They sang the ‘Buchenwald Song’ more often than anything else. Composed by the Viennese songwriter Hermann Leopoldi with words by celebrated lyricist Fritz Löhner-Beda, both of whom were prisoners, it was a stirring march tune, with words extolling courage in the midst of wretchedness. It had been specially commissioned by Rödl: ‘All other camps have a song. We must get a Buchenwald song.’20 He’d offered a prize of ten marks to the successful composer (which was never paid) and was delighted by the result. The prisoners sang it when they marched out to work in the mornings:
O Buchenwald, I cannot forget you,
For you are my fate.
He who has left you, he alone can measure
How wonderful freedom is!
O Buchenwald, we do not whine and moan,
And whatever our fate may be,
We will say yes to life,
For the day will come when we are free!
Rödl abjectly failed to recognize the spirit of defiance. ‘In his weakness of intellect,’ recalled Leopoldi, ‘he absolutely did not see how revolutionary the song actually was.’21 Rödl also commissioned a ‘Jewish Song’ with defamatory lyrics about the crimes and pestilence of the Jews, but it had been ‘too stupid’ even for him, and he banned it. Some other officers later resurrected it and forced the prisoners to sing it late into the night.22
But still it was the Buchenwald Song more often than not. The Jews sang it times without count on the roll-call square under the lights; ‘Rödl enjoyed dancing to the melody,’ said Leopoldi, ‘as on one side the camp orchestra played, and on the other side the people were whipped.’23 Singing it on the march to work in the red dawn, they invested it with all their loathing and hatred of the SS. Many died singing it.
‘They cannot grind us down like this,’ Gustav wrote in his diary. ‘The war goes on.’
בן
Buchenwald expanded month by month. The forest was eaten away and logged, and amidst the waste the buildings rose like pale fungus on the blighted back of the Ettersberg.
The SS barracks gradually formed a semicircle of two-storey blocks, with an officers’ casino in the centre. There were handsomely designed villas with gardens for the officers, a small zoo, riding and stable facilities, garage complexes and a petrol station for SS vehicles. There was even a falconry establishment. Standing among the trees on the slope near the quarry, it comprised an aviary, a gazebo and a Teutonic hunting hall of carved oak timbers and great fireplaces, stuffed with trophies and heavy furniture. It was intended for the personal use of Hermann Goering, but he never even visited the place. The SS was so proud of it that for a fee of one mark local Germans could come in and look around.24
All of this construction was wrought from the rock and trees of the hill on which it stood, and mixed with the blood of the prisoners whose hands transported and laid the stones and bricks and timbers.
Along the roads between the construction sites, Gustav Kleinmann and his fellow slaves hauled their wagons of materials, and his son was now one of those whose hands put up the buildings. Fritz’s tireless benefactor, Leo Moses, had again used his influence to have Fritz transferred to the detail responsible for building the SS garages.25
The kapo of Construction Detachment I, which was undertaking the project, was Robert Siewert, a friend of Leo Moses. A German of Polish extraction, Siewert wore the red triangle of a political prisoner. He’d been a bricklayer in his youth, and served in the German army in the last war. A dedicated communist, he’d been a member of Saxony’s parliament in the 1920s. In his fifties, he had an air of resilient strength and energy: thickset, with a broad face and narrow eyes under dark, heavy brows.
At first the labour was all about carrying – bring this here, bear this burden, and run! A fifty-kilo sack of cement weighed more than Fritz himself. Labourers in the yard would lift it on to his shoulders, and he would carry it, staggering, trying to run, to wherever it was needed. But there was no abuse, no beatings. The SS valued the construction detachment highly, and Siewert was able to protect his workers.
For all his stern appearance, Robert Siewert had a kind heart. He reassigned Fritz to the lighter task of mixing mortar, and taught him how to gain favour with the SS. ‘You have to work with your eyes,’ he told him. ‘If you see an SS man coming, work fast. But if no SS are about, then you take your time, you spare yourself.’ Fritz became so adept at watching for the guards and making a show of intense productive labour that he acquired a reputation for industriousness. Siewert would point him out to the construction leader, SS-Sergeant Becker, and say, ‘Look how diligently this Jewish lad works.’
One day Becker arrived at the building site with his superior, SS-Lieutenant Max Schobert, deputy commandant in charge of protective custody prisoners. Siewert called Fritz away from his work and presented him to the officer, extolling his performance. ‘We could train Jewish prisoners as bricklayers,’ he suggested. Schobert, a brutal-faced individual with a perpetual sneer, looked down his large nose at Fritz. He didn’t like this suggestion at all; all that expense to train Jews! Oh no, he wouldn’t permit that. Nonetheless, a seed had been planted.
When new SS troops arrived at Buchenwald to bring the garrison up to full strength, the seed began to germinate. Work had to be accelerated to complete the SS barracks – a task well beyond the capacity of the existing workforce. Siewert pressed his case again, this time taking it all the way to Commandant Koch. He complained that he didn’t have enough bricklayers. The only solution would be to train young Jews for the job. Koch’s reaction was the same as Schobert’s. Siewert insisted that he simply couldn’t provide the labour in any other way, but the answer remained no Jews.
Siewert decided there was nothing for it but to prove his case. Fritz became his apprentice. Siewert began by having him taught to lay bricks to build a simple wall under the supervision of Aryan workmen. With a string laid out as a guide, he pasted on the mortar and laid down brick after brick, neatly and correctly. Fritz had inherited his father’s aptitude for manual craft, and he learned quickly. Having mastered the basics, he was taught how to do corners, pillars and buttresses, then lintels, fireplaces and chimneys. In wet weather he learned plastering. Every day Siewert would come and talk to him and check on his progress. In double-quick time Fritz became a quite passable mason and builder – the first Jew in Buchenwald to do so.
His progress was so impressive, and the need so urgent, that Commandant Koch relented, allowing Siewert to start up a training programme for Jewish, Polish and Roma boys. They spent half of each day working on-site, and half in their block in the camp being taught construction theory and science. They wore green bands on their sleeves with the inscription ‘Bricklayers’ School’ and enjoyed certain privileges. A particular delight was the heavy labourers’ special food allowance: twice a week, they received an extra ration of bread and half a kilo of blood pudding or meat pâté, which was brought to the construction site for them. This was on top of their standard daily ration of bread, margarine, a spoonful of curd or beet jam, acorn coffee and cabbage or turnip soup.
To Fritz, Robert Siewert was a hero, representing the spirit of resistance and the essence of human kindness. The young were his greatest concern, and he did all he could to equip them with skills and knowledge which could save their lives. ‘He spoke to us like a father,’ Fritz would recall, ‘with patience and kindness.’26 Fritz wondered where he got the strength, at his age and after so many years of imprisonment.
When winter began to set in, Siewert got permission to set up oil drums as braziers on the building site, on the pretext that the plaster and mortar were liable to crack in freezing conditions. His real purpose was the welfare of his workers, who had only their thin prison uniforms to protect them. A humane and courageous man from heart to backbone, Robert Siewert never failed in his duty, knowingly putting himself at risk by interceding with the SS on behalf of Jews, Roma and Poles.
But Siewert’s influence did not extend far beyond the limits of th
e construction site and the bricklaying school. As soon as the day’s work ended and the prisoners returned to the main camp, it was back to the regime of singing parades, random beatings, food deprivation and capricious murders. Fritz would look at his fellow prisoners and silently give thanks that at least he ate better than they did and was not at risk of being driven over the sentry line or kicked to death. He ached for his papa, who slaved each day on the haulage column. Fritz saved what he could from his additional rations to give to him when they met in the evenings.
Gustav’s mind was eased by his son’s new status and the safety it brought. ‘The boy is popular with all the foremen and kapo Robert Siewert,’ he wrote. ‘From Leo Moses we get our greatest support, which gives us further confidence.’ To Gustav’s indomitably optimistic mind, it was beginning to seem that they might survive this ordeal.
Fritz had been moved out of the Youth Block earlier in the year and transferred to block 17, close to his father’s block. It had been painful to part from his friends, but the move proved formative, another important stage in his growth to manhood. Block 17 was where the Austrian VIP and celebrity prisoners – the Prominenten – were housed.
Most were politicals, but of a higher status than most of the red-triangle men in the camp.27 Some of their names were familiar to Fritz, his father having known of them in his time as an activist in the Social Democratic Party. The inmates included Robert Danneberg, a Jewish socialist who had been president of the Vienna provincial council and one of the leading figures in ‘Red Vienna’ – the socialist heyday which had lasted from the end of the First World War until the right-wing takeover in 1934. Contrasting with Danneberg’s sober presence was the droll, round-faced Fritz Grünbaum, star of the Berlin and Vienna cabaret scenes, conférencier,fn1 scriptwriter, movie actor and librettist for Franz Léhar (one of Hitler’s favourite composers). As a prominent Jew and a political satirist, Grünbaum had been taken by the Nazis soon after the Anschluss. Ageing and slightly built, with his bald, shaved pate and bottle-bottom spectacles, he resembled Mahatma Gandhi. Having endured both the quarry and latrine details, his health and spirit had been broken, and he had attempted suicide. Even so, he managed to keep up a semblance of his old persona, and would on occasion perform cabaret for the other prisoners. His comment on his plight as a Jew was simple and to the point: ‘What does my intellect benefit me when my name damages me? A poet called Grünbaum is done for.’ He was right; he would be dead within months.28
Fritz also got to know the bespectacled, sombre-looking Fritz Löhner-Beda, author of the poignant, defiant lyrics of the Buchenwald Song. Like Grünbaum he had written librettos for Léhar’s operas. He always hoped that Léhar, who had influence with both Hitler and Goebbels, would be able to have him freed, but he hoped in vain. To add to his torment, songs from Léhar’s operettas Giuditta and The Land of Smiles were often played over the camp’s tannoy, the SS apparently unaware of his involvement in them. Even more hurtfully they played the popular song ‘I Lost My Heart in Heidelberg’, for which he had written the lyrics.
One of the brightest of the block 17 Prominenten was Ernst Federn, a young Viennese psychoanalyst and Trotskyist who wore the red-on-yellow star of a Jewish political prisoner. Forbidding to look at, with heavy features that made him look almost thuggish beneath his cropped scalp, Ernst was the kindest of souls. Anyone could come to him to talk about their problems. His irrepressible optimism earned him a reputation for being a little crazy, but gave marvellous encouragement to the other prisoners.29
There were many social democrats, Christian socialists, Trotskyists and communists in block 17. In the free time in the evenings, young Fritz would sit and listen to their conversations about politics, philosophy, the war … Their talk was intellectual, sophisticated, and Fritz strained to comprehend what they said. One thing that came through clearly was the strength of their belief in the idea of Austria. Despite their own hopeless situation and their country’s obliteration as an independent state, they shared a vision of a future Austria, free from Nazi rule, renewed and beautiful. The men of block 17 were convinced that Germany would lose the war in the end, even though the trickles of news reaching the camp indicated that they were currently winning on all fronts.
Fritz’s faith and courage grew in the light of these men’s vision of a better future, even while guessing that few of them would live to see it. ‘The camaraderie I learned in block 17 changed my life fundamentally,’ he would recall. ‘I became acquainted with a form of solidarity unimaginable in life outside the concentration camps.’30
A highlight of Fritz’s time in the block was Fritz Grünbaum’s birthday celebration, it being the same day as his sister Herta’s (she would be turning eighteen that day). The block 17 men saved portions of their rations to give the old fellow a decent dinner, and a little extra was stolen from the kitchens. After their meal, Löhner-Beda gave a speech and Grünbaum himself sang a few verses. As the youngest inmate present, Fritz was permitted to congratulate the humbled star.
With these politicians, intellectuals and entertainers, what could one young apprentice upholsterer-turned-bricklayer from Leopoldstadt, a playmate of the Karmelitermarkt, possibly have in common? That they were all Austrians either by birth or by choice, and that they were Jews. It was enough. In Buchenwald they were a tiny nation of survivors surrounded by a poison sea.
And the deaths went on.
The killings in the quarry were growing more frequent. Many of the dead were friends of Fritz or his papa, some from the old days in Vienna. That year, across all the concentration camps, prisoner deaths spiralled from around 1,300 to 14,000.31 The atmosphere of war was the cause of it; while the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht fought and conquered Germany’s enemies from Poland to the English Channel, the Totenkopf SS in the camps felt their blood stirring and their tempers flaring, and they ramped up their war against the enemy within. News of military victories triggered spurts of triumphal aggression, and setbacks – such as the failure to subdue Britain, the only enemy still fighting – inspired retribution.
Disposal of the rising numbers of corpses became a problem, and in 1940 the SS began to equip its camps with crematoria.32 Buchenwald’s was a small, square building with a yard surrounded by a high wall. From the roll-call square the spike of its chimney could be seen under construction, brick upon brick; when it was complete, it began pouring out its first acrid smoke. From that day on, the smoke would scarcely stop. Sometimes it blew away across the treetops; often it drifted over the camp. But always there was the smell of it: the bitter odour of death.
אמא
In the new year, after months of frustration, Tini received a result at last from the United States consulate in Vienna.
Since March 1940 there had been a standing summons for an interview for emigration, but Tini had been advised that she needed to wait until Gustav and Fritz had been freed if she wanted the family to go together.33 But since the SS would not release prisoners until they had all the necessary papers to emigrate, this was a hopeless dead end.
All the affidavits were in place. The problem was getting American visas and valid tickets for travel (which had to be paid for) and having everything coordinated. While France remained free it had provided a route out of Europe to America, but the German invasion had closed the French ports. In the autumn, Lisbon had become available to emigrants, but the US consulate in Vienna simultaneously put a freeze on issuing visas. Roosevelt’s stance on giving a haven to refugees had withered in the face of America’s growing anti-Semitism. Capitulating to public opinion, the President had instructed the State Department to reduce the number of visas to near zero: ‘No more aliens.’ The consulate still called applicants for interview, which was tortuous in itself, requiring expenditure on notarized documents, police certificates, steamship tickets, local anti-Jewish taxes. At the final interview, when the anxious applicant had miraculously got every document in order, they were told that they had failed to show they could make a c
ontribution to the United States, and that they were therefore likely to ‘become a public charge’.34 Visa refused.
As of October 1940, virtually all applicants – people who were living in constant terror and had beggared themselves satisfying the bureaucratic requirements – went away heartbroken.35 Tini was close to despair. ‘We have everything,’ she wrote to the German Jewish Aid Committee in New York, ‘but none of us has emigrated … Our local consulate is not giving us adequate answers.’36 She couldn’t understand the endless frustration; her husband was a hard worker with good skills and they had affidavits in plenty.
Her only hope was for the children. At the beginning of 1941, Tini made her breakthrough. Her old friend Alma Maurer, who had been at her wedding and now lived in Massachusetts, had obtained an affidavit for Kurt from a prominent Jewish gentleman in the town where she lived – a judge no less. And then a miracle – the United States was willing to make an allowance for a small number of Jewish children. In conjunction with the German Jewish Children’s Aid organization, a limited number of unaccompanied minors would be received and placed with appropriate Jewish families in the United States. Kurt had been accepted.
It would hurt both Tini and Herta to let him go, but it was the only way to get him to safety. And there was more good news – although Herta wasn’t eligible for the children’s scheme, the kind gentleman in Massachusetts would be willing to sponsor her if she could obtain the necessary visa.
7. The New World
אבא
Beneath a cloud-packed grey sky the Ettersberg lay under thick snow which softened but did not hide the outlines of the barrack blocks and the tower-spiked fences.
Gustav leaned on his shovel. The kapo’s back was turned, and Gustav snatched the moment to catch his breath. His bare hands were purple and when he breathed on them there was no feeling of warmth – no sensation at all. He knew that when he returned to the barrack in the evening and the bone-cold numbness leached out of him, they would gripe and ache abominably.
The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz Page 10
