The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

by Jeremy Dronfield

When Christmas came and Wocher set off to Vienna again for the holiday season, Fritz provided him with some more addresses of some non-Jewish friends of his papa’s from the neighbourhood around the Karmelitermarkt. He also gave him the address of the old apartment in Im Werd, and a letter for his mother.8 Despite everything, Fritz couldn’t give up hope completely. He needed to believe that she and Herta were alive and well. Somebody must know.

  חברים

  Leopoldstadt had lost its heart. Formerly Jewish shops were still untenanted, businesses boarded up, homes empty. When Alfred Wocher ascended the stairs of the apartment building at Im Werd 11, half of the apartments were unoccupied.9 So much for the Nazi claim that Jews were taking up scarce living space that was needed for true Germans.

  There was no answer when he knocked at flat number 16. The door had probably never been opened since Tini Kleinmann turned the key in the lock in June 1942. Enquiring at some of the other apartments, Wocher eventually came across a man named Karl Novacek, who had been a friend of Gustav’s. Karl, who worked as a cinema projectionist, was one of the handful of non-Jewish friends who had remained loyal to the Kleinmanns throughout the Nazi persecutions.10 He was overjoyed to learn that Gustav and Fritz were still alive.

  He wasn’t the only one. There were other true friends in the same street – Olga Steyskal, a shopkeeper who had an apartment in the building next door, and Franz Kral, a locksmith. Their reaction was the same as Karl’s. As soon as they heard the news, the three friends hurried across the street to the market and returned with baskets of food for Wocher to take back to Auschwitz. Word also reached Fritz’s cousin Karoline Semlak – Lintschi as she was better known – who lived a few streets away. Lintschi had become a Christian Aryan by marriage, but unlike poor Aunt Helene in Döbling she had no qualms about exposing her Jewish connections. She put together a package of food and wrote a letter, enclosing photographs of her children. Olga – or Olly as her friends called her – also wrote Gustav a letter; she’d always been deeply fond of him, as he was of her; there might have been sparks between them if he hadn’t already been married.

  It was an incongruous, improbable occasion: a group of Aryan friends and a converted Jew packing off a Bavarian soldier in Wehrmacht uniform with armfuls of loving gifts for two Jews in Auschwitz. It was strangely beautiful, but it left Wocher with a problem: the food parcels filled two suitcases. Conveying it all safely to Fritz was going to be quite a challenge.

  Back at Auschwitz, he smuggled the gifts into the factory in stages and passed them over. The food was very welcome, but even more precious to Fritz was the news of Lintschi and their friends. He asked eagerly after his mother and sister, but Wocher shook his head. Everyone he’d spoken to had said the same – Tini Kleinmann and her daughter had gone with the deportations to the Ostland and never been heard of since. Fritz’s disappointment was bitter. But he still clung to the faint possibility that they weren’t dead. His aunts, Jenni and Bertha, had been deported on one of the last transports to leave Vienna for Minsk the previous September. Jenni had no family of her own other than her talking cat, but Bertha had left behind her daughter, Hilda (who was married to a non-Jew), and grandson.11

  Sharing most of the food among his workmates, Fritz took the rest, along with the letters, back to his papa. Despite the crushing news about Tini and Herta, Gustav was heartened to hear from his dear friends. His nature rebelled against giving up hope, and it gave him joy to think that he would be able to write to people he loved.

  There was a much bleaker reaction from Gustl Herzog and Stefan Heymann when Fritz told them what he’d done; despite his own confidence in Alfred Wocher’s trustworthiness, Stefan in particular was deeply suspicious. He warned Fritz against any further involvement with the German.

  Fritz kept his own counsel. His respect for Stefan was great, but his longing for the old world and his family was greater.

  16. Far from Home

  אבא

  ‘Dearest Olly,’ Gustav wrote.

  Your kind letter to me is received with many thanks, and you must forgive me for leaving you for so long with no word from me and Fritzl, but I have to take great care not to cause any trouble for you. For your kind package I thank you many times over … It makes me so glad that I have such kind and good friends when I am so far from home.1

  It was the third day of the new year of 1944, and there was a faint whiff of hope in the air. Gustav’s pencil darted rapidly across the square-ruled sketch paper.

  Believe me, dear Olly, through all the years I have always recalled the beautiful hours that I spent with you and all your dear ones, and have never forgotten you. As for me and Fritzl, the years have been hard, but I owe it to my will power and energy that it was always my choice to keep going.

  If it should be granted to me to be in contact again with you and your dear ones, it will make up for what I have been missing – that for two and a half years I have had no news about my family … But I’m not letting my hair turn grey over it, because someday I will be reunited with them. As far as I am concerned, dear Olly, I am still the old Gustl, and intend to stay that way … Anyhow, be assured, my dear, that wherever I am I am always thinking of you and all my dear friends – now I close with the fondest wishes and kisses. Your Gustl and Fritz.

  Gustav folded the sheets and put them in an envelope. Fritz would smuggle it into the factory the next morning and pass it to this German friend of his. Once again his boy had surpassed himself for courage and initiative. There was no restraining him; all Gustav could do was hope he didn’t bring trouble on himself again.

  As the weeks went by, Fritz took letters to Fredl Wocher from other Viennese prisoners – mostly Jews with Aryan wives at home. They took care to write in a way that wouldn’t incriminate either the sender or receiver if they were intercepted by the Gestapo.

  בן

  Passing letters wasn’t the only way in which Fritz subverted the system to benefit his comrades. Bonus trading was another.

  Auschwitz had recently introduced bonus coupons for exemplary workers. Available only to non-Jewish prisoners in high-status occupations,2 they could be exchanged for luxury items like tobacco or toilet paper at the prisoner canteen. The system – which was Himmler’s idea – was meant to increase productivity, but in practice kapos often used the coupons as a means of rewarding special favours rather than good work.3

  For many, the main attraction of the coupons was that they could be used to pay for visits to the camp brothel. This facility was another of Himmler’s initiatives to reward productivity. It stood surrounded by a barbed-wire fence near the camp kitchens, and was known euphemistically as the ‘women’s block’.4 The women were prisoners from Birkenau – German, Polish, Czech; none of them Jews – who had ‘volunteered’ on the promise that they would be given their freedom in due course. There was a waiting list for customers at the brothel, and only Aryan prisoners with bonus coupons could apply. On admission, the customer was given an injection against venereal disease and an SS man assigned him a woman and a room. During the day, when the brothel was closed, the women could sometimes be seen taking walks outside the camp, each escorted by a Blockführer.

  As an official Aryan, Gustav received bonus coupons, but had little use for them. Camp director Schöttl, who had perverse tastes, got vicarious thrills from listening to prisoners’ detailed descriptions of their activities with the women; but although he tried several times to persuade Gustav to go to the brothel, he always declined, ruefully pointing out his advanced age. (He was only fifty-two, but by camp reckoning that made him a veritable greybeard; almost nobody lived that long.)

  Since he didn’t smoke either, Gustav had no particular need for his coupons, so he passed them to Fritz, who traded them on the black market.

  Fritz had cultivated the acquaintance of the kapos in charge of the kitchen and the Canada store where belongings looted from prisoners were kept; both men were deeply corrupt, and both were addicted to the brothel. In return fo
r coupons, Fritz received bread and margarine from the larder and valuable clothes from the Canada store – pullovers, gloves, scarves and anything warm. He took his bounty back to the block and shared it with his father and friends.

  He was uncomfortably conscious that his trade depended on the exploitation of the women in the brothel. In such a hostile environment, one person’s philanthropy had to come at the cost of another’s suffering. Eventually the women were replaced by a new batch of younger Polish girls. The original group, who had endured months of degradation on the promise of freedom, were sent back to Birkenau. They were never set free.5

  In the spring and early summer of 1944, the character of Auschwitz began to alter noticeably. Gustav recorded in his diary that Monowitz was receiving a constant stream of new prisoners, nearly all young Hungarian Jews. They brought with them a hollow-eyed melancholy, as well as news from the east which, by Gustav’s reckoning, indicated that the war was going very badly for the Germans.

  In March, Germany had invaded its former ally Hungary. Alarmed by the steady crumbling of Germany’s forces on the Eastern Front and the likelihood of an Anglo-American invasion of northwest Europe, the Hungarian government had begun making secret overtures of peace to the Allies. In German eyes, this was a devastating betrayal. Hitler responded with swift fury, invading the country and taking control of its army.

  Hungary had a population of around 765,000 Jews.6 Their lives had been blighted by exclusion and anti-Semitism, but thus far they hadn’t been harmed. Now, in an instant, they were cast into the pit.

  Systematic persecution began on 16 April – the first day of Passover, the traditional celebration of divine liberation from bondage.7 Einsatzgruppe units, reinforced by the Hungarian gendarmerie, began herding hundreds of thousands of Jews into makeshift camps and ghettos. It was rapidly, efficiently and savagely done; the SS sent its two most experienced officers to take charge: Adolf Eichmann, who had developed his expertise in deporting Jews from Vienna; and Rudolf Höss, the former commandant of Auschwitz.

  The first transports left Hungary for Auschwitz at the end of April, containing 3,800 Jewish men and women. On arrival, most went to the gas chambers.8 They were the first trickle in a human flood. To heighten efficiency, the ‘old Jew-ramp’ at Oświęcim was replaced by a rail spur hastily laid right into the Birkenau camp, with an unloading ramp nearly half a kilometre long.

  Gustav later became acquainted with some of the Hungarian women who arrived in Auschwitz at that ramp, and they described to him in detail what happened.

  On Tuesday 16 May, the entire Birkenau camp was put on lockdown. Prisoners were shut in their blocks under guard. The only exceptions were the Sonderkommando and, incongruously, the camp orchestra. Shortly afterwards, a long train came steaming and squealing along the rail tracks, through the archway in the brick gatehouse, and rolled to a halt at the ramp. The doors slid open, and from each wagon about a hundred people spilled out. Old and young, women, men, children, infants. Scarcely any had the faintest idea what manner of place they had come to, and many disembarked with light hearts, tired and disorientated but hopeful.9 As the striped uniforms of the Sonderkommando moved among them, they weren’t afraid. The sound of music from the orchestra added to the atmosphere of harmlessness.

  Then came the selection. Everyone over fifty years of age, anyone who was lame or sick, children and their mothers, pregnant women, all were sent to one side. Healthy men and women between sixteen and fifty years old – about a quarter of the total – were sent to the other. As the day wore on, two more trains came in from Hungary. Two more selections, thousands of souls sent to left or right. Those designated fit for labour were labelled ‘Transit Jews’ and sent to a section of the vast camp. The others were herded onwards to the low buildings among the trees at the end of the rail tracks where foul-smelling smoke streamed from the chimneys night and day.10

  Around fifteen thousand Hungarian Jews entered Birkenau that day; the exact number murdered would never be known, because not one of them – the dead or the enslaved – was ever registered as a prisoner of Auschwitz or received a number.11 Even those assigned to the labour camps were not intended to survive long.

  It was the beginning of a monstrous escalation which would mark the zenith – or rather the nadir – of Auschwitz as a place of extermination. Between May and July 1944, Eichmann’s organization sent 147 trains to Auschwitz.12 They arrived in Birkenau at the rate of up to five a day, overwhelming the system. Additional gas chambers which had lain dormant were put back into use. Four in all operated round the clock. Nine hundred overworked, traumatized Sonderkommando operatives herded the panicked women, men and children naked into the gas chambers and hauled out the corpses afterwards. The Canada detail filled block after block with looted clothes, valuables and suitcases of belongings. The crematoria couldn’t cope with the sheer number of dead, and pits were dug in which to burn the bodies. The SS went into a frenzy; so great was the rush to murder each newly arrived batch that gas chambers were often opened up while some victims were still breathing; those who moved were shot or clubbed; others were flung into the fire pits still half-alive.13

  Many of the men and women who passed the selections were sent to Monowitz. Gustav watched them arrive with bleak sympathy. ‘Many of them no longer have parents, because the parents are left behind in Birkenau,’ he wrote. Only a minority were like himself and Fritz – a father and son together, or a mother and daughter. Would they have the strength and luck to survive as he and Fritz had? Looking at their broken state, it seemed unlikely. Many already showed the vacant depression symptomatic of the transformation into Muselmänner. ‘Such a sad chapter,’ Gustav wrote.

  אבא

  By the middle of 1944, Gustav’s upholstery detail had moved to premises in the Buna Werke. Such was the level of influence he now enjoyed that he’d been able to have Fritz transferred to work under him.14

  The early months of the year had been tough: a savage winter with thick snow and outbreaks of fever and dysentery. Both of them had fallen sick and spent time in the hospital, in constant danger of being selected for liquidation. Gustav had been the first to fall ill, admitted along with dozens of others in February. He was in for eight days, recovering just in time to avoid a selection in which several men who’d been admitted at the same time were sent to the gas chambers. Another outbreak of sickness in late March had put Fritz in hospital for over two weeks.15

  Now that he was based in the factory, Gustav was finally introduced to Fredl Wocher, their benefactor, who now had his and Fritz’s complete trust.

  For Fritz, being in his father’s workshop meant a resumption of his apprenticeship in upholstery, interrupted by the Anschluss of 1938. They worked under a civilian master from Ludwigshafen. ‘He’s all right,’ Gustav wrote, ‘and he supports us wherever he can. The man is anything but a Nazi.’

  The loyalties of Germans were coming under increasing strain as the war unfolded and they began facing up to probable defeat and the reality of what the Nazi regime had done. On 6 June, the long-anticipated invasion of France by Allied forces began. Meanwhile, the Red Army pushed relentlessly from the east.

  In July the Russians swept into the Ostland, encircling Minsk and capturing the region where the remains of Maly Trostinets lay. The small camp had been decommissioned and razed in October 1943, having served its purpose. On 22 July, units advancing into eastern Poland captured the huge concentration camp of Majdanek on the outskirts of Lublin, the first large-scale camp to fall into Allied hands. They found it virtually intact, complete with gas chambers and crematoria and the corpses of its victims. Eyewitness descriptions flew around the world, appearing in newspapers ranging from Pravda to the New York Times. In the words of one Russian war correspondent, the horror of it was ‘too enormous and too gruesome to be fully conceived’.16

  Pressure was growing on the Allied governments – who already had quite detailed intelligence about the camps, including Auschwitz – to do somethin
g directly to help. There were calls for bombing raids against camp facilities and railway networks. Allied air commanders considered and dismissed the calls; it was not a viable use of their resources, they said, which were fully committed to strategic bombing and air support for the advancing armies. And that was that.17

  However, the SS were acutely conscious that some of the camps were located next to strategic industrial facilities which were at high risk of bombing – such as the Buna Werke at Auschwitz, which was just within striking distance of Allied long-range bombers. The Auschwitz SS decided to implement some air-raid precautions.18 Shelters were set up at the Buna Werke and a blackout policy was put into effect across the Auschwitz complex. The task of equipping the factories for blackout fell upon Gustav Kleinmann, who was taken off upholstery work and put in charge of manufacturing blackout curtains. He was given a workshop with sewing machines and a team of twenty-four prisoners, mostly young Jewish women – ‘all well-behaved and reliable folk’. While Gustav’s team made the curtains, Fritz assisted the civilian fitters who installed them.

  Gustav worked under a civilian manager called Ganz, a socialist, who would stop by the workshop to chat and share his lunch. Ganz was quite different from some of his fellow managers in this part of the factory, who lived in awe and terror of the SS and insisted that the Führer knew what he was doing; a few were thoroughgoing Nazis who reported any fraternization to the senior engineer, another loyal Hitlerite.

  Some of the Polish women from the neighbouring insulation workshop would smuggle bread and potatoes to the Jewish prisoners in the blackout workshop. Where they got the food from was a mystery, because their own rations were hardly plentiful. Gifts also came from two Czech curtain fitters, who acted as messengers for Czech Jews, much as Alfred Wocher did for Fritz, taking letters to their friends in Brno and bringing back gifts of lard and bacon.