The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

by Jeremy Dronfield

  The prisoners in Camp 2, although in a dreadful state, weren’t nearly as wretched as those in the main camp. They had strength left and they had anger. As soon as Captain Sington’s truck had departed, the lynchings began.

  Hundreds of men, exalted in their fury and their strength in numbers, singled out the individuals who had tortured them. Gustav – the kindest, gentlest soul imaginable – watched dispassionately as SS guards and green-triangle block seniors were strung up or beaten to death. He saw at least two murderers from Auschwitz-Monowitz die, and felt no pity or remorse. The Hungarian troops made no move to intercede. That afternoon, when the killing was done, the surviving SS were made to remove the bodies, burying them the next day with their own hands.

  The British gradually took control of the administration, making records of all the surviving prisoners, ordering them by nationality; Bergen-Belsen was transformed into a displaced persons camp, and the inmates were prepared for repatriation. Gustav remained with the Hungarian Jews; he’d made many good friends among them, and they’d elected him room senior.

  It was a liberation and yet not a liberation. The inmates were no longer under the heel of the SS; the British brought in food and medical supplies, and they ate well and began to recover their health (although in the main camp the inmates were in such a bad state that thousands died in the weeks following liberation). Yet they were still prisoners. The Hungarian soldiers were under orders from the British to prevent anyone leaving, and took the orders seriously. As far as Camp 2 was concerned, the quarantine was preposterous – there was no typhus here, and no need to keep the prisoners incarcerated. Gustav began to chafe, longing to experience freedom again after all these years.

  The liberation of Belsen made headlines around the world; there were newsreels and radio reports, and the papers were full of it. Across Europe and in Britain and America, the relatives of people in Nazi captivity sent desperate requests for information. Periodically, Captain Sington’s loudspeaker truck toured Camp 2, broadcasting the names of people whose families had enquired.16

  Gustav thought of Edith and Kurt. He hadn’t seen his daughter since her departure for England in early 1939, and had heard no news of her since the start of the war. Kurt too had been cut off since December 1941. Gustav wrote a message to Edith detailing his whereabouts and block number, and entrusted it – along with the thousands of messages from other inmates – to the British administration.17

  In the main camp, medical staff worked to save as many lives as possible. It was a place which blasted the minds of those who witnessed it. The corpses were heaped in thousands, and the half-dead, half-living moved around them as if they were just lumber, stepping over them, sitting down to eat their scraps leaning against stacks of corpses.18 Deep pits were excavated, dozens of metres long. SS guards were made to carry the dead into the pits by hand, jeered at and cursed by survivors; a few SS men made a run for the forest, but they were shot down and their comrades had to drag their bodies back. Into the pits they went, along with their victims.19 The task proved overwhelming in the end; there were just too many bodies, and bulldozers had to push the decomposing corpses into the pits. It took nearly two weeks before the last were buried.20

  The survivors of Camp 1 were moved to the clean, solid buildings of Camp 2, which was redesignated as a hospital. As the insanitary, broken-down wooden barracks in the main camp emptied they were torched with flamethrowers.

  An English nurse on the medical staff felt shame and remorse that, having heard of the existence of such camps as early as 1934, she had never realized – and hadn’t wanted to realize – that they could be like this. She and her colleagues were ‘stirred with a cold anger against those primarily responsible, the Germans, an anger which grew daily at Belsen’.21 Others were shocked by how abuse and degradation had reduced many survivors to an animal-like state, fighting for food, eating from bowls which doubled as bedpans, with only a wipe with a rag between uses.22

  The influx from the main camp raised a problem for Gustav and the Mittelbau survivors: it brought typhus into their vicinity. Buildings housing the infected were cordoned off, but their presence still increased the risk that it would spread throughout the barracks.

  Gustav was growing desperate to leave this terrible, haunted place.

  Ten days after the liberation, the first repatriation transports were allowed to leave, carrying a selection of French, Belgian and Dutch survivors. Their way home lay through liberated countries. Those who came from Germany, Austria and other places that were either war zones or still in German hands would have to wait. Gustav watched the transports go with longing, and as the days passed he lost patience. It didn’t matter that it was irrational, that Austria wasn’t yet free; he was sure he could find his way home, no matter what. He believed that Fritz would be in Vienna now, waiting for him. Gustav needed to get back to him somehow. At the very least he yearned to be free of confinement.

  Choosing his moment, on the morning of Monday 30 April he set out. Taking his few belongings and a little food, he walked out of his building and along the tarmac path, heading for the road.

  A Hungarian soldier stepped in front of him, rifle raised.

  ‘Where d’you think you’re going?’

  ‘Home,’ said Gustav. ‘I’m leaving.’ There was a look in the soldier’s eyes that Gustav had seen in hundreds of SS guards – the look of an anti-Semite regarding a Jewish prisoner. Until two weeks ago this soldier had been fighting alongside Nazis. Gustav went to walk past him. The soldier swung his rifle butt and smacked him in the chest. Gustav staggered, wheezing.

  ‘Try that again and I’ll shoot you,’ said the soldier.

  Gustav had seen enough to know he wouldn’t hesitate. The bid for freedom was over; he was trapped.

  Nursing his bruised ribs, he walked back to his block. Getting out of Belsen would be trickier than he’d anticipated. He talked it over with a fellow Viennese, a man named Josef Berger, who was also desperate to go home.

  That afternoon, the two men left their building quietly and hung about, keeping an eye on the sentries. At last came the moment they were waiting for, when one guard shift was relieved by the next. While the soldiers were distracted, Gustav and Josef made a dash for it – not towards the road this time but in the direction of the woods fringing the northwestern edges of the camp.

  They were between sentry posts when there was a shout in Hungarian and the crack of a rifle. The bullet snapped over their heads. Another shot zipped past, and they both threw themselves flat on the ground. Bullets thwacked into the turf around them. Gustav and Josef crawled along on their elbows. As soon as there was a pause in the shooting, they jumped to their feet and made a break for the woods, dodging, hurling themselves through the trees and out the other side. They ran on through the Russian section of the camp and into the forest on the far side.

  בן

  Minutes ticked by in the chilly, dripping Kellerbau cavern, but there were no sounds of planes, no thump of explosions: all around Fritz, there was just the echoing susurrus of tens of thousands of prisoners breathing and muttering to one another.

  Time ticked on. Outside the tunnel, the SS machine-gunners watched and waited for the imminent explosion.

  Minutes turned slowly into hours. The prisoners, accustomed to standing at roll calls which dragged on just like this, thought little of it. A false alarm, presumably. At least they weren’t having to work. Most of them would never learn the true reason why they’d been sent into the tunnels, and would never be aware of the complications which kept them standing there for so long. Events were going on over their heads, veiled in obscurity, which would never be fully revealed.

  The explosive charges embedded around the entrance had failed to detonate. Paul Wolfram, the manager in charge, would later claim to have deliberately sabotaged the murder plot by having his men plant the bombs and mines without detonators. But that didn’t explain the other explosives. Commandant Ziereis – who spent much of this
period drunk – claimed that he had reservations about the whole business. But a story circulated among some of the survivors was that a Polish prisoner named Władvsłava Palonka, an electrician, had discovered the detonator wires and cut them.23

  At 4.00 p.m. the all-clear sounded, and the prisoners who had walked in unknowingly to their deaths walked out again – still with no idea of the death sentence that had hung over them – and filed back to the camps. Had the plot succeeded, it would have killed over twenty thousand people – one of the largest single acts of mass murder in the history of Europe.24

  The routine of roll calls and labour resumed, but then, on Tuesday 1 May, the prisoners were not sent to work. Fritz sensed a mood among the SS which reminded him of Monowitz in the middle of January. This time the panic was deeper. The SS now had no Reich left into which they could retreat. There would be no evacuation from Mauthausen.

  Two days later, all the guards disappeared from the camp. The fanatical Nazis among them intended to fight a last-ditch defence in the mountains, while the rest shed their uniforms and went into hiding among the civilian populations in the cities. Command of Mauthausen-Gusen was officially handed over to the Vienna civil police force, while camp administration fell to the Luftwaffe. A detachment of the Vienna fire brigade who had come here as political prisoners in 1944 were drafted to help.25

  To the south, armies made up of Americans, British, Poles, Indians, New Zealanders and one Jewish Brigade were pushing into the mountainous borderland between Italy and Austria.

  In the east, the Red Army had crossed the Austrian border and by 6 April had surrounded Vienna. The German forces remaining there were hopelessly insufficient to defend it, and the siege was short-lived. By 7 April, Soviet troops were in the southern part of the inner city, and three days later the Germans evacuated Leopoldstadt. The Danube bridges were captured, and on 13 April the last SS armoured unit abandoned the city.26 Vienna was liberated, seven years almost to the day since Hitler had held his plebiscite and set the seal on the Anschluss. Now he was trapped in his Berlin bunker and his grand Reich was reduced to a tiny, bleeding stump.

  The third Allied spearhead came from the northwest. American forces crossed the Bavarian stretch of the Danube on 27 April. Patton sent his XII Corps into Austria north of the river. They faced heavy fighting from fanatical German forces who had taken to hanging deserters from roadside trees.27 As the American advance pushed down the Danube valley, the very tip of the spearpoint consisted of a patrol from the 41st Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron and a platoon from the 55th Armored Infantry Battalion. Probing east of Linz they came to the villages of St Georgen and Gusen, where they first laid eyes on the camps.

  For sheer horror, Mauthausen and Gusen rivalled Bergen-Belsen. Both had been sinks into which the concentration camps had drained. The death rate at Mauthausen had spiralled to over nine thousand a month. The walking cadavers who greeted the American liberators were found to be living among tens of thousands of their unburied, half-buried or half-burned dead. The stench of it was what stuck in the minds of the GIs. ‘The smell and the stink of the dead and the dying, the smell and the stink of the starving,’ recalled one officer. ‘Yes, it is the smell, the odor of the death camp that makes it burn in the nostrils and memory. I will always smell Mauthausen.’28

  Olive-green tanks marked with the white American star, scarred and weathered, rolled into the camp compounds. In Gusen I, a sergeant stood on top of his Sherman and yelled in English to the crowd of emaciated prisoners, ‘Brothers, you are free!’29 Bursts of various national anthems exploded from the crowd, and the Volkssturm officer in command of the German guards presented his sword to the sergeant.

  Fritz, in the neighbouring Gusen II, watched the Americans arrive with relief and satisfaction, but without any overwhelming joy. He was too weak and demoralized to celebrate. Having been only passably healthy when he arrived, he had endured three months in this hell where life expectancy even for the fittest new arrivals was only four. He was scarcely alive, little more than bones wrapped in skin, covered with bruises and sores. He had no real comrades in Mauthausen-Gusen, only fellow sufferers. ‘I was utterly demolished there,’ he wrote later.30 He was too weak and sick to go home – even assuming there was a home to go to. Most of all he missed his papa, but hadn’t the faintest idea what had happened to him.

  אבא

  After a kilometre or so, Gustav and Josef stopped to catch their breath. They listened, but there were no sounds of pursuit, just birdsong and the muffled silence of the wood. They sank down to rest. Gustav looked about him, gazed up at the sky, and inhaled the fir-scented air. The very smell of it gave him joy; it was the scent of liberty. ‘Finally free!’ he wrote in his diary. ‘The air around us is indescribable.’ For the first time in years, the atmosphere was untainted by the odours of death and labour and unwashed human hordes.

  They weren’t safe yet. The front lines lay east, so for the time being Gustav and Josef turned their backs on their homeland and pressed on northwest through the forest.

  All afternoon and into the evening they walked, passing several tiny hamlets scattered among the woods – German places, where they didn’t dare ask for help. Eventually, after around twenty kilometres, they emerged from the forest into the small village of Osterheide. On the outskirts stood a large prisoner-of-war camp – Stalag XI – which had been liberated by the British the day after Belsen.31 It had been evacuated several days ago, but there was still a population of Russian POWs, who gave the itinerant Viennese bed and board for the night.

  The next morning, Gustav and Josef walked on into Bad Fallingbostel, a pleasant spa town, choked with refugees and troops. The two men presented themselves to the British authorities, but were told that nothing could be done for them right away – they ought to be in one of the displaced persons camps. They fared better at the German mayor’s office, where they were assigned accommodation in a hotel and allotted a food ration.

  Gustav found himself a week’s employment as a saddler with a local upholsterer named Brokman. The wages were decent, and for the first time in seven years he was treated as a citizen. He began to recover from his ordeal. In his room at the hotel he brought out the little green notebook which had accompanied him since the early days. On the first page was the entry: ‘Arrived in Buchenwald on the 2nd October 1939 after a two-day train journey. From Weimar railway station we ran to the camp …’

  So began the record of his captivity. Now he started recording his liberty.

  ‘At last one is a free man, and can do as one pleases,’ he wrote. ‘Only one thing nags at me, and that is the uncertainty about my family at home.’

  It would continue to prey on his mind, so long as the remnants of the Nazi regime remained, still fighting, in the territory between himself and his homeland.

  21. The Long Way Home

  משפחה

  Edith stood at the front window, watching the postman wheel his bicycle up the hill. The grandly named Spring Mansions – a genteel three-storey Victorian house converted to flats – stood at the corner of Gondar Gardens in Cricklewood, from which half of London could be seen laid out: the railway, and beyond, the Kilburn High Road, cutting a straight line all the way to Westminster.

  Little Peter stood beside her, looking out at the view. He had only just returned to his parents after being evacuated to a farm near Gloucester. During his absence his parents and his baby sister, Joan, had left Leeds and moved to this little flat in London. Peter was almost a stranger to his mother – completely British by birth and accent. Edith and Richard, conscious of the hostility to all things German in this country, never spoke anything but English in the house.

  The postman propped his bicycle on the hedge and posted a bundle of letters through the letterbox. Edith went downstairs and collected them from the mat; flicking through the envelopes for the other tenants, she came across one addressed to ‘Fr. Edith Kleinmann’. There were several crossed-out addresses, starting with Mrs Brostof
f’s in Leeds. She tore open the envelope.

  Peter heard his mother running up the stairs, calling breathlessly for his father. Peter couldn’t make out what the excitement was about; she just kept repeating that her father was alive. Alive.

  It was almost beyond belief. All this time, she’d had no notion of what had become of her family; she knew from Kurt that their father and Fritz had gone to Buchenwald, but that was all. Everyone had seen the dreadful newsreels from Belsen and heard the BBC broadcasts – and to think that her papa had been there and lived!

  Edith wrote immediately to Kurt. On their behalf, Judge Sam Barnet used every political connection he had to try to open a line of communication with their father.1 Weeks went by, and no further word came from Gustav. It was as if, having revealed his presence, he’d suddenly vanished.

  בן

  Following liberation, the US army brought medical aid to the survivors of Mauthausen and Gusen. Thousands were beyond saving, and died in those first days.

  Fritz Kleinmann was among those whose grip on life still held, despite his desperate condition. When the medical assessments began, he was interviewed by an American officer, who revealed that he’d been born in Vienna himself, in Leopoldstadt. Pleased by this connection between them, the officer found Fritz a priority place on an emergency evacuation.

  He was taken to Regensburg in southern Bavaria, a beautiful, ancient city where an American military hospital had been set up. His arrival coincided with the news that Germany had surrendered; Hitler and Himmler were dead, and the war in Europe was over.

  The 107th Evacuation Hospital was housed in tents and buildings on the bank of the River Regen where it flowed into the Danube.2 When Fritz was checked in, he was scarcely alive, his weight recorded as thirty-six kilos.fn1 The hideous, miraculous, haphazard chain of events that had allowed him to evade death for five and a half years had nearly finished him off at the end.