And so it went on, barrack life week in, week out, parades, boot‑blacking and brass‑polishing, with occasional field exercises and maneuvers. And then, in 1914, just when the young men of the 1912 intake thought they would soon be done with the army and going back to their farms and workshops with their manhoods made, the war came. The ecstatic thrill of impending combat galvanized bored and glory‑hungry young men all over Europe, none more so than those of Austria.
* Now Kęty, Poland
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All of a sudden, the 56th Infantry Regiment was on alert, and along with the rest of the 12th Infantry Division, they marched to the train sta‑
tion to embark for the fortress town of Przemyśl on the right flank of First Army.5 This would be the regiment’s jumping‑off point for the advance north into Russian territory.6 Gustav and his comrades marched with a lively step under their heavy packs as the band blared out the vibrant tune of the regimental Daun march, immaculate in their gray field uniforms with steel‑green facings, their mustaches waxed and backs straight, grinning to the waving girls and as pleased with themselves as only young men can be.
They were with friends and comrades, and off to chase the Russians all the way to St. Petersburg.
They were marching with less spring in their step by the morning of August 22, five days later. The railheads were well short of the Russian border, and there had been a long, punishing forced march to the advance. After hours and many kilometers, under their twenty‑kilo packs, with winter overcoats strapped on, carrying ammunition, spade, and rations for days, with their rifle straps chafing and feet sore, Lance Corporal Gustav Kleinmann and his platoon mates were more ready for bed and bottle than for battle. And they got neither that day. Their objective was the city of Lublin, where they were supposed to link up with a Prussian advance from the north. While I and V Corps on their left flank met heavy Russian resistance and took a lot of casualties, X Corps barely made contact, and just marched all day long, pushing into Russian territory.7
Gustav eased his leg into a more comfortable position. Outside, a hard Galician frost bit at the edges of the window panes, and snow lay thick on the ground.
It had been a wretched winter, following on from a terrible fall. In that first glorious week of the war, they had achieved their objective, capturing Lublin and driving the Russian army back in disarray. But they’d been let down by poor leadership and tactics, and the Germans had failed to sup‑
port them with an advance from the north. By the middle of September the Russians had rallied and begun recapturing ground.8 Their counterattacks turned into a rout, with Austrian regiments breaking and falling back all along the line.
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The civilian population, with their towns and villages under Russian bombardment or threatened with being swallowed up, panicked, and the train stations and roads were choked with refugees. The large Jewish popula‑
tion was especially terrified. They knew about Russia’s anti‑Semitic laws and had heard stories of dreadful pogroms; many, indeed, were the descendants of Jews who had fled Russia. In the territories captured by the tsar’s army, Jewish property was expropriated, Jews were dismissed from public offices, and some were seized as hostages and taken away to Russia; throughout captured Galicia, Russian officials extorted money from the Jewish popula‑
tion with threats of violence.9 A flood of refugees headed west and south toward the heartlands of Austria‑Hungary. At first they sought sanctuary in Cracow, but by the autumn even that city was under threat, and the refugees began heading for Vienna; the authorities set up embarkation stations for them at towns behind the lines, including at Wadowitz* and Oświęcim.10
Eventually Austria’s forces fought the Russians to a standstill, and the front line settled just short of Cracow, with Russia in possession of a swathe of eastern Galicia. All along the line, the armies dug trenches and began the dreadful attrition of bombardment, raids, and hopeless attacks.
In the New Year, Gustav and the 56th Regiment—what remained of them after the retreat—found themselves in the front line outside Gorlice, a town about a hundred kilometers southeast of Cracow. Their defenses were poor—
the trench line was little more than a series of shallow ditches protected by a single strand of barbed wire—and they had little or no reserve line. What was more, to get from the rear to the trenches, units had to cross open ground that was subjected to Russian artillery fire.11 The Russians held the town and dominated the ground in front of it from a stronghold in a large hilltop cem‑
etery on the western outskirts.
And there they sat through the biting winter. For Gustav, it had been a kind of reprieve when he was wounded—a bullet through the left forearm and calf. He’d spent a short while in the auxiliary hospital at Bielitz‑Biala,† a large town close by Zablocie; he knew the place well, having worked there as a baker’s boy between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Then, in mid‑January
* Now Wadowice, Poland
† Now Bielsko‑Biała, Poland
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he’d been moved here, to the reserve hospital in the next town—Oświęcim, or Auschwitz, as it was known in German.12
The town itself was pleasant in peacetime, with fine civic buildings and an ancient, picturesque Jewish quarter that attracted tourists.13 Gustav knew it from childhood; it stood at the confluence of the Vistula and the Sola, the river that meandered down from the lake by the village where he’d been born.
The military hospital at Oświęcim was a little way from the town, across the Sola in the outlying hamlet of Zasole. A complex of modern barracks had been constructed here, standing in neat rows near the riverbank. It wasn’t an ideal spot; the ground was marshy and in summer plagued with insects. It had been intended as part of a transit camp for seasonal migrant workers flowing from Galicia into Prussia, but the outbreak of the war had curtailed it, and the lines of wooden workers’ barracks stood empty.14
For Gustav, worse than the ache of the wounds—which were almost healed now—was the wrench of being away from his comrades when they were still in the line. Gustav was determined not to malinger; his wounds weren’t debilitat‑
ing, and despite his rather slight appearance, he was proving a tough young fellow with a surprising capacity for taking hardship and injury.
But for now there was peace here, and silence but for the brisk footsteps of the nurses and the low murmur of voices. The bandages and missing limbs were reminders of the howling, exploding hell from which he had come, and to which he would return soon enough.
Bullets smacked into sides of the tombs and the trees, flinging stone splinters in their faces. But Gustav and his men held on and returned fire, pressing ahead, meter by meter, into the cemetery.
Gustav was only a month out of the hospital and already back in the thick of it—back to Gorlice, back to the frozen trenches at the foot of the slope lead‑
ing up into the town, back to the sporadic fall of shells and the steady attri‑
tion. Then came this day—February 24, 1915—when the regiment launched an assault on the heavily defended Russian positions in the cemetery.
To Corporal Gustav Kleinmann’s eye it had looked like a suicide mis‑
sion: an uphill frontal attack against a large force in a secure, easily defended position. The cemetery was a traditional Catholic one; rather than a field of 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 165
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headstones it was a city of little stone tombs—structures of limestone and marble packed close together with narrow alleys between. It was a veritable fortress, and Gustav’s plato
on was cut to pieces in the first approach. With their sergeant and platoon officer kil ed, Gustav and his right‑hand man, Lance Corporal Johann Aleksiak, came up with a plan of their own to try to make a success of the attack without wasting any more lives.15 Leading the remnants of the platoon—which now consisted of just themselves, two lance corporals, and ten privates—they skirted to the left flank of the enemy position, where they were sheltered from the Russian fire, and advanced from there.
They had infiltrated the fringes of the cemetery and were among the tombs before the Russians knew they were there. As soon as they were noticed, wither‑
ing gunfire lashed at them. They returned fire as best they could and pressed on. The Russians began lobbing hand grenades, but still Gustav and his squad pushed forward, firing and driving back the Russians. The alleys between the tombs became too narrow for effective firing, so they paused and fixed bayo‑
nets. They were now about fifteen meters inside the enemy perimeter and might be encircled at any moment. With bayonets fixed and their blood hot and furious, Gustav and his men launched their final, savage assault.
It worked; the Russians were prized at bayonet‑point out of their posi‑
tions, and with the pressure taken off by Gustav’s flank attack, the rest of 3
Company was able to advance into the cemetery. Between them they took around two hundred Russian prisoners that day, part of a total haul of 1,240
captured by the regiment.
In the face of the setbacks the Austrian army had suffered since the start of the war, the capture of the cemetery was a major achievement—significant enough to earn a passing mention in a report by Field Marshal von Höfer, Deputy Chief of the General Staff.16 Not for the first time, nor the last, a knife‑
edge battle had turned on the initiative of two lowly noncommissioned officers.
Rabbi Frankfurter chanted the last blessings of the Sheva Brachot, the seven blessings of marriage, his voice echoing hauntingly through the synagogue chapel. Beneath the wedding canopy held up by his soldier comrades, Gustav stood in his best dress uniform, the Silver Medal for Bravery 1st Class gleaming on his breast. Beside him was his bride, Tini Rottenstein, radiant, with bright 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 166
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splashes of her white lace collar and silk flowers against the dark fabric of her coat and broad‑brimmed hat.
Two years had passed since that day on the cemetery hill in Gorlice. They hadn’t been easy. Gustav and Johann Aleksiak had both received the Silver Medal 1st Class for their actions that day, one of Austria’s highest awards. In his citation, their commanding officer had called it a “clever, unprecedentedly courageous approach” in which the two corporals had “excellently distinguished themselves.”17 The twelve men with them had received the 2nd Class medal. It had been a fierce battle, and over a hundred men of the 56th Infantry Regiment had received decorations.18 It had all turned out to be for nothing, as the Russians later recaptured the cemetery. However, in May 1915 the Austrians launched the Gorlice‑Tarnow offensive, which drove the tsar’s army back across the Vistula and out of Galicia. Eventually they had retaken the fortress towns of Przemyśl and Lemberg,* as well as the Russian cities of Warsaw and Lublin. In August that year Gustav had been wounded again, this time a much more serious injury to the lung.19 He recovered eventually and returned again to action.
And now had come the precious day—Tuesday, May 8, 1917—when he and his girl went with their friends and family to the pretty little syna‑
gogue chapel in Vienna’s Rossauer barracks. Like Gustav’s, Tini’s ancestry was from the outer parts of the empire. Her father, Markus Rottenstein, and her mother, Eva, were from Neutra in Hungary,† and had moved to Vienna after their marriage.20
“May the barren one rejoice and be happy at the gathering in of her chil‑
dren in joy.” Rabbi Frankfurter’s chanting filled the room. “Blessed are You Lord, who created joy and happiness, groom and bride, gladness, jubilation, cheer and delight, love, friendship, harmony and fellowship . . . who gladdens the groom with the bride.” Then he laid the traditional glass on the floor by Gustav, who brought his boot heel down and shattered it. “Mazel tov!” yelled the chorus of soldiers, family, and friends.
The rabbi spoke, reminding Tini of the solemnity of wedding a soldier, and touched on the goodness of the Austro‑Hungarian empire to its Jewish people. He likened the new emperor, Karl, to the sun shining on the Jews; his forebears had brought down the walls of the old ghettos and “installed
* Later Lwów, Poland; now Lviv, Ukraine
† Now Nitra, Slovakia
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Israel” in their realm.21 Austria had always had its share of anti‑Semitism, it was true, but since the emancipation of the Jews under the Habsburg emperors, they had lived well and achieved much. With this foundation, Gustav and Tini and their fellow Jews could make their way with their own hands and hearts.
Gustav and Tini Kleinmann walked out of the synagogue that day into a new era. Gustav wasn’t done with fighting; he would see more action on the Italian front and earn more decorations, helping Austria and Germany fight their slow, inevitable, bloody defeat. But he survived in the end and came home to Vienna. In the summer of the first year of peace, Edith was born, the first child of many. The old empire had gone, broken up by the victorious Allies; Galicia had been ceded to Poland, Hungary was independent, and Austria was reduced to a rump. But Vienna was still Vienna, the civilized heart of Europe, and Gustav had more than earned his family’s place in it.
Many didn’t see it that way. In the last year of the war, trapped in a mire of impending defeat, people in Austria and Germany had begun telling themselves stories to relieve the shame of losing. It was the fault of the Jews, many said; they had thrived in the wartime black market, it was alleged. Fingers were pointed at the rivers of Jewish refugees fleeing the front, and how they had worsened the food crisis in the cities; stories were told about how Jews had shirked their duty to their country and avoided military service. The pernicious influence of Jews in government and commerce had been a knife in Germany’s and Austria’s back, people claimed. In the Vienna parliament there was anti‑Jewish agitation from German nationalists and the conservative Christian Social Party; newspapers began to print dire threats of pogroms.22
Yet the promise lived on, the outburst of anti‑Semitism settled down to a murmur, and the Jews of Vienna continued to thrive. Gustav struggled but never despaired, throwing himself into socialist politics in a bid to ensure a brighter future for all working people and to win prosperity for his growing family.
Another train, another time, another world . . . and yet the same.
Gustav sat in darkness, rocked by the motion of the train. Around him the air was thick with the familiar stench of unwashed bodies, stale uniforms, 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 168
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and the latrine pail, and alive with the dull murmur of voices. There were forty men in a space so small that they had barely half a square meter* per man, packed so close together they could scarcely move, and getting to the piss bucket in the corner was an ordeal. Two days had passed since board‑
ing the train at Weimar; two days locked in darkness. Gustav’s eyes had adapted to the slivers of light leaking through cracks around the door and gratings, just enough to write a few brief phrases in his diary. It must be around noon now; the light was at its brightest, and the faces of his comrades were discernible. Gustl Herzog was there, and the long, earnest features of Stefan Heymann, as well as Gustav’s friend Felix “Jupp” Rausch, and Fritz sitting close to some of his young friends, including Paul Grünberg, a Vien‑
nese who was the same age as him and had been a trainee bricklayer
. The mood was profoundly depressed, and without water or blankets they were thirsty and cold.
Although he could neither see it nor smell it, Gustav knew the landscape through which they must be passing by now; he knew those fields, those green distant hills and ghostly mountains, the quaint little villages and towns. He had been born here, grown up here, bled for his country here, and now the rail tracks were bringing him back one last time, to die. Behind him, the family he had begun with such hope lay broken and scattered. The promise of 1915, when they pinned the medal to his chest, and of 1917, when he’d stomped the glass beneath his heel and joined with Tini in marriage beneath the canopy in the blue and white synagogue, and the promise of 1919, when he’d held baby Edith for the first time, the promise that Israel had been built in Austria; that promise had now been crushed under the wheels of this vast, insane, malfunctioning machine in its unstoppable, senseless drive to jolt life into an Aryan German greatness that had never existed, and that never could exist because its blinkered puritanism was the very antithesis of all that makes a society great. Nazism could no more be great than a strutting actor in a gilt cardboard crown could be a king.
The train, huffing its way past fields of stubble where the wheat had been harvested and woods turning golden in the fall, began to lose speed. Slowing to a crawl, it turned south and heaved into the station in the small town of Oświęcim.23
* About five square feet
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Shedding billows of steam, the locomotive shunted its train of cattle cars up to the loading ramp. And there it stayed. Inside the cars, the Jews of Buchenwald wondered if they had reached their destination yet. The hours of that October afternoon ticked by but nothing happened. The slivers of light faded, and Gustav and his companions were left in total darkness, ach‑
ing, hungry, parched. And frightened. Would the door never open? Would they never move?
The Stone Crusher Page 22