The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

by Jeremy Dronfield

  Following interrogation and review, the prisoners were assigned to categories. Those labelled Zurück (return) were put back into confinement to await further processing. The ones marked as Entlassung (dismissal) were released – mostly women, the elderly, adolescents, and foreigners arrested by mistake. The category every man dreaded to hear was Tauglich (able-bodied), which meant Dachau or Buchenwald, or the new name that was being whispered: Mauthausen, a camp they were building in Austria itself.5

  While they waited for their verdicts, Gustav and Fritz were put in a mezzanine room overlooking the yard. Here they could see the source of the noises they had heard. The men outside had been forced into packed ranks with their hands raised, lambasted and abused by stormtroopers armed with sticks and whips. They were made to lie down, stand up, roll around; whipped, kicked, laughed at, their coats and good suits smeared with dirt, their hats trampled on the ground. Some were singled out for severe beatings. Those not taking part in the ‘gymnastics’ were made to chant: ‘We are Jewish criminals! We are Jew-pigs!’

  Throughout this, the regular police, men of long service who knew the Jewish folk of Leopoldstadt, stood by, assisting as required. Although few participated in the abuse, neither did any resist it. At least one senior policeman joined in with the beatings in the courtyard.6

  After a long wait, Fritz’s and Gustav’s verdicts came through. Fritz, only fifteen years old, had been tagged Entlassung. He was free to go. Gustav was marked Zurück: back to the cells. Fritz could do nothing but watch in sick dismay as his papa was force-marched away.

  בן

  It was evening when Fritz left the police station. He walked home alone, passing the familiar entrance of the Prater. He’d walked this route many times before – after swimming with his friends in the Danube, after days out in the park, in a bliss of sweet cakes or buzzing with adrenaline. Now there was just emptiness.

  The streets were sullen and bloodshot, hungover after the previous night’s debauch. Leopoldstadt was devastated, the pavements in the shopping streets and the Karmelitermarkt carpeted with glass shards and splintered wood.

  Fritz came home to the apartment, to the arms of his mother and sisters. ‘Where is Papa?’ they asked. He told them what had happened, and that Papa had been detained. Again the terrible names pushed to the front of their minds: Dachau, Buchenwald. They waited through that night, but no word came; they enquired tentatively, but could learn nothing.

  Around the world, news of the pogrom was met with revulsion. The United States recalled its ambassador from Berlin in protest,7 the President declaring that the news ‘has profoundly affected the American people … I had difficulty believing that such things could occur in the 20th century.’8 In London The Spectator (then a liberal left-wing magazine) said that ‘barbarism in Germany is on so vast a scale, is marked by an inhumanity so diabolical and bears marks of official inspiration so unmistakable that its consequences … are yet beyond prediction’.9

  But the Nazis dismissed the atrocity claims as false reporting designed to distract from the real outrage – the terroristic Jewish murder of a German diplomat. They congratulated themselves on having dealt the Jews a deserved punishment, an ‘expression of a righteous disgust amongst the broadest strata of the German people’.10 Condemnations from abroad were dismissed as ‘dirt and filth fabricated in the known centres of immigration of Paris, London and New York, and guided by the Jewish-influenced world press’.11 Destruction of the synagogues meant that Jews ‘can now no longer hatch plots against the State under cover of religious services’.12

  Fritz, Tini, Herta, Edith and Kurt waited through that Friday, and could discover nothing about Gustav. Then, as dusk fell and the Shabbat began, there was a knock on the door. Nervously, Tini went and opened it. And there he was – her husband, alive.

  Exhausted, famished, dehydrated, gaunter than ever, Gustav walked in like a resurrection from the grave, to an outburst of joyful relief. He told his story. The Nazi officials had taken note of his service in the Great War, and old friends among the police had vouched for his many combat wounds and decorations. The standing order from the top of the SS was that veterans were excluded from the round-up, along with the sick, the elderly and juveniles.13 Even the Nazis wouldn’t go so far yet as to condemn a war hero to a concentration camp. Gustav Kleinmann was free to go.

  Over the next few days, the transports began. Fleets of Grüne Heinrichfn3 police vans drove in relays from police stations all over the city, packed with Jewish men – some of them war veterans too, but lacking Gustav’s decorations or acquaintances in the police. They were all headed towards the same destination: the loading ramp of the Westbahnhof railway station. There the prisoners were herded into freight wagons. Some went to Dachau, some to Buchenwald. Many would never be seen again.

  אבא

  Gustav absently twisted a strip of fabric round his fingers: an offcut, a scrap of waste, a remnant of his livelihood. The street echoed with the sound of hammering as a workman opposite drove nails into the planks covering the broken panes of a Jewish-owned shop. It was Jewish no longer.

  Looking along Im Werd and across at the market and Leopoldsgasse, he picked out the businesses that had once belonged to Jewish friends and were now either empty or in the hands of non-Jews. Like the neighbours who had turned him and Fritz over to the SA, many of the new owners had been friends of the people whose shops they had taken. There was Ochshorn’s perfumery on the far corner of the market square, now owned by Willi Pöschl, a neighbour from Gustav’s building. The butchers, poulterers and fruit sellers had lost their market stalls: Another friend of Gustav’s, Mitzi Steindl, had eagerly participated in pushing out the Jews and seizing their businesses; she’d been poor before all this, and Gustav had often given her work as a seamstress just to help her out.

  With a whole class marked as enemies of the people, and the chance of an instant profit, friend had turned on friend without hesitation or qualm. Many of them revelled in the baiting, the intimidation, plundering, beatings and deportations. In the eyes of all but a few, Jews could not be friends, for how can a dangerous, predatory animal be a friend to a human being? It was inconceivable.

  An English journalist observed: ‘It is true that Jews in Germany have not been formally condemned to death; it has only been made impossible for them to live.’14 In the face of this impossibility, hundreds took their own lives, accepting the inevitable and relieving themselves of this hopeless nothing of a life. Many more decided to leave and find a life elsewhere. Ever since the Anschluss, Austrian Jews had been trying to emigrate, and now their numbers and their desperation increased.

  משפחה

  Gustav and Tini talked about leaving. Tini had relatives and friends who had gone to America many years ago. But leaving the Reich for a better place had become extremely difficult for a Jewish family without wealth or influence. In the five and a half years since the Nazis had taken power in Germany, tens of thousands of Jews had emigrated, but every nation on earth increasingly resisted the flow of migrants and refugees.

  In Austria, Jewish emigration – and life generally – came under the control of Adolf Eichmann. Formerly a clerk with the intelligence and security arm of the SS, the Austrian-born Eichmann had made himself the organization’s foremost expert on Jewish culture and affairs.15 His solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ was, first and foremost, to encourage Jews to leave, via the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. He reactivated the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (IKG), Vienna’s Jewish cultural and welfare organization, forcing its leaders to become part of his apparatus. The IKG compiled information on Jews and coordinated the bureaucracy required for their departure.

  Despite wanting the Jews gone, the Nazis couldn’t resist making it as cruelly hard for them as possible. They stripped them of their wealth as they passed through the system, imposing a variety of extortionate taxes and fines, including an ‘escaping the Reich’ tax of 30 per cent of their assets and an ‘atonement’ tax of 20
per cent (a punishment for Jewry’s ‘abominable crimes’),16 plus hefty bribes and an exchange rate for foreign currency which was pure theft. Moreover, the applicant’s tax clearance was only valid for a few months, and securing a visa often took longer than that. Would-be emigrants were often flung right back to the start and had to pay all over again. As a result, the Nazi government had to lend the IKG money in order to help pay for impoverished Jews to obtain their travel tickets and foreign currency.17 In this way, the Nazis’ own hatred gummed up the workings of the very machine they had created to carry it out.

  Finding a place to emigrate to was the hardest part. Around the world, people condemned the Nazis and criticized their own governments for doing too little to take in refugees. But the campaigners were outnumbered by those who did not want immigrants in their midst, taking their livelihoods and diluting their communities. The German press jeered at the hypocrisy of a world which made so much indignant noise about the supposedly pitiful plight of the Jews but did little or nothing to help. The Spectator called it ‘an outrage, to the Christian conscience especially, that the modern world with all its immense wealth and resources cannot give these exiles a home’.18

  For the Kleinmann family, their city had become, in the words of a British journalist:

  … a city of persecution, a city of sadism … no amount of examples of cruelty and bestiality, can convey to the reader who hasn’t felt it the atmosphere of Vienna, the air which the Austrian Jews must breathe … the terror at every ring of the front-door bell, the smell of cruelty in the air … Feel that atmosphere and you can understand why it is that families and friends split up to emigrate to the corners of the earth.19

  Even after Kristallnacht, foreign governments, the conservative press and the prevailing democratic will continued to stand firm against letting in more than a trickle of Jewish migrants. When people in the West looked to Europe, they saw not only the few hundred thousand Jews in Germany and Austria, but looming behind them the thousands in other Eastern European countries, and the three million in Poland; all these nations had recently enacted anti-Semitic laws.

  ‘It is a shameful spectacle,’ said Adolf Hitler, ‘to see how the whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor tormented Jewish people but remains hardhearted and obdurate when it comes to helping them.’20 Hitler sneered at Roosevelt’s ‘so-called conscience’, while in Westminster MPs from all parties spoke earnestly about the need to help the Jews, but Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare warned of ‘an underlying current of suspicion and anxiety about an alien influx’ and advised against mass immigration.21 However, the members, prompted by Labour MPs George Woods and David Grenfell, insisted on a concerted move to help Jewish children – to save ‘the young generation of a great people’ who ‘have never failed … to make a handsome and generous contribution’ to the way of life of nations which gave them asylum.22

  Meanwhile, Jews in the Reich could only live out their days, queue at the consulates of Western nations, and wait and hope that their applications would be successful. For the thousands in concentration camps, an emigration visa was their only hope. Hundreds in Vienna were homeless, and many were reluctant to apply to emigrate for fear of arrest.23

  Gustav had no money and no property, so he couldn’t raise the funds to buy his way through the bloodsucking bureaucracy. He also felt little confidence in his ability to begin a new life in a strange country. The final word lay with Tini, who simply couldn’t bear the thought of leaving. She was rooted in Vienna, born and bred. At her age, where could she possibly go without feeling torn from her natural place? Her children were another matter. She was especially worried about fifteen-year-old Fritz; the Nazis had taken him once, and might take him again. It wouldn’t be long before he lost the protection of his age.

  In December 1938, over a thousand Jewish children left Vienna for Britain – the first of a projected five thousand accepted by the UK government, living up to its fine words for once.24 Eventually over ten thousand would find safety in Britain through the Kindertransport. Yet even this was just a fraction of those needing refuge. The British proposed opening up Palestine to ten thousand additional children. Tini heard about this proposal and had hopes of placing Fritz on one of the transports;25 he was old enough to cope with being sent away and to support himself through work, which eight-year-old Kurt could not. The talks in Palestine dragged on for months. The Arabs feared being swamped in their own land, losing the majority rights they currently enjoyed and sacrificing all their hopes of a future independent Palestinian state. The talks eventually broke down.26

  While the rest of her family fretted and wavered, Edith Kleinmann was absolutely determined to leave. On top of the degradation and abuse she had suffered, as a lively, outgoing spirit, she couldn’t bear this confinement, which amounted to a kind of captivity. Whatever it took she had to get out.

  Edith had her eyes on America, and had acquired the two affidavits she needed from her mother’s relatives there, who were willing to provide her with shelter and support. Thus prepared, at the end of August 1938 she had registered at the American consulate to begin the application process.27 The system was bursting with applicants, and was deliberately squeezed tight at both ends, by the State Department and the Nazi regime. With the end of the year looming, Edith faced the prospect of being stuck in Vienna forever. After Kristallnacht, impatient with waiting, she decided that England looked like a better prospect.

  Since the early summer, large numbers of Jews – mostly women, who passed more easily through the vetting process – had fixed on Britain as the place to try for. Hopeful advertisements had begun to appear in the classified section of The Times.28 The advertisers ranged from maids, cooks, chauffeurs and nannies to goldsmiths, doctors of law, piano teachers, mechanics, language tutors, gardeners and bookkeepers. Many offered themselves for more lowly work than they were qualified for. The same self-recommendations recurred: ‘good teacher’, ‘perfect cook’, ‘good handyman’, ‘experienced’, ‘excellent character’. As time went on, the advertisements became palpably desperate: ‘any work’, ‘urgently seeks’, ‘with boy aged 10 (in children’s home if necessary)’, ‘immediately’ … the clamouring of people with prison walls rising around them and doors slamming shut.

  Certified domestic servants had the best chance of getting a visa.29 A near neighbour of the Kleinmanns, Elka Jungmann, placed an ad which was typical of the hundreds of others:

  COOK, with long-service testimonials (Jewess), also housekeeper, knows all housework, seeks post.—Elka Jungmann, Vienna 2, Im Werd 11/19.30

  As an apprentice milliner, Edith had no domestic skills to offer, and she wasn’t keen on acquiring any. She dressed well, lived well and saw herself as a lady. Clean the house? It wasn’t in her nature. But Tini took her in hand, teaching her what she could, and obtained her a placement as a maid with a well-off local Jewish family. Edith worked there for one month, and they generously gave her a testimonial certifying that she had worked for six. With amazing good fortune Edith managed to obtain a work contract in England. All she needed now was a visa and clearance from the Nazi authorities.

  This was the hard part. The British government gave out only a handful of visas each day.31 The queue at the British consulate was long and painfully slow. Twenty-four hours a day, all the members of the family took turns holding Edith’s place in line. The cold was bitter, but they kept to their rota as the queue inched forward day by day. The pavements outside the various consulates were clogged with applicants, who were periodically dispersed by the police; sometimes SA men would come by and beat the Jews with rope-ends.32 It took a whole week for Edith’s place to reach the grand doorway of the Palais Caprara-Geymüller, which housed the British consulate.33 She was admitted, and lodged her application. Then she waited. At last, in early January 1939, she was granted her visa.

  Edith’s parting was painful for everyone. None of them could imagine how or when they would ever meet again. She boarded a train
and vanished from their lives into a new existence, leaving a void in the family.

  Within days Edith was aboard a ferry crossing the English Channel, leaving the terror and the abuse and the danger behind her, but also everything she knew and everyone she loved, fearful for what might happen to them. In later years, when she grew old and talked to her children about this time, she would fall silent at this point, as if the pain still remained too sharp, long after all else had lost its bite – this memory of parting more potent than anything that had gone before.

  משפחה

  In Vienna, the besieged Jewish community was a ghost of its former self. A visitor who came in the early summer of 1939 believed it was worse than anything in Germany; whole streets of shops and houses in Leopoldstadt were left vacant where Jews had been evicted; formerly busy streets were deserted, ‘and it looked to us just like a dead city’.34

  The Zionist Youth Aliyah, whose official purpose was to prepare young Jews for kibbutz life in Palestine, did heroic work among the children, providing teaching, training in crafts and medicine, and succour. Over two-thirds of Vienna’s remaining Jews now depended on charity, mostly within their own communities. They went outdoors as little as they could. In most districts it was dangerous for them to be out after dark, especially on evenings when Nazi Party meetings took place; there would always be some brutality after the SS and SA had wound themselves up with speeches. Some districts were too dangerous at any time of day or night.

  In their apartment, the Kleinmann family held together, closing in around the empty space left by Edith. Kurt attended one of the improvised schools, while his brother and sister did what they could to help their parents. That summer, Fritz turned sixteen and had to get a new identity card. Of all the family’s J-Karte photos, Fritz’s – in which the good-looking boy, dressed only in his vest, glared with detestation into the camera – was the only one that would ultimately survive.