, named after the popular German eau de cologne; their job was to scoop out the faeces from the latrines – often with their bare hands – to fill the shit-carriers’ buckets. The SS typically allotted this task to Jewish intellectuals and artists.18

  At least the boys were treated decently by their kapo, Willi Kurz. A former amateur heavyweight boxing champion, Willi was a disillusioned soul; having once been on the board of an Aryans-only sports club in Vienna, he had been deeply hurt when the authorities looked into his ancestry and branded him a Jew.

  He was kind to the boys on his detail; he let them ease off the pace and take a rest if the SS weren’t around. Whenever a guard appeared, Willi would make a show of driving the boys along at full pace, yelling savagely at them and brandishing his cudgel, but he never used it on them. His performance was so convincing that the guards didn’t bother inflicting beatings themselves if Willi was in charge.

  All the while, Fritz thought back on the photograph and hoped.

  אבא

  ‘Left–two–three! Left–two–three!’

  Gustav, with his shoulder to the rope, heaved. There was no pause, no respite – just heave, step, heave, step, into eternity. On either side the other cattle heaved and stepped, sweating in the sunlight dappled by the trees. Twenty-six Jewish stars, twenty-six half-starved bodies hauling the wagon with its load of logs through the forest, up the slope, along the dirt road, wagon wheels groaning under the weight.

  It was arduous, but for Gustav, transfer out of the quarry to the haulage column had been a lifesaver, and he owed it to Leo Moses. The quarry had become worse than ever. Prisoners were chased over the sentry line every day, and Sergeant Hinkelmann had invented a new torture: if a man collapsed from exhaustion, Hinkelmann would have water poured into his mouth until he choked. Meanwhile, Sergeant Blank entertained himself by throwing rocks down on the prisoners as they left the quarry; many were hit and maimed, and some killed. The SS men had also taken up an extortion racket against Jewish quarry workers who received money from home; every few days, each man had to pay up five marks and six cigarettes or get beaten. With two hundred prisoners, the guards made a tidy little income from their ‘paydays’, although the sum declined week by week as the prisoners were murdered.

  Through Leo’s advocacy, in July Gustav had been transferred out of the killing ground to the haulage column. They carried building materials around the camp complex all day long – logs from the forest, gravel from the quarry, cement from the stores. The kapos made them sing as they worked, and the other prisoners called them singende Pferde – singing horses.19

  ‘Left–two–three! Left–two–three! Left–two–three! Sing, pigs!’

  Whenever they passed an SS guard, he would lash out at them. ‘Why don’t you run, you dogs? Faster!’

  But still it was better than the quarry. ‘It is hard work,’ Gustav wrote, ‘but one has more peace and is not hunted … Man is a creature of habit, and can get used to everything. So it goes, day after day.’

  The wheels turned, the men-horses sang and heaved, the kapos yelled time, and the days passed.

  בן

  SS-Sergeant Schmidt screamed at the group of men as they ran in circles around the roll-call square. ‘Faster, you Jew-shits!’ Fritz and the other boys, who were at the front, increased their pace to avoid the blows Schmidt aimed at anyone going too slowly. Some of the runners struggled with painful stomachs or testicles where Schmidt had kicked them for answering too slowly at roll call. ‘Run! Run, you pigs, run! Faster, you shits!’

  While the other prisoners returned to their barracks, the block 3 inmates had been made to stay. Schmidt, their Blockführer, had found fault in his inspection again – a bed not properly made, a floor insufficiently pristine, belongings not stowed away – and it was punishment time once more – Strafsport. Thickset and flabby, Schmidt was a noted spiv as well as a sadist; he held a post in the prisoners’ canteen and skimmed off tobacco and cigarettes in large quantities. The boys of block 3 called him ‘Shit Schmidt’ after his favourite word.20 ‘Run! March! Lie down … get up … That’s shit – lie down again. Now run!’ Thwack went his bullwhip on the backside of some poor man who couldn’t keep up. ‘Run!’

  Two hours went by, the hot sun setting and the square cooling, the men and boys sweating and labouring for breath. At last Schmidt dismissed them with a curse and they limped back to their block.

  Starving, they sat down to the only warm meal of the day: turnip soup. If they were lucky there might be a little scrap of meat.

  Fritz had finished and was about to get up when Gustl Herzog told the boys to stay where they were. ‘I have to talk to you,’ he said. ‘You boys mustn’t run so fast during the Strafsport. When you run fast, your fathers can’t keep up and they get beaten by Schmidt for lagging behind.’ The boys were ashamed, but what could they do? Someone would get beaten for going too slow. Gustl and Stefan showed them the solution. ‘Run like this – lift your knees higher, take smaller steps. That way, you look like you’re running flat-out, but you go slowly.’

  It worked well enough to fool Shit Schmidt. As time went on, Fritz would learn all the veterans’ little tricks – absurd things, some of them, but they could mean the difference between safety and pain, or between life and death.

  And all the while, as Fritz laboured in the gardens and Gustav hauled his wagon, the war went on in the world outside, the months dragged by, and all hope of release slowly waned. His mother’s application to have him released, which had sustained Fritz’s spirits for a while, began to fade into the realm of no-hope.

  6. A Favourable Decision

  בת

  Everything was changing for Edith and Richard. In this land of refuge, they now saw something emerging that they’d thought was left behind in Vienna.

  In June 1940, the quiet home front became a place of bombs and blood and death, the Bore War giving way to
the Battle of Britain. Every day, Luftwaffe bombers attacked airfields and factories, and every day the Spitfires and Hurricanes scrambled to oppose them. The RAF had become a coalition force, its British and Commonwealth pilots joined by exiles from Poland, France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia. Britain still liked to think of itself as a sole nation, but it was nothing of the sort.

  The press fixated on two things: the progress of the battle and growing fears about Britain being infiltrated by German spies and saboteurs paving the way for invasion. The rumours had begun in April. The press – with the Daily Mail at the forefront – had helped whip up paranoia about fifth columnists.1 Paranoia became hysteria, and hostile eyes were turned towards the 55,000 Austrian and German Jewish refugees; these men, women and children were hardly likely to be spying for Hitler, and had been spared internment,2 but with the country under threat of invasion, the Mail and some politicians were strident in their demands that the government intern all German nationals, regardless of status, for the sake of national security.

  When Churchill became prime minister in May, he extended the categories subject to internment to include members of the British Union of Fascists, the Communist Party, and Irish and Welsh nationalists. In June, he lost patience and issued the order: ‘Collar the lot!’3 To avoid putting too much pressure on infrastructure, arrests would proceed in stages. Stage one: Germans and Austrians – Jews, non-Jews and anti-Nazis alike – who did not have refugee status or who were unemployed. Stage two would sweep up all remaining Germans and Austrians living outside London, and the third stage would round up those in London.

  Churchill told parliament, ‘I know there are a great many people affected by the orders … who are the passionate enemies of Nazi Germany. I am very sorry for them, but we cannot … draw all the distinctions which we should like to do.’4 The first-stage arrests began on 24 June.5

  People were circulating the kind of anti-Semitic slurs which always arose in times of stress: Jews were black marketeers, evaded military service, enjoyed special privileges, had more money, better food, better clothes.6 Desperate to quell the growing anti-Semitism, the Anglo-Jewish community fell into line with the national mood. The Jewish Chronicle breathtakingly recommended taking ‘the most rigorous steps’ against refugees, including Jews, and supported the extension of internment; British synagogues stopped allowing sermons in German, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews began to restrict gatherings of German–Jewish refugees.7

  In Leeds, Edith’s fears had been growing for months. She and Richard had set up home in a flat in a rather run-down Victorian house close to the synagogue.8 Edith had left her live-in position with Mrs Brostoff and switched to a daily job as a cleaner for a woman who lived nearby. This was no light undertaking, as changes of employment by refugees had to be registered and approved by the Home Office.9 Richard continued with his kosher biscuit-baking. With a baby on the way, they should have been happy, but Edith was deeply unsettled. Life was now uncomfortable for anyone with a German accent in Britain. And with a German invasion looking certain, they were consumed by fear. They had seen how quickly Austria had fallen to the Nazis, and it was only too easy to imagine stormtroopers in Chapeltown Road, and Eichmann or some other SS ghoul issuing orders from Leeds Town Hall.

  Feeling that the time had come to try to get out of Europe altogether, Edith dug out the affidavits from her relatives in America. She enquired of the Refugees Committee whether they were still valid now that she was married. It took nearly two weeks for the reply to find its way back from London: no, they were not. Edith would need to write to her sponsors and ask them for new affidavits. The sponsors would also need to extend them to include her husband.10 And of course they would need to apply for an immigration visa at the US Embassy in London. With the war escalating in the skies over their heads and the threat of internment growing, Edith and Richard were looking at an excruciatingly long process.

  They would never discover just how long it would take; at the beginning of July the second stage of the government programme came into force, and the Leeds police arrested Richard.

  It was only by luck that they didn’t take Edith too. Women with children were not exempt, but pregnant women were.11

  Richard was only twenty-one years old, with the scars of Dachau and Buchenwald on his body; he had fled to Britain seeking sanctuary. And now he had been torn from his wife and unborn child and imprisoned by the very people who should be shielding him from the Nazis.

  Edith immediately lodged an application for his release with the Home Office. It was no easy process, as internees had to prove that they were no threat to security and that they could make a positive contribution to the war effort.12 Both the Leeds and London branches of the Jewish Refugees Committee lobbied the Home Office on behalf of the thousands now incarcerated. Many weren’t even in real camps with proper facilities – the numbers had been too great, and improvised centres had been set up in derelict cotton mills, disused factories, racecourses, and anywhere that could be found. Many went to the main internment centre on the Isle of Man.13 Some internees were old enough to remember that the Nazi concentration camps had begun precisely like this – Dachau had been founded in a derelict factory.

  The weeks of July and August went by, Edith’s pregnancy advanced, and no word came. She wrote to the JRC in late August, but they advised her against pressing the matter: ‘We … feel that you have done everything possible at the present time and think it would be most unwise for our Committee to intervene. We have been advised by the Home Office that additional appeals and letters of enquiry … can result in delaying any decision.’14

  A few days later, the decision was reached – Richard would remain in custody.

  For a concentration camp veteran, life in an internment camp was relatively mild. There was no forced labour, no real punishments, no sadistic guards. Internees played sports, set up newspapers, concerts and educational circles. But they were prisoners nonetheless. And although there were no SS guards, Jews often found themselves confined alongside unrepentant and vindictive Nazi sympathizers. Richard had the additional torment of knowing that Edith was having to cope with her pregnancy alone and without his wages.

  In early September, now in her ninth month, Edith submitted a second application for Richard’s release. The JRC assured her, ‘We sincerely trust that the application will receive a favourable decision.’15 The waiting began again. After two weeks, a brief note came from the Aliens Department of the Home Office, telling her that Richard’s case would come before the committee ‘as soon as possible’.16

  Two days later Edith’s contractions started. She was taken to the maternity hospital in Hyde Terrace in the centre of Leeds, where on Wednesday 18 September she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. She named him Peter John. An English name for a Yorkshire-born English baby son.

  As that fraught summer drew to a close and the public spirit grew phlegmatic, the mood turned against interning harmless refugees. In July, a ship carrying several thousand internees to Canada – including some Jews – had been sunk by a U-boat. The loss of life had made Britain look at itself and take stock of how it was treating innocent people just because they were foreign. The policy was gradually reversed. In parliament, politicians expressed regret for what they had done in a fit of panic; one Conservative member said, ‘We have, unwittingly I know, added to the sum total of misery caused by this war, and by doing so we have not in any way added to the efficiency of our war effort.’17 A Labour member added: ‘We remember the horror that sprang up in this country when Hitler put Jews, Socialists and Communists into concentration camps. We were horrified at that, but somehow or other we almost took it for granted when we did the same thing to the same people.’18

  Peter was five days old when the news came through to Edith – Richard had been released.19

  אבא

  Gustav opened his notebook and leafed through the pages. So few of them – the whole of 1940 summed up in just three pages crammed with h
is strong script. ‘Thus the time passes,’ he wrote, ‘up early in the morning, home late in the evening, eating, and then straight to sleep. So a year goes by, with work and punishment.’

  It wasn’t always straight to sleep. A new torment had been devised for the Jews by the deputy commandant in charge of the main camp, SS-Major Arthur Rödl. Each evening, when they returned from the quarry, the gardens and the building sites, exhausted and hungry, while all the other prisoners went to their barracks, the Jews were made to stand on the roll-call square under the glare of the floodlights and sing.

  Rödl, a bumptious crook whose low intelligence had not hindered his rise to senior rank, loved to hear his Jewish ‘choir’ perform. The camp orchestra sat to one side playing, and the ‘choirmaster’ stood on top of a gravel heap at the edge of the square and conducted.

  ‘Another number!’ Rödl would call out over the tannoy, and the weary prisoners would draw breath and struggle through another song. If the singing wasn’t good enough, the tannoy would bark out: ‘Open your mouths! Don’t you pigs want to sing? Lie down, the whole rabble, and give us a song!’ And down they had to lie, whatever the weather, in the dust, the dirt, muddy puddles or snow, and sing. Blockführers would walk between the rows, kicking any man who didn’t give voice loudly enough.

  The ordeal often went on for hours. Sometimes Rödl would grow bored and announce that he was going for dinner, but the prisoners would have to stay and practise: ‘If you can’t get it right,’ he told them, ‘you can stay and sing all night.’ The SS guards, who resented having to stand by and supervise, would take out their wrath on the prisoners, administering kickings and beatings.