The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

by Jeremy Dronfield

  Her first few months in England had been uneventful. Her work placement, arranged through the Jewish Refugees Committee, the JRC, was as a live-in maid with a Mrs Rebecca Brostoff, a Jewish lady in her sixties who had a prominent wart on her nose and a home in the quiet suburbs. Her husband, Morris, was a bristle merchant, and they were modestly well off. Both had been born in Russia and had been refugees themselves in their youth.1

  Leeds was nothing like Vienna; it was a sprawling industrial city, all soot-blackened brick and English Victorian architecture, long streets of small, begrimed factory-workers’ houses, grand public buildings and grey, smoky skies. But there were no Nazis here, and although anti-Semitism existed, there was no Jew-baiting, no exclusion, no scrubbing games, no Dachau or Buchenwald.

  Many British people were glad to give German Jews a refuge, but some were not, and the government was caught between the two. The press spoke for and against them – emphasizing the contribution they made to the economy and the plight they faced in their home country – while on the other hand British workers worried about their jobs, and their fears were played upon by the right-wing papers. Allegations were made about the criminal tendencies and shiftlessness of Jews, and the threat they posed to the British way of life. But still, there were no actual Nazis, no SA or SS. With the outbreak of war, the government had begun screening foreign nationals and interning enemy aliens; Edith, as a refugee from Nazism, was naturally exempt.2 And that, it seemed, was that.

  Mrs Brostoff treated Edith – not the world’s most natural domestic servant – kindly, and Edith was content on a decent weekly wage of three pounds.

  With the country mired in the Phoney War (or the Bore War as some called it), Edith’s first winter in England was marked not by conflict but by romance. She had known Richard Paltenhoffer slightly in Vienna; he was the same age, and they had moved in the same circles. In England they met again, and fell in love.

  Richard had been through hell since Edith had last seen him. In June 1938 he’d been picked up by the Vienna SS, under the so-called Action Work-Shy Reich. This programme was meant to sweep the ‘asocial’ element in German society off the streets and into the concentration camps – the ‘useless mouths’, the unemployed, beggars, drunks, drug addicts, pimps and petty crooks. Nearly ten thousand people were rounded up this way – many, like Richard Paltenhoffer, just Jews who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.3 Richard had been sent to Dachau, then transferred to Buchenwald,4 at that time an even worse place than when Fritz and Gustav Kleinmann arrived a year later, more overcrowded and with even more primitive conditions.5 On one of the regular punishment parades which usually followed evening roll call, a man standing in front of Richard had been bayoneted by an SS guard. The blade passed right through the man, who fell back against Richard, and impaled Richard’s leg. The wound gave him trouble for months afterwards, but luckily he hadn’t succumbed to infection. He was ultimately saved by an extraordinary stroke of luck. In April 1939, to mark Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, Himmler agreed to a celebratory mass amnesty of nearly nine thousand concentration camp prisoners.6 Among them was Richard Paltenhoffer.

  Instead of returning to Vienna he crossed the border into Switzerland. The Austrian Boy Scouts organization helped him obtain the necessary travel permit to go to England. By the end of May he was on his way to Leeds, where he was found a job in a factory making kosher biscuits.7

  Edith and Richard had both been welcomed into the large and thriving Jewish community in the city, which had its own active branch of the Jewish Refugees Committee. With a tiny budget of £250 a year, local volunteers helped hundreds find homes and work in Leeds.8

  It was through a social club for young Jews that Edith and Richard found each other. In Edith’s eyes, Richard Paltenhoffer was a reminder of home and the life she had lost – the lively society and her career in fashion rather than in sweeping carpets. Richard was a genial, attractive figure. He had a beaming smile and liked to laugh, and he dressed sharply – nicely cut chalk-stripe suits and a fedora, always with a handkerchief tucked just so in the breast pocket. Among the Yorkshire working men in their serge, woollen scarves and flat caps, Richard stood out like an exotic bloom in a potato field.

  A war – even a phoney war – was a time of possibility for the young, and with two high spirits far from home it was almost inevitable that they would enjoy themselves to the full. Christmas was past, and January scarcely over when Edith discovered she was pregnant. They started making arrangements for a wedding.

  As refugees, any change of status had to be registered with the government. At nine thirty sharp on a Monday morning in February, they presented themselves at the office of Rabbi Arthur Super at the Leeds New Synagogue, and from there they all went to the police station to fill in the required forms. Then, with help from the United Hebrew Congregation, the JRC Control Committee and a Rabbi Fisher, late of the Stadttempel in Vienna, the prospective marriage was arranged.9

  With bureaucracy satisfied, on Sunday 17 March 1940, Edith Kleinmann married Richard Paltenhoffer at the New Synagogue in Chapeltown Road, a remarkable modern building of green copper domes and brick arches in the heart of Leeds’ own equivalent of Leopoldstadt.

  Two months later, Adolf Hitler launched his invasion of Belgium, the Netherlands and France. Within a month, the remnant of the British Expeditionary Force had to be evacuated from the beach at Dunkirk. The Phoney War was over. The Germans were on their way, and seemingly unstoppable.

  אבא

  ‘Left–two–three! Left–two–three!’

  The kapo barked out the time as the team pulled the quarry wagon up the rails. ‘Left–two–three! Left–two–three!’ Fritz’s shoes slithered on the ice and loose stones, his wasted muscles cracking, hands and shoulders chafed raw by the rope. Around him other men grunted as they pulled. Behind him, still others – his papa among them – pushed with frozen fingers on the bare metal.

  Winter had come savagely to the Ettersberg, but the kapos could always be relied on to outdo it. ‘Pull her, dogs! Left–two–three! Onward, pigs! Isn’t this fun?’ Any man who flagged was kicked and beaten. The wheels squealed and scraped, the men’s feet thumped and ground on the stones, their hot breath clouded in the bitter air. ‘At the double! Faster or you’ll be in the shit!’10 A dozen back-breaking wagonloads to be drawn up this slope to the construction sites every day, each one an hour’s round trip. ‘Forward, pigs! Left–two–three!’

  ‘The men-beasts hang in the reins,’ Gustav wrote, turning his daily hell into a series of stark poetic images. ‘Panting, groaning, sweating … Slaves, cursed to labour, like in the days of the Pharaohs.’

  There had been a brief respite in the new year; in the middle of January, Dr Blies, concerned about the extreme death rate from disease in the little camp,11 and with the SS worrying that it might spread to them, had ordered that the survivors be moved to more sanitary conditions in the main camp. They were showered and deloused, then put into quarantine in a barrack close to the roll-call square. It seemed almost luxurious after the tents, with waxed wooden floors, solid walls, tables to eat off, toilets and a washroom with cold running water. Everything was kept immaculately clean; the prisoners even had to remove their shoes in an anteroom before entering the barrack. Severe punishments were inflicted for dirt and disorder. During that first blessed week of quarantine they got regular food and didn’t have to work. Gustav had regained his strength.

  Of course it couldn’t last. On 24 January 1940 the quarantine period had ended. For the first time, Gustav and Fritz were separated; Fritz was placed with forty or so other young boys in block 3 (known as the ‘Youth Block’ despite being occupied mostly by grown men).12

  They got to know the main camp better, learning the layout and landmarks – the foremost of which being the Goethe Oak. This venerated tree stood near the kitchens and bath block, and was reputed to have been a landmark in Goethe’s walks from Weimar up the Ettersberg. So potent were its cultural as
sociations that the SS had preserved it and built the camp around it, putting it to use for punishments.13 The method, used throughout the concentration camp system, was to tie a man’s hands behind his back and hang him by his wrists from a beam or branch. The Goethe Oak made a spectacular venue for this abominable ritual. The hanged men would be left for hours – enough to cripple them for days or weeks – and often beaten bloody while they hung. Two of Gustav’s workmates were among those suspended from the Goethe Oak for not working hard enough.

  Fritz and his papa had been surprised on emerging from quarantine to learn that Jews made up less than a fifth of Buchenwald’s prisoner population.14 There were criminals, Roma, Poles, Catholic and Lutheran priests, and homosexuals, but by far the largest number were political prisoners – mostly communists and socialists. Many had been prisoners for years – in some cases since the beginning of the Nazi regime in 1933. However, it was for the Jews and the Roma that the SS reserved their hardest labour and harshest treatment.

  ‘Left–two–three! Left–two–three!’ A dozen loads a day, up the hill, a dozen dangerous high-speed rolls back to the quarry. Fingers burning with cold on the metal, scorched by ropes, minds numbed, feet skittering on the ice, the kapo’s abuse.

  On and on it went, day after day, until winter began giving way to spring. Eventually Gustav and Fritz were taken off the wagon detail and put to work within the quarry, carrying stones. It almost passed belief that this was even worse.

  They had to pick up stones and boulders from where they were hewn out of the rock face and carry them – always at the double – in their bare hands to the waiting wagons. Palms and fingers quickly blistered and bled. The shift lasted ten hours, with a short break at midday. On top of the work came the abuse for which the place was infamous, far beyond anything experienced on the wagons.

  ‘Every day another death,’ Gustav wrote. ‘One cannot believe what a man can endure.’ He could find no ordinary words to describe the living hell of the quarry. Turning to the back pages of his notebook, he began composing a poem – titled ‘Quarry Kaleidoscope’ – translating the chaotic nightmare into precise, measured, orderly stanzas.

  Click-clack, hammer blow,

  Click-clack, day of woe.

  Slave souls, wretched bones,

  At the double, break the stones.15

  In these lines he managed to find a midpoint between the experiences he lived each day and how it was perceived through the eyes of the kapos and the SS.

  Click-clack, hammer blow,

  Click-clack, day of woe.

  Hear how all these wretches moan,

  Whimpering while they tap on stone.16

  The slave-driving, each endless day, and the murderous abuses, all transmuted into poetic imagery. ‘Shovel! Load it up! Think you can take a breather? You think you’re some kind of VIP?’ Hands slipping, grazing on the boulders, staining the pale limestone with rust-red blood; struggling, laden, to the wagons. ‘On, you shirkers – wagon number two! If you don’t have it full soon, I’ll beat you to a pulp!’ The stones clattering and banging into the hollow iron belly of the wagon. ‘Finished? You think you’re free now? D’you see me laughing? Wagon three, at the double! Faster, or you’ll be in the shit. On, pigs!’ Driven along with kicks and curses; the filled wagon wheeling slowly away up the steep rails: ‘Left–two–three! Left–two–three!’

  The kapos and guards entertained themselves with the prisoners. One of Gustav’s fellow carriers was made to take a huge rock and run with it in circles, uphill and down. ‘Be funny, understand?’ the kapo ordered him. ‘Or I’ll beat you crooked.’ The victim tried to run in a frolicsome manner, and the kapo laughed and applauded. Round and round he ran, chest heaving, straining for breath, bruised and bloodied. At last, overcome by sheer exhaustion, the droll performance faltered; yet he kept moving, struggling round the circle twice more. But the kapo was bored now; he pushed his victim to the ground and delivered a savage, fatal kick to the head.

  A favourite game was to snatch the cap off a passing prisoner and hurl it up a tree or in a puddle – always just beyond the sentry line. ‘Hey, your cap! Go get it – there by sentry four. Go on, mate, go get it!’ This would often be a new prisoner who didn’t know the rules. ‘And the fool runs,’ Gustav wrote. Past the sentries he would go – bang! – and he was dead. Another entry in the guards’ escape register, another credit towards some SS man’s bonus holiday time: three days for each escapee shot. An SS sentry named Zepp was in cahoots with several kapos, including Johann Herzog, a green-triangle prisoner and former Foreign Legionnaire whom Gustav described as ‘a murderer of the worst sort’.17 Zepp would reward Herzog and his fellows with tobacco each time they sent a man into the line of his rifle.

  Although there were regular suicides, most of the prisoners would not give up, and couldn’t be tricked. There were some who seemed unbeatable, no matter what abuses were inflicted on them. A blow with a rifle butt:

  Smack! – down on all fours he lies,

  But still the dog just will not die!18

  One day Gustav witnessed a scene which would always remain with him as an image of resistance. In the middle of the quarry, dominating everything, stood a machine. A massive roaring engine drove a series of wheels and belts connected to a huge hopper, into which stones were shovelled. Inside, heavy steel plates worked up and down and side to side, an iron jaw chewing and crushing the stones to gravel. On the footplate, a kapo worked the throttle and gears. When the quarry labourers were not filling the wagons, they were feeding this monstrous machine. For Gustav, the stone crusher was emblematic not just of the quarry but of the camp and the entire system in which Buchenwald was just a component – the great engine in which he and Fritz and their fellows were both the fuel driving it and the grist that it ground.

  It rattles, the crusher, day out and day in,

  It rattles and rattles and breaks up the stone,

  Chews it to gravel and hour by hour

  Eats shovel by shovel in its guzzling maw.

  And those who feed it with toil and with care,

  They know it just eats, but will never be through.

  It first eats the stone and then eats them too.19

  One prisoner on the crusher-filling detail, a comrade of the man who had been made to run in circles, kept his head down and shovelled the stones, anxious to avoid the attention of the kapos. He was a tall, powerfully built man, and he shovelled well. The kapo on the footplate saw the opportunity for a game; he edged the throttle up until the machine was running at double speed, rattling and banging diabolically. The prisoner shovelled faster. Man and machine laboured – the man panting, muscles straining, the crusher grinding and clattering fit to explode. Gustav, working nearby, left off his labours to watch; so did others, and the kapos, also enthralled, let them.

  On and on the contest went, shovel by shovel, clattering plates, roaring gears, the man dripping with sweat, the crusher thundering and defecating a cascade of gravel. The man seemed to have tapped within himself an unparalleled seam of strength and will. But the crusher’s stamina was limitless, and little by little the man weakened and slowed. Summoning his will, he rallied for one more titanic effort, stretching his muscles to shovel as if for his life; the machine would win, it always won, but still he tried.

  Suddenly there was a bang and a long, grinding groan from inside the machine. The stone crusher shuddered, coughed and stood still. The kapo on the footplate, dismayed, delved into the machine’s innards and found that a stone had got into the gears.

  There was a silence pregnant with dread. The prisoner leaned on his shovel, gasping for breath. He had vanquished the stone crusher, and was liable to be murdered for it. The senior kapo, stunned for a moment, burst out laughing. ‘Come here, tall lad!’ he called. ‘What are you, a farmhand? A miner, I’ll bet?’

  ‘No,’ said the prisoner. ‘I’m a journalist.’

  The kapo laughed. ‘A newspaperman? Too bad. I’ve got no use for one of tho
se.’ He turned away, then stopped. ‘Wait, though, I do need someone who can write. Go and wait in the hut there. I have other work for you.’

  As the hero laid down his shovel, Gustav suddenly felt the weight of the rock in his hands and his kapo’s eyes turning towards him. Hurriedly he went back to work, contemplating what he’d just witnessed. Man against machine; on this occasion, man had won a small victory. The machine, it seemed, could be beaten by a person with the necessary strength and will. Whether this was also true of the greater machine remained to be discovered.

  The mechanic cleared the stone from the gears and restarted the engine. Rattling, clattering, the crusher went back to work, consuming the rocks fed into its insatiable gullet by the labouring prisoners, eating their strength, their sweat and blood, grinding them down as it ground down the stone.

  5. The Road to Life

  אמא

  Tini regarded the two envelopes with apprehension. They were both identical, from Buchenwald. She knew many wives and mothers whose men had gone to the camps; it sometimes ended with the men obtaining their emigration papers and being released. Or sometimes the men came back to Vienna in a little pot as ashes. Letters were unheard of.

  She ripped open one of the envelopes. Inside was something that looked more like an official notice than a letter. Scanning it, she realized with relief that it was from Gustav. She recognized his strong handwriting where he’d filled in his name and prisoner number. Most of the space was taken up by a list of printed restrictions (whether money and packages could be received by the prisoner, whether he could write or receive letters, a warning that enquiries on the prisoner’s behalf to the commandant’s office would be futile, and so on). There was a tiny space in which Gustav had written a short message, subject to SS censorship. Tini gleaned little other than that he was alive and well and working in the camp. Tearing open the other letter, she found a near-identical message from Fritz. Comparing the two, she noticed that the block numbers were different. So they had been separated. That was a worry. How could the boy look after himself?