Suddenly there was a bang and a long, grinding groan from inside the machine. The stone crusher shuddered, coughed, and stood still. The kapo on the footplate, dismayed, delved into the machine’s innards and found that a stone had got into the gears.
There was a silence pregnant with dread. The prisoner, having heroically crippled the stone crusher, was liable to be murdered. The senior kapo, stunned for a moment, burst out laughing. “Come here, tall guy!” he called. “What are you, a farmhand? A miner, I’ll bet?”
“No,” said the prisoner. “I’m a journalist.”
The kapo laughed. “A newspaperman? Too bad. I’ve got no use for one of those. Wait, though, I do need someone who can write. Go and wait in the hut there. I have other work for you.”
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Man against machine; on this occasion, man had won a small victory. The machine, it seemed, could be beaten by a person with the necessary strength and will. Whether this was also true of the greater machine remained to be discovered.
The mechanic cleared the stone from the gears and restarted the engine.
Rattling, clattering, the stone crusher went back to work, consuming the rocks fed into its insatiable gul et by the laboring prisoners, eating their strength, their sweat and blood, grinding them down as it ground down the stone.
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5 The Road to Life
ON MAY 4, 1940, a curfew was introduced for Jews in Vienna, lasting from 9:00 pm to 5:00 am.1 One might think, after 1938, that there were no ways left in which the Nazis could further blight the lives of Jews, but one would be wrong. There was always another stick with which to beat them.
In October the previous year, two transports of Jews had left Vienna bound for Nisko in German‑occupied Poland; they were to be resettled there in some kind of agricultural community.2 The program—organized with the cooperation of Josef Löwenherz, head of the IKG—sputtered out, but it served as a practice run for mass deportations and added to the sense of insecurity among the Jews remaining in Vienna. When the survivors returned home in April, they brought back a story of abuse and murder.3
For Tini Kleinmann, the mission to get her children out of Austria became more urgent. Her chief priority was to have Fritz released from the camp while he was still a minor and eligible for higher priority emigration. In the spring, Tini received her first letter from him and Gustav. Until now there had been no communication, but suddenly they were allowed. The letters weren’t much: the camp provided a form in which the prisoner had to fill in his name, prisoner number, and block number. Most of the space was taken up by a list of restrictions (whether money and packages could be received, whether that prisoner could write or receive letters, a warning that inquiries to the com‑
mandant’s office would be futile, and so on). There was a tiny space in which the prisoner could write a short message, subject to SS approval. Tini gleaned little other than that her husband and son had been separated, as they gave different block numbers. She replied with news of home and scraped together 70
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money to send them, earned from occasional illegal work. She wrote that she missed them, and pretended that all was well.4
Meanwhile, she lodged applications for emigration with the IKG and the United States consulate for Fritz, Herta, and Kurt. Each application needed two affidavits from friends or relatives living in America pledging to provide shelter and support to the applicant. The affidavits were no problem, as Tini had several connections. There was a cousin, Bettina Prifer, who had emigrated to New York in January with her two teenage children.5 Bettina’s husband, Ignatz, was from Lemberg.* Like Gustav Kleinmann he had been categorized as a Polish Jew and had been deported on the Nisko transport in October.6
Another of Tini’s American cousins was Bettina’s brother, Alfred Bienenwald, an itinerant merchant seaman who had made his home in America before the First World War and now lived in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey.7 Finally, Tini had an old and dear friend, Alma Maurer, who had emigrated many years ago and lived in Massachusetts.8 Support and connections were plenti‑
ful—it was the bureaucracy of the Nazi regime and United States consulate that presented a problem.
America’s resistance to taking in refugees had not abated in the past two years. If anything, it had grown stronger. President Roosevelt—who wanted to increase the numbers—could do nothing against Congress and the press.
The United States had a theoretical quota of sixty thousand refugees per year, but chose not to use it. Instead, Washington employed every bureaucratic trick it could dream up to obstruct and delay applications. In June 1940, an internal State Department memo advised on policy for its consuls in Europe:
“We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone the granting of the visas.”9
Tini Kleinmann trekked from office to office, stood in line, wrote letter after letter, filled out forms, suffered the abuse of Gestapo officials, lodged inquiries, and waited, and waited, and waited, and feared every new message in case it was a summons for deportation, her every turn blocked by the State Department’s obstacles and devices—obstacles specifically designed to pander
* Lemberg, Austro‑Hungarian Empire, later became Lwów, Poland, now Lviv, Ukraine 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 71
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to congressmen and newspaper editors, businessmen, workers, small town wives, and storekeepers, in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Chicago and New York, Florida, California, and Washington, who mistrusted Jews and objected stridently to a suffocating new wave of immigrants.
For ten‑year‑old Kurt, this world was a bewildering place; as a child, it affected him erratically and left sporadic, vivid impressions on his memory.
It was a perpetual struggle for his mother to keep him and Herta warm and fed on the little money she could scrape together. In the summer, they were allowed to go to a farm owned by the IKG to pick peas. They got lunch there, which helped. There were still a few wealthy Jewish families in Vienna who managed to eke out their remaining fortunes and charitably helped support those who were destitute. One such family invited Kurt to dinner. His mother coached him strictly—“Sit up straight, behave yourself, do as you’re told.”
She fretted all the time about Kurt’s behavior—he was a good boy, but he had a lot of energy and like most boys his age he could be volatile. In the precarious situation they were in, the countless little instances of naughtiness bred a fear in Tini’s mind that he would do something to jeopardize himself, and she never let up drumming into him how vital it was that he behave himself. Kurt went to dinner and enjoyed a magnificent meal. Except for the Brussels sprouts. He’d never had them before and took against them right away, but after his mother’s fearsome coaching he felt obliged to eat them.
He threw up right afterward.
Kurt coped with being a child in the new Vienna as best he could. He existed in a kind of limbo. Many of the boys and girls who had been his friends were now inexplicably his enemies. He was separated from them, and his social world shrunk down to his relatives. His mother had a large extended family.
There was an uncle called Sigmund, of whom the family saw relatively little.
Tini’s eldest sister, Charlotte Popper, was married to an upholsterer who had helped Gustav get established in the trade. They had a son who had emigrated to Chile, and the family was hoping to join him there. Another of Kurt’s aunts, Bertha, lived nearby in Haidgasse. She had married yo
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went missing in action in May 1915, and two months later was declared dead.
Bertha, left alone with her children, had never remarried.10 Jeanette Rottenstein, two years older than Tini, had never married at all.11 Jenni was a seamstress, and until 1935 she’d shared an apartment with their elderly mother, Eva, in the old Jewish quarter, not far from the Stadttempel. After Eva’s death, Jenni had moved to Leopoldstadt. She lived alone with her cat and told the children it spoke to her—Jenni would ask it a question, and it would say mm-jaa. Kurt was charmed by this performance, although it was never clear whether Jenni was joking. She had a childlike sense of humor and loved animals. She and Kurt had a scheme wherein she would give him money to buy caps for his cap pistol, and Kurt would stalk the city pigeon‑catcher; when he was about to net some birds, Kurt would fire his pistol, sending them up in a flapping gray cloud and leaving the catcher with an empty net. Jenni was Kurt’s favorite aunt.
He had several others, a few of whom had married out to non‑Jews and now lived in a state of uncertainty, their children classed as Mischlinge—mon‑
grels—under Nazi law. One such child was his cousin Richard Wilczek, son of a gentile housepainter named Viktor who was married to Hilda, the daughter of Bertha Teperberg. The same age as Kurt, Richard Wilczek was not only a cousin but his best friend. He wasn’t around anymore; his father had sent him and his mother to the Netherlands for safety after the Anschluss. What had become of Richard now that the Nazis were there too, Kurt didn’t know.
Another playmate lost.
They had been a happy band, the children from the streets around the Karmelitermarkt, before the Nazis came. On a Saturday morning Tini would make Kurt sandwiches, pack them in his little rucksack, and he would meet up with his best friends in the street. “So whose turn is it today?” They took turns to decide their destination, and off they would go, hiking across the city like a band of pioneers to some distant park or landmark or, if the weather was hot, to the Danube to swim. It was a perfect little society of friends, with no notion that some of them were marked with any stigma.
Kurt’s awareness that grown‑ups had decreed that some children were not like others had come on him violently. He’d been conscious of Nazi regula‑
tions since 1938, but they had made little impact on his eight‑year‑old mind.
Then, one day in winter, a boy in the uniform of the Hitler Youth had called him a Jew and pushed him down. Kurt began to realize he was marked, that 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 73
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although he didn’t know this boy, he’d hated Kurt enough to knock him down and shove his face hard into the snow.
When the hate came from an actual friend, that was when the injustice of it stuck in Kurt’s brain. He’d been with a little group of friends in the market, playing as they had always done. The boy who was the dominant personality in the group suddenly decided that he needed to pick on somebody—as such boys will—and he singled out Kurt, calling him by the slurs he’d heard adults use against Jews. He began pulling off Kurt’s coat buttons and taunting him.
Kurt wasn’t easily bullied; he hit the boy. Shocked, the boy pulled a metal bar off his little scooter and laid into Kurt with it, battering him on the head so badly that Kurt had to go to the hospital. He remembered his mother looking down at him anxiously as his cuts and bruises were treated. She understood the consequences that would follow. A complaint had been made to the police by the boy’s parents; Kurt, a Jew, had dared to strike an Aryan. That was a matter for the law.
Probably because of his age, Kurt was let off with a caution. The incident left a scar on his mind. He understood now the malevolence and injustice of the Nazis.
There was another Mischling cousin Kurt’s own age with whom he liked to play: Viktor Kapelari, who lived with his parents in Vienna‑Döbling, the subur‑
ban Nineteenth District. Viktor’s mother, Helene, was another of Tini’s sisters; she had converted to Christianity when she married. They were wealthy; Vik‑
tor’s grandfather owned a factory.
Viktor and his mother had always been fond of Kurt and often took him fishing. Mingled with the pleasant memories of these trips, Kurt would always retain a haunting image of Viktor’s father in the sinister field‑gray uniform of a Nazi.
After one of their fishing trips, Kurt came home with a bone‑handled hunting knife belonging to Viktor, which he had pocketed. One day, one of the periodic orders came out from the Gestapo or the Sipo for all the Jews in the district to report to the local police station for some inspection or registra‑
tion or selection. Putting on his coat, Kurt slipped the knife into his pocket.
He knew now what the Nazis could do. They had taken his father and Fritz away, they had tormented his sisters, they had pushed him down in the snow, beaten him and made it into his crime. There was nothing they would not be allowed to do. Kurt was determined to defend his mother and Herta against 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 74
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them. Walking along, fingering the knife blade in his pocket, he could sense his mother’s anxiety. He understood, in a vague way, that when Jews were ordered to report, something bad could happen. To soothe her fears, he showed her the knife.
She was horrified. “Get rid of it! Throw it away!” There was no convincing her of the necessity for it. Reluctantly, he tossed the knife away. They walked on, Kurt almost heartbroken. How in the world was he to defend the people he loved now? What would become of them?
Another dawn, another roll call, another day of woe. The prisoners in their stripes stood in ranks in the cool summer air, motionless except to take the sustenance doled out, soundless except to answer to their numbers. Any breach of roll‑call discipline meant punishment, as did any infraction of the immaculate neatness and cleanliness of one’s locker, one’s bunk, and one’s barrack block: a veneer of precise order glued over a morass of bestial barbarism.
At last the slow ritual began drawing to a close and the prospect of the day’s labors settled on each man. For Fritz, that meant working in the vegetable gardens attached to the farm complex—hard labor still but infinitely better and safer than the killing ground of the quarry.12 For Gustav, it was back to the murderous task of stone‑carrying. He’d had a reprieve during the second half of the winter when Gustav Herzog, one of the younger Jewish block seniors, employed him as an orderly in his block’s bunk room. He’d discovered that Gustav was an upholsterer and had skill with mattresses, as well as a knack for keeping things in order. It was completely illegal, and would have led to punishment for both of them, but it helped the block pass inspections by the SS and kept Gustav in safe, easy work for two months. Eventually, though, the assignment had to end, and in mid‑May Gustav had been sent back to the hell of the quarry.
Now that they were neither living in the same block nor working in the same place, he and Fritz saw little of each other, but they met when they could.
Receiving a little money from home enabled them to buy occasional comforts from the prisoner canteen, which helped brighten their days.
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As the morning parade was dismissed and the men were just beginning to move, the camp senior bellowed out:
“Prisoner 7290 to the main gate, at the double!”
In their separate sections of the assembly, both Gustav’s and Fritz’s hearts froze. Each man’s number was as familiar to him as his name; officially within the camp it was his name, and the instant he heard those digits, Fritz felt as if he’d been physically seized. There were normally only two reasons for a prisoner t
o be summoned to the gate at roll call: punishment, or assignment to the stone quarry expressly for the purpose of being murdered.
“Prisoner 7290 to the main gate, at the double!” the camp senior repeated.
Fritz pushed through the mass of prisoners as they milled about, forming into their various work details, and ran to the main gate. Gustav watched him go with his heart in his mouth.
In an extremity of fear, Fritz reported to the adjutant, SS‑Lieutenant Her‑
mann Hackmann. Known as “Jonny,” Hackmann was a clever, slender young man with a boyish grin that concealed a brutal, cynical nature; he carried a hefty bamboo cudgel and presided over roll call each morning.13 He looked Fritz up and down, glanced at his number, and said, “Wait there. Face the wall.”
Fritz stood by the gatehouse, staring at the whitewashed bricks while behind him the work details marched out through the gate. When everyone had gone, SS‑Sergeant Schramm, Fritz’s Blockführer,* came to fetch him.
“Come with me.”
Outside the gate, Schramm led him to the administrative complex that straddled the Caracho Way, as the home stretch of the Blood Road was known.†
On the left was the camp Gestapo building. Fritz was led in and left stand‑
ing for a long time before being called into a room. “Cap off. Take off your jacket.” The habit of obeying strange orders without question was ingrained by now, and Fritz did as he was told. “Put these on.” He was handed a civilian shirt, tie, and jacket.
They were rather large for him, especially in his half‑starved condition, but he put them on, knotting the tie neatly into the rumpled collar. They sat him before a camera and took mugshots from all sides. Wary of the Gestapo’s intentions, Fritz stared with deep, hostile suspicion into the lens. When it
* SS guard in command of a barrack block
The Stone Crusher Page 10