Experts in typhus and famine relief were brought in, along with general medical staff. It was traumatic for all of them. One English nurse who arrived on April 19 felt shame and remorse that, having heard of the existence of such camps as early as 1934, she had never realized—and hadn’t wanted to real‑
ize—that they could be like this. She and her colleagues were “stirred with a cold anger against those primarily responsible, the Germans, an anger which 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 302
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grew daily at Belsen.”21 Others were shocked by how abuse and extreme deg‑
radation had reduced many survivors to an animalistic state, fighting for food, eating voraciously from bowls that they had just used as bedpans, with only a wipe with a rag between uses, living among rotting corpses without noticing the choking stench.22
It was measure of the state of these survivors that the Mittelbau transferees, wasted and starved as they were, were considered relatively fit and healthy. The influx from the main camp raised a problem for them: it brought typhus into their vicinity. The infected were put in a set of buildings that were cordoned off, but their presence still increased the risk that it would spread throughout the barracks.
Gustav was not alone in desperately wanting to leave this terrible, haunted place. He wasn’t sick, but like everyone else he was under quarantine. Also, there was still fighting going on outside the neutral zone, and it was still dan‑
gerous out there. Nonetheless, Gustav was itching to go.
On April 25, the first repatriation transports were allowed to leave. Those who departed were a selection of French, Belgian, and Dutch survivors. The way to their homelands lay to the west, in liberated countries. Those who came from Germany, Austria, Poland, Russia, and Hungary would have to wait, regardless of their state of health. Their countries were either war zones or still in German hands. Some were now Soviet‑occupied territory, and repatriation would present a whole new world of difficulties. Moreover, within German‑held territory there were still concentration camps not yet liberated—Mauthausen‑
Gusen, for one, where at that very moment the SS leadership were plotting to murder all the prisoners by trapping them in the tunnels.
Gustav watched the transports go with longing. It gave him hope, but as the days passed and no further transports left, he started growing impatient.
It was now over two weeks since the British had liberated the camp. It didn’t matter that it was irrational, that Austria wasn’t yet free, Gustav was sure he could find his way home. He believed that Fritz would be in Vienna now, waiting for him. Gustav needed to get back there somehow.
He waited until the weekend was over, and on the morning of Monday, April 30, Gustav set out. Taking his few belongings and a little food, he walked out of his barrack block and along the asphalt path, heading for the road. A Hungarian soldier stepped in front of him, rifle raised. Where did he think he was going? Gustav told him he was leaving, going home. There was a look in 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 303
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the soldier’s eyes no different from the expression Gustav had seen in hundreds of SS guards—the look of an anti‑Semitic fascist regarding a Jewish prisoner.
Until two weeks ago this soldier had been fighting alongside the Nazis. Gustav went to walk past him. The soldier swung his rifle‑butt and smacked Gustav in the chest. “Try that again and I’ll shoot you,” he said.
Gustav staggered, then turned and went back to his barrack. He was trapped in this place, liberated but not free.
Fritz stood waiting amid the dense crowd of prisoners in the chilly, dripping, cavernous tunnel, wondering what was going on. Minutes ticked by, but there were no sounds of airplanes, no thump of explosions: just the echoing susurrus of tens of thousands of prisoners breathing and murmuring to one another.
Hours passed. The prisoners, who were accustomed to standing at roll calls that dragged on just like this, thought little of it. A false alarm, presumably.
At least they weren’t having to work.
Most of them would never learn the true reason why they’d been lured into the tunnels, would never be aware of the complications that kept them standing there for so many hours. The explosive charges, bombs, and mines embedded around the entrance were failing to detonate. Paul Wolfram, the DESt manager in charge of blowing up the tunnel entrance, would later claim that it was reluctance on his part to commit mass murder, adding that the bombs and mines had no detonators. Commandant Ziereis—who spent much of this period drunk—claimed that he had reservations about the whole busi‑
ness. But a story among some of the survivors claimed that a Polish prisoner named Władvsłava Palonka, an electrician, had discovered the detonation wires and cut them.23
At 4:00 pm the all‑clear sounded, and the prisoners who had walked in unknowingly to their deaths walked out again and filed back to their blocks in the camps. For the time being they were safe, rescued at the last minute either by an uncharacteristic failure of the SS’s murderous instincts or an ingenious act of daring by a resourceful prisoner. Had it succeeded, it would have killed over twenty thousand and would have been one of the largest single acts of mass murder in the history of Europe.24
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Routine resumed for a couple days, but on Tuesday, May 1, the prison‑
ers were not sent to work. For Fritz there was a sense of déjà vu; the mood among the SS was like at Monowitz in the middle of January, but now the panic was deeper.
On May 3, all the SS guards disappeared from the camp. The fanatical Nazis among them had gone off intending to fight a last‑ditch defense in the mountains, while the rest shed their uniforms and went into hiding among the civilian populations in the cities. Command of Mauthausen‑Gusen was officially handed over to the Vienna civil police force, and camp administra‑
tion fell to the Luftwaffe. They were aided by a detachment of the Vienna fire service who had come here as political prisoners in 1944.25 There would be no evacuation from Mauthausen. There was nowhere left to go.
The Allies were closing in on Austria from three directions. In the south, the 15th Army Group—an international force of Americans, British, Canadians, Poles, Indians, New Zealanders, and one Jewish Brigade—was pushing into the South Tyrol, the mountainous borderland between Italy and Austria. It was here that the Nazis had been hoping to make a last stand in an imaginary
“Alpine Fortress” that they had never gotten around to creating.
In the east, the Red Army had crossed the Hungarian‑Austrian border at the end of March and immediately began moving to encircle Vienna. By April 6, the city was surrounded by two Soviet armies and under siege. The German forces remaining in Vienna—around forty thousand troops with only twenty‑six functioning tanks—were hopelessly insufficient to defend it against the vastly superior Soviet force, and the siege was short lived. By April 7, Soviet troops were in the southern part of the inner city, and on April 10 the Ger‑
mans evacuated the districts east of the Danube Canal, including Leopoldstadt.
The Danube bridges were captured, and on April 13, the last SS armored unit abandoned the city.26 Vienna was liberated from the Nazis seven years almost to the day since Hitler had held his bogus plebiscite to consolidate his political grip on Austria. Now he was trapped in his Berlin bunker and his grand Reich was reduced to a tiny, bleeding stump.
The third spearhead into Austria came from the northwest, where the American 65th Infantry Division, part of General Patton’s Third Army, crossed the Bavarian stretch of the Danube on April 27 against stiff German resistance.
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XII Corps into Austria north of the Danube, less than a hundred kilometers northwest of Linz and Mauthausen. They faced heavy fighting from fanati‑
cal German forces who had taken to hanging deserters from roadside trees.27
Leading the American advance was the 11th Armored Division, and on May 5, as the advance pushed down the Danube, the very tip of the spearpoint consisted of a patrol from the 41st Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron and a platoon from the 55th Armored Infantry Battalion. Probing the Danube val‑
ley east of Linz they came to the villages of St. Georgen and Gusen, and first laid eyes on the camps.
For sheer horror, Mauthausen and Gusen rivaled Bergen‑Belsen, which had been liberated three weeks earlier. Like Belsen, Mauthausen had been a sink into which the SS concentration camps had drained. Tens of thousands of prisoners had been transferred here, and the death rate had spiraled to over nine thousand a month. The walking cadavers in striped uniforms who greeted the American liberators were found to be living among tens of thousands of their unburied, half‑buried, or half‑burned dead. The stench of it was what stuck in the minds of the GIs. “The smell and the stink of the dead and the dying, the smell and the stink of the starving,” recalled one officer. “Yes, it is the smell, the odor of the death camp that makes it burn in the nostrils and memory. I will always smell Mauthausen.”28
Olive‑green tanks bearing the white American star, scarred and weathered, rolled into the camp compounds. In Gusen I, Sergeant Albert J. Kosiek from Chicago stood on top of his Sherman and yelled in English to the crowd of emaciated prisoners, “Brothers, you are free!”29 His announcement was trans‑
lated into all the prisoners’ languages by a representative of the International Red Cross; bursts of various national anthems came from the crowd, and the Volkssturm officer in command of the German guards presented his sword to Sergeant Kosiek.
In Gusen II, Fritz Kleinmann greeted his liberation without any overwhelm‑
ing joy. He was too weak and demoralized to celebrate with any fervor. The typical life expectancy for a prisoner in Mauthausen‑Gusen was four months, even if he began from a state of robust health. Fritz, having been only pass‑
ably healthy when he arrived, had experienced three months. He was scarcely alive, little more than bones shrouded in skin, marked with bruises and sores.
The spirit of resistance and the system of support that had kept Fritz going in Buchenwald and Auschwitz had been absent in Mauthausen‑Gusen. He had 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 306
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no real comrades, only fellow sufferers. “I was utterly demolished there,” he wrote.30 Now that he was free, he was too weak and sick to go home, if there was even a home to return to.
Nursing his bruised ribs, Gustav walked back to his block. Getting out of Bergen‑Belsen was going to be trickier than he’d anticipated. He talked it over with a fel ow Viennese, a man named Josef Berger, who was also desperate to go home.
That afternoon, the two men left the building and hung around, watching the sentries. At last came the moment they were waiting for: the changing of the guard. While the soldiers were distracted, Gustav and Josef made a dash for it—not toward the road this time but in the direction of the woodlands fringing the northern and western edges of the camp. They were between sentry posts when there was a shout in Hungarian and the crack of a rifle, the bul‑
let snapping over their heads. Another shot zipped past, and they both threw themselves flat on the ground. Bullets thwacked into the turf around them, and they crawled on. As soon as there was a pause in the shooting, the two men jumped to their feet and made a break for the woods, dodging, hurling themselves among the trees and out the other side. They ran on through the Russian section of the camp and into the forest on the far side.
After a kilometer or so, Gustav and Josef stopped to catch their breath.
There were no sounds of pursuit; just birdsong and the muffled silence of the forest. They sank down to rest. Gustav looked around him, gazed up at the sky, and inhaled the fir‑scented air. The very smell of it gave him joy; it was the scent of freedom. “Finally free!” he wrote in his diary. “The air around us is indescribable.” For the first time in years, the atmosphere was untainted by the odors of death and labor and unwashed human hordes.
They weren’t safe yet; they had to keep going. The front lines lay east, so for the time being they turned their backs on their homeland and pressed on west by north through the forest. All afternoon and into the evening they walked, passing several tiny hamlets scattered among the woods—German places, where they didn’t dare ask for help. Eventually, after around twenty kilometers, they emerged from the forest into the small village of Osterheide. On the outskirts 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 307
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there was a large prisoner of war camp—Stalag XI—that had been liberated by the British the day after Belsen.31 It had been evacuated several days ago and was in the process of being converted into an internment camp for Nazi party members. However, there was still a population of Russian POWs, who gave the itinerant Viennese bed and board for the night.
Next morning, May 1, Gustav and Josef walked on into the nearby town of Bad Fallingbostel, which was in British hands. It was a small, pleasant spa town, choked with refugees and troops. Gustav and Josef presented themselves to the British authorities in charge but were told that nothing could be done for them right away—they ought to be in one of the displaced persons camps for refugees and former camp inmates. They tried applying to the German mayor’s office, where they fared much better, assigned accommodation in a hotel and a food ration.
Gustav found himself a week’s employment as a saddler with a local uphol‑
sterer named Brokman. For the first time in seven years, he worked for decent pay, earned his bread, and was treated as a citizen. He began to recover from the ordeal he’d been through. In his room at the hotel, he brought out the little green notebook that had accompanied him since the early days. On the first page was the entry: “Arrived in Buchenwald on the 2nd October 1939 after a two‑day train journey. From Weimar train station we ran to the camp . . .”
So began the record of his captivity. Now he started recording his liberty.
“At last one is a free man, and can do as one pleases,” he wrote. “Only one thing nags at me, and that is the uncertainty about my family at home.”
It would continue to prey on his mind, so long as the remnants of the Nazi regime remained, still fighting, across the territory between himself and his homeland.
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21 The Long
W a y H o m e
PETER PALTENHOFFER, LOOKING OUT the front window of the apart‑
ment, could see all of London laid out before him. The grandly named Spring Mansions—a genteel three‑story Victorian townhouse—stood at the corner of Gondar Gardens, where the road dropped down a steep hill. Just beyond, the line of the railroad could be seen, and beyond that the Kilburn High Road, which cut a straight line all the way to Westminster in the bomb‑scarred heart of London.
The war was all but over, but the wounds would take a long time to heal.
Peter had missed a lot of it. He had been evacuated for a while to a farm near Gloucester in the west of England. Little of it stuck in his memory—the walks to church on a Sunday (their hosts were not Jewish), the gander that would bite his backside when he ran to the outhouse, the country lanes. His memories before that were even more cloudy, and when he came home to his parents and his baby sister, Joan, it was no longer the same place—his parents had left Leeds and moved to this little apartment in London.
Peter had known nothing in his short life but England and the war. He was British by birth, language, an
d accent; his parents, conscious of the hostility to all things German in this country, never spoke anything but English in the house.
Bringing Peter back from Gloucestershire had turned out to be premature.
Although the Blitz had finished, a rash of devastating V‑2 rockets had hit the capital. There was never any warning, just a massive explosion. Nonetheless, his mother would grab him and Joan and rush them to the shelter, snatching the gas masks off the hall table in passing.
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As Peter watched, a mailman wheeled his bicycle up the hill and posted a bundle of letters through the street door. A few minutes passed, then he heard footsteps racing up the stairs, and his mother’s excited voice. She appeared holding an opened letter. The envelope was covered with scratched‑out and rewritten addresses. Peter couldn’t make out what the excitement was about; she just kept repeating that her father—Peter’s grandfather—was alive. Alive.
Edith wrote immediately to Kurt to tell him the news.
Kurt was fifteen now, prospering at school, growing into the community of New Bedford, and becoming more American all the time. He sold war bonds, went to camp, and rose to be an Eagle Scout. Vienna was draining out of him. He was forgetting his old self, forgetting his mother language. But his life was idyl ic.
Elated by the news, he tried writing to his father via the International Red Cross, and when no reply came, Judge Barnet contacted his acquaintance Leverett Saltonstall, United States senator for Massachusetts, seeking help. Sam Barnet was amazed that Kurt’s father was still alive: “Dear Lev,” he wrote,
“I know that you will agree with me . . . that only through the intervention of God himself could anyone have lived through six years of slavery in any concentration camp.” He asked his friend to inquire about opening a channel of communication.1
The senator’s response was not encouraging. Communication with dis‑
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