The Stone Crusher

by Jeremy Dronfield

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  19 Mauthausen

  FRITZ FELT THE PINCH of cold steel round his wrists as the handcuffs snapped shut. “If you make any attempt to escape,” said the officer, “you will be shot immediately.”

  His three‑man escort—an NCO and two privates—marched him to the station. There they all boarded a train bound for Linz. For the third time, Fritz traveled the familiar route: St. Pölten to Blindenmarkt to Amstetten . . .

  At some point the train must have passed by the spot where he had made his leap. It was unidentifiable now in the light of day with the snow starting to thaw. How vivid it all was in his memory. But no more vivid than his pleasant interlude in St. Pölten; like a blissful vacation, he would always remember it as lasting little more than a week, when in fact it had been closer to three.1

  Three weeks of eating well, resting in safety, and having his health restored.

  At Linz they changed to a local train for the short journey to Mauthausen, crossing the Danube and doubling back along the north bank. Mauthausen itself was a pleasant little town, nestled in a bow of the Danube beneath roll‑

  ing green hills checkered with fields and woods. Fritz was marched through it, two paces ahead of the NCO and the soldiers, who kept their rifles trained on his back. The locals, accustomed to living in the shadow of the place that lay out of sight in the hills above the town, paid them no heed.

  A winding road led up the valley to the camp. When it came in sight, it was like no concentration camp Fritz had ever seen. He’d heard about it from prisoners transferred to Monowitz, but its appearance was still remarkable—

  Mauthausen was more like a fortress than a camp, with high, thick stone walls topped by walkways and studded with gun emplacements. There was an angle in the wall, in which there stood a massive, beetling stone gatehouse flanked 280

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  at one corner by a squat round tower and at the other by an enormous square turret four stories high. Off to one side, emerging through the melting snow, was a fruit garden, and tucked under the wall was an enclosure containing SS

  barrack buildings. Somewhere within those walls were Fritz’s father and friends.

  Or so he hoped. One could only imagine how harsh the selections would be in such a camp. But Fritz had faith in his father’s strength, and in the destiny that bound them together; deep down he was certain they would be reunited here—

  much sooner than they had expected. Fritz would certainly have a story to tell.

  Instead of taking him through this imposing gate, his Wehrmacht guards turned left and marched him along the road parallel to the outer wall, past the fruit garden. Mauthausen was built on a steep hill, and on the slope just below, Fritz saw a second camp, smaller and more conventional in appearance, with barbed wire fences and basic watch towers. At the corner of the stone wall, the road swung sharply right, and the ground on one side fell steeply away, ending in a sheer drop into a vast, deep pit lined with jagged cliff faces.

  Fritz was looking down into the place that gave Mauthausen its evil name: the granite quarry. Wider and many times deeper than the limestone quarry at Buchenwald, its bottom was a hive of long work sheds teeming with slaves and echoing to the tinkling clangor of picks and chisels on stone; the far rim fell away with the slope of the hill, and on that side was a broad, steep staircase cut into the rock, curving upward in one enormous flight of 186 steps from the bottom of the pit to the rim. Up it hundreds of prisoners were climbing, each carrying a square block of granite on his back. They called it the Stair of Death, and it was the symbol of all that was hideous about Mauthausen.

  Unlike the little Buchenwald quarry, whose main purpose had been to provide materials for the camp itself, this was a full‑scale industrial operation run by the German construction materials company DESt* in conjunction with the SS; the granite extracted here was destined for the monumental building projects conceived by Adolf Hitler. The Führer’s grandiose vision required stone in enormous quantities, and thousands of prisoners had died extract‑

  ing and carrying it. The Stair of Death was the epitome of SS thinking—why install a more efficient mechanical conveyor when criminal and Jewish labor was so cheap and the process so satisfyingly punishing? Injuries and fatalities were constant—the slightest misstep on the staircase would send a man and

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  his granite block tumbling among the others, setting them off like dominoes, breaking limbs and crushing bodies.

  The road around the main camp ran a little way along the edge of the quarry, then turned right into the administrative section, a compound of low barrack huts. Here Fritz’s Wehrmacht guards handed him over to the SS and departed.

  Fritz had been expecting an interrogation and a beating but received nei‑

  ther. An SS sergeant marched him to the main gatehouse. This was another titanic construction of stone, a bit like the Buchenwald gatehouse, but built from granite and much more intimidating, with two towers crowned by glazed watch offices decked with floodlights and machine guns. This was the main entrance to the prisoners’ part of the camp (the gatehouse he’d seen at the front led into a courtyard containing the SS garages).

  Passing through the gate, Fritz found himself looking at a surprisingly small and ordinary interior; it was smaller than Monowitz and filled with rows of similarly basic single‑story wooden barrack blocks on either side of a narrow roll‑call ground. The sergeant disappeared through a door into the gatehouse, ordering Fritz to wait by the wall.

  A few prisoners were hanging around there. One came over and asked Fritz who he was and what he’d been brought here for. Fritz told him his name and that he was from Vienna. The man walked away and came back a few moments later with another prisoner, who had an air of authority and knowingness, clearly some kind of functionary. He was Viennese and had been in Mauthausen for several years. He studied Fritz, chatted a little. Mauthausen was pretty bad, he said, but the one thing you really didn’t want to be was a Jew. Jews lasted no time at all here. With that, he walked off.

  After a few more minutes, the SS sergeant emerged from the gatehouse and, out of the blue, demanded to know whether Fritz had an Auschwitz tattoo. Taken aback, Fritz said no, and to prove it, rolled up his right sleeve.

  The sergeant—who evidently didn’t know much about Auschwitz practices—

  seemed satisfied and put Fritz in the custody of a functionary prisoner who took him to the bathhouse.

  There he met the Viennese prisoner again. This time he introduced him‑

  self properly; his name was Josef Kohl, though everyone called him Pepi for short. Fritz would later learn that Pepi Kohl was the leader of Mauthausen’s resistance. Feeling instantly at ease with him, Fritz admitted the truth for the 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 282

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  first time since his escape. Some of the truth, anyway: the fact that he’d been in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and the story of his escape from the transport, right up to his arrest. He kept quiet about being Jewish; any hope he had of surviving here would depend on that fact remaining hidden. Thank goodness his papa was marked as Aryan.

  For the third time Fritz went through the ritual of being a new prisoner: the shower, the confiscation of his clothes and belongings, the shaving of his head, and finally registration at the prisoner records office. Mauthausen added its own nuances to the system, but the only really significant novelty was that he went through it alone. The camp took in only eight other prisoners that day, and they came in later.

  As his details were being taken, Fritz was told that the sole reason he was brought here was his refusal to give a home
address. It was too late for that now. Perhaps acting on advice from Pepi Kohl, Fritz admitted the truth and was entered on the records as a transferee from Auschwitz who had been in the camp system since October 2, 1939. Better that than be subjected to torture by the camp Gestapo—a certain fate if he’d continued to keep silent.

  The interlude between his escape and his arrival was of no interest to the SS

  here. Neither was his tattoo; it was noted as a distinguishing feature, but the number wasn’t taken down. He told them he was a German Aryan “protective custody” prisoner, and the clerk didn’t bat an eye. Fritz was entered on the record accordingly and assigned the prisoner number 130039.2

  No detailed records had come from Auschwitz, and no inquiries could be made. Auschwitz no longer existed; it had fallen to the Red Army on Janu‑

  ary 27, less than ten days after the evacuation (the same day Fritz boarded the soldiers’ train at Blindenmarkt). The only souls remaining in Monowitz had been the few hundred half‑dead specters in the hospital and their carers, and many of those hadn’t survived long after liberation. Auschwitz and all its secrets were now part of history.3

  Fritz gave the name of his cousin Lintschi as his next of kin, and his real Vienna address. Lintschi was officially Aryan, and there was nobody left at Im Werd 11/16 who could be endangered by association with him. When it came to his trade, he calculated his chances. He’d acquired a lot of varied skills in the camps, but which ones should he admit to? It didn’t look as if there was much call for construction workers here, and he guessed that any surplus labor would wind up in the quarry. He told them he was a heating engineer.4 It was 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 283

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  half true—he’d helped build and fit out the heating plants at both Buchenwald and Monowitz, and he’d learned from his papa how easy it could be to bluff one’s way into a trade.

  Although Fritz’s escape bid had failed in the end, it had done one thing for him: given him respite, during which he’d eaten well and rested, building up his health and strength. He knew well what an advantage this would give him in surviving what was to come.

  Fritz was assigned to block 12, at the end of the main walled enclosure.

  It was unsettlingly close to the camp bunker, which had a gas chamber and crematorium attached. In the next section of the camp, separated by a wall, was the quarantine area and block 20—Mauthausen’s own Death Block, where hundreds of Soviet prisoners of war were kept in appalling conditions, starved and put to murderous hard labor. Fritz learned that there had been a major escape from the Death Block two weeks earlier; the whole camp had been awakened by machine gun fire after the Russians used wet blankets to short the electric fence enclosing that side of the camp. Many had been killed, but four hundred had managed to escape. They were desperate and weak, and for days afterward the local people heard gunshots from the woods as the Russians were hunted down and murdered by the SS.5

  The camp was horribly overcrowded, with some blocks intended for three hundred prisoners holding many times that number. Mauthausen, Buchenwald, and the other concentration camps on Reich soil had been receiving countless transports of prisoners evacuated from Auschwitz and its subcamps.

  Fritz, finding his feet in this new place, was looking forward to his reunion with his papa and friends, who must be somewhere among the multitude. But as he asked around he couldn’t find anyone who knew where they were or who recognized their names. Wherever he inquired, he could find no trace of them. As far as he could gather, although there had been transports from Auschwitz nobody knew of any that had arrived on or around January 26.

  His father simply wasn’t here. Neither were any of their old friends from Monowitz. It was as if they had never been here. But if that was the case, where on Earth were they? Fritz had heard dreadful stories about SS atrocities in Poland and the Ostland—about whole transports of Jews murdered in the forests. Was that what had happened to the Auschwitz transport? Was that the fate Fritz had escaped?

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  Fritz was gone, launched over the side into the freezing night. Pray God he would find his way to home and safety. Gustav sat with his back against the car wall. He was so weak and tired. He’d had no food for days and only a mouthful of snow for moisture. “One man will kill another for a little scrap of bread,” he wrote in his diary. “We are veritable artists of hunger . . . we fish for snow with a mug tied to a string dangled out of the car.”

  Later that night the train with its freight of dying men and frozen corpses crossed the Danube and pulled in at the Mauthausen ramp. The train was sur‑

  rounded by an SS cordon and stood waiting. Hours ticked by; dawn came, and then the morning wore away. Inside the cars, the men who still had strength and wits wondered what was happening. There appeared to be some kind of dispute going on.

  A team of prisoners from the camp came along the train, and to the rav‑

  enous delight of the men aboard they handed out bread and canned food.

  There was little of it—half a loaf and one can between five men—and it was devoured in no time.

  Eventually, with night drawing in again, the train began to groan and move, heading back the way it had come. Mauthausen’s commandant, with his camp full to bursting, had refused to receive the transport.6 It crossed the Danube and as it passed through Linz, it turned west. Where they were being taken, they had no idea, other than that they were heading in the general direction of the German border. In a matter of hours they would be in Bavaria, and if the train carried on in a straight line it would bring them to Munich. That could mean only one thing: Dachau.

  Gustav became aware of voices raised in urgent debate. A dozen of his com‑

  rades—including several of the old Buchenwalders—had been inspired by Fritz’s example and were talking of escape. They appealed to Gustav and to Paul Schmidt, who had been Fritz’s kapo in the Buna Werke and had helped conceal him after his faked death. But Gustav could no more face it than when Fritz had tried to persuade him, and Schmidt also declined to go. As the train left Linz behind, twelve of them climbed the sidewall and leapt over. Despite the scale of the exo‑

  dus there were no shots. The SS seemed oblivious; if more prisoners had had the strength, the train might have reached its destination empty except for the corpses.

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  Whatever the destination was, it wasn’t Dachau. Passing into Bavaria, the train veered due north. Day followed night—and another, and another. By the fifth day since leaving Mauthausen behind, they were in the German prov‑

  ince of Thuringia and appeared to be heading directly for Weimar. Was Gustav going back to Buchenwald? That would be a strange return. But no—the train kept steaming northward, bypassing Weimar, and on Sunday, February 4—

  two weeks to the day since leaving Gleiwitz—it pulled into the freight yard at Nord hausen, an industrial town on the southern fringe of the Harz mountains.7

  It was met by SS and a Sonderkommando from the nearby Mittelbau‑

  Dora concentration camp. Gustav and the other exhausted, wasted prisoners climbed over the sidewalls with difficulty. Once the living had disembarked, the dead were lifted out. By the end of the process, 766 corpses lay stacked on the ground. Gustav had seen some terrible things, but this was among the worst. “Starved and murdered,” he wrote in his diary later, “some frozen to death, and the whole thing not to be described.” Many of the survivors were hardly in better condition than the dead—around six hundred of them died in the two days following their arrival, out of a little over three thousand who had survived the transport.8

  Tucked in a fold in a wooded ridge north of Nordhausen, the concentra‑

  tion camp had originally been founded in 1943 as a satellite
of Buchenwald, code‑named Dora. In October 1944 it had become a main camp and given the name Mittelbau.9 It was about the size of the main camp at Buchenwald, but the buildings were laid out haphazardly and the place was dreadfully over‑

  crowded, with over 19,300 prisoners crammed into its barrack blocks.

  The new arrivals went through the registration procedure, Gustav receiving prisoner number 106498.10 Assigned to blocks, they gave all their attention to the food—“the first warm meal since the start of our fourteen‑day odyssey,”

  Gustav noted. Each man got half a loaf, a portion of margarine, and a chunk of sausage, “on which we pounce like hungry wolves.”

  Gustav remained in the Mittelbau‑Dora camp for only two days. Then he was selected for transfer to one of the smaller satellite camps. There were no transports, so they had to march the whole way, skirting the hill on which Mittelbau‑Dora was built and following the valley northwest to a concentra‑

  tion camp beside the railroad on the edge of the village of Ellrich—a walk of fourteen kilometers.

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  Ellrich concentration camp was by some margin the worst Gustav had yet experienced. It wasn’t large, but it contained around eight thousand prisoners in wretchedly insanitary conditions. Despite intakes from elsewhere, the popu‑

  lation was constantly falling due to the horrific death toll from starvation and disease. From around a hundred deaths per month the previous fall the fatality rate had escalated to nearly five hundred in January. There were no washing or laundry facilities, with the result that lice were endemic; an attempted delousing program in the fall had simply resulted in destroying hundreds of prisoners’

  uniforms, which had never been replaced. When Gustav and the others arrived on February 6, they were confronted by the sight of filthy inmates, many of them in rags, some of them naked but for their underwear. The “unclothed”