The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

by Jeremy Dronfield

  After the blazing summer, a terrible autumn and a wretched winter had followed. Despite driving the Russian army back in disarray, the Austrian troops had been let down by poor leadership, and the Germans had failed to support them properly. The Russians had soon rallied and begun recapturing ground.6 It had turned into a rout, with Austrian regiments breaking and falling back all along the line.

  The civilian population panicked, and the railway stations and roads had become choked with refugees. Jews were especially terrified; Tsarist Russia’s anti-Semitic laws were notorious. Indeed, many Galician Jews were descendants of those who had fled Russian pogroms. The advancing Russians expropriated Jewish property and extorted money from them with threats of violence, Jews were dismissed from public offices, and some were seized as hostages and taken away to Russia.7 Refugees flooded west and south towards the heartlands of Austria–Hungary. At first they sought sanctuary in Cracow, but by the autumn even that city was under threat, so the refugees began heading for Vienna. The authorities set up embarkation stations for them at Wadowitzfn2 and Oświęcim.8

  Eventually Austria’s forces – with Gustav and the 56th to the fore – had fought the Russians to a standstill, and the front line settled just short of Cracow. The armies dug trenches and began the dreadful attrition of bombardment, raids and hopeless attacks. By the new year, Gustav and his comrades – what remained of them – were in the front line outside Gorlice, a town about a hundred kilometres southeast of Cracow. The trench line was little more than a series of shallow ditches protected by a single strand of barbed wire, hemmed in by open ground which was pounded by Russian artillery.9 The enemy held the town and dominated the ground in front of it from a stronghold in a large hilltop cemetery on the western outskirts.

  And there they had sat through the biting winter. For Gustav, it had been a kind of reprieve when he was wounded – a bullet through the left forearm and calf.10 He’d stayed briefly in the auxiliary hospital at Bielitz-Biala,fn3 a large town close by Zablocie (he knew the place well, having worked there as a baker’s boy in his early teens), and in mid-January he’d been moved here, to the reserve hospital in the next town – the transport hub and army base of Oświęcim, or, as it was called in German: Auschwitz.

  Gustav had known the place in childhood. The town itself had been pleasant in peacetime, with fine civic buildings and an ancient, picturesque Jewish quarter which attracted tourists.11 It stood at the confluence of the Vistula and the Sola, the river that meandered down from the lake by the village where Gustav had been born. The military hospital at Oświęcim was a little way from the town, across the Sola in the outlying hamlet of Zasole – a group of modern barracks standing in neat rows near the riverbank (not an ideal spot: the ground was marshy and in summer plagued with insects). Originally the barracks had been attached to a transit camp for seasonal migrant workers flowing from Galicia into Prussia, but since the outbreak of war the lines of workers’ barracks had stood empty.12

  For Gustav, worse than the ache of the wounds – which were almost healed now – was the wrench of being away from his comrades while they were still in the line. He was determined not to malinger; his wounds weren’t debilitating, and despite his slight, even delicate appearance, with his soft eyes and large ears, he had proven a tough young man, with a surprising capacity for taking hardship and injury.

  But for now he was at peace here, the only sounds the brisk footsteps of nurses and the low murmur of voices.

  אחים

  Bullets smacked into sides of the tombs, flinging stone splinters in Gustav’s face. He and his men held on and returned fire, pressing ahead, metre by metre, into the cemetery.

  Gustav was only a month out of hospital and already back in the thick of it – back to Gorlice, back to the frozen trenches at the foot of the slope below the town, back to the sporadic fall of shells and the steady attrition. Then came this day – 24 February 1915 – when the division launched an assault on the heavily defended Russian positions.

  To Corporal Gustav Kleinmann’s eye it looked like a suicide mission: an uphill frontal attack against a large force in a secure, easily defended position. The cemetery on his company’s front was a traditional Catholic one – a city of little tombs of limestone and marble, packed close together. It was a veritable fortress, and Gustav’s company had been cut to pieces in the first approach. With their sergeant and platoon officer killed, Gustav and his right-hand man, Lance Corporal Johann Aleksiak, had improvised a plan of their own to avoid wasting any more lives.13 Leading the remnants of the platoon – now consisting of just themselves, two lance corporals and ten privates – they had skirted to the left flank of the enemy position, where they were sheltered from the Russian fire, and advanced from there. Infiltrating the fringes of the cemetery, they were among the tombs before the Russians were aware of them. Immediately, withering gunfire lashed at them. They returned fire as best they could and pressed on. The Russians began lobbing hand grenades, but still Gustav and his squad pushed forward, driving the enemy back.

  They had advanced fifteen metres inside the enemy perimeter when the alleys between the tombs became too narrow for effective firing. Gustav stopped his men and ordered them to fix bayonets. With their blood hot and furious, they launched their final, savage assault.

  It worked; the Russians were prised out of their positions on the points of the Austrian bayonets. Gustav’s flank attack had drawn the main force of the Russian defence, allowing the rest of 3 Company to advance into the cemetery. Between them they took two hundred Russian prisoners that day, part of a total haul of 1,240 captured by the regiment.

  In the face of the setbacks the Austrian army had suffered since the start of the war, the capture of Gorlice cemetery was a significant enough achievement to earn a deluge of medals and even a passing mention in a report by Field Marshal von Höfer.14 Not for the first time, or the last, a knife-edge battle had turned on the initiative of a lowly non-commissioned officer.

  בן

  Rabbi Frankfurter chanted the last blessings of the Sheva Brachot, the seven blessings of marriage, his voice echoing hauntingly through the synagogue-chapel of Vienna’s Rossauer barracks. Beneath the wedding canopy held up by his comrades, Gustav stood in his best dress uniform, the Silver Medal for Bravery 1st Class gleaming on his breast. Beside him was his bride, Tini Rottenstein, radiant, her white lace collar and silk flowers bright against the dark fabric of her coat and broad-brimmed hat.

  Two years had passed since that day in Gorlice cemetery. Gustav and Johann Aleksiak had both received the Silver Medal, one of Austria’s highest awards. Their commanding officer had described their actions as a ‘clever, unprecedentedly courageous approach’ in which the two corporals had ‘excellently distinguished themselves’.15 It had been a fierce battle, and over a hundred men of the 56th Infantry Regiment received decorations.16 Since that day, despite setbacks, the Austrians had driven the Tsar’s army across the Vistula and out of Galicia, capturing Lemberg,fn4 Warsaw and Lublin. In August that year Gustav had been wounded again, this time a much more serious injury to the lung.17 He had recovered eventually and returned again to action.

  ‘May the barren one rejoice and be happy at the gathering in of her children in joy.’ Rabbi Frankfurter’s chanting filled the room. ‘Blessed are You, Lord, who created joy and happiness, groom and bride, gladness, jubilation, cheer and delight, love, friendship, harmony and fellowship … who gladdens the groom with the bride.’ Then he placed the traditional glass on the floor by Gustav, who brought his boot heel down and shattered it. ‘Mazel tov!’fn5 yelled the congregation.

  The rabbi spoke, reminding Tini of the solemnity of wedding a soldier, and touched on the goodness of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to its Jewish people; he likened the new Emperor Karl to the sun shining on the Jews; his forebears had brought down the walls of the old ghettos and ‘installed Israel’ in their realm.18 Austria had always had its share of anti-Semitism, it was true, but since the emancipation o
f the Jews under the Habsburg emperors, they had lived well and achieved much. With this foundation, they could make their way with their own hands and hearts.

  Gustav and Tini walked out of the synagogue that day into a new era. Gustav wasn’t done with fighting; he would see more action on the Italian front and earn more decorations, helping Austria and Germany fight their slow, inevitable, bloody defeat. But he survived in the end and came home to Vienna. In the summer of the first year of peace, Edith was born, the first child of many. The old empire had been broken up by the victorious Allies; Galicia had been ceded to Poland, Hungary was independent, and Austria was reduced to a rump. But Vienna was still Vienna, the civilized heart of Europe, and Gustav had more than earned his family’s place in it.

  Many didn’t see it that way. People in Austria and Germany began telling themselves stories to relieve the shame of losing the war. It was the fault of the Jews, many said; they had thrived in the wartime black market; fingers were pointed at the floods of Jewish refugees fleeing the front, and how they had worsened the food crisis in the cities; tales were told about how Jews had shirked their duty and avoided military service; their pernicious influence in government and commerce had been a knife in Germany’s and Austria’s back. In the Vienna parliament there was anti-Jewish agitation from German nationalists and the conservative Christian Social Party, and newspapers began to print dire threats of pogroms.19

  Yet the promise lived on. The outburst of anti-Semitism settled down to a murmur, and the Jews of Vienna continued to thrive. Gustav sometimes struggled to make a living, but he never despaired, throwing himself into socialist politics in a bid to ensure a brighter future for all working people, and to win prosperity for his children’s future.

  אבא

  Another train, another time, another world … and yet the same.

  Gustav sat in darkness, rocked by the motion of the train. Around him the air was thick with the familiar stench of unwashed bodies, stale uniforms and the latrine pail, and alive with the dull murmur of voices. Dozens of men in a space so small that they could scarcely move; getting to the piss bucket in the corner was an ordeal.

  Two days had passed since boarding the train at Weimar. Gustav’s eyes had adapted to the slivers of light leaking through cracks around the door and gratings, just enough to write a few brief lines in his diary. It must be around noon now; the light was at its brightest, and the faces of his comrades were discernible: Gustl Herzog was there, and the long, earnest features of Stefan Heymann, as well as Gustav’s friend Felix ‘Jupp’ Rausch, and Fritz sitting close to some of his young friends, including Paul Grünberg, a Viennese who was the same age as him and had been one of Siewert’s apprentices but hadn’t completed his training.20 Without water or blankets they were thirsty and cold, and the mood was profoundly depressed.

  He could neither see it nor smell it, but Gustav knew the landscape through which he guessed they were passing now: the fields, the green distant hills and mountains, the quaint little villages. He had grown up here, bled for his country here, and now the rail tracks were bringing him back one last time, to die here.

  Behind him, the family he had begun with such hope lay broken and scattered. The promise of 1915, when they pinned the medal to his chest, and of 1917, when he’d ground the glass beneath his heel and joined with Tini in marriage, and the promise of 1919, when he’d held baby Edith for the first time, the promise that Israel had been built in Austria: that promise had been crushed under the wheels of this vast, insane, malfunctioning machine in its unstoppable, senseless drive to jolt life into an Aryan German greatness which had never existed, and never could exist, because its blinkered puritanism was the very antithesis of all that makes a society great. Nazism could no more be great than a strutting actor in a gilt cardboard crown could be a king.

  The train, huffing its way past fields of harvest stubble and woods turning golden, began to lose speed. Slowing to a crawl, it turned south and heaved into the station in the small town of Oświęcim.21

  Shedding billows of steam, the locomotive dragged its cattle wagons up to the loading ramp. And there it stayed. Inside, the men of Buchenwald wondered if they had reached their destination yet. The hours ticked by but nothing happened. The cracks of light faded, leaving them in total darkness.

  Gustav was thankful for the consolation of having Fritz by his side through these hours. How he would have coped if the boy hadn’t come of his own free will did not bear thinking about. The spirit of that crushed promise of long ago lived on in Fritz, in the bond which held father and son together and had kept them alive so far. If they were indeed going to die here, at least it would not be alone.

  Eventually they heard movement outside: wagon doors crashing open and barked orders; their door squealed aside and a blaze of torches and electric lanterns dazzled their eyes. ‘Everyone out!’

  They disembarked, stiff and in pain, into a ring of light and growling guard dogs. ‘Form ranks! Front rank here. Quickly!’ Well trained by years of roll calls, the Buchenwalders rapidly formed up in the spaces between the tracks. Expecting the usual abuse and beatings, they were surprised – and a little unsettled – to receive neither. The armed guards called out an order from time to time, but otherwise were eerily silent, walking up and down the rows, observing the new prisoners closely. Time passed, and the men grew more and more nervous. Whenever no guards were nearby, Gustav reached out and hugged Fritz to him.

  The last time Gustav had set foot in this station had been in 1915, when he was discharged from the hospital and sent back to the front line. Nothing about it seemed familiar.

  It was a little after 10.00 p.m. when the tramp of boots marching along the loading ramp heralded the arrival of an SS squad from the camp. They were led by a hard-faced officer, middle-aged, with a grim slant to his mouth and steel-rimmed spectacles. This was SS-Lieutenant Heinrich Josten of the Auschwitz detention department.22 He meticulously checked off the names and numbers of the new arrivals on a list, then raised his voice: ‘Does any man have any watches or other valuables? Gold, for example? If so, you are to give them up. You will not need them now.’ Nobody responded. Josten gave the nod to his men, and they began marching the prisoners in orderly fashion along the ramp.

  From the freight yard, they marched down a long, straight street between what looked like light industrial buildings and rows of dilapidated wooden barracks. Now, this did look vaguely familiar to Gustav.

  Turning left, they went along a short road leading to a gateway flooded with arc lights; the gates swung wide, the barrier lifted and the Buchenwalders marched in under the wrought-iron arch with its slogan:

  ARBEIT MACHT FREI

  Work brings freedom. The barrier descended and the gates clanged shut behind them.23

  They were now inside Auschwitz concentration camp. They passed along a wide street flanked by trim grass verges and large, well-built two-storey barrack blocks; they were similar to the SS barracks at Buchenwald, but to Gustav’s eye there was a different kind of familiarity, more distant. He had been here before.

  Arriving at a building in the far corner of the camp, the Buchenwalders were ordered inside. They found themselves in a bath block. Their names were checked off against the transport list again, and they went through into a changing room staffed by prisoners. Here they were ordered to strip naked for a medical inspection; following that they would be showered and their uniforms deloused before going to their accommodation.24

  Fritz and his father glanced at each other; the nervousness that had been growing among the Buchenwalders increased. They had heard the rumours of gassings at Auschwitz, and that the gas chamber was disguised as a shower room.25 The men stripped off their old, soiled uniforms and underwear, then filed through yet another room, where they were scrutinized by a doctor, and another where their heads were freshly shaved – right down to the scalp, without leaving the furze of stubble they normally wore. Their bodies were also shaved, including their pubic hair. There f
ollowed a louse inspection. Fritz noticed a sign painted in sinister Teutonic letters on the white wall: ‘One louse is your death.’26

  Next came the showers. Fritz, Gustav and the others watched anxiously as the first batch were herded through the door.

  Minutes passed; a restlessness began to spread among the prisoners. Fritz could feel the tension mounting, marked by a low murmuring. When their turn came, would they obey and walk meekly into the lethal chamber?

  Suddenly, a man’s face appeared in the doorway, gleaming wet, with water dripping from his chin, grinning. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It really is a shower!’

  The next batches went through in much better spirits. Finally, they were issued with their deloused and disinfected uniforms and fresh underwear.27 To Gustav’s relief, his diary, with its pages of priceless testimony, was still secreted inside his clothes.

  When they were dressed, they were inspected by SS-Captain Hans Aumeier, deputy commandant and head of Department III – the ‘protective custody’ section, which covered most Jews. Drunk and in a foul temper, he slapped the block senior – a German wearing a green triangle – who’d turned up late to collect the new arrivals. Aumeier was everything that caused the SS to be feared: a glowering martinet with a tight little slit for a mouth and a reputation for torture and mass shootings. Once he was satisfied with the new prisoners, he ordered the block senior to take them to their accommodation.

  They were placed in block 16A, in the middle of the camp. As soon as they were inside, the block senior demanded that they all hand over any contraband articles, and told his room orderlies – all young Polish prisoners – to search them. The belongings taken ranged from paper and pencils to cigarette holders and pocket knives, as well as money and sweaters – all precious items. Some of the bolder spirits – including Gustl Herzog – argued with the Poles, refusing to hand over their possessions, and were beaten with rubber hoses. Any man who spoke up got a beating. Many lost objects they had treasured – keepsakes which had kept their spirits alive, or in the case of warm clothing, had kept body and soul together through the previous winter.