They were herded to another train, this one made up of boxcars. Into these they were driven at gunpoint, crushed in with scarcely room to move. Then the doors slammed. Tini and Herta, clinging to each other, found themselves in a darkness filled with sobbing, the moans of the injured, and the crying of terrified children. Outside they could hear the guards yelling and car doors grinding shut all along the train.
After the last door had slammed, they were left in darkness for hours, not moving. A few people, broken by the sudden, violent shock, lost their reason during that awful night; they screamed and raved. The SS hauled out the mad
* Now Vawkavysk, Belarus
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and the sick and put them all together in a separate car, where they suffered a special hell almost beyond imagining.
The next day, the train began to move. It went painfully slowly. The trans‑
port was no longer behind a speedy Reichsbahn locomotive but a plodder from the Haupteisenbahndirektion Mitte,* the network serving the German eastern territories. In the two days since leaving Vienna they had covered over a thousand kilometers; now it took a further two days to cover a quarter of that distance.25
Eventually the train came to a halt. The sounds coming from outside sug‑
gested that they were in some kind of station. The terrified people waited for the doors to open, but they didn’t. Night came, and nothing happened, then another day. The train sat there, unattended except for periodic inspections by the Sipo‑SD guards, for two whole days. It had arrived on a Saturday, and the German railroad workers in Minsk had recently been awarded the right not to work weekends.26
Cramped together in darkness, illuminated only by tiny cracks of day‑
light in the car walls, frightened, with little or nothing to eat or drink, and only a bucket in the corner as a toilet, the deportees endured the dragging nightmare hours in horrible uncertainty. Had the plan for them changed?
Had they been tricked? What would become of them? On the morning of the fifth day since leaving the comfort of the passenger train, the imprisoned were jolted from their stupor; the train was moving again. Dear God, would this never end?
“Please dear child,” Tini had written to Kurt, almost a year ago now, “pray that we are all reunited in good health.” She had never quite let go of that hope.
“Papa wrote . . . thank God he is healthy . . . the knowledge that you are well taken care of by your uncle is his only joy . . . Please, Kurtl, be a good boy . . .
I hope they have good things to say about you, that you keep your things and your bed in order and that you are nice . . . You have a wonderful summer, soon the beautiful days will be over . . . All the kids here envy you. They don’t even get to see a garden.”27
With a shrieking of steel on steel and a thump and rattle of cars bumping, the train halted again. There was silence, and then the car door slammed wide open, flooding the imprisoned with blinding light.
* Main Railroad Administration, Central
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Precisely what befell Tini and Herta Kleinmann that day will never be known.
What they witnessed, what they did or said or felt was never recorded. And the exact details of what happened to them were also lost to history. Not a single one of the one thousand and six Jewish women, children, and men brought to the freight yard at Minsk railroad station on the morning of Monday, June 15, 1942, was ever seen again or left any account.
But general records were kept, and there were other transports from Vienna to Minsk during that summer from which a handful of individuals brought back their stories.28
When the car doors opened, the people inside—bone‑weary, aching, starv‑
ing, dehydrated—were ordered out. They were yanked about and scrutinized by Sipo‑SD men, and quizzed about their skills. An officer addressed them, reiterating what they had been told back in Vienna—that they would be put to work in industry or farming. Most of the people, unable to do without hope, were reassured by this speech. A few dozen of the healthier‑looking adults and older children were selected and taken aside. The remaining multitude were herded to the station barrier, where their belongings were taken from them.
The carloads of luggage, food, and supplies that had been brought from Vienna were also seized.29 Trucks and closed vans were waiting in the road, into which the people were loaded.
The convoy drove out of the city, heading southeast into the Belarusian countryside—a vast, flat plain of field and forest, dusty under a huge sky.
When the German forces took this land from the Soviet Union the previ‑
ous summer, they had rolled through it like a consuming wave. Immediately in their wake came a second wave: Einsatzgruppe (Task Force) B, one of seven such units deployed behind the front line armies. Commanded by SS‑General Arthur Nebe, formerly head of the German criminal police, Einsatzgruppe B
comprised a total of around a thousand men—mostly drawn from the Sipo‑SD
and other police branches—divided into smaller subunits, or Einsatzkomman‑
dos. The role of these units was to locate and exterminate Jews in captured towns and villages, a task in which they were often willingly assisted by units of the Waffen‑SS and Wehrmacht, and in some areas such as Poland and the Baltic state of Latvia, by local police.30
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Not all Jews were murdered immediately. That was impracticable, given the millions who inhabited these regions. Besides, the Nazis had learned in Poland how to make Jews contribute to the war economy. A ghetto was established in Minsk, and its industry made to serve the Reich and line the pockets of corrupt officials inside and outside the ghetto. It was to this ghetto that the first transports of German and Austrian Jews had been brought in late 1941, with local Jews massacred to make way for them. Then, in 1942, the implementation of the Final Solution had begun, and Minsk had been chosen as one of its principal centers.
The task of organization fell to the local commander of the Sipo‑SD, vet‑
eran Einsatzgruppe officer SS‑Lieutenant Colonel Eduard Strauch. He surveyed the area and chose a secluded spot in the countryside about a dozen kilometers southeast of Minsk. The little hamlet of Maly Trostinets had been a collec‑
tive farm under the Soviets. Strauch took it over and ordered a concentration camp built there. Maly Trostinets camp was only small, never intended to hold more than about six hundred prisoners to work the farmland and provide a Sonderkommando* for its main purpose, which was mass murder. Another task was to sort the plundered belongings of the victims, which provided a cash source for the SS.31
Of the tens of thousands of people—mostly Jews—brought to Maly Trosti‑
nets, few ever saw the camp. When each trainload of deportees—usually around a thousand at a time—arrived at Minsk railroad station, the Sipo‑SD selected a few dozen for the camp. The trucks carrying the remaining hundreds drove out in the direction of Maly Trostinets; accounts vary, but it seems that they would normally stop off at a meadow outside the city.32 From there, at inter‑
vals of an hour or so, individual trucks would drive on while the rest waited.
The trucks drove to a half‑grown pine plantation about three kilometers away from the camp. There, one of two possible fates awaited the captives.
For the majority it was quick, for some slower. But the end was the same.
There was a clearing among the trees where a huge pit had been excavated by a Sonderkommando, about fifty meters long and three meters deep. Waiting beside it was a platoon of Waffen‑SS under SS‑Lieutenant Arlt. Each of Arlt’s men was armed with a pistol and twenty‑five rounds of ammunition; more boxes of cartridges were stack
ed nearby.33 About two hundred meters out
* Special labor detail: concentration camp prisoners forced to handle victims before and after executions
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from the clearing, a ring of sentries from a Latvian police unit stood guard, to prevent any victims escaping or any potential witnesses venturing near.34
Disembarked from the truck, the women, men, and children were forced to strip to their underwear, leaving behind any possessions they had on them.
At gunpoint, in groups of about twenty, they were marched to the edge of the pit, where they had to stand in a line, facing the edge. Behind each person stood an SS trooper. On the order, the victims were shot in the back of the neck at point‑blank range, and fell into the pit. Then came the next batch.
When they had all been shot, a machine‑gun that had been set up at the end of the pit opened fire on any corpses that seemed to be still moving.35 After a short interval, the next truck would arrive, and the process would be repeated.
What made those people submit? From the first who faced the empty pit to those who saw it already half‑filled with the corpses of their neighbors and friends, and who heard the shots being fired—what enabled them to stand and be shot down? Were they paralyzed by terror? Had they resigned themselves to their fate, or suffered an existential self‑negation? Or did they still retain, until the very last split second with the pistol at their neck, a hope that the shot would not fire, that somehow they would be reprieved? A few did try to run, although they didn’t get far, but overwhelmingly the victims went quietly to their deaths.
At Maly Trostinets there was none of the undisciplined fury and eupho‑
ria that had often characterized Einsatzgruppe killings elsewhere, in which infants had their backs broken and were hurled into the pits, and the murderers laughed and raged as they killed. Here it was just cold, clockwork execution.
And yet it told on the killers’ minds. Even these men had consciences of a sort—wizened, stunted consciences, just enough to be rubbed raw by the end‑
less blood and guilt. It had happened among the murderers in Buchenwald’s Commando 99. Arlt’s men were provided with vodka to numb the feeling, but it didn’t heal the damage.36 For this reason the SS had experimented with alternative methods that would allow them to exterminate but avoid bloody‑
ing their hands.
At the beginning of June, mobile gas vans had been introduced at Maly Trostinets. They had three of them—two converted from Diamond cube vans, and one larger Staurer furniture removal van. The Germans called them S‑Wagen, but the local Belarusian people called them dukgubki—soul suffoca‑
tors.37 While the majority of Jews were shot at the pit, some—probably two or three hundred from each transport—went to the gas vans. The lottery happened 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 148
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at the station in Minsk, where some were loaded into the regular trucks, and some into the S‑Wagen parked among them, crammed in so tightly that they crushed and trampled one another.
Once the shootings had been completed, the gas vans started up and drove to the plantation, where they parked beside the corpse‑filled pit. Each driver or his assistant connected a pipe from the exhaust to the van interior, which was lined with steel. Then the engine was started. The people trapped inside immediately began to panic; the vans shook and rocked with the violence of their struggle, and there were muffled sounds of screaming and hammering on the sides. Gradually, over the course of about fifteen minutes, the noise and shuddering lessened and the vans grew still.38
When all was quiet, each vehicle was opened. Some of the bodies, which had piled up against the door, fell out onto the ground. A Sonderkommando of Jewish prisoners climbed up and began hauling out the rest of the corpses, heaving them into the pit on top of the victims of the shootings. The van interior was a scene of indescribable horror; many of the bodies were streaked with blood, vomit, and feces; the floor was littered with broken eyeglasses, tufts of hair, and even teeth lying in the mess, where the victims had fought and clawed the people near them in their demented efforts to escape.
Before the vans could be used again, they were taken to a pond near the camp and the interiors thoroughly washed. The delay this caused, together with the small number of vans available and frequent mechanical failures, was the reason why firing squads were still used. The SS was still working to refine its methods of mass murder.
SS‑Lieutenant Arlt wrote in his log for that day: “On 6/15 there arrived another transport of 1000 Jews from Vienna.”39 That was all. He had no interest in describing what was just another day’s work, over which the SS felt it was better to draw a veil of discretion.
A summer sun lay hot and lazy on the slow‑moving surface of the Danube Canal. The faint, delighted squeals of children drifted over the water from the grassy banks where families sat with picnics or strolled under the trees. Pleasure boats cruised along, and rowboats scudded across the expanse between them.
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It was all far away from Tini’s senses as she pulled on the oars—a pleas‑
ant, distant background music of laughter. Sunlight sparkled on the splashes with each lift of the oar blades from the water and illuminated the faces of her children. Edith, smiling serenely, Fritz and Herta still little kids, and Kurt, the last‑born and beloved, a tiny speck scarcely out of diapers. Tini smiled at them, and heaved at the oars, sending the boat surging across the water.40 She was good at rowing—had been since her girlhood. And she doted on her family; at the age of twelve she had been made a counselor to the younger children because she loved it so well; to nurture and to save was part of her makeup, and in motherhood it had its purest expression.
The sounds of the other boats and the revels on the far banks faded, as if a mist had descended, closing off the boat from the world. The oars dipped and splashed, and the boat glided on.
In a drawer in a chest in faraway Massachusetts, Tini’s last letters to Kurt lay gathered. The German in which they were written was already leaking away from his comprehension as his child’s mind adapted to his new world.
He had absorbed her meaning, but was already slowly, insensibly beginning to forget how to read her words.
My beloved Kurtl . . . I am so happy that you are doing well . . . write often . . . Herta is always thinking of you . . . I am afraid every day . . . Herta sends hugs and kisses. A thousand kisses from your Mama. I love you.
That night, after the Sonderkommando had backfilled the pit, dusk fell on the silent clearing among the young pines. Birds returned, night creatures foraged among the weeds and ran over the disturbed soil of the pit. Beneath lay the remains of Rosa Kerbel and her four grandchildren—Otto, Kurt, Helene, and Heinrich—and the elderly Adolf and Amalie Klinger, five‑year‑old Alice Baron, the spinster sisters Johanna and Flora Kaufmann, Adolf and Witie Aptowitzer from Im Werd, and Tini Kleinmann and her pretty twenty‑year‑old daughter Herta, along with the other nine hundred souls who had boarded the train in Vienna.
They had believed that they were going to eke out a new life in the Ostland, and that perhaps one day they would be reunited with their dear ones—hus‑
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bands, sons, brothers, daughters—who had been scattered to the camps and far countries.41 Beyond all reason, beyond all human feeling, the world—not only the Nazis but the politicians, people, and newspapermen of London, New York, Chicago, and Washington—had closed off that future and irrevocably sealed it.
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10 A Trip to Death
THE SUMMER S
UN WAS LOWERING, glittering a blinding orange between the branches, sending long, coal‑gray tree shadows across the forest floor. The rasp of saws on tree trunks and the urgent grunts of men filled Gus‑
tav’s ears, along with the pumping of his own blood and the heave of his breath as he and his workmate, Friedmann, helped hoist a log up onto the wagon.
In a way it was pleasant to be working in the woods again, away from the grit and dust and mud. But it was exhausting. Gustav worked on the infirmary wagon during the day, but on the haulage column in the evening shifts that were routine during the longer daylight hours. The area being logged was at least accessible by track, so a wagon could be used rather than carrying by hand. But the two SS sergeants in charge—Chemnitz and Deuringer—rained abuse on them, and the kapo, a vindictive sadist called Jacob Ganzer, drove everyone harder than ever. The work had to be done at top speed, which made it not only exhausting but dangerous.
Gustav and his mates hefted their heavy log and launched it onto the stack already on the wagon. Not a second to spare to catch their breath or ensure that the stack was stable—already another was ready to be heaved up, and kapo Ganzer was barking at them to go faster. Gustav took one end of the massive trunk, Friedmann applied his shoulder to it, other hands took up the weight, and they strained it upward, over the sideboard of the wagon, up onto a space on the log pile. With Ganzer’s hectoring voice in their ears, somebody let go before the trunk was quite settled—it shifted and rolled, an unstoppable mass weighing hundreds of kilos, bringing the others with it. It rolled over Gustav’s hand, and his brain scarcely had time to feel the crushing, cracking pain in 152
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his fingers before the log slammed into his body, knocking him to the ground and landing on top of him.1
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