Occasional letters found their way to Vienna from Edith. They were short and simple. Edith had settled into her work as a maid, and was doing well. She lived in the suburbs of Leeds and worked for a Russian Jewish lady called Mrs Brostoff. She said nothing of her feelings.
Edith’s letters continued to arrive during that summer, then abruptly stopped; on 1 September, Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war, and an impenetrable barrier fell between Edith and her family.
Nine days later, an even worse blow fell upon them. On 10 September, Fritz was seized by the Gestapo.
אבא
A new wave of arrests was sweeping through the Reich. With Germany at war with Poland, all Jews of Polish origin were classed as enemy aliens.35 As an Austrian citizen, born and bred, Gustav should have been safe. However, people who knew him well were aware that he’d been born in the old kingdom of Galicia. Since 1918 Galicia had become part of Poland, and as far as Germany was concerned, any Jew born there was Polish and a security threat.
The hammer blow fell on a Sunday, when Tini was in the apartment with Herta, Fritz and Kurt. There was a loud knock at the door, making them all flinch in terror.
Tini opened the door warily and peeped out. Four men loomed over her, all neighbours. She recognized every face; every line under the eyes and every bristle on their cheeks was a familiar sight. All were working men like Gustav – friends with wives she knew, whose children had once played with hers. There was Friedrich Novacek, an engineering worker, and foremost among them Ludwig Helmhacker, a coalman.36 These were the same men who had turned Gustav over to the authorities on Kristallnacht, and Ludwig and his little gang of Nazi quislings had called many times since.
‘What do you want from us now, Wickerl?’ Tini said in exasperation as they pushed past her into the small apartment. (Despite everything, she couldn’t help calling Ludwig by the familiar diminutive.) ‘You know we’ve got nothing – we don’t even have food.’37
‘We want your husband,’ said Ludwig. ‘We have orders; if Gustlfn4 isn’t here, we’re to take the lad.’ He nodded at Fritz.
Tini felt as if she’d been physically kicked. There was nothing she could say to change what was happening. They took hold of her precious boy and marched him out of the door. Ludwig paused before leaving. ‘See, we’ll take Fritzl to the police, and when Gustl reports, the lad can come home again.’
When Gustav returned later that day, he found his family in a state of panic and grief. When he heard what had happened, he didn’t hesitate; he turned right round and headed for the door, intending to go straight to the police. Tini grabbed his arm. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘They’ll take you.’
‘I’m not leaving Fritzl in their hands.’ He made for the door again.
‘No!’ Tini pleaded. ‘You have to run away, go somewhere and hide.’
There was no shaking him. Leaving Tini in tears, Gustav walked quickly to the police station in Leopoldsgasse. Taking his courage in both hands, he walked right in and up to the desk. The police officer on duty looked up at him. ‘I’m Gustav Kleinmann,’ he said. ‘I’m here to turn myself in. You have my son. Take me and let him go.’
The policeman glanced around. ‘Get out,’ he muttered. ‘Get the hell out of here.’
Bewildered, Gustav left the building. He went home to find Tini both relieved to see him and distraught that Fritz was still gone. ‘I’ll try again tomorrow,’ he said.
‘They’ll come for you before then,’ she said. Again she pleaded with him to run away and hide, but he refused. ‘Get out now,’ she insisted, ‘or I’ll turn on the gas – I’ll kill myself.’ Kurt and Herta watched in horror. Their parents’ resilience was the mainspring of the family; to see them reduced to despair was appalling.
Eventually Tini got through to Gustav. He left the apartment, promising to find a place to hide. All that day and evening Tini waited on tenterhooks, listening out for the knock on the door. It didn’t come; instead, late that night, Gustav himself returned. He had nowhere else to go, and couldn’t bear to leave Tini and the children alone all night. There was no knowing who might be taken next if the Nazis didn’t find him.
At two o’clock in the morning they came – the thundering on the door, the tide of men surging into the apartment, the snapped orders, the hands seizing hold of Gustav, the weeping, pleas, the last desperate words between husband and wife. He was allowed to pack a small bundle of clothes – a sweater, a scarf, a spare pair of socks.38 And then it was all over. The door slammed, and Gustav was gone.
Part II
* * *
BUCHENWALD
3. Blood and Stone: Konzentrationslager Buchenwald
אבא
Making sure he was alone, Gustav took out a little pocket notebook and pencil. He wrote in his clear, angular hand: ‘Arrived in Buchenwald on the 2nd October 1939 after a two-day train journey.’
Over a week had passed since that dreadful arrest, and a lot had happened. Even the most concise account would eat up the notebook’s precious leaves. He’d managed to keep it concealed, knowing it would be the death of him if he were found with it. There was no telling whether he would ever get out of this place. Whatever happened, this diary would be his witness.
He smoothed down the page and continued writing ‘From Weimar railway station we ran to the camp …’
בן
The wagon door groaned open, flooding the inside with light; instantly a hell’s chorus of shrieked orders and snarling guard dogs erupted. Fritz blinked and looked around, stunned by the barrage on his senses.1
It seemed an age since Wickerl Helmhacker and his pals had torn Fritz away from his mother. The only thing he had to console him was that, since he hadn’t been released, that must mean his papa had got away safely.
Fritz had been taken initially to the Hotel Metropole, headquarters of the Vienna Gestapo. Huge numbers of Jewish men had been arrested and the SS were struggling to accommodate them. After a few days in the Gestapo cells, Fritz was transferred with thousands of others to the football stadium near the Prater. There they were kept under guard in crowded, insanitary conditions for nearly three weeks. Eventually they were taken to the Westbahnhof and loaded into cattle wagons.
The journey to Germany dragged on for two days. Fritz, confined in the press of bodies, was rocked by the jolting train and oppressed by the proximity of strangers, a sixteen-year-old boy among a crowd of anxious, sweating men. They were of every kind imaginable: the middle-class father, the businessman, the bespectacled intellectual, the bristle-cheeked workman, the ugly, the handsome, the portly, the terrified, the man who took it all calmly, the man simmering with indignation, the man scared to his bowels. Some were silent, some muttered or prayed, some chattered incessantly. Each man an individual with a mother, a wife, children, cousins, a profession, a place in the life of Vienna. But to the men in uniforms outside the wagon – just livestock.
‘Out, Jew-pigs – now! Out-out-out!’
Out they came into the dazzling light. One thousand and thirty-five Jews – bewildered, seething, confused, scared, dazed – pouring down from the cattle wagons on to the loading ramp of Weimar station into a hailstorm of abuse and blows and snarling dogs.2 A crowd of local people had turned out to watch the transport come in; they stood beyond the SS guards, jeering, smirking, calling out insults.
The prisoners – many carrying bags and bundles and even suitcases – were pushed, beaten and yelled into ranks. From the loading ramp they were herded into a tunnel, then out into the air again, driven along at a run. The crowd followed for a while along the northbound city street.
‘Run, Jew-pigs, run!’
Fritz forced his cramped limbs to run. If any man faltered, turned aside, even looked like he was slackening his pace, or if he spoke to another, the hammer blow of a rifle butt would fall on his shoulders, his back, his head.
These SS men were worse than any Fritz had seen in Vienna; they belonged to the Totenkopfverbände – Death�
�s Head units; their caps and collars bore skull-and-crossbones badges and their brutality was beyond all human reason. Drunkards and sadists with stunted or twisted minds, deformed souls – vested with a sense of destiny and almost limitless power, trained to believe that they were soldiers in a war against the enemy within.
Fritz ran and ran into a seemingly endless hell of violence. The city street gave way to kilometre after kilometre of country road. The prisoners were mocked and spat on. Men who stumbled, weakened by age or fatigue or the burden of their luggage, were immediately shot. A man might stoop to tie a shoelace, or fall over, plead for water, and he would be gunned down without hesitation. The road, climbing a long slope, led into a thick forest. There the prisoners were turned aside on to a new concrete road. Veterans called it the Blood Road. Many prisoners had died making it, and their blood was joined by that of the new arrivals driven along it.
As he ran, lungs bursting, Fritz thought he recognized a familiar tall, lean figure ahead of him. Increasing his pace, Fritz drew level. He had been right – here, in spite of all reason, was his papa! Labouring along, dripping with sweat, with Tini’s little package of spare clothing under his arm.
To Gustav, it was as if Fritz had materialized out of nowhere. This was no occasion for astonishment or emotional reunions. Keeping their mouths shut and sticking close together, they edged deeper into the pack to avoid the random blows, shutting their minds to the sporadic gunshots, and ran on with the herd, up the hill, deeper and deeper into the forest.
The hill was the Ettersberg, broad-backed and covered in dense beech woods. For centuries it had been a hunting ground of the dukes of Saxony-Weimar, and more recently a popular spot for picnics. It had been a retreat for artists and intellectuals, famously associated with writers like Schiller and Goethe.3 The city of Weimar was the very epicentre of German classical cultural heritage; by founding a concentration camp on the Ettersberg, the Nazi regime was placing its own imprint upon that heritage.
At last, after eight kilometres, which had taken the prisoners more than an hour to run, the Blood Road bent northward and emerged into a vast open space cleared in the forest. Scattered across it were buildings of all shapes and sizes, some complete, some still under construction, many hardly begun. These were the barracks and facilities of the SS, the infrastructure of the machine in which the prisoners were both fuel and grist. Buchenwald – named for the picturesque beech forest which made the mountain so pleasant – was more than just a concentration camp; it was a model SS settlement whose scale would eventually rival that of the city itself. What happened here among the beeches would one day cast all of Weimar’s Germanic heritage in shadow. Many of the people imprisoned here called it not Buchenwald but Totenwald – Forest of the Dead.4
Ahead the road was barred by a wide, low gatehouse in a massive fence. This was the entrance to the prison camp itself. On the gateway were two slogans. Above, on the lintel, was inscribed:
RECHT ODER UNRECHT – MEIN VATERLAND
My country, right or wrong: the very essence of nationalism and fascism. And wrought into the ironwork of the gate itself:
JEDEM DAS SEINE
To each his own. It could also be read as Each person gets what he deserves.
Exhausted, sweating, bleeding, the new arrivals were herded through the gate. There were now 1,010 of them; twenty-five of the men who had set out from Vienna were now corpses along the Blood Road.5
They found themselves within an impenetrable cordon: the huge camp was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence with twenty-two watchtowers at intervals, decked with floodlights and machine guns; the fence was three metres high and electrified, with a lethal 380 volts running through it. The outside was patrolled by sentries, and inside was a sandy strip called the ‘neutral zone’; any prisoner stepping on it would be shot.6
Immediately inside the gate was a large parade ground – the Appelplatz, or roll-call square. Ahead and along one side were barrack huts which marched in orderly, radiating rows down the hill slope, with bigger two-storey blocks beyond. Gustav and Fritz and the rest of the newcomers were ordered into ranks in the roll-call square. They stood at gunpoint, awkward and dishevelled in their soiled business suits and work clothes, sweaters and shirts, raincoats, fedoras and office shoes, caps and hobnail boots, bearded, bald, slicked hair, tousled mops. While they stood, the bodies of the men murdered along the road were carried in and dumped among them.
A group of finely dressed SS officers appeared. One, a middle-aged, pouchy-faced man with a slouching posture, stood out. This, they would learn later, was Camp Commandant Karl Otto Koch. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you Jew-pigs are here now. You cannot get out of this camp once you are in it. Remember that – you will not get out alive.’
The men were entered in the camp register, and each assigned a prisoner number: Fritz Kleinmann – 7290; Gustav Kleinmann – 7291.7 Orders came in a confusing barrage which many of the Viennese found hard to understand, unaccustomed to German dialects. They were made to strip naked and march to the bath block, where they showered in almost unbearably hot water (some were too weak to stand it, and collapsed). Then came immersion in a vat of searing disinfectant.8 Naked, they sat in a yard to have their heads sheared, and under yet another rain of blows from rifle butts and cudgels were made to run back to the roll-call square.
There they were issued with camp uniforms: long drawers, socks, shoes, shirt, and the distinctive blue-striped trousers and jacket, all ill-fitting. If desired, for twelve marks a prisoner could buy a sweater and gloves,9 but few had so much as a pfennig. All their own clothes and belongings – including Gustav’s little package – were taken away.
Scalps shaved, dressed in uniform, the new arrivals were no longer individuals but a homogeneous mass identified only by their numbers, the only distinguishing features an occasional fat belly or a head standing higher than the rest. The violence of their arrival had impressed on them that they were the property of the SS, to do with as it saw fit. Each man had been issued with a strip of cloth with his prisoner number on it, which he was required to sew on to the breast of his uniform, along with a symbol. Examining his, Fritz saw that it was a Star of David made up of a yellow and a red triangle superimposed. All the other men had the same. The red triangle denoted that, having been arrested on the pretext that they were Jewish–Polish enemy aliens, they were under so-called ‘protective custody’ (meaning ‘protection’ for the state).10
The prisoners were now inspected by another SS officer, who had a flat face like the back of a shovel. This, they would learn, was Deputy Commandant Hans Hüttig, a dedicated sadist. Surveying them with disgust, he shook his head and said, ‘It’s unbelievable that such people have been allowed to walk around free until now.’11
They were marched to the ‘little camp’, a quarantine enclosure on the western edge of the roll-call square surrounded by a double cordon of barbed wire. Inside, rather than barrack huts, were four huge tents containing wooden bunks four tiers high.12 In recent weeks, over eight thousand new prisoners had arrived at Buchenwald, more than twenty times the usual rate of intake,13 and the tents were full to bursting.
Gustav and Fritz found themselves sharing a bunk space only two metres wide with three other men. There were no mattresses, just bare wooden planks. They had a blanket each, so they were at least warm. Squeezed in like sardines and their bellies empty, they were so dead-tired they fell asleep right away.
The following day, the new prisoners were registered with the camp Gestapo – photographed, fingerprinted and briefly interrogated, a process which took all morning. In the afternoon they received their first warm food: a half-litre of soupy stew containing unpeeled potatoes and turnips, with a little fat and meat floating in it. The evening meal consisted of a quarter-loaf of bread and a little piece of sausage. The bread was provided in whole loaves, and as there were no knives, sharing it out was a haphazard business which usually led to disputes and jealous quarrels.
For eight days they
were left in quarantine, then put to work. Most were set to hard labour in the nearby stone quarry, but Gustav and Fritz were employed on maintaining the canteen drains. All day long the workers were abused and slave-driven. Gustav wrote in his diary: ‘I have seen how prisoners get beaten by the SS, so I look out for my boy. It’s done by eye contact; I understand the situation and I know how to conduct myself. Fritzl gets it too.’
So ended his first entry. He looked back over what he had written so far, just two and a half pages to bring them this far, through this much distress and danger. Eight days gone. How many more to come?14
אבא
Gustav understood that to stay safe it was vital to remain unnoticed. But within two months of arriving in Buchenwald, both he and Fritz drew attention to themselves in the most dangerous way possible – Gustav unwillingly, Fritz deliberately.15
Each morning, an hour and a half before dawn, shrill whistles yanked them from the forgetfulness of sleep. Then came the kapos and the block senior, yelling at them to hurry. These men were a shock to new arrivals; they were fellow prisoners – mostly ‘green men’, criminals who wore the green triangle on their uniforms – appointed by the SS to act as slave drivers and barrack overseers, allowing the SS guards to keep a distance from the mass of prisoners.
As the whistles shrilled, Fritz and Gustav put on their shoes and scrambled down, sinking to their ankles in cold mud on the bare floor. Outside, the camp was ablaze with electric light along the fence lines, atop the guard towers and in the walkways and open areas. They were herded to the square for roll call, receiving a cup of acorn coffee each. It was sweet but had no power to stimulate, and was always cold by the time they got it. Doling it out was a long process, and they had to stand in silence, motionless and shivering in their thin clothes for two hours. When it was time to go to work, sunrise was beginning to lighten the landscape.
The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz Page 5