Resting on his cot in the hospital tent, he knew that the ordeal which had begun on that day in March 1938, when the Luftwaffe dropped their snowstorm of leaflets all over Vienna, was finished.
Except it wasn’t, quite. The journey which had started that day would not be complete until he returned to Vienna and discovered whether it was still his home – and, most importantly, whether his father had survived. And as for the nightmare – why, that would never end so long as life and memory lasted. The dead remained dead, the living were scarred, and their numbers and their histories would stand for all time as a memorial.
Leaving the future to take care of itself for the moment, Fritz focused on regaining his strength. The doctors gave him a diet of cookies, milk pudding and a strength-building concoction whose ingredients he never knew. Within two weeks he had gained ten kilos.fn2 He was still severely underweight, but he felt strong enough to travel, and could feel the pull of home. The hospital was packing up to move to a new location, and his request to be discharged was granted. He went to the city hall in Regensburg, where he was issued with civilian clothes and listed for transport back to Austria.
It was late May when Fritz passed through Linz and arrived at the demarcation line between the American and Soviet zones on the south bank of the Danube, opposite Gusen and Mauthausen. At St Valentin he caught a train. Yet again he took the railway journey through Amstetten, Blindenmarkt and St Pölten. This time he met with no interference.
At last, on Monday 28 May 1945 Fritz set foot in Vienna, five years, seven months and twenty-eight days since leaving it on the transport bound for Buchenwald. His train came in at the Westbahnhof, the very station from which he had departed. Fritz later discovered that of the 1,035 Jewish men who had been on that transport, only twenty-six were still alive.
Vienna hadn’t suffered as much in the recent fighting as Berlin had. The siege had been brief, with no wholesale destruction. Parts of the city were scarcely touched. However, it was Fritz’s luck that the route he walked from the station to the city was one of the worst hit, giving him the distressing impression that Vienna had been all but destroyed.
It was late in the evening, and the darkness of a summer night was settling over the streets when he reached the Danube Canal. The buildings on the Leopoldstadt side were badly damaged by bombs, and the once handsome Salztor Bridge was just a jagged stump protruding from the bank. Fritz crossed elsewhere and eventually found himself in the Karmelitermarkt.
The stalls had been packed away, the cobblestones were bare, and it was as it had been on those evenings long ago when he and his friends had played here, kicking a rag ball around, watching out for the police, being warned off by the lamplighters for climbing the lampposts. He could recall the cream cakes, the pink Mannerschnitte wafers, the bread crusts and ends of sausages, the shopkeepers and stallholders, Jews and non-Jews driving their trade side by side, thriving without hate or hostility, their children playing in a single rushing, laughing society. Now half of what had made this place live was gone: ashes from the Auschwitz ovens floating down the Vistula; bones in the soil under the pine needles of Maly Trostinets, or scattered to the world – Palestine, England, the Americas, the Far East. Aside from a handful like Fritz, they would never return to the Karmelitermarkt.3
When he reached the old apartment building in Im Werd, he found the outer door locked. The Soviet authorities had imposed a curfew which began at 8.00 p.m. He hammered on the door, and it was opened by the familiar figure of Frau Ziegler, the building caretaker. She greeted him with amazement. Everyone had thought he and his father were dead.
She let him in, but wouldn’t allow him up to the old apartment; there were new people living there now who’d been bombed out of their home. There were no Kleinmanns here any more.
On his first night back in Vienna, Fritz slept on Frau Ziegler’s floor. When he rose next morning and went out, he found that the news of his return had preceded him. ‘The Kleinmann boy is back,’ they said to one another in astonishment.
He didn’t see Olga Steyskal or any of his papa’s other friends that morning, but he did run into Josefa Hirschler, the caretaker of Olly’s apartment building. She greeted him warmly, and invited him to take his first Viennese breakfast with her and her children, who were old friends of his. He was begrimed from his journey across Austria, so Josefa sent him out to the back courtyard to clean up. He found a bowl waiting for him filled with hot water.
As he splashed his face and scrubbed at his neck, he felt that a new life was beginning for him. But it was a new life alone, without any family. His little brother in America, his sister in England, his mother and Herta gone, almost certainly dead in the east … As for his papa, there didn’t seem much hope; he’d seemed near to death when they parted. You have to forget your father … Were Robert Siewert’s words going to come true at last, here at the end of the road? If by some miracle his papa had survived, where in the world was he?
אבא
Gustav had found himself a good life in Bad Fallingbostel; he had work, and was eating well. He’d made friends with a German woman from Aachen who gave him extra food. He made rucksacks for some Serbian army officers who had been prisoners of war; they seemed well supplied, and gave him lots of cigarettes.4
‘I feel much stronger,’ he wrote, but ‘Dear Lord, if only I were in Vienna with my son.’ He had never doubted that Fritz had made it home after jumping from the train.
Several other Viennese drifted into Fallingbostel and formed a tiny community. With the war finally over, Gustav and his new friends at last set out on the long trek home.
They went slowly, finding food and shelter wherever they could, passing through the mountainous forest country south of Hildesheim. Gustav appreciated the slowness of the journey, relishing the freedom and the beautiful scenery. In the town of Alfeld, he bumped into an old friend who’d been a political prisoner in Buchenwald and was now chief of police, no less. Hearing about the journey Gustav had before him, he gave him a bicycle.
The pace picked up, and on 20 May the travelling party reached the city of Halle in Saxony, where Gustav was reunited with many more old comrades from both Monowitz and Buchenwald. Among the latter was his good friend and Fritz’s mentor Robert Siewert, who had survived right to the end, and had come back to his old home town to begin rebuilding its communist party.
Halle proved to be something of a gathering place for concentration camp survivors, and Gustav decided to stay for a while. They received good care and plenty to eat, and there was an established Austrian committee. Robert Siewert gave a public talk on conditions in Buchenwald – beginning his lifelong task of helping to keep the memory alive.
After a month in Halle, the journey resumed. Cycling through Bavaria, Gustav exulted in the beauty of nature. ‘This area is glorious,’ he wrote during one of the frequent halts. ‘Nothing but mountains everywhere. I feel as if I have been born again.’
In late June they reached Regensburg, and on 2 July Gustav rode his bicycle over the Danube bridge at Passau and entered Austria, welcomed home by the pealing of church bells striking noon.
The Austrian exiles reached Linz after dark, in pouring rain. It was too late to find accommodation, so they passed the night in an air-raid shelter. Provided with ration cards, they spent several days in the city.
Although he was on home soil and Vienna was only a train ride away, Gustav’s footsteps slowed again. After travelling so far, he suddenly felt no great urgency to reach home. He was enjoying himself, and although he never confessed as much to his diary, there must have been an anxiety nagging at the back of his mind that distressing news might be waiting for him. Not only the full truth about what had happened to Tini and Herta, but what if his faith was mistaken, and Fritz wasn’t there?
More than anything he was relishing his freedom. For the first time ever – not only since the camps but for the first time in his whole life – Gustav was completely at liberty, without responsibility or cares o
r fear, free to go as he pleased and take his time drinking in the sights and smelling the flowers.
One day, taking advantage of the beautiful weather, he took a day trip up into the mountains with one of his companions.5 Acting on an impulse, they went to the village of Mauthausen, where yet another old camp comrade, Walter Petzold from Auschwitz, was now chief of police. They walked up the hill and had a look at the concentration camp, its formidable stone enclosure now deserted. Gustav was curious to see the place from which the Auschwitz train had been turned away. Had he known that Fritz had spent three months here, and that it had nearly killed him, he might have regarded it in a different light.
On 11 July, Gustav crossed the ‘green border’ for the first time, passing from the American into the Soviet zone. He found the Russians ‘very courteous to us concentration camp survivors’. Through the rest of July and August, he lingered in central Austria, and it was only when the summer began to wane that he finally steered his bicycle towards the last homeward leg.
On a day in September Gustav Kleinmann entered Vienna. He saw the devastation, the massive concrete flak towers looming over the pretty parks, and he saw all the familiar landmarks. The Karmelitermarkt was still there, and the apartment buildings of Im Werd overlooking it, and his old workshop on the ground floor of number 11, under new occupancy now. He went into number 9, up to the second floor, and knocked on the door of Olly’s apartment. And there she was, his dearest, truest friend, regarding him with utter astonishment, recovering her senses and welcoming him joyfully home.
There was only one thing missing, and it was quickly resolved. Gustav found the one person he had most longed to see living alone in an apartment in the same building. His pride and delight, his beloved boy. Gustav threw his arms around Fritz and together they wept for joy.
They were home and together again.
Epilogue: Jewish Blood
Vienna, June 1954
An American GI stood looking across the Danube Canal towards Leopoldstadt. He wore dress uniform, with the chevron of a private first class on his sleeve. His unit patch was the 1st Infantry Division, whose troops had been among the first to hit Omaha Beach on D-Day. This soldier was far too young to have been there on that day: he’d been just a schoolboy in 1944. Now he was grown tall, the very image of a United States soldier. He was stationed in Bavaria, and had taken advantage of a one-week furlough to take a look at Vienna, the city where he’d been born.
It was familiar yet different – bringing itself back to life, healing its wounds. The GI approached the Soviet checkpoint and showed his identification. They waved him through, and he walked out across the broad Augarten Bridge, under the shadow of the Rossauer Kaserne, the grand imperial barracks where his parents had been married in 1917.
Many of the familiar buildings were scarred, some covered in scaffolding, still under repair. But Leopoldstadt was still recognizable, still as fresh in his mind as the day he’d left. How his life had changed since then, and how it had changed him. After high school, he had gone to college to study pharmacology, and in 1953 he’d been drafted into the army – Private Kurt Kleinmann. And now he was back.
Kurt was a product of America as much as Vienna now. His family were there – not only the Barnets, who had become family in all but name, but also Edith, who now lived in Connecticut. She and Richard had stayed on in London for three years after the war, but then finally left gloomy, impoverished England behind for good. The Paltenhoffers had adapted rapidly to American life. When they arrived, Peter and Joan – aged eight and six – had been English children with ‘Oxford accents’ (according to the New Bedford paper), but that didn’t last long. Determined to fit in, Richard and Edith changed their name from Paltenhoffer to Patten, and just this year, while Kurt was with the army overseas, they had become United States citizens.1
Strolling along the Obere Donaustrasse and up the Grosse Schiffgasse, Kurt was surprised at how well he remembered it all: the familiar turn right and left, and the Karmelitermarkt opened up before him, its stalls laid out in rows, the clock on its slender tower in the centre, the shops and apartment buildings of Leopoldsgasse and Im Werd on either side. Just as it had always been.
As familiar as it all felt, he was an alien here now. The sense of foreignness was almost palpable – he couldn’t even speak the language any more.
Kurt climbed the stairs and knocked on the door of Olga’s apartment. The door was answered by his father. Gustav was older, more lined, with more grey in his hair, but still wearing the same familiar smile on the lean face with its trim moustache. And there was Olga herself, loyal, wonderful Olly. She was Frau Kleinmann now, Kurt’s stepmother.
He visited many times during that summer. Sitting around the kitchen table, the four of them – Gustav and Olly, Kurt in his incongruous army uniform, and Fritz – talked as best they could. As time passed, Kurt found that a little of his German came back: just enough to get by, but not enough for a proper conversation.
It was hard to recover the lost years. His father didn’t want to talk about his time in the camps, and Kurt’s relationship with Fritz was altogether different. Raised as an all-American boy, Kurt was dismayed by his brother’s communist sympathies. Fritz had acquired his politics by inheritance from their father’s socialism, and in the camps from heroes like Robert Siewert and Stefan Heymann. Life as a worker in Soviet-controlled post-war Austria had confirmed him in his beliefs. There were also religious differences. None of the family aside from Kurt had ever been very devout, and Fritz had abandoned his faith entirely along the Auschwitz road.2
‘No talking about politics or religion,’ decreed Gustav, and they stuck to safer subjects.
משפחה
On their return to Vienna in 1945, Gustav and Fritz had faced problems of adjustment. Even finding somewhere to live was a challenge in the bomb-damaged, Soviet-run city. Gustav stayed in Olly Steyskal’s apartment, and remained there until he married her in 1948, the same year he managed to re-establish his upholstery business.
There was still anti-Semitism, but it had gone underground, confined to muttering and insinuation. Of the 183,000 Jews who had lived in Vienna in March 1938, more than two-thirds had emigrated: nearly 31,000 to Britain, 29,000 to the United States, 33,000 to South America, Asia and Australia, and just over 9,000 to Palestine. Over 21,000 who had emigrated to European nations had subsequently come under Nazi rule, and nearly all went to the camps, along with 43,421 Jews deported directly from Vienna to Auschwitz, Łodz, Theresienstadt and Minsk, and the thousands sent, like Fritz and Gustav, to Dachau and Buchenwald.3
Vienna after the Shoah still had a Jewish community, which gradually recovered its identity and preserved its heritage, but it was a fragment of what it had been. The synagogues had been destroyed or stood in ruins, and only a few were ever rebuilt. The Stadttempel in the ancient Jewish quarter, where Kurt had sung as a boy, was one of them.
Fritz was unable to work at first due to poor health, and lived for a time on a disability pension. He and his father discussed what they should do about Kurt. Should they bring him home? He was a child still, and they missed him. But what was there for him here? His mother was dead, and his father ageing and poor. They concluded that he was better off where he was. So Gustav and Fritz carried on together, just the two of them, supporting each other as they had through so many trials.
One of the delights of those post-war years was their reunion with Alfred Wocher. The tough, courageous old German had survived the inferno of the last defence of the Reich, and tracked down his old Auschwitz friends in Vienna. He visited them many times. ‘For us concentration camp inmates, Wocher had fulfilled more than his duty,’ Fritz recalled. ‘Through his conduct he gave us courage and faith, and thus contributed decisively to our surviving Auschwitz. Nobody rewarded him for it. We the survivors are indebted to him.’
While his father tried to forget what he had seen and suffered in the camps, Fritz was of an entirely different disposition. He reme
mbered it vividly and deliberately and with anger. He harboured a burning detestation of the former Nazis who still lived in Vienna. He heard the older folk muttering about his papa – See, the Kleinmann Jew is back again – and while his father tried to live peacefully alongside the collaborators, Fritz wouldn’t speak to anyone who had sided with Nazis. They were mystified by this, and one of the neighbours who had betrayed them to the SS actually complained to Gustav, ‘Your son won’t say hello to us!’ Wilful ignorance about the Shoah was so entrenched that this man couldn’t begin to grasp the evil of what he had done.
There were occasional reprisals against collaborators by younger Jewish men, and Fritz became involved. An Aryan neighbour, Sepp Leitner, had been a member of the Vienna-based 89th SS-Standarte, which had taken part in the destruction of the synagogues on Kristallnacht. Fritz confronted Leitner and beat him up. He was arrested for assault by the police, but the Soviet authorities, who approved of summary justice for fascists, ordered his release.
Fritz couldn’t accept what his country had become; in Buchenwald he’d listened to the Austrian Prominenten debate the nation’s post-Nazi future, imagining a democratic socialist utopia, and Fritz had longed for that. Things improved in 1955, when Austria regained its independence, but the workers’ paradise never materialized. Fritz took evening classes and became active in his company’s trade union. His family life was unsettled; he had two marriages, from which came a son, Peter, and a stepson, Ernst.
Meanwhile, Gustav was content to be back in his old trade and married to Olly. In 1964 he retired, having carried on to the ripe age of seventy-three. He and Olly visited America. Although he scarcely understood a word of English, he now had five American grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. He posed for photographs with the little ones on his knees, beaming contentedly, surrounded once more by love and family.
The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz Page 32
