Yet Gustav Kleinmann, a hopeful man by nature, believed that his family might be safe – they were, after all, Austrians more than Jews. The Nazis would surely only persecute the devout, the openly Hebraic, the Orthodox … wouldn’t they?
בת
Edith Kleinmann kept her head high as she walked. Like her father she considered herself an Austrian more than a Jew. She thought little of such things – she was eighteen years old; by day she was learning millinery and had ambitions to be a hat designer; in her free hours she had a good time, went out with boys and loved music and dancing. Edith was, above all else, a young woman, with the drives and desires of youth. The boys she went out with were rarely Jewish. This made Gustav uneasy; being Austrian was a fine thing, but he felt that one should still cleave to one’s people. If there was a contradiction there, Gustav didn’t recognize it.
A few days had passed since the arrival of the Germans. They had marched in on the Sunday, the day the abandoned plebiscite would have taken place. Most Jews had stayed indoors, but Edith’s brother Fritz, typically daring, had ventured out to watch. At first, he reported, a few brave Viennese threw stones at the German troops, but they were quickly overwhelmed by the cheering, Heil-Hitlering multitude. When the full German force made its triumphal entrance into the capital, led by Adolf Hitler himself, the columns seemed endless: fleets of gleaming limousines, motorcycles, armoured cars, thousands of field-grey uniforms, helmets and tramping jackboots. The scarlet swastika flags were everywhere – held aloft by the soldiers, hanging from the buildings, fluttering from the cars. Behind the scenes, Heinrich Himmler had flown in and begun the process of taking over the police.20 The plundering of wealthy Jews went on, and suicides were reported daily.
Edith walked briskly. Some kind of disturbance was going on at the corner of the Schiffamtsgasse and Leopoldsgasse, where a large crowd had gathered near the police station.21 Edith could hear laughter and cheering. She went to cross the road, but slowed her step, noticing a familiar face in the press – Vickerl Ecker, an old schoolfriend. His bright, eager eyes met hers.
‘There! She’s one!’22
Faces turned towards her, she heard the word Jewess, and hands gripped her arms, propelling her towards the crowd. She saw Vickerl’s brown shirt, the swastika armband. Then she was through the press of bodies and in the midst of a ring of leering, jeering faces. Half a dozen men and women were on their hands and knees with brushes and buckets, scrubbing the pavement – all Jews, all well dressed. One bewildered woman clutched her hat and gloves in one hand and a scrubbing brush in the other, her immaculate coat trailing on the wet stones.
‘On your knees.’ A brush was put in Edith’s hand and she was pushed to the ground. Vickerl pointed at the Austrian crosses and Say Yes! slogans. ‘Get rid of your filthy propaganda, Jewess.’ The spectators crowed as she began to scrub. There were faces she recognized in the crowd – neighbours, acquaintances, smartly dressed businessmen, prim wives, rough working men and women, all part of the fabric of Edith’s world, transformed into a gloating mob. She scrubbed, but the paint wouldn’t come off. ‘Work suitable for Jews, eh?’ somebody called out and there was more laughter. One of the stormtroopers picked up a man’s bucket and emptied it over him, soaking his camel-hair coat. The crowd cheered.
After an hour or so, the victims were given receipts for their ‘work’ and permitted to go. Edith walked home, stockings torn, clothes soiled, struggling to contain herself, brimming over with shame and degradation.
In the coming weeks these ‘scrubbing games’ became an everyday part of life in Jewish neighbourhoods. The patriotic slogans proved impossible to shift, and often the SA added acid to the water so that it burned and blistered the victims’ hands.23 Fortunately for Edith she wasn’t taken again, but her fifteen-year-old sister, Herta, was among a group forced to scrub the Austrian crosses from the clock pillar in the marketplace. Other Jews were forced to paint anti-Semitic slogans on Jewish-owned shops and businesses in livid red and yellow.
The suddenness with which genteel Vienna had turned was breathtaking – like tearing the soft, comfortable fabric of a familiar couch to reveal sharp springs and nails beneath. Gustav was wrong; the Kleinmanns were not safe. Nobody was safe.
משפחה
They all dressed in their best outfits before leaving the apartment – Gustav wore his Sunday suit; Fritz in schoolboy knickerbocker trousers; Edith, Herta and Tini in their smartest dresses; little Kurt in a sailor suit. In Hans Gemperle’s photography studio they gazed into the camera’s lens as if looking to their own futures. Edith smiled uncomfortably, resting a hand on her mother’s shoulder. Kurt looked contented – at eight he understood little of what the changes in his world might mean – and Fritz displayed the nonchalant ease of a cocky teenager, while Herta – just turning sixteen and a young woman already – was radiant. As Herr Gemperle (who was not a Jew and would thrive in the coming years) clicked his shutter, he caught Gustav’s apprehensiveness and the stoicism of Tini’s dark eyes. They understood now where the world was going, even the sanguine Gustav. It had been Tini’s urging that had brought them to the studio. She had a foreboding that the family might not be together for much longer and wanted to capture her children’s image while she had the chance.
The poison on the streets now began to flow from the offices of government and justice. Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, Austrian Jews were stripped of their citizenship. On 4 April Fritz and all his Jewish schoolfellows were expelled from the Trade School; he also lost his work placement. Edith and Herta were fired from their jobs, and Gustav was no longer able to practise his trade; his workshop was seized and locked up. People were warned not to buy from Jews; those who were caught doing so were made to stand with a sign: ‘I am an Aryan, but a swine – I bought in this Jewish shop.’24
Four weeks after the Anschluss,fn7 Adolf Hitler returned to Vienna. He gave a speech at the Nordwest railway station – just a few hundred metres away from Im Werd – to a crowd of twenty thousand members of the SA, SS and Hitler Youth. ‘I have shown through my life,’ he thundered, ‘that I can do more than those dwarfs who ruled this country into ruin. In a hundred years’ time my name will stand as that of the great son of this country.’25 The crowd exploded into a storm of ‘Sieg Heil!’ repeated over and over, ear-splitting, echoing throughout the Jewish neighbourhoods of Leopoldstadt.
Vienna was decked with swastikas, every newspaper filled with pictures glorifying the Führer. The next day Austria had its long-awaited plebiscite on independence. Jews, of course, were barred from voting. The ballot was firmly controlled and closely monitored by the SS, and to nobody’s surprise the result was 99.7 per cent in favour of the Anschluss. Hitler declared that the result ‘surpassed all my expectations’.26 The bells of Protestant churches across the city rang for fifteen long minutes, and the head of the Evangelical Church ordered services of thanksgiving. The Catholics remained silent, not yet certain if the Führer meant to deal them Jews’ wages.27
Foreign newspapers were banned. Swastika lapel badges began to appear everywhere, and suspicion fell on any man or woman not wearing one.28 In schools, the Heil Hitler salute became part of daily routine after morning prayers. There were ritual book-burnings, and the SS took over the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, the Jewish cultural and religious affairs centre near the Stadttempel, humiliating and baiting the rabbis and other officials who staffed it.29 From now on the IKG would become the government organ through which the ‘Jewish problem’ was handled, and would have to pay ‘compensation’ to the state to occupy its own premises.30 The regime seized Jewish property worth a total of two and a quarter billion Reichsmarks (not including houses and apartments).31
Gustav and Tini struggled to hold their family together. Gustav had a few good Aryan friends in the upholstery trade who gave him employment in their workshops, but it was infrequent. During the summer, Fritz and his mother got work from the owner of the Lower Austrian Dairy, delivering milk in the neighbouri
ng district early in the morning, when the customers wouldn’t know that their milk was being brought by Jews. They earned two pfennigs for each litre they delivered, making up to one mark a day – starvation wages. The family subsisted on meals from the Jewish soup kitchen along the street.
There was no escaping the touch of Nazism. Groups of brown-shirted stormtroopers and Hitler Youth marched in the streets singing:
When Jewish blood drips from the knife,
Then we sing and laugh.
Their songs extolled the hanging of Jews and putting Catholic priests against the wall. Some of the singers were old friends of Fritz’s, who had turned Nazi with shocking suddenness. Some had even joined the local SS unit, the 89th Standarte. The SS were everywhere, demanding identification from passing citizens, proud and pleased in their crisp uniforms and unalloyed power. It infected everything. The word Saujud – Jew-pig – was heard everywhere. Signs saying ‘Aryans only’ appeared on park benches. Fritz and his remaining friends were barred from playing on sports grounds or using swimming pools – which struck Fritz hard, because he loved to swim.
As summer progressed, the anti-Semitic violence subsided, but official sanctions went on, and beneath the surface a pressure was building. A fearful name began to be heard: ‘Keep your head down and your mouth shut,’ said Jews to one another, ‘or you will go to Dachau.’ People began to disappear: prominent figures first – politicians and businessmen – then able-bodied Jewish men were spirited away on flimsy pretexts. Sometimes they were delivered back to their families in ashes. Then another name began to be whispered: Buchenwald. The Konzentrationslager – concentration camps – which had been a feature of Nazi Germany since the beginning, were multiplying.32
Persecution of Jews was becoming thoroughly bureaucratic. Their identities were a matter of special attention. In August it was decreed that if they didn’t already have recognized Hebraic first names, they had to take new middle names – ‘Israel’ for men, ‘Sara’ for women.33 Their identity cards had to be stamped with a ‘J’ – the Juden-Kennkarte, or J-Karte as they called it. In Leopoldstadt, a special procedure was employed. The cardholder, having had their card stamped, was taken into a room with a photographer and several male and female assistants. After being photographed, head and shoulders, the applicant had to strip naked. ‘Despite their utmost reluctance,’ one witness recorded, ‘people had to undress completely … in order to be taken again from all sides.’ They were fingerprinted and measured, ‘during which the men obviously measured the women, hair strength was measured, blood samples taken and everything written down and enumerated’.34 Every Jew was required to go through this degradation, without exception. Some bolted as soon as they got their cards stamped, so the SS began doing the photography first.
By September the situation in Vienna was quiet, and a semblance of normal life began to resume, even for Jews within their communities.35 But the Nazis were far from content with what they had done so far; a spur was needed to push people to the next level of Jew-hatred.
In October an incident occurred in Belgium which foreshadowed what was to come. The port city of Antwerp had a large and prosperous Jewish quarter. On 26 October 1938, two journalists from the Nazi propaganda paper Der Angriff came ashore from a passenger steamer and began taking photographs of the Jewish diamond exchange. They behaved in an intrusive and offensive manner, and several Jews reacted angrily; they tried to eject the journalists, and there was a scuffle in which one of the Germans was hurt and their camera taken.36 In the German press the incident was blown up into an outrageous assault on innocent and helpless German citizens. According to Vienna’s main newspaper, a party of German tourists had been set upon by a gang of fifty Jewish thugs, beaten bloody, and had their property stolen as they lay unconscious. ‘A large part of the Belgian press is silent,’ the paper fumed. ‘This attitude is indicative of the inadequacy of these papers, which are not afraid to make a fuss when a single Jew is held accountable for his crimes.’37 The Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter issued a dire warning that any further acts of Jewish violence against Germans ‘could easily have consequences beyond their sphere of influence, which might be extremely undesirable and unpleasant’.38
The threat was clear, and tensions high.
As November began, anti-Semitic feelings all across the Reich were looking for an outlet. The trigger was pulled far away in Paris, when a Polish Jew called Herschel Grynszpan, in a blaze of rage over the expulsion of his people from Germany – including his own family – took a new-bought revolver into the German Embassy and fired five bullets into Ernst vom Rath, an official chosen at random.
In Vienna the newspapers called the assassination an ‘outrageous provocation’.39 The Jews must be taught a lesson.
Vom Rath died on Wednesday 9 November. That night, the Nazis came out in force on the streets of Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Vienna and every other town and city. Local party officials and the Gestapo were the masters of ceremonies, and under their lead came the SA and the SS, armed with sledgehammers, axes and combustibles. The targets were homes and businesses still in Jewish hands. Jews were beaten and murdered out of hand if they got in the way. The stormtroopers tore down and burned wherever they could, but it was the shattering of glass that onlookers remembered most vividly; the Germans called it Kristallnacht, night of crystal glass,40 for the glittering shards that carpeted the pavements. The Jews would remember it as the November Pogrom.
The general order was that there was to be no looting, only destruction.41 In the chaos that ensued the order was broken many times over, with Jewish homes and businesses robbed under cover of searching for weapons and ‘illegal literature’.42 Jews denounced by their neighbours had their homes invaded, possessions broken, furnishings and clothes slashed and torn by brown-shirted men; mothers shielded their terrified children and couples clung to each other in petrified despair as their homes were violated.
In Leopoldstadt, Jews caught outdoors were driven into the Karmelitermarkt and beaten. After midnight the synagogues were set ablaze, and the rooftops within sight of the Kleinmanns’ apartment glowed orange, illuminated by the flames of the Polnische Schul, the synagogue in Leopoldsgasse. The fire brigade turned out, but the stormtroopers barred them from fighting the fire until the magnificent building had been completely consumed. In the city centre, the Stadttempel, which couldn’t be burned because it adjoined other buildings, was gutted instead; its gorgeous carvings, fittings, and beautiful gold-and-white paintwork were smashed and violated, the ark and the bimah thrown down and broken.
Before dawn, the arrests began. Jews in their thousands – mostly able-bodied men – were snatched from the streets or dragged from their homes by the stormtroopers.
Among the first taken were Gustav and Fritz Kleinmann.
2. Traitors to the People
אבא
They were taken to the district police headquarters, an imposing building of red brick and ashlar near the Prater public park.1 The Kleinmann family had spent many a holiday afternoon in the Prater, strolling the acres of green parkland, relaxing in the beer garden, the children delighting in the rides and sideshows of the funfair. Now, in the gloomy winter morning, the gates were shut and the steel spiderweb of the Ferris wheel loomed over the rooftops like a threat. Gustav and Fritz passed by the park entrance without seeing it, in a lorry packed with other Jewish men from Leopoldstadt.
Father and son had been reported to the stormtroopers by their neighbours: by men who had been Gustav’s close friends – Du-Freundenfn1 – men he had chatted to, smiled at, known and trusted, who knew his children and his life story. Yet without coercion or provocation they had pushed him over the cliff.
At the police station, the prisoners were unloaded and herded into a disused stable building.2 Hundreds of men and women were in there already. Most had been taken from their homes like Gustav and Fritz, hundreds more seized the next morning while lining up outside the embassies and consulates of foreign nations, seek
ing escape;3 others had been snatched randomly off the streets. A barked question: ‘Jude oder Nichtjude?’fn2 And if the answer was ‘Jude’ or if the victim’s appearance even hinted at it – into the back of the lorry. Some were marched through the streets, abused and assaulted by crowds. The Nazis called this the Volksstimme – the voice of the people – and it howled through the streets with a sound of sirens, and in the light of dawn it went on and on; a nightmare from which there would now be no waking.
Six and a half thousand Jews – mostly men – had been taken to police stations across the city,4 and none was fuller than the one by the Prater. The cells had overflowed with the first arrivals, and now people were crammed so tightly in the stable building they had to stand with hands raised; some were made to kneel so that newcomers could crawl over them.
Gustav and Fritz stuck together in the press. The hours wore by as they stood or knelt, hungry, thirsty, joints aching, surrounded by muttering and groans and prayers. From out in the yard came jeering and the sounds of beatings. Every few minutes, two or three people would be called from the room for interrogation. None came back.
Fritz and his father had lost track of the hours they had endured when at last the finger pointed at them and they struggled through the mass of bodies to the door. They were marched to another building and led before a panel of officials. The interrogation was held together by a glue of insults – Jew-pig, traitor to the people, Jewish criminal. Each prisoner was forced to identify with these calumnies, to own them and repeat them. The questions were the same for every man: How much money have you in savings? Are you a homosexual? Are you in a relationship with an Aryan woman? Have you ever helped to perform an abortion? What associations and parties are you a member of?
The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz Page 3