The Stone Crusher

by Jeremy Dronfield

  oners, mostly young Jewish women—“all well‑behaved and reliable folk.” He used his position to have Fritz transferred along with him. While his father’s team made the curtains, Fritz helped the civilian fitters who installed them in the factory buildings.

  Gustav worked under the director of the insulation department, a good civilian manager called Ganz “who gives me a completely free hand.” Ganz was a socialist, and after he discovered that Gustav had been a social democrat, he would stop by the workshop to chat and share his lunch. Ganz was quite 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 238

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  different from his fellow manager, a man called Edlinger who lived in awe and terror of the Nazis; he wouldn’t listen to the prisoners’ stories, and insisted that the Führer knew what he was doing.

  Edlinger wasn’t alone. All unofficial contacts between prisoners and civil‑

  ians had to be made cautiously because of the presence of stool pigeons. One of the civilian foremen, a man named Ackerl, was a thoroughgoing Nazi who reported any fraternization to the senior engineer, another loyal Nazi called Loch.

  For every hostile force among the civilians, there was usually a sympa‑

  thetic one. Some of the Polish women from the insulation workshop would smuggle bread and potatoes to the Jewish prisoners in the blackout workshop.

  Two young women in particular—Stepa Stanislawa and Danuta Jurewska—

  befriended the Jews and were unfailingly courageous in offering them help.

  Where they got the food from was a mystery, because their own rations were hardly plentiful. There were also two German women—Erika and Waltraud—

  who provided morsels of bread and sausage. They confessed that with the war going so badly for Germany, they feared that they might never see their homes again.

  The women in Gustav’s workshop, having been inside Birkenau, told Gus‑

  tav all about what went on there—the transports from Hungary, the selections, the starvation and plundering. Four Hungarian tailors who were allotted to his curtain detail described the round‑ups of Jews in Budapest. It had been like an unforeseen tornado, quicker and more ferocious than in Vienna. Despite the restrictions in Hungary, Jews had grown used to being able to keep the Shab‑

  bat and attend synagogue and had convinced themselves that the persecution stories coming out of Germany were exaggerated. Then the Nazis had come, and they had seen for themselves what it was like.

  For nearly two years Gustav had absorbed the stories out of Birkenau, but this was a new and monstrous level of barbarism. “The stench of the burn‑

  ing corpses reaches as far as the town,” Gustav wrote in his diary. “The four crematoria cannot cope; they are having to burn the rest in pyres.” Every day he saw the transports pass by on the railroad from the southeast, which ran close to Monowitz, the long chains of freight and cattle cars closed tight. “But we know everything that’s going on. They are all Hungarian Jews—and all this in the twentieth century.”

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  With Fritz helping, his civilian colleague Schubert fixed the last curtain to the office window. He explained to the manager how to use the curtains, but it was heavy going; Schubert was a Volksdeutsche—an ethnic German—from Poland and spoke German very badly.

  He and Fritz packed their tools away. As they did so, one of the civilians passed some ends of bread to Schubert, with a nod at Fritz. Schubert took them discreetly, slipping them into Fritz’s toolbox. Fritz heaved the stack of curtains onto his shoulder, picked up his toolbox, and together they walked out into the sunlight. On to the next building. There were hundreds upon hundreds of windows in the Buna Werke, spread across a vast area, and although there were other teams of fitters, it was still a mammoth undertaking. Some of the factories weren’t even operational, and the work to complete them went on around the clock. After nearly two years, rubber production still hadn’t begun.

  The inefficiency of slave labor and the constant erosion by small acts of sabo‑

  tage were holding it back.

  Fritz got on well with Schubert despite the difficulties of communication.

  His papa, who could speak Polish, got on with Schubert even better. He came from the town of Bielitz‑Biala, where Gustav had worked as a baker’s boy in the early years of the century, and where he had spent time in the military hospital in 1915 prior to his spell at Oświęcim.

  Entering the next building, Schubert showed his pass to the supervisor, along with the paper that allowed Fritz to accompany him. The document bore the number of the work detail—114—and the number of prisoners Schubert was allowed to have with him. Fritz rather enjoyed being out and about like this—it was almost like a taste of freedom. A year had passed since his inter‑

  rogation and torture by Grabner and his simulated death and resurrection, and there was no longer any fear of it coming back to haunt him. Each day he and Schubert returned to the workshop with their toolboxes full of scraps of bread to add to the pool of gifts to be shared among the prisoners. There were other curtain fitters who were just as kind as Schubert, including two Czechs—Frantisek and Pepitschko—who acted as message couriers for some of Fritz’s Czech Jewish friends, just as Fredl Wocher did for him and his father.

  Whenever the two went on leave to Brno, they took letters to the prisoners’

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  friends and brought back gifts of bacon and lard. All but the most strictly reli‑

  gious Jews received bacon with gratitude, having long abandoned the stricter elements of their faith.21 Some, like Fritz, had abandoned faith itself, finding it impossible to sustain a belief in a God who loved the Jews.

  The next building on the list was close to the main factory gates. There was a checkpoint just outside, manned by an SS corporal. Fritz didn’t know his name; the prisoners called him “Rotfuchs”—Red Fox—because of his flaming red hair. He possessed a temper to match. As Fritz was passing by, Rotfuchs was staring in irritation at a group of Greek Jews standing idle inside the gates.

  Rotfuchs’s anger got the better of him; he came in through the gates, marched up to the Greeks and started yelling at them to get back to work, battering them savagely with the butt of his rifle. None of them spoke German, and they had no idea what he was saying.

  Fritz couldn’t stop himself. He dropped everything and ran across, throw‑

  ing himself between Rotfuchs and his victims. “You have to get back to the checkpoint,” he said, and pointed toward the wide‑open gate. “Prisoners might escape.”

  Any other SS man might have at least been given pause by this reminder of his duty, even by a Jewish prisoner. But not Rotfuchs. He turned apoplectic with rage. “I’ll do as I please!” he screamed. There was the oily schlick-clack of his rifle being cocked, and the muzzle aimed at Fritz. So this was it; after all these years, it would end here.

  Fritz Kleinmann would have become another in the endless string of Jews shot by the SS if it hadn’t been for Herr Erdmann, one of the senior engineers, rushing forward at the very instant Rotfuchs took aim. As Erdmann snatched the rifle away, Fritz, without hesitation, turned on his heel and walked deter‑

  minedly into a nearby materials store. He knew better than to hang around at the scene.

  It could have gone either way; Fritz might have been shot anyway as a punishment, or at the very least suffered twenty‑five lashes on the Bock. But it never came to that; Herr Erdmann lodged a formal complaint against Rotfuchs with IG Farben, with the result that the corporal was transferred to a different posting. The prisoners of Monowitz never saw him again.

  Erdmann’s action typified many Germans’ feelings. Outside of the SS itself, there was little sympathy left for the Nazi regime; for many Germans, what
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  the effect was being countered by the ever‑worsening situation Hitler had brought upon Germany. Many were afraid of what would become of them, and for those who worked in and around Auschwitz, the more they learned about what the SS had really done—and was daily continuing to do—to the Jews, the less they could stomach it. Their acts of resistance were small—a little food, a blind eye turned—but they saved lives.

  Even a few of those in the military were disposed to be kind. With his ability to move around the Buna Werke on curtain‑fitting duties, Fritz was able to continue meeting up with Fredl Wocher, who had been moved to a differ‑

  ent factory. On one occasion, Wocher introduced Fritz to two of his military friends, both NCOs in the Luftwaffe antiaircraft batteries stationed around the perimeter. They had more rations than they needed and gave Fritz several cans of meat and fish preserves, jam, and synthetic honey. More bounty for the pool to be shared among the prisoner laborers or smuggled into the camp.

  These gifts were becoming more important than ever, because with Ger‑

  many afflicted by shortages, all resources were being channeled to the military on the front lines; citizens in Germany were on rations, and prisoners in the concentration camps got almost nothing. The number of hopeless Muselmänner increased, and deaths from sickness and starvation escalated, as did the selections for the gas chambers. There was a limit to how far the surplus food collected by Fritz and his comrades could go, but at least it helped a few. At the sugges‑

  tion of Gustl Herzog and Stefan Heymann, Fritz and his better‑fed comrades donated all their camp‑issued rations to other prisoners who were starving.

  How to share out the rations and the extra food among such a large number was a matter of constant worry to Fritz, and the harsh choices it forced him to make would never cease to haunt him. “If we were to share it among so many, for each it would be no more than a drop of water on a hot stone.” And to give food to a Muselmann, so starved that one look told you he would be dead within days, seemed like a waste. “Even today the thought torments me,”

  said Fritz many years later, when he recalled his actions. Hardening his heart against the terminally weak and dying, he gave his spare food to the young.

  There were three boys in particular in his block, all of whom had lost their parents to the gas chambers. They were Walter Ansbacher, a sixteen‑year‑old from Augsburg, and fourteen‑year‑old Artus Fischmann from the Łodz ghetto; the third was Fritz’s old schoolfriend, Leo Meth. Leo had initially escaped from the Nazis in Vienna by being sent to France, only to fall into the net after 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 242

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  the German annexation of the Vichy zone. Fritz gave these boys his share of ration bread and soup, as well as a portion of the sausage and other morsels donated by the factory employees and the antiaircraft men. In his mind it was payback for the kindness he’d received from elders like Leo Moses when he was a vulnerable sixteen‑year‑old in Buchenwald.

  Gustav also did what he could for young and needy prisoners. One day when a batch of new arrivals were being entered on the register, he heard the name Georg Koplowitz called. It sparked a memory from the distant past.

  After the death of Gustav’s father and his own departure for Vienna, around 1908 Gustav’s mother had moved to the town of Beuthen,* across the border in what was then the German Empire. There she worked for a Jewish family with the name Koplowitz; she’d been fond of them and remained with them until her death in 1928. Intrigued, Gustav tracked down this young man and discovered that he was in fact the son of the very same family, the sole sur‑

  vivor of the selection at Birkenau. Gustav took Georg under his wing, giving him surplus food each day and arranging for him to be provided with a safe position as a helper in the hospital under Felix Rausch.22

  The circle of kindness was completed by British prisoners of war who worked in the factories. They were inmates of camp E715, a labor subcamp of Stalag VIII‑B. Despite being within the SS‑controlled Auschwitz zone and the inmates being employed as slave laborers in the Buna Werke, they were prisoners of the Wehrmacht, and it was Wehrmacht guards who escorted them to work and watched over them there. The POWs received regular welfare packages via the International Red Cross, and they shared some of the contents with the Auschwitz prisoners they worked with, along with news about the war, which they picked up from BBC broadcasts on secret radio sets in their camp. Fritz particularly remembered the chocolate, the English tea, and the Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes. Given how priceless these last two commodities were to the average British soldier, it was an act of great generosity to share them. The British were appalled by the abuses they saw perpetrated by the SS and complained to their own guards about it. “The behavior of the English prisoners of war towards us quickly became the talk of the camp,” Fritz recalled, “and the assistance they gave was of great value to many of our comrades.”

  * Now Bytom, Poland

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  Although the gifts from civilians, German soldiers, and POWs alike came quite readily, it was dangerous to be found in possession of them. There was one SS man in particular to beware of. SS‑Sergeant Bernhard Rakers, Monowitz work detail leader, was both brutal and corrupt. He’d been transferred from Sachsenhausen as a punishment for embezzlement, and had continued in his habits. He ran the prisoner work details in the Buna Werke like his own little kingdom, intruding his presence even where it wasn’t officially required, lin‑

  ing his pockets, and sexually harassing the women workers. He dished out savage punishments to prisoners and forced laborers alike.23 Curt Posener said of him, “His grift in the workplace greatly exasperated even the senior Nazis among the IG Farben managers and engineers, because Rakers would not adhere to any rules.”24 Fritz, going about with contraband food concealed in his toolbox, was constantly aware of the risk of bumping into him. Rak‑

  ers would often search prisoners, and the discovery any kind of contraband earned the culprit twenty‑five lashes on the spot. There would be no official report—the contraband went straight into Rakers’s pocket.

  If a prisoner was caught with contraband by any other SS guard, the out‑

  come was just as terrible—a whipping on the Bock at the very least, or a period of days without food or water in the standing cells in the bunker: tiny, claustrophobic rooms in which it was impossible to sit down.

  But the known result of not collecting contraband food—slow starvation, sickness, and death over the course of a few months—was infinitely worse than the risk of punishment. And so Fritz and the others looked for new and better ways to acquire food. It was two Hungarian Jews who suggested the idea of the coats.

  Jenö and Laczi Berkovits were brothers from Budapest, both young and both skilled tailors who’d been assigned to Gustav Kleinmann’s blackout detail.25 One day they approached Fritz and outlined their idea. The black fabric they were using to make curtains was thick and sturdy, coated on one side with waterproofing. One could make excellent raincoats from it. Such gar‑

  ments would be valuable trade goods, which could be exchanged for food on the black market. They could even be sold for cash to civilians in the factories.

  Fritz had doubts. The curtain material was carefully stock controlled, the length of raw fabric tallied against the number of curtains produced. Even rejects had to be handed over to Herr Ganz. But Jenö and Laczi were enthu‑

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  of fabric. A skilled tailor could organize th
e usage of material so that the gar‑

  ments came more or less within the normal percentage of wastage. And with the number of curtains being produced, that would make a lot of coats.

  Fritz consulted his father, who agreed to give the plan a trial. Between them the Berkovits brothers managed to turn out between four and six overcoats every day, without significantly increasing the overall consumption of mate‑

  rial. Meanwhile the other workers in Gustav’s shop had to work extra hard to keep curtain production up to speed. When it came to completing the coats, however, the brothers ran into a major problem: they had no buttons, nor anything that could be used as a substitute. The problem was solved when Pepitschko, one of the Czech curtain fitters, offered to bring back a supply on his next trip to Brno.

  Fritz’s Polish women friends from the insulation workshop, Danuta and Stepa, smuggled the finished coats out to their labor camp, where they sold them to fellow workers. The price per coat was either one kilo of bacon or half a liter of schnapps. Others were sold to civilians in the factories.

  The danger of the scheme being discovered by the SS gradually increased as more and more civilians appeared wearing the distinctive black coats. But this risk was mitigated somewhat when the coats started becoming popular with German engineers and managers, who acquired a vested interest in turn‑

  ing a blind eye to the operation. And so the number of prisoners Fritz and his friends were able to help increased a little, and more lives were saved.

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  17 Resistance and

  B e t r a y a l

  FRITZ KLEINMANN DID EVERYTHING he could to help save lives but he craved a more direct form of resistance, and he was not alone. By the middle of 1944, he was already deeply involved.

  Putting up an armed resistance against the SS was impossible without weapons and support. As things stood, the only way to achieve that would be to make contact with the Polish partisans operating from their hideouts in the Beskids mountains, about forty kilometers to the south. Getting basic messages to them was one thing, but developing a proper relationship would require a meeting in person. Somebody would have to escape.