The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

by Jeremy Dronfield

  Gustav and Fritz had only enjoyed a brief stint on drainage work, and had now been assigned to the quarry detail. Forming orderly columns, they were marched out through the main gate, turning right to follow the road leading down between the main camp and the SS barrack complex – a set of large two-storey brick buildings, some still under construction, arranged in an arc like the blades of a fan. The Nazis adored their grand designs, even in their concentration camps – an illusive appearance of elegance, order and meaning to screen the nightmare.

  A little way down the hill, the prisoners passed through the inner sentry line. There were no fences outside the main camp, and the work areas were surrounded by a well-manned cordon of SS sentries. They were spaced at twelve-metre intervals; every second sentry was armed with a rifle or sub-machine gun, and every other with a cudgel. Once inside the sentry line, any prisoner who crossed it was shot without hesitation or challenge. For the desperate, running into the line was a common means of suicide. For certain SS guards, forcing prisoners to run over the line was a favourite means of entertainment. An ‘escape register’ was maintained, recording the names of the SS marksmen and awarding credit for kills, which added up to rewards of vacation time.

  The quarry was large – a pale, raw limestone scar on the green wooded hillside. From it, if one raised one’s head, and the mist and and rain permitted, a vista of broad, rolling countryside stretched to the hazy western horizon. But one didn’t raise one’s head – not for more than a moment. The work was hard, ceaseless, dangerous; the men in stripes dug stone, broke stone, carried stone, and were beaten by the kapos if they slacked. A kapo was expected to be harsh, motivated by the knowledge that if the SS were dissatisfied with him, they would remove his status and put him back among the prisoners, who would exact their revenge.16

  There was a narrow railway in and out, on which huge steel dump wagons ran, each the size of a farm cart, carrying the stone from the quarry to the construction sites around Buchenwald. Gustav and Fritz worked as wagon haulers; all day, they and fourteen other men had to heave and push a laden wagon weighing around four and a half tonnes17 up the hill, a distance of half a kilometre, lashed and yelled at by kapos. The rails were laid on beds of crushed stone, which slipped and grated under the men’s flimsy shoes or wooden clogs. Speed was imperative, and as soon as the wagon was emptied, it had to get back to the quarry at once, running down the return track, propelled by its own weight, with the sixteen men holding on to prevent it racing out of control. Falls were frequent, with fractured limbs and broken heads. Often a wagon would jump the rails, sometimes directly in the path of the next wagon, leaving a trail of men crushed and dismembered.

  The injured would be taken off to the infirmary; or, if they were Jews, to the Death Block – a holding barrack for the terminally sick.18 Men with crippling injuries would be given a lethal injection by an SS doctor.19 Even slight wounds could be life-threatening in the insanitary conditions in which the prisoners lived and worked. For a man with poor eyesight, losing his spectacles could effectively be a death sentence.

  Gustav and Fritz toiled on day after day, managing to avoid both punishment and injury. ‘We are proving ourselves,’ Gustav wrote in his diary.

  So it went on for two weeks. Then, on 25 October, dysentery and fever broke out in the quarantine camp. They had no water supply, and workers in the quarry would drink from puddles; this was believed by some to be the cause. With over 3,500 weakened men crammed into its tents, and sanitation consisting of nothing but a latrine pit, it was a fertile ground for disease. Each day the population was eroded by dozens of deaths.

  Nevertheless, the grinding life of the camp went on. Each day, impoverished rations; each day, standing for hours at roll call in the cold and rain; each day, beatings and injuries. The SS waged a special vendetta against a chief rabbi called Merkl, who was regularly beaten bloody, and eventually forced to run through the sentry line. And all the while the dysentery went unchecked and the death toll rose.

  Some Poles, driven by hunger, cut their way out of the little camp and broke into the main camp kitchens, returning with twelve kilos of syrup, a delight which slightly brightened the prisoners’ diets. It was a short-lived pleasure. The theft was discovered, and the whole of the little camp was punished with two days’ withdrawal of rations. A few days later, a crate of jellied meat was stolen from the store. The prisoners were starved again for two days and forced to stand at attention on the roll-call square from morning until evening. While the punishment parade was still going on, there was a break-in at the piggery in the farm site at the north end of the camp, and a pig was taken. Camp Commandant Koch (who lived in a pleasant house in the Buchenwald complex and went for Sunday walks in Buchenwald’s own zoo with his wife and little children) personally ordered starvation for everyone until the thieves were caught. Every prisoner’s clothing was inspected for signs of blood or sawdust from the pigpen. The punishments and interrogations went on for three days, until it was finally discovered that the thieves were actually SS men.20

  Weakened by starvation, subjected to soul-breaking labour, the living walked silent and hunched like spectres of the already dead.

  Then, suddenly, things got even worse.

  בן

  On Wednesday 8 November 1939, Adolf Hitler flew to Munich to lead the Nazi Party’s annual commemoration of the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, when he and his followers made their first attempt to seize power in Bavaria. Hitler opened the occasion with a speech in the grandiose Bürgerbräukeller beer hall. With the war only just begun and his planned invasion of France facing postponement due to bad weather, the Führer planned to rush back to Berlin, and therefore gave his address an hour earlier than scheduled. Eighteen minutes after his departure – when he should have been in the middle of his speech – a bomb concealed in a pillar exploded with colossal force, obliterating the handful of people standing nearby and injuring dozens of others.21

  Germany was appalled. Although the perpetrator, Georg Elser, was a German communist with no Jewish connections, in Nazi eyes the Jews were responsible for every ill deed. In the concentration camps next day – which happened to be the anniversary of Kristallnacht – they took brutal revenge. In Sachsenhausen the SS subjected the inmates to intimidation and torture, while at Ravensbrück the Jewish women were locked in their barracks for nearly a month.22 But these cruelties paled beside what occurred at Buchenwald.

  Early in the morning of 9 November, all Jewish prisoners, including Gustav and Fritz, were taken from their work details and marched back to the main camp. They were ordered back to their barrack blocks, and when all were confirmed present and correct, SS-Sergeant Johann Blank commenced the ritual punishment.

  Blank was a born sadist. A former forestry apprentice and poacher from Bavaria, he was an enthusiastic participant in the game of forcing prisoners across the sentry line, carrying out many of the murders personally.23 Accompanied by other SS men, still hungover from the previous night’s Putsch celebrations, Blank went from block to block, picking out twenty-one Jews, including a seventeen-year-old boy who had the bad luck to be outdoors on an errand. They were marched to the main gate, where they had to stand while the SS men performed a little parade to coincide with the commemorative march then taking place in Munich. When they were finished, the gate was opened and the twenty-one Jews were herded down the hill towards the quarry.

  Inside their tent, Gustav and Fritz knew nothing of what was going on, other than the sounds that carried their way. For a long while, there was silence. Then, suddenly, there came a crackle of gunfire; then another and another, followed by sporadic shots. Then silence again.24

  Reports of what had happened quickly circulated round the camp. The twenty-one had been marched to the quarry entrance, where they had all been shot. A few had managed to run, only to be hunted down and murdered among the trees.

  The day wasn’t over yet. SS-Sergeant Blank, accompanied by Sergeant Eduard Hinkelmann, now turned their attent
ion to the little camp. They carried out an inspection of the tents, finding fault with everything and working themselves into a fury. They ordered the prisoners out to the roll-call square. When they were lined up, the kapos went along the ranks, grabbing every twentieth man and shoving him forward. They came along Gustav and Fritz’s line: one, two, three … the counting finger danced along, pulsing the beats … seventeen, eighteen, nineteen: the finger went past Gustav … twenty: the finger jabbed at Fritz.

  He was seized and pushed towards the other victims.25

  A heavy wooden table with straps dangling from it was dragged on to the square. Any prisoner who had been here more than a week or two recognized the Bock – the whipping bench. It had been introduced by Deputy Commandant Hüttig as a means of punishing prisoners and entertaining his men.26 Every prisoner had witnessed its use and was terrified by the sight of it. Sergeants Blank and Hinkelmann very much enjoyed putting it to work.

  Fritz was gripped by the arms and, with his insides dissolving, was rushed to the Bock. His jacket and shirt were removed and his trousers pulled down. Hands shoved him face down on the sloping top, forced his ankles through the loops, and tightened the leather strap over his back.

  Gustav watched in helpless dismay as Blank and Hinkelmann prepared; they relished the moment, stroking their bullwhips – ferocious weapons of leather with a steel core. Camp regulations allowed for a minimum of five lashes and a maximum of twenty-five. Today the rage of the SS could be sated by nothing less than the full number.

  The first lash landed like a razor cut across Fritz’s buttocks.

  ‘Count!’ they yelled at him. Fritz had witnessed the ritual before; he knew what was expected. ‘One,’ he said. The bullwhip cut across his flesh again. ‘Two,’ he gasped.

  The SS men were methodical; the lashes were paced to prolong the punishment and heighten the pain and terror of each blow. Fritz struggled to concentrate, knowing that if he lost count the lashes would start over again. Three … four … an eternity, an inferno of pain … ten … eleven … fighting to concentrate, to count correctly, not to give in to despair or unconsciousness.

  At last the count reached twenty-five; the strap was loosed and he was forced to his feet. Before his father’s eyes he was helped away, bleeding, on fire with pain, his mind stunned, as the next unfortunate was dragged to the Bock.

  The obscene ritual dragged on for hours: dozens of men, hundreds of slowly paced blows. Some men succumbed to the distress of the moment, miscounted their strokes and had to begin again. None walked away unbroken.

  אבא

  There was no medical treatment for Jews, no time off, no healing interlude. The victims, cut up and in horrible pain, were thrown immediately back into the daily routine of the camp. They had to soldier on as best they could, because to succumb to pain or sickness here was to give in to death. In Buchenwald, no matter how bad things got, they could always get worse, and regularly did.

  Two days passed, and at morning roll call Fritz stood to attention with considerable difficulty. Despite his pain, he was more worried about his papa than about himself; Gustav wasn’t well at all. The starvation punishment had been renewed; dysentery and fever still plagued the camp, and now Gustav had caught the sickness. He was pale, feverish and afflicted by diarrhoea. Fritz watched him from the corner of his eye as the minutes ticked slowly by. In this state he couldn’t possibly work; he could scarcely stand through roll call.

  Gustav swayed, shivering, his senses withdrawing. Sounds grew faint and muffled, a black haze closed in around his vision, his extremities became suddenly numb, and he felt himself falling, falling, into a black pit. He was unconscious before he hit the ground.

  When he woke, he was on his back. Somewhere indoors. Not the tent. Above him floated the face of Fritz. Another man too. Was this the infirmary? That was impossible; the infirmary was closed to Jews. In his hazy, febrile state, Gustav realized dimly that this must be the block set aside for hopeless cases, from which people rarely emerged alive. The Death Block.

  Fritz and the other man had carried him here – Fritz struggling despite his injuries. The air was thick, stifling, filled with groans and an atmosphere of hopeless, helpless death.

  There were two doctors. One, a German named Haas, was callous and stole from the sick, leaving them to starve. The other was a prisoner, Dr Paul Heller, a young Jewish physician from Prague. Heller did the best he could for his patients with the meagre resources the SS provided.27 Gustav lay helpless for days, with a temperature of 38.8°C, sometimes lucid, sometimes in a fever dream.

  Fritz, meanwhile, was growing ever more worried about conditions in the little camp. They were being starved again. The announcement on the tannoy had been heard so many times it was like a mantra – ‘Food deprivation will be imposed as a disciplinary measure.’ This month alone they had endured eleven days of it. Some of the younger prisoners suggested begging the SS for food. Fritz, who had scarcely begun recovering from his whipping, was among them. The older, wiser prisoners, many of them veterans of the First World War, warned against it. Taking action meant exposure, and exposure meant punishment or death.

  Fritz talked it over with a Viennese friend, Jakob Ihr – nicknamed ‘Itschkerl’ – a boy from the Prater. ‘I don’t care if we have to die,’ said Itschkerl. ‘I’m going to speak to Dr Blies when he comes.’

  Ludwig Blies was the camp doctor; although hardly a kind man, he was more humane – or at least less callous – than some other SS doctors. He had on rare occasions intervened to halt excessive punishments.28 Blies also seemed an approachable figure: middle-aged and disarmingly comical in appearance.29

  ‘All right,’ said Fritz. ‘But I’m coming with you. And I’ll do the talking; you just back me up.’

  When Dr Blies made his next inspection, Fritz and Itschkerl diffidently presented themselves to him. Fritz, being careful not to seem demanding, made his voice quaver with weepy desperation. ‘We have no strength to work,’ he pleaded. ‘Please give us something to eat.’30

  Fritz had weighed his words carefully; rather than seeking pity, he was appealing to the practical SS view of prisoners as a labour resource. But it was also extremely dangerous to appear unable to work; uselessness meant death.

  Blies stared in astonishment. Fritz was small for his age, and appeared little more than a child. With the effects of injury and starvation, he made a pitiful sight. Blies wavered, his humanity vying with his Nazi principles. Abruptly he said, ‘Come with me.’

  Fritz and Itschkerl followed the doctor across the square to the camp kitchens. Commanding them to wait, Blies went into the food store, and came out a few minutes later carrying a large loaf of ration-issue rye bread and a two-litre bowl of soup. ‘Now,’ he said, handing over this astonishing bounty, ‘back to your camp. Go!’

  They shared the food – equivalent to a meal ration for half a dozen men – with their closest bunk-mates. The following day the whole camp was put back on full rations, apparently on Blies’s orders. The two boys were the talk of the camp, and from that day forward Itschkerl became one of Fritz’s best friends.

  As the days wore on, Fritz visited his papa in the Death Block whenever he could. The dysentery had failed to kill him, and the worst was past; however, it was obvious to Gustav that he would never get well in this unsanitary, pestilential environment. After two weeks, he begged to be discharged, but Dr Heller wouldn’t let him go. He was far too weak to survive.

  Gustav was determined; disobeying the doctor’s orders, he asked Fritz to help him to his feet. Father and son slipped out of the Death Block together. The moment he was out in the fresh air Gustav began to feel better; with his arm around Fritz’s shoulders, they made their way back to the little camp, Fritz guiding his papa’s faltering steps.

  Even in the muddy, overcrowded tent the atmosphere felt fresher than in the ward, and Gustav began to regain his strength. The following day he was given light work as a latrine cleaner and furnace stoker;31 he ate better
, and recovered his health a little.

  Fritz too was recovering from his injuries. But there was always a limit to one’s health in Buchenwald. They were both thin; Gustav, who had always been lean, had dwindled to forty-five kilosfn1 during his illness. Fritz’s new reputation for cleverness had made him popular not only with the ordinary prisoners but even with some of the camp seniors – the very highest of the prisoner functionaries. But still the reality remained: any perks were minimal and the consolations little more than a stay of death. ‘I work to forget where I find myself,’ Gustav wrote.

  With their first camp winter beginning to set in, he and Fritz were grateful to receive a parcel of fresh underwear from home. They were allowed to receive such things, but could send out no communications. A letter accompanied the parcel. Tini was trying to arrange for the children – including Fritz – to go to America, but making little progress against the bureaucratic tide. Of Edith there was no news at all. Where she was and what she might be doing were a blank.

  4. The Stone Crusher

  בת

  The night sky over the north of England was deepest black, speckled with stars and banded by the mist of the Milky Way, with a bright slice of a first-quarter moon floating in it. The nation was at war and shrouded in blackout, and the heavens had all illumination to themselves.

  Edith Kleinmann looked up at the same stars that tracked the skies over Vienna, where her family, God willing, were all keeping safe. She received no news at all, only fears. She longed to know how her mother and father, sister and brothers, friends and relatives were. Edith had news of her own that she was bursting to share. She had met a man. Not just any man, but the man. His name was Richard Paltenhoffer, and he was an exile like her.