“Believe me, dear Olly, through all the years I have always recalled the beautiful hours that I spent with you and all your dear ones, and have never forgotten you. As for me and Fritzl, the years have been hard, but I owe it to my will‑power and energy that it was always my choice to keep going.
“If it should be granted to me to be in contact again with you and your dear ones, it will make up for what I have been missing—that for two and a half years I have had no news about my family . . . But I’m not letting my hair turn gray over it, because someday I will be reunited with them. As far as I am concerned, dear Olly, I am still the old Gustl, and intend to stay that way.
And I get the same impression about you from your dear lines. . . . Anyhow, be assured, my dear, that wherever I am I am always thinking of you and all my dear friends—now I close with the fondest wishes and kisses. Your Gustl and Fritz.
“PS—Please give my regards to Franzl, Franzi, Karl, Gretl, as well as the Rittmann and Buritsch families.”2
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Gustav folded the sheets and put them in an envelope addressed to Olga Steyskal, Im Werd 9, Vienna. Fritz would smuggle it into the factory the next morning and pass it to his German friend. Once again his boy had surpassed himself for courage and initiative. There was no restraining him; all Gustav could do was hope he didn’t bring trouble on himself again, or on his friends.
As the weeks went by, Fritz took letters to Fredl Wocher from other Vien‑
nese prisoners—mostly Jews with Aryan wives at home. Unlike Gustav’s first letter to Olga, they took care to compose them so that they wouldn’t incriminate either the sender or receiver if they were intercepted by the Gestapo.
This wasn’t the only way in which Fritz and Gustav worked to benefit their comrades. Since the reorganization of the camps under the new commandant, on orders from Himmler Auschwitz had introduced bonus coupons for prison‑
ers; worth 2 to 5 marks each, the coupons were given out for exemplary work and could be exchanged for luxury items like tobacco or toilet paper at the prisoner canteen. This was the only legitimate way for a prisoner to acquire money; in theory, the system was meant to increase the productivity of the most valuable workers, but in practice the bonuses were quickly adapted to the existing culture of favoritism and corruption among kapos. Although in the rest of Auschwitz they were paid to all categories of prisoner, in Monowitz they were given only to Aryans and confined to those with high‑status occu‑
pations. Some kapos used them as a means of rewarding special favors rather than good work.3
Such bonuses provided a strong temptation to some prisoners to deviate from the general culture of resistance, in which one did as little work as one could get away with. For many, the temptation was increased by the fact that bonus coupons could be exchanged for visits to the camp brothel.
This facility—another of Himmler’s initiatives to encourage productivity—
had been created from a barrack block near the kitchens; known euphemisti‑
cally as the Frauenblock,* it was enclosed within its own barbed wire fence and divided internally into single rooms.4 The women were prisoners from Birkenau: German, Polish, Czech, none of them Jews. They had volunteered for this ordeal on the promise that they would be given their freedom in due course. The brothel was open for business in the evenings and all day Sunday; there was a waiting list for customers, and only Aryan prisoners with bonus
* Women’s block
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coupons could apply—block seniors, functionaries, kapos, and foremen would stand in line to enter their names in the Rapportführer’s book, sitting at his table by the brothel door. On admission, the customer was given a prophylactic injection against venereal disease and an SS man assigned him a woman and a room. During the day, when the brothel was closed, the women could some‑
times be seen taking walks outside the camp, each escorted by a Blockführer.
As a rule, the communist and socialist political prisoners declined to use the brothel, partly on principle but mainly because it would make them vul‑
nerable to blackmail by the SS. As an official Aryan, Gustav received bonus coupons, but in the almost monk‑like existence to which he had accustomed himself, he had little use for them. SS camp director Schöttl, who had perverse tastes, got vicarious thrills from listening to prisoners’ detailed descriptions of their activities with the women; but although he tried several times to per‑
suade Gustav to go to the brothel, he always declined, ruefully pointing out his advanced age. (He was only fifty‑two, but by camp reckoning that made him a veritable graybeard; almost nobody lived that long.) Since he didn’t smoke either, Gustav had no pressing need for his bonus coupons. Instead he passed them to Fritz (who as a Jew received none of his own). Fritz had made friends with the kapos in charge of the kitchen and the store room where the clothes looted from prisoners were kept; both men were deeply corrupt, and both were addicted to the brothel. In return for Gustav’s coupons they gave Fritz bread and margarine from the larder and good clothes from the Canada store—pullovers, gloves, scarves, anything to supplement the camp uniform and keep one warm. He took his bounty back to the block and shared it among his father and friends.
Around the middle of 1944 the women in the brothel were replaced by a new batch of younger Polish girls. The original group, who had endured months of degradation in the Frauenblock on the promise of freedom, were sent back to Birkenau. They were never set free.5
In mid‑May 1944, the general character of Auschwitz began to alter notice‑
ably. Gustav noted in his diary that Monowitz was receiving a constant stream of new prisoners and that they were, without exception, young Hungarian Jews.
They brought with them a hollow‑eyed melancholy, as well as news from the east which, by Gustav’s reckoning, indicated that the war was going very badly for the Germans. His reckoning was correct.
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In March 1944, Germany had invaded its former ally, Hungary. The Hungar‑
ian government had grown alarmed by the steady crumbling of Germany’s forces on the Eastern Front and in Italy and the imminent likelihood of an Anglo‑American invasion of northwest Europe. Concerned about their image as collaborators in Nazi atrocities, the government had begun to withdraw its support from Germany and made secret overtures of peace to the Allies. In German eyes, it was a devastating betrayal, in part because Hungarian army divisions made up a large and valuable portion of Germany’s fighting forces.
Hitler responded with swift fury, invading the country, taking control of the administration, and retaining the use of the Hungarian divisions.
Hungary had a population of around 765,000 Jews.6 Their lives had been blighted by exclusion and anti‑Semitism—including forced conscription and expulsion from professions—but had so far remained safe from harm. Now, in an instant, they were cast into the pit.
Systematic Nazi persecution began on April 16—the first day of Passover, the traditional celebration of divine liberation from bondage.7 Einsatzgruppe units, reinforced by the Hungarian gendarmerie (who threw themselves into the task with relish), began rounding up hundreds of thousands of Jews in zones across Hungary, herding them into makeshift camps and ghettos. It was rapidly, efficiently, and savagely done; the RSHA, the supreme security department of the SS, sent its two most experienced officers to exercise the Final Solution in Hungary: Adolf Eichmann, who had developed his expertise in deporting Jews from Vienna and honed it in the Netherlands and other conquered countries; and Rudolf Höss, the former commandant of Auschwitz.
The first RSHA transports left Budapest and Topolya* on April 29 and 30, a
rriving at Auschwitz on May 2. Between them they contained three thou‑
sand eight hundred Jewish men and women preselected as potential workers.
After reselection in Birkenau, 486 men and 616 women were judged fit and registered; the rest went to the gas chambers.8 They were the first trickle in a human flood. Work was being completed in Birkenau to heighten the camp’s efficiency; the “old Jew‑ramp” at Oświęcim would no longer suffice, and a rail
* Now Bačka Topola, Serbia; formerly part of Yugoslavia, ruled by Hungary 1941–4
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spur had been hastily laid right into the Birkenau camp, with an unloading ramp nearly half a kilometer long. An additional spur went right to the gas chambers and crematoria, which were housed in extended enclosures at the rear of the main perimeter.
Rudolf Höss returned from Hungary on May 8 and took over as temporary senior commandant, especially to oversee the impending escalation.9
On Tuesday, May 16, 1944, the entire camp of Birkenau was put on lock‑
down. Prisoners were shut in their blocks under guard. The only exceptions were those in the Sonderkommando and, incongruously, the camp orchestra.
Shortly afterward, a long train came steaming and squealing along the rail tracks, through the archway in the brick gatehouse, and rolled to a halt at the Birkenau ramp. It consisted of forty to fifty freight cars. The doors slid open, and from each car about a hundred people spilled out. Old and young, women, men, children, infants. Scarcely any of them had the faintest idea what man‑
ner of place they had come to; they’d been led to believe that their destination was a camp where they could live and work, and many disembarked with light hearts, tired and disorientated but hopeful. Some Hungarian Jews had been forced to labor in the killing fields of the Ostland during the alliance with Germany and knew well what atrocities had been done there, but even these few believed that the Nazis would treat Hungarians differently from Soviets.10
As the striped uniforms of the Sonderkommando moved among them, no fear of death troubled them. The sound of music from the camp orchestra added to the atmosphere of harmlessness.
Then came the selection. Men and women over fifty years of age, anyone who was lame or sick, children, mothers and fathers with young children and infants, pregnant women, al these were sent to one side. Healthy men and women between sixteen and fifty years old—about a quarter of the total—
were sent to the other.
As the day wore on, the process was repeated; two more trains completed their journey from Hungary at the Birkenau ramp. Two more selections, thou‑
sands of souls sent to left or right. Those designated fit for labor were labeled
“Transit Jews” and put in a transit section of the vast camp. The elderly, the unwell, pregnant women, mothers with small children—were herded on to the low buildings among the trees where foul‑smelling smoke streamed from the chimneys night and day.11
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Around fifteen thousand Hungarian Jews entered Birkenau on those three trains; the exact number murdered would never be known, because not one of them—the dead or the enslaved—was ever registered as a prisoner of Aus‑
chwitz or received a number.12 Even those assigned to the labor camps were not intended to survive long.
It was the beginning of a monstrous schedule that would mark the zenith—
or rather the nadir—of Auschwitz as a place of extermination. Between May and July 1944, Eichmann’s organization in Hungary sent 147 trains to Aus‑
chwitz, containing a total of 437,403 people, more than half the country’s Jewish population.13 The trains arrived in Birkenau at the rate of up to five a day, overwhelming the system. Additional gas chambers that had lain dormant for some time were put back into use. Four in all operated around the clock.
Nine hundred overworked, traumatized Sonderkommando herded the pan‑
icked women, men, and children naked into the gas chambers and hauled out the corpses. The expanded Canada detail filled block after block with looted clothes, valuables, and suitcases of belongings. The crematoria couldn’t cope with the sheer number of dead, and pits were dug in which to burn the bod‑
ies. The SS went into a frenzy of killing; so great was the rush to murder each newly arrived batch that gas chambers were often opened up hastily, while some victims were still breathing; those who moved were shot or clubbed to death; others were flung into the fire pits still alive.14
Many of the Hungarian Jews who survived the selections were sent to Monowitz. Gustav watched them arrive with bleak sympathy. “Many of them no longer have parents, because the parents are left behind in Birkenau,” he wrote in his diary. Only a minority were like himself and Fritz—a father and son together, or a mother and daughter. Would they have the strength and luck to survive as he and Fritz had done? Looking at their broken state, it seemed unlikely. “Such a sad chapter,” he wrote.
By the middle of 1944, Gustav and Fritz had been properly reunited. Gustav’s upholstery detail had moved to premises in the Buna Werke, and he’d had Fritz transferred to work under him.15 This was the level of influence he now enjoyed.
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They’d had a hard time in the early months of the year. Winter was savage in this part of the world, with thick snow on the ground and out‑
breaks of fever and dysentery. Both of them had fallen sick and spent time in the hospital, where despite the presence of good friends among the func‑
tionaries they were in constant danger of being selected for liquidation.
Gustav had been the first to fall ill and had been admitted to the hospital along with dozens of others on February 14. He was in for eight days, and only five days after his discharge a selection took place and several of the men who’d been admitted at the same time were sent to the gas chambers.
Another outbreak of sickness in late March had put Fritz in the hospital for over two weeks; like his father he was lucky. Discharged in early April, he went back to work.16
Now that he was based in the factory, Gustav began getting to know Fredl Wocher personally. The man who had helped put him in touch with his old friends in Vienna now had his and Fritz’s complete trust; he kept the lines of communication open and became a good friend to both of them.
For Fritz, being in his father’s workshop meant a resumption of his appren‑
ticeship in upholstery, which had been interrupted by the Anschluss of 1938.
They worked under a German civilian master from Ludwigshafen. “He’s all right,” Gustav wrote, “and he supports us wherever he can. The man is any‑
thing but a Nazi.”
The loyalties of Germans were coming under increasing pressure as the war unfolded. On June 6, the long‑anticipated invasion of France by British, Cana‑
dian, and American forces began. Meanwhile, the Red Army pushed relentlessly from the east, while even more Allied armies advanced north through Italy. In early July the Red Army swept into the Ostland, encircling Minsk and captur‑
ing the region where the destroyed remains of Maly Trostinets lay (the small camp had been decommissioned and razed in October 1943, having served its purpose). On July 22, units advancing into the German General Government region of eastern Poland captured the huge concentration camp of Majdanek, which lay on the outskirts of the city of Lublin.
Majdanek was the first large‑scale camp to be captured by the Allies. The Russian advance had been so rapid that the retreating SS had been forced to leave it virtually intact, complete with gas chambers and crematoria and the corpses of its victims. Eyewitness descriptions of Majdanek by Soviet and American reporters flew around the world, appearing in newspapers
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from Pravda to the New York Times. In the words of one Russian war corre‑
spondent, describing the functioning of the gas chambers and the vast quan‑
tities of plundered belongings, the horror of it was “too enormous and too gruesome to be fully conceived.”17 By the end of that year the Soviet Union had established a small memorial museum at Majdanek—the first to com‑
memorate the Holocaust, founded while other concentration camps were still in full operation.18
News also reached the outside world about the mass deportations of Jews from Hungary, and pressure was growing on the Allied governments—who already had quite detailed intelligence about the camps, including Auschwitz—
to do something directly to help. There were calls for bombing raids against camp facilities and railroad networks. But the Allied air commanders consid‑
ered and dismissed the calls; it was not a viable use of their resources, they said—resources that were fully committed to mass bombing of strategic targets and providing air support to the advancing armies. And that was that.19 How‑
ever, the SS didn’t know this, and what was more, some of the camps were located adjacent to strategic industrial facilities at high risk of bombing. With the Third Reich shrinking, Auschwitz and the IG Farben Buna complex at Monowitz were coming within striking distance of Allied long‑range bombers.
The Auschwitz SS, who’d been discussing the matter since November 1943, finally decided to implement some air raid precautions.20 Air raid shelters were set up at the Buna Werke and a blackout policy was implemented across the Auschwitz complex.
At Monowitz, the task of equipping the factories against air raids fell in part upon Gustav Kleinmann, who was taken off upholstery work and put in charge of manufacturing blackout curtains. He was made a kapo and given a workshop attached to the department where fiberglass pipe insulation was made. He was provided with sewing machines and a team of twenty‑four pris‑
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