The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz
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Jeremy Dronfield
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THE BOY WHO FOLLOWED HIS FATHER INTO AUSCHWITZ
Contents
Preface
Foreword by Kurt Kleinmann
Prologue
Part I
VIENNA 1 ‘When Jewish Blood Drips from the Knife …’
2 Traitors to the People
Part II
BUCHENWALD 3 Blood and Stone: Konzentrationslager Buchenwald
4 The Stone Crusher
5 The Road to Life
6 A Favourable Decision
7 The New World
8 Unworthy of Life
9 A Thousand Kisses
10 A Journey to Death
Part III
AUSCHWITZ 11 A Town Called Oświęcim
12 Auschwitz-Monowitz
13 The End of Gustav Kleinmann, Jew
14 Resistance and Collaboration: The Death of Fritz Kleinmann
15 The Kindness of Strangers
16 Far from Home
17 Resistance and Betrayal
Part IV
SURVIVAL 18 Death Train
19 Mauthausen
20 The End of Days
21 The Long Way Home
Epilogue: Jewish Blood
Bibliography and Sources
Notes
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
To Kurt
and in memory of
Gustav
Tini
Edith
Herta
Fritz
The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future.
Elie Wiesel, Night
Preface
This is a true story. Every person in it, every event, twist and incredible coincidence, is taken from historical sources. One wishes that it were not true, that it had never occurred, so terrible and painful are some of its events. But it all happened, within the memory of the still living.
There are many Holocaust stories, but not like this one. The tale of Gustav and Fritz Kleinmann, father and son, contains elements of all the others but is quite unlike any of them. Very few Jews experienced the Nazi concentration camps from the first mass arrests in the late 1930s through to the Final Solution and eventual liberation. None, to my knowledge, went through the whole inferno together, father and son, from beginning to end, from living under Nazi occupation, to Buchenwald, to Auschwitz and the prisoner resistance against the SS, to the death marches, and then on to Mauthausen, Mittelbau-Dora, Bergen-Belsen – and made it home again alive. Certainly none who left a written record. Luck and courage played a part, but what ultimately kept Gustav and Fritz living was their love and devotion to each other. ‘The boy is my greatest joy,’ Gustav wrote in his secret diary in Buchenwald. ‘We strengthen each other. We are one, inseparable.’ This tie had its ultimate test a year later, when Gustav was transported to Auschwitz – a near-certain death sentence – and Fritz chose to cast aside his own safety in order to accompany him.
I have brought the story to life with all my heart. It reads like a novel. I am a storyteller as much as historian, and yet I haven’t needed to invent or embellish anything; even the fragments of dialogue are quoted or reconstructed from primary sources. The bedrock is the concentration camp diary written by Gustav Kleinmann between October 1939 and July 1945, supplemented by a memoir and interviews given by Fritz in 1997. None of these sources makes easy reading, either emotionally or literally – the diary, written under extreme circumstances, is sketchy, often making cryptic allusions to things beyond the knowledge of the general reader (even Holocaust historians would have to consult their reference works to interpret some passages). Gustav’s motive in writing it was not to make a record but to help preserve his own sanity; its references were comprehensible to him at the time. Once unlocked, it provides a rich and harrowing insight into living the Holocaust week by week, month by month, and year after year. Strikingly, it reveals Gustav’s unbeatable strength and spirit of optimism: ‘… every day I say a prayer to myself,’ he wrote in the sixth year of his incarceration: ‘Do not despair. Grit your teeth – the SS murderers must not beat you.’
Interviews with surviving members of the family have provided additional personal detail. The whole – from Vienna life in the 1930s to the functioning of the camps and the personalities involved – has been backed up by extensive documentary research, including survivor testimony, camp records and other official documents, which have verified the story at every step of the way, even the most extraordinary and incredible.
Jeremy Dronfield, June 2018
Foreword by Kurt Kleinmann
More than seventy years have already passed since the dreadful days described in this book. My family’s story of survival, loss of life and rescue encompasses all those connected to that period who experienced incarceration, lost family members, or who were lucky enough to escape the Nazi regime. It is representative of all who suffered through those days and therefore needs to be never forgotten.
My father’s and brother’s experiences through six years in five different concentration camps are living testimony to the realities of the Holocaust. Their spirit of survival, the bond between father and son, their courage, as well as their luck, are beyond the comprehension of anyone now living, yet kept them alive throughout the entire ordeal.
My mother sensed the danger we were in as soon as Hitler annexed Austria. She helped and encouraged my eldest sister to escape to England in 1939. I lived under Nazi rule in Vienna for three years until my mother secured my passage to the United States in February 1941. That not only saved my life, but also brought me to the home of a loving family who treated me as if I were their own. My second sister was not so fortunate. Both she and my mother were eventually arrested and deported with thousands of other Jews to a death camp near Minsk. I have known for decades that they were killed there, and have even visited the remote location where it took place, but was deeply moved, devastated in fact, to read in this book for the first time exactly how this event happened.
That my father and brother both survived their ordeal is miraculously detailed in this book. I was reunited with them when, drafted into military service in 1953, I returned to Vienna fifteen years after leaving. Over the subsequent years my wife Diane visited Vienna many times with me and our sons, who met their grandfather and uncle. There was a close family relationship that survived separation and the Holocaust and has lasted ever since. Although I did not have trauma or animosity towards Vienna or Austria, that does not mean that I can totally forgive or forget Austria’s past history. In 1966, my father and stepmother visited me and my sister in the United States. Besides us showing them the wonders of our new country, it also provided them with the opportunity to meet my foster family in Massachusetts. That thankful and joyous union brought together those dear to me who were responsible for my existence and my survival.
The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz is a sensitive, vivid yet moving and well-researched story of my family. It is almost difficult for me to describe my gratitude to Jeremy Dronfield for putting it together and writing this book. It is beautifully written, interspersing the memories of myself and my sister with the story of my father and brother in the concentration camps. I am grateful and appreciative that my family’s Holocaust story has been brought to the public’s attention and will not be forgotten.
Kurt Kleinmann
August 2018
Prologue
Austria, January 1945
Fritz Kleinmann shifted with the motion of the tr
ain, shuddering convulsively in the sub-zero gale roaring over the sidewalls of the open freight wagon. Huddled beside him, his father dozed, exhausted. Around them sat dim figures, moonlight picking out the pale stripes of their uniforms and the bones in their faces. It was time for Fritz to make his escape; soon it would be too late.
Eight days had passed since they’d left Auschwitz on this journey. They had walked the first sixty kilometres, the SS driving the thousands of prisoners westward through the snow, away from the advancing Red Army. Intermittent gunshots were heard from the rear of the column as those who couldn’t keep up were murdered. Nobody looked back.
Then they’d been put on trains bound for camps deeper inside the Reich. Fritz and his father managed to stay together, as they had always done. Their transport was for Mauthausen in Austria, where the SS would carry on the task of draining the last dregs of labour from the prisoners before finally exterminating them. One hundred and forty men crammed into each open-topped wagon – at first they’d had to stand, but as the days passed and the cold killed them off, it gradually became possible to sit down. The corpses were stacked at one end of the wagon and their clothing taken to warm the living.
They might be on the brink of death, but these prisoners were the lucky ones, the useful workers – most of their brothers and sisters, wives, mothers and children had been murdered or were being force-marched westward and dying in droves.
Fritz had been a boy when the nightmare began seven years ago; he’d grown to manhood in the Nazi camps, learning, maturing, resisting the pressure to give up hope. He had foreseen this day and prepared for it. Beneath their camp uniforms he and his papa wore civilian clothing, which Fritz had obtained through his friends in the Auschwitz resistance.
The train had paused at Vienna, the city that had once been their home, then turned west, and now they were only fifteen kilometres from their destination. They were back in their homeland, and once they broke free they could pass for local workmen.
Fritz had been delaying the moment, worried about his father. Gustav was fifty-three years old and exhausted – it was a miracle he had survived this far. Now that it came to it, he didn’t have the strength to attempt the escape. The strength wasn’t in him any more. Yet he couldn’t deny his son the chance to live. It would be a wrenching pain to part after so many years of helping one another to survive, but he urged Fritz to go alone. Fritz begged him to come, but it was no good: ‘God protect you,’ his father said. ‘I can’t go, I’m too weak.’
If Fritz didn’t make the attempt soon, it would be too late. He stood up and changed out of the hated uniform; then he embraced his papa, kissed him, and with his help climbed the slippery sidewall of the wagon.
The full blast of the wind at minus thirty degrees hit him hard. He peered anxiously towards the brake houses on the adjacent wagons, occupied by armed SS guards. The moon was bright – two days from the full, rising high and laying a ghostly glow across the snowy landscape, against which any moving shape would be starkly visible.1 The train was thundering along at its maximum speed. Screwing up his courage and hoping for the best, Fritz launched himself into the night and the rushing, freezing air.
Part I
* * *
VIENNA
Seven years earlier …
1. ‘When Jewish Blood Drips from the Knife …’
אבא
Gustav Kleinmann’s lean fingers pushed the fabric under the foot of the sewing machine; the needle chattered, machine-gunning the thread into the material in a long, immaculate curve. Next to his worktable stood the armchair it was intended for, a skeleton of beechwood with taut webbing sinews and innards of horsehair. When the panel was stitched, Gustav fitted it over the arm; his little hammer drove in the nails – plain tacks for the interior, studs with round brass heads for the outer edge, tightly spaced like a row of soldiers’ helmets; in they went with a tap-tapatap.
It was good to work. There wasn’t always enough to go around, and life could be precarious for a middle-aged man with a wife and four children. Gustav was a gifted craftsman but not an astute businessman, although he always muddled through. Born in a tiny village by a lake in the historic kingdom of Galicia,fn1 a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he’d come to Vienna aged fifteen to train as an upholsterer, and then settled here. Called to military service in the spring of the year he turned twenty-one, he’d served in the Great War, been wounded twice and decorated for bravery, and at the war’s end he’d returned to Vienna to resume his humble trade, working his way up to master craftsman. He had married his girl, Tini, during the war, and together they had raised four fine, happy children. And there was Gustav’s life: modest, hard-working; and if not entirely content, he was at least inclined to be cheerful.
The droning of aeroplanes interrupted Gustav’s thoughts; it grew and receded as if they were circling over the city. Curious, he laid down his tools and stepped out into the street.
Im Werd was a busy thoroughfare, noisy with the clop and clatter of horse-drawn carts and the grumbling of lorries, the air thick with the smells of humanity, fumes and horse-dung. For a confusing moment it appeared to Gustav to be snowing – in March! – but it was a blizzard of paper fluttering from the sky, settling on the cobbles and the market stalls of the Karmelitermarkt. He picked one up.
PEOPLE OF AUSTRIA!
For the first time in the history of our Fatherland, the leadership of the state requires an open commitment to our Homeland …1
Propaganda for this Sunday’s vote. The whole country was talking about it, and the whole world was watching. For every man, woman and child in Austria it was a big deal, but for Gustav, as a Jew, it was of the utmost importance – a national vote to settle whether Austria should remain independent from German tyranny.
For five years, Nazi Germany had been looking hungrily across the border at its Austrian neighbour. Adolf Hitler, an Austrian by birth, was obsessed with the idea of bringing his homeland into the German Reich. Although Austria had its own home-grown Nazis eager for unification, most Austrians were opposed to it. Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg was under pressure to give members of the Nazi Party positions in his government, Hitler threatening dire consequences if he didn’t comply – Schuschnigg would be forced out of office and replaced with a Nazi puppet; unification would follow, and Austria would be swallowed by Germany. The country’s 183,000 Jews regarded this prospect with dread.2
The world watched keenly for the outcome. In a desperate last throw of the dice, Schuschnigg had announced a plebiscite – a referendum – in which the people of Austria would decide for themselves whether they wanted to keep their independence. It was a courageous move; Schuschnigg’s predecessor had been assassinated during a failed Nazi coup, and right now Hitler was ready to do just about anything to prevent the vote going ahead. The date had been set for Sunday 13 March 1938.
Nationalist slogans (‘Yes for Independence!’) were pasted and painted on every wall and pavement. And today, with two days to go until the vote, planes were showering Vienna with Schuschnigg’s propaganda. Gustav looked again at the leaflet.
… For a free and Germanic, independent and social, Christian and united Austria! For peace and work and equal rights for all who profess allegiance to the people and the Fatherland.
… The world shall see our will to live; therefore, people of Austria, stand up as one man and vote YES!3
These stirring words held mixed meanings for the Jews. They had their own ideas of Germanism – Gustav, immensely proud of his service to his country in the Great War, considered himself an Austrian first and a Jew second.4 Yet he was excluded from Schuschnigg’s Germanic Christian ideal. He also had reservations about Schuschnigg’s Austrofascist government. Gustav had once been an organizer for the Social Democratic Party of Austria. With the rise of the Austrofascists in 1934, the party had been violently suppressed and outlawed (along with the Nazi Party).
But for the Jews of Austria at this moment, anything was prefer
able to the kind of open persecution going on in Germany. The Jewish newspaper Die Stimme had a banner in today’s edition: ‘We support Austria! Everyone to the ballot boxes!’5 The Orthodox paper Jüdische Presse made the same call: ‘No special request is needed for the Jews of Austria to come out and vote in full strength. They know what this means. Everyone must fulfil his duty!’6
Through secret channels, Hitler had threatened Schuschnigg that if he didn’t call off the plebiscite, Germany would take action to prevent it. At this very moment, while Gustav stood in the street reading the leaflet, German troops were already massing at the border.
אמא
With a glance in the mirror, Tini Kleinmann patted down her coat, gathered her shopping bag and purse, left the apartment and woke the echoes in the stairwell with her neat little heels click-clacking briskly down the flights. She found Gustav standing in the street outside his workshop, which was on the ground floor of the apartment building. He had a leaflet in his hand; the road was littered with them – in the trees, on the rooftops, everywhere. She glanced at it, and shivered; Tini had a feeling of foreboding about it all which Gustav the optimist didn’t quite share. He always thought things would work out for the best; it was both his weakness and his strength.
Tini walked briskly across the cobbles to the market. A lot of the stallholders were peasant farmers who came each morning to sell their produce alongside the Viennese traders. Many of the latter were Jews; indeed, more than half the city’s businesses were Jewish-owned, especially in this area. Local Nazis capitalized on this fact to stir up anti-Semitism among the workers suffering in the economic depression – as if the Jews were not suffering from it too.