The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

by Jeremy Dronfield

  Gustav Kleinmann died on 1 May 1976, the day before his eighty-fifth birthday. He had been severely ill for some time, yet his prodigious inner strength had kept him going in his final days.

  Two years later, Fritz, who was only in his mid-fifties, had to take early retirement. The torture he had endured in the Gestapo dungeon at Auschwitz had left him with permanent back injuries which, despite spinal operations, eventually caused partial paralysis. Nonetheless, he had his father’s toughness, and he lived a long life, passing away on 20 January 2009, aged eighty-five.

  While his father tried to forget the Shoah, it was Fritz Kleinmann’s abiding concern to ensure that the world did not. After the war ended, the Allies prosecuted high-ranking Nazis in trials at Nuremberg in 1945–6 and at Dachau in 1945–7. Many were executed or imprisoned, and the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity entered the statutes of international law.

  But once those trials were over, a shadow fell over Nazi atrocities – particularly within Germany itself. Those who had lived through it and colluded with it wanted to draw a veil over the past. By the end of the 1950s a generation of Germans had been raised on a cushion of lies – that the Jews had mostly just emigrated, that there had been atrocities on all sides during the war, and that those committed by Germany had been no worse than those by the Allies. These young Germans knew almost nothing of the Holocaust, and the names of Auschwitz and Sobibor, Buchenwald and Belsen were obscure or unknown to them. Most of the SS murderers remained free, many still living in Germany.

  That changed in 1963, when Fritz Bauer, a Jewish state attorney in Frankfurt, who had helped trace Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, instituted proceedings against twenty-two former SS men accused of carrying out atrocities at Auschwitz. The witnesses in the Frankfurt trials included over two hundred surviving inmates, of whom ninety were Jews.4 Among them were Gustav and Fritz Kleinmann, who gave written statements to the prosecutors in April and May 1963.5 Their fellow witnesses included Stefan Heymann, Felix Rausch and Gustav Herzog. Among those on trial were members of the camp Gestapo, Blockführers and administrators. Some were acquitted; others received sentences ranging from three years to life.

  More important than the individual sentences, the Frankfurt trials – along with Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961 – forced Germany’s eyes open, and ensured that the nation – and the world – would not forget the Holocaust.

  Fritz Kleinmann continued doing his part. In 1987 he was invited by a friend, the Austrian political scientist Reinhold Gärtner, to give a public talk about his experiences to a group about to set out on a study trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Fritz would be one of four survivors speaking. ‘For days before it I could not sleep; the images from my concentration camp imprisonment welled up more intensely than ever before.’ The event – which included extracts from his father’s diary read by a Viennese actor – moved Fritz profoundly, and overwhelmed the audience. He came back and gave his talk again and again to new parties for over a decade.

  Persuaded to explore his memories further, Fritz wrote a short memoir which was later published in a book.6 Even though decades had passed, he still burned with indignation and anger about the atrocities visited on him and his people, but his ire was countered by the love he still felt for those who had helped him survive: Robert Siewert, Stefan Heymann, Leo Moses and all the rest. He pored over the handful of old documents he had preserved. He still had the photograph of himself taken in 1939 for his J-Karte identity card and the one taken in Buchenwald in 1940, which his mother had given to a relative before boarding the transport to Maly Trostinets.

  And there was the diary. His father had revealed its existence to him shortly after their reunion in Vienna. Turning back its dog-eared cover, there was the first page, yellowed, covered with his father’s angular pencil strokes, fading now after all these years. ‘Arrived in Buchenwald on the 2nd October 1939 …’ The vividness of the images seared Fritz’s mind. The quarry, hauling the stone-laden wagon up the tracks, the corpses in the mud, a man running across the sentry line and dropping with a bullet in his back, hanging from the beam in the Gestapo bunker, arms twisting out of their sockets, the weight of the Luger in his palm, the agonizing cold of the open wagon between Gleiwitz and Amstetten … and his father’s poem, ‘Quarry Kaleidoscope’, with its unforgettable central image:

  It rattles, the crusher, day out and day in,

  It rattles and rattles and breaks up the stone,

  Chews it to gravel and hour by hour

  Eats shovel by shovel in its guzzling maw.

  And those who feed it with toil and with care,

  They know it just eats, but will never be through.

  It first eats the stone and then eats them too.

  But it hadn’t crushed them all. A few, like the tall prisoner in the poem, had managed to outlast the machine, to keep going until the stone crusher clattered itself to a halt, malfunctioning, choked by its own appetite.

  In the end the Kleinmann family had not only survived but prospered; through courage, love, solidarity and blind luck, they outlasted the people who had tried to destroy them. They and their descendants spread and multiplied, perpetuating through the generations the love and unity that had helped them through the darkest of times. They took their past with them, understanding that the living must gather the memories of the dead and carry them into the safety of the future.

  Bibliography and Sources

  Interviews

  Conducted by the author

  Kurt Kleinmann: March–April 2016, July 2017

  Peter Patten: April 2016, July 2017

  Archived

  Fritz Kleinmann: February 1997: interview 28129, Visual History Archive: University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute

  Archive and unpublished sources

  ABM Archives of Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, Oświęcim, Poland

  AFB Findbuch for Victims of National Socialism, Austria: findbuch.at/en (retrieved 21 February 2017)

  AJJ American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives, New York

  AWK Testimonies from Kristallnacht: Wiener Library, London: available online at wienerlibrarycollections.co.uk/novemberpogrom/testimonies-and-reports/overview (retrieved 19 February 2017)

  BWM Belohnungsakten des Weltkrieges 1914–1918: Mannschaftsbelohnungsanträge No. 45348, Box 21: Austrian State Archives, Vienna

  DFK Letters, photographs and documents from the archive of Fritz Kleinmann

  DKK Letters and documents in possession of Kurt Kleinmann

  DOW Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstandes, Vienna: some records available online at www.doew.at/personensuche (retrieved 14 April 2017)

  DPP Documents and photographs in possession of Peter Patten

  DRG Documents and photographs in possession of Reinhold Gärtner

  FDR FDR Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York

  FTD Records of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials: Fritz Bauer Institut, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

  GRO Records of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales: General Register Office, Southport, UK

  HOI Home Office: Aliens Department: Internees Index, 1939–1947: HO 396: National Archives, Kew, London

  IKA Archiv der Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde, Vienna

  ITS Documents on victims of Nazi persecution: ITS Digital Archive: International Tracing Service, Bad Arolsen, Germany

  LJL Leeds Jewish Refugee Committee: case files: WYL 5044/12: West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds, UK

  LJW Leeds Jewish Refugee Committee: correspondence and papers: Collection 599: Wiener Library, London

  MTW Maly Trostinec witness correspondence, 1962–67: World Jewish Congress Collection: Box C213-05: American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati

  NARA National Archives and Records Administration, Washington DC

  PGB Prisoner record archive: KZ-Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, Weimar

  PGD Prisoner record archive: KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau, Dachau

>   PGM Prisoner record archive: KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen Research Centre, Vienna

  PNY Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York: Microfilm Publication M237, 675: NARA

  TAE Trial of Adolf Eichmann: District Court Sessions: State of Israel Ministry of Justice: available online at nizkor.org (retrieved 19 March 2016)

  WLO Adolph Lehmanns Adressbuch: Wienbibliothek Digital: www.digital.wienbibliothek.at/wbrobv/periodical/titleinfo/5311 (retrieved 20 May 2017)

  YVP Papers and documents: Yad Vashem, Jerusalem: some available online at www.yadvashem.org

  YVS Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names: Yad Vashem, Jerusalem: available online at yvng.yadvashem.org (retrieved 14 April 2017)

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