The Stone Crusher

by Jeremy Dronfield

  * Conservative Judaism is known outside America as Masorti Judaism 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 114

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  8 Unworthy

  o f L i f e

  NOBODY EVER REALLY KNEW the reason for Philipp Hamber’s death, but everyone heard about the circumstances in which it was done. The camp SS

  required no reasons for their brutalities; a bad mood, drunkenness, a hangover, a perceived slight, a prisoner looking askance at a guard, or just a sadistic impulse—

  these were enough. When SS‑Sergeant Abraham knocked Philipp Hamber to the ground and killed him, nobody took note of the cause because there was none; but they remembered the atrocity itself vividly, and its terrible repercussions.1

  Like Gustav Kleinmann, Philipp Hamber was a Viennese Jew and worked in the haulage column, but he was in a different team under a kapo called Schwarz. They had made a delivery to the site where the camp’s economic affairs building was under construction.2 SS‑Sergeant Abraham happened to be on‑site. He was one of the cruelest, most feared Blockführers in Buch‑

  enwald. Something—some misdirected glance from Philipp, a mistake, per‑

  haps a dropped sack of cement, or just something about the way he looked or moved—drew Abraham’s attention. He singled Philipp out, shoved him, knocked him to the ground, and kicked him. In a sadistic fury, he dragged the helpless prisoner through the churned mud of the building site and heaved him into a foundation trench full of rainwater. As Philipp floundered and choked, Sergeant Abraham planted a boot on the back of his head and held him beneath the surface. Philipp’s struggling gradually subsided, and his body went limp.

  News of the drowning of Philipp Hamber spread through Buchenwald.

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  lives, but whereas they had learned to live in spite of it and to avoid it as best they could, now they were becoming resentful.

  “Again there is unrest in the camp,” Gustav wrote. He hardly ever took his diary from its hiding place these days. During the past nine months he had scarcely filled two of the notebook’s little pages. His last entry had been in January 1941, when they were moving snow. Now it was spring. In the intervening months the prisoners’ submission to SS oppression had been tested more severely than ever.

  At the end of February, a transport of several hundred Dutch Jews had arrived. Since falling to German invasion the previous year, the Netherlands had been ruled by Arthur Seyss‑Inquart—the Austrian Nazi who had helped facilitate the Anschluss in 1938. The large Jewish population had been confined to their own districts and expelled from certain professions but were otherwise not persecuted by the German occupiers to the same degree as in Germany, Austria, and Poland. The homegrown Dutch Nazis were not content with this situation; they persistently harassed the Jews, who sometimes responded violently. In February 1941 violent clashes took place in Amsterdam in which the Nazis suffered a severe beating at the hands of young Jewish men. A Ger‑

  man police officer was killed. The SS rounded up four hundred Jewish men as hostages, a move which triggered a wave of strikes by communist trade unions, paralyzing the docks and transport system. Open warfare erupted between the strikers and the SS, and at the end of the month, 389 of the Jewish hostages were transported to Buchenwald.3

  They were all fit, spirited men, many of them dock workers, and had already proven themselves unwilling to submit to abuse. A few were housed in block 17, where Fritz lived with the Austrian Prominenten, but most were put in block 16, where Gustl Herzog was now block senior (and where Rich‑

  ard Paltenhoffer had once been confined). Fritz spent a lot of time with the Dutchmen, many of whom spoke German. They were astonished to find so many Austrians in the camp; they had come to associate the Austrian accent with the Nazi forces occupying their country, and strangely it hadn’t occurred to them that there were Austrian Jews.

  Fritz and the others taught the Dutchmen the ways of the camp, but it did them little good. They weren’t easily cowed, and the SS treated them with an unprecedented level of brutality. All were put to work as stone‑carriers in the quarry, and in the first couple months around fifty were murdered. Many 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 116

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  fell sick or suffered injuries and were barred from medical treatment. Gustl Herzog did what he could to help; when the SS doctors had left the building, he and a couple other functionaries smuggled sick and injured Dutchmen into the prisoner infirmary. Pneumonia and diarrhea were rife, and some of them had festering wounds, but the SS, determined to grind them down to dust, still forced them to work.

  Gustl Herzog wasn’t the only prisoner who helped them; the political pris‑

  oners did everything they could for their fellow socialists. By spring, the SS

  had decided that under these circumstances the Dutch could not be broken quickly enough, and so in May all the survivors were transferred to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. None ever returned.

  Gustav had recorded none of this in his diary, but the murder of Philipp Hamber—which occurred in the atmosphere of resistance generated by the treatment of the Dutch—prompted him to bring it out of hiding to set down how Philipp had been “drowned like a cat” and that the prisoners were not taking it quietly. There was unease and resentment, and much of it came from one man: Philipp’s brother, Eduard, who also worked in the haulage column and had witnessed the murder.4 They were unusually close. Both had been movie producers in Vienna before the Anschluss, and Eduard was politically active in the Social Democratic party, hence they had been arrested soon after the Nazi takeover. Eduard wanted justice for his brother.

  Unfortunately for the SS, the murder—having occurred on a large con‑

  struction site outside the main camp fences—had been witnessed by a civilian visitor, and Commandant Koch had no option but to enter the death in the camp log and hold an inquiry. At the same time, Eduard Hamber lodged an official complaint with Koch’s deputy. He knew the danger he was putting himself in. “I know that I must die for my testimony,” he told a fellow prisoner,

  “but maybe these criminals will restrain themselves a little in the future if they have to fear an accusation. Then I will not have died in vain.”5

  At the next roll call, all the members of kapo Schwarz’s haulage detail were called to the gatehouse. Their names were taken, and they were asked what they had seen. They all denied having seen anything. Only Eduard persisted in his accusation. They were all sent back to their blocks. Eduard was interrogated again by several officers, including Commandant Koch and the camp doctor.

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  of honor that nothing will happen to you.”6 Eduard repeated his account of how Abraham had beaten his brother and deliberately, brutally drowned him.

  They let him go back to his block, but late that night he was called out again and was placed in a cell in the Bunker—the cell block that occupied one wing of the gatehouse. The Bunker had an evil reputation; tortures and murders were known to be perpetrated in there, and no Jew who entered it ever came out alive. Its principal jailer was SS‑Sergeant Martin Sommer, whose boyish looks belied years of experience in concentration camps and a hideous cruelty. All the prisoners knew Sommer well from his regular performances wielding the whip when victims were taken to the Bock, besides his reputation as the Bunker’s chief torturer. After four days, Eduard Hamber’s corpse was brought out for disposal. Sommer claimed that he had committed suicide, but everyone knew that Sommer had beaten him to death.7

  This wasn’t enough to satisfy the SS. At intervals over the following weeks, three or
four of the witnesses from the Schwarz detail would be named at roll call and brought to the Bunker. There they were interrogated by Deputy Commandant Rödl (the music lover) and the new camp physician, SS‑Doctor Hanns Eisele. A virulent anti‑Semite, Eisele was known to the prisoners as the Spritzendoktor (Injection Doctor) because of his willingness to dish out lethal injections to sick or troublesome Jews. He was also known by the nickname Weisser Tod—White Death.8 He used randomly selected prisoners for vivisec‑

  tion for his own personal edification, administering experimental injections and unnecessary surgery—including amputations—and then murdering the victims.9 He would be remembered as perhaps the most evil doctor ever to practice at Buchenwald. As with Eduard Hamber, the prisoners were told by Koch and Eisele that they had nothing to fear if they told the truth; again they denied that they had seen anything. Their silence didn’t save them; they were murdered to the last man.

  “Three or four of the thirty men are brought daily to the Bunker,”

  Gustav wrote in his diary, “and taken care of by Sergeant Sommer: even Lulu, a foreman* from Berlin, and (so kapo Schwarz believes) Kluger and Trommelschläger from Vienna are among the victims. Thus our rebellion shrivels up.”10

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  Eduard Hamber’s heroic sacrifice had been fruitless, based on the idea that the SS could be brought to account for their crimes, or at least be made to fear that they might. They were immune and their power was limitless.

  Summer returned to the Ettersberg, and more besides. “Fritzl and I are now receiving money regularly from home,” Gustav wrote. Somehow or other, Tini was managing to scrape together whatever she could from charity or work, knowing that it would make their lives in the camp a tiny bit more comfortable.

  She also sent occasional packages of clothing—shirts, underpants, a sweater—

  which were invaluable. Whenever something arrived for them, Gustav or Fritz would be called to the office to collect and sign for the items; usually the package would be opened and the contents itemized on their record cards.11

  Gustav’s love for his son had grown to fill his whole heart during their time in Buchenwald, as had his pride in the man he was becoming—this June he would turn eighteen. “The boy is my greatest joy,” he wrote. “We strengthen each other. We are one, inseparable.”12

  On Sunday, June 22, the camp loudspeakers announced momentous news.

  That morning, the Führer had launched an invasion of the Soviet Union. With three million troops, Operation Barbarossa was the biggest military action in history, with a front spanning the whole of Russia, north to south, intended to engulf it in one huge wave. The war had entered a new phase. Before the summer was out, Buchenwald would come to feel the change.

  Tini sat at the table where her family had once eaten together.

  “My beloved Kurtl,” she wrote. “I am extremely happy that you are doing fine and you are well. I am really curious to hear about your summer vacation.

  Actually, I almost envy you; one cannot go anywhere anymore here . . . For that reason, I would be so glad if I could be with you now. Here, we cannot enjoy ourselves anymore . . .”13

  It was true. Existing restrictions on Jews had been tightened in May 1941

  with the issue of a declaration reinforcing long‑standing laws: Jews were for‑

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  grounds, and restaurants; they were barred from entering shops or buying goods outside certain specified times. Some rules were expanded: whereas previously Jews had been barred from sitting on designated public benches, now they were forbidden to enter public parks at all. The declaration also introduced some new and deeply sinister rules: Jews were not allowed to leave Vienna without special permission, were barred from making inquiries to high government offices, and the spreading of rumors about resettlement and emi‑

  gration was strictly forbidden.14

  Everything was conspiring to keep the Jews in Europe. Not long after Kurt’s departure, Portugal had implemented a temporary ban on transmigrants, due to a bottleneck at Lisbon, and in June President Roosevelt, pandering again to the xenophobes, banned the transfer of funds from the United States to European countries, hamstringing the refugee aid agencies.15 Liberal organizations lobbied for the rights of Jewish refugees and New Republic magazine accused the State Department of caving in to bigotry, calling the refugee effort “a football for anti‑Semitism.” Roosevelt and the State Department were victims of a “clever German strategy” to spread Nazi propaganda in democratic nations “where the seeds of anti‑Semitism and anti‑liberalism are already sprouting.”16 They had been germinating since the early 1930s through what Elmer Holland, Demo‑

  cratic congressman from Pennsylvania, cal ed the “Vermin Press”—papers like the New York Herald Tribune, which called for “a fascist party to be born in the United States.” There were accusations of undue Jewish influence in Wash‑

  ington from the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Times-Herald, and the New York Daily News, along with apologetics on behalf of Hitler.17 And—as in Brit‑

  ain—there was a rising panic over a mythic immigrant fifth column. Suspected fifth columnists were threatened and even murdered; the finger was pointed at the Jehovah’s Witnesses for refusing to salute the flag; vigilante groups formed; and even Jewish child refugees were labeled by some as potential spies. Even before the nation joined in the war, the FBI was receiving up to twenty‑eight hundred reports from the public every single day about alleged spies.18

  Accordingly, the inflow of refugees was squeezed tight until it became barely a trickle. By June 1941, there were 44,000 Jews still in Vienna, only 429

  having been able to emigrate to the United States so far that year.19 In July, US immigration regulations were altered, making existing affidavits invalid.20

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  Tini could scrape together. She’d had a brief stint working in a grocery store but had been fired because as a Jew she was not a citizen.

  But still Tini went on trying. It wore her down; some days the depres‑

  sion weighed so heavily on her soul that she couldn’t drag herself out of bed.

  During the past two months, news had come to the neighboring Orthodox families of Friedmann, Heller, and Hermann that their menfolk had died in Buchenwald. They had been persecuted by Blank and Hinkelmann to the point that they committed suicide by running through the sentry line. All the time Tini expected to hear similar news about Gustav or Fritz, knowing the kind of grueling labor her husband was being made to do. “He is not a young man anymore,” she wrote. “How can he bear that?”21 Every time a letter from them was delayed, it sent her into a panic. So she persevered and fought on, refusing to give up hope of at least getting Herta to safety.

  “Life is getting sadder by the day,” she wrote to Kurt. “But you are our sunshine and our child of fortune, so please do write often and in detail . . .

  Please give my regards to your aunts and Uncle Barnet. Millions of kisses from your sister Herta, who is always thinking of you.”22

  That first summer was all about absorbing the new world.

  Judge Barnet and his sisters hadn’t wasted any time in putting Kurt to school, despite his speaking no English. Rather than waiting for September, the judge used his influence to have him enrolled right away in the local grammar school. Although he was eleven, they put him in second grade; after two weeks he was bumped up to third grade, then the fourth. Kurt picked up English quickly, thanks in large part to Ruthie, t
he Barnets’ niece, who came to live with them that summer.

  Having his own room hadn’t lasted long; soon after Kurt’s arrival, Ruthie moved in. She was from Brockton, near Boston, where her father had a hard‑

  ware store; she’d graduated college and taken a job as a teacher at Fairhaven, across the estuary from New Bedford. Sam Barnet gave her Kurt’s room, and Kurt moved in with Uncle Sam. This was more like back in the old apartment, when the whole family had shared a room. Each day Kurt would come home from school and Ruthie tutored him in English. She was a good teacher, kind 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 121

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  and good‑natured, and Kurt grew to adore her; in time she would become a surrogate sister to him. Cousin David next door would become a little brother, their relationship echoing Kurt’s bond with Fritz.

  In those first months, the presence of a Viennese refugee boy in the Barnet household caused a stir in New Bedford society. Kurt was photographed for the newspaper sitting on Sarah Barnet’s knee, with David and his baby sister, Rebecca, alongside; he was interviewed for the radio, and when he graduated fourth grade in June, the teacher placed him front and center in the class photograph. It seemed like Kurt could hardly move without having his picture in the paper.

  The Jewish community of southeast Massachusetts was a warm, welcom‑

  ing place for him, insulated from the colder, darker places into which some of his fellow refugees were sent. In later years, Kurt would be surprised and dismayed to learn of other children placed with uncaring, neglectful families or in neighborhoods where their German accents or Jewishness brought hos‑

  tility. Judge Barnet and his huge extended family seemed to know everyone and everything, and they were all eager to make Kurt feel right at home. He spent weekends with Ruthie’s parents, Abe and Goldie, in Brockton and at their summer home on the coast. Abe’s hardware store was a wonderland, and Abe an amiable soul. Later on, after the United States joined the war, Uncle Sam played an active role in the war effort, recruiting Kurt as a mascot to help sell war bonds.