The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

by Jeremy Dronfield

  As both a pillar and keystone of the town – especially its Jewish community – Samuel Barnet might well be expected to be an intimidating presence, with an imposing mansion on the edge of town; instead, the car turned in at the driveway of a regular middle-class suburban house standing shoulder-to-shoulder with others almost but not quite identical to it.

  Kurt’s reception was warm but reserved. Communication was near impossible once Mrs Maurer had left. ‘Pat-a-cake, baker’s man’ would be of no use at all in this situation. Fortunately, the judge wasn’t alone in welcoming the new arrival. Samuel Barnet had been a widower for more than twenty years; with him lived his three middle-aged sisters, all resolutely unmarried. Kate, Esther and Sarah appointed themselves Kurt’s aunts, welcoming the bewildered boy and showing him his room. He’d never had a room of his own before.

  Next morning he woke to find a strange presence at his bedside. A tiny boy aged about three, dressed in a little camel-hair coat, was gazing at him in wonder. The apparition opened its mouth to speak – and out poured a stream of incomprehensible English gibberish. The child seemed to want or expect something, but Kurt had no idea what. The boy’s face fell in disappointment, and he burst into tears. He turned to an adult standing behind him and wailed, ‘Kurt won’t talk to me!’

  The little boy, Kurt learned, was David, the son of Judge Barnet’s younger brother, Philip, who lived next door. Together they made up one large extended household. Over the next few weeks, Kurt was quickly and smoothly assimilated. Uncle Sam – as Kurt learned to call Judge Barnet – belied his sombre appearance and proved as warmly welcoming as any guest could wish. Kurt would never be allowed to feel out of place. Years later he would learn how fortunate he had been; not all refugee children landed on their feet. Many found themselves in unfriendly households or suffered anti-Semitic or anti-German abuse in the neighbourhood, or both. As Kurt got to know New Bedford, he would discover that the Barnets were leading lights in a large Jewish community, within which he was welcomed.

  The Barnet family were Conservative Jews.fn1 All Kurt had known were his family’s lightweight religious observances, in which synagogue and Torah played little role, and the strictly Orthodox who were common around Leopoldstadt. Conservatives – who were not necessarily politically conservative – were somewhere in between; they believed in preserving ancient Jewish traditions, rituals and laws, but departed from the Orthodox in recognizing that human hands had written the Torah and that Judaic law had evolved to meet human needs.

  Spring was coming to New Bedford, and the trees lining the street turned green. If you squinted along it, you could almost imagine that you were in the Hauptallee in the Prater, and that none of this had happened – the Nazis coming, the family sundered. Kurt could already sense – if it hadn’t been for the lack of his mother and father, and of Fritz, Herta and Edith, and the vast distance that lay behind him – that he had found something that felt like a home.

  8. Unworthy of Life

  אח

  Nobody ever knew the cause of Philipp Hamber’s murder, but everyone heard about the circumstances. The SS required no reasons for their brutalities: a bad mood, a hangover, a prisoner looking askance at a guard, or just a sadistic impulse. When SS-Sergeant Abraham knocked Philipp Hamber to the ground and killed him, what the witnesses remembered was the atrocity itself, and the terrible repercussions for them.1

  ‘Again there is unrest in the camp,’ Gustav wrote. He rarely took his diary from its hiding place these days. His last entry had been in January 1941, when they were shovelling snow. Now it was spring. In the intervening months the prisoners had been growing less submissive to SS violence.

  At the end of February, a transport of several hundred Dutch Jews had arrived. There had been violent clashes in the Netherlands between home-grown Dutch Nazis and the Jewish population, and in Amsterdam the Nazis suffered a severe beating at the hands of young Jews. The SS rounded up four hundred as hostages, a move which triggered a wave of strikes, paralysing the docks and triggering open warfare between the strikers and the SS. At the end of the month, 389 of the Jewish hostages were transported to Buchenwald.2 Some were quartered in block 17, and Fritz spent a lot of time with them. He and his friends tried to teach the Dutchmen the ways of the camp, but it did them little good. They were strong, spirited men who weren’t easily cowed, and the SS treated them with an unprecedented level of brutality. All were put to work as stone-carriers in the quarry, and in the first couple of months around fifty were murdered. Deciding that the Dutchmen couldn’t be broken quickly enough, the SS shipped the survivors off to the notoriously brutal Mauthausen. None ever returned.

  The Dutchmen left behind them a budding spirit of defiance inspired by their resilience. When Philipp Hamber was murdered, the prisoners’ mood began to simmer dangerously.

  Like Gustav, Philipp was Viennese and worked in the haulage column, in a different team under a kapo called Schwarz. His brother Eduard was in the same team. Philipp and Eduard had been movie producers before the Anschluss. Despite being unused to physical labour, they had survived three years in Buchenwald. On this particular spring day, their team had made a delivery to a building site. SS-Sergeant Abraham, one of the cruellest, most feared Blockführers in Buchenwald, happened to be there.3 Something – a misdirected glance from Philipp, a mistake, perhaps a dropped sack of cement or just something about the way he looked or moved – drew the SS man’s attention.

  In a rage, Sergeant Abraham shoved Philipp to the ground and kicked him. Then he seized the helpless man’s collar and dragged him through the churned mud of the building site, heaving him into a foundation trench full to the brim with rainwater. As Philipp floundered and choked, Abraham planted a boot on the back of his head, forcing him beneath the surface. Eduard, along with the other prisoners, watched in silent horror as his brother struggled. Philipp’s thrashing gradually subsided and his body went limp.

  Buchenwald was accustomed to murder as a constant part of its everyday life, the prisoners learning to live with it and to avoid it as best they could. But now they were becoming resentful. News of the killing of Philipp Hamber spread like a flame.

  Gustav brought his long-neglected diary out of hiding and set down how Philipp had been ‘drowned like a cat’ and that the prisoners were not taking it quietly. Much of the unease and anger came from Eduard.4 He wanted justice for his brother.

  His cause was helped by the fact that the murder, having occurred on a construction site in the SS complex, had been witnessed by a civilian visitor; therefore Commandant Koch had no option but to enter the death in the camp log and hold an inquiry. Simultaneously, Eduard lodged an official complaint. He was aware of the danger he was putting himself in. ‘I know that I must die for my testimony,’ he told a fellow prisoner, ‘but maybe these criminals will restrain themselves a little in the future if they have to fear an accusation. Then I will not have died in vain.’5

  He had underestimated the SS. At the next roll call, all Philipp’s comrades from kapo Schwarz’s haulage detail, including Eduard, were called to the gatehouse. Their names were taken, and they were asked what they had witnessed. Terrified, they all denied having seen anything. Only Eduard persisted in his accusation. While the others were sent back to their blocks, Eduard was interrogated again by Commandant Koch and the camp doctor. Koch assured him, ‘We want to know the whole truth. I give you my word of honour that nothing will happen to you.’6 Eduard repeated his account of how Abraham had attacked his brother and deliberately, brutally drowned him.

  They let him go back to his block, but late that night he was called out again and taken to the Bunker – the cell block which occupied one wing of the gatehouse. The Bunker had an evil reputation; tortures and murders were perpetrated in there, and no Jew who entered it ever came out alive. Its principal jailer and torturer was SS-Sergeant Martin Sommer, whose boyish looks belied years of experience in concentration camps. Everyone knew Sommer well from his regular performances wieldin
g the whip when victims were taken to the Bock.

  After four days in the Bunker, Eduard Hamber’s corpse was brought out.

  It was claimed that he had committed suicide,7 but it was common knowledge that Sommer had tortured him to death.

  This wasn’t enough to satisfy the SS. At intervals over the following weeks, three or four of the witnesses from the Schwarz detail would be named at roll call and brought to the Bunker. There they were interrogated by Deputy Commandant Rödl (the music lover) and the new camp physician, SS-Doctor Hanns Eisele. The prisoners were told that they had nothing to fear if they told the truth. Knowing perfectly well that this was a lie, they continued to deny that they had seen anything. Their silence did not save them; they were murdered to the last man.

  Gustav described the successive disappearances in his diary; the men were marched to the Bunker ‘and taken care of by Sergeant Sommer: even Lulu, a foremanfn1 from Berlin, and (so kapo Schwarz believes) Kluger and Trommelschläger from Vienna are among the victims. Thus our rebellion shrivels up.’8

  Eduard Hamber had based his heroic sacrifice on the premise that the SS could be brought to account for their crimes, or at least be made to fear that they might be. All he had proved was that they were immune and their power was limitless.

  אמא

  Tini sat at the table where her family had once eaten together. ‘My beloved Kurtl,’ she wrote. ‘I am extremely happy that you are doing fine and are well. I am really curious to hear about your summer vacation. Actually, I almost envy you; one cannot go anywhere any more here … I would be so glad if I could be with you now. Here, we cannot enjoy ourselves any more …’9

  Restrictions on Jews had been tightened still further in May with a declaration reinforcing and extending existing laws: Jews were forbidden to visit all theatres, concerts, museums, libraries, sports grounds and restaurants; they were barred from entering shops or buying goods outside specified times. Whereas they had been forbidden to sit on designated public benches, they were now barred entirely from public parks. The declaration also introduced some new rules: Jews were not allowed to leave Vienna without special permission and were banned from making enquiries to the government. The spreading of rumours about resettlement and emigration was strictly prohibited.10

  Tini still hadn’t given up her efforts to get Herta and Fritz to America. But it was harder than ever. Shortly after Kurt’s departure, Portugal had suspended transmigration due to a bottleneck at Lisbon, and in June President Roosevelt stopped the transfer of funds from the United States to European countries, hamstringing the refugee aid agencies.11 In the first half of 1941, only 429 Viennese Jews had managed to emigrate to the United States, leaving behind 44,000 desperate to escape.12 Then, in July, US immigration regulations invalidated all existing affidavits.13

  All Tini’s plans were crushed. But still she went on trying. It wore her down; some days the depression weighed so heavily on her that she couldn’t drag herself out of bed. Just recently, news had come to several neighbouring families that their menfolk had died in Buchenwald, all persecuted to the point where they committed suicide by running through the sentry line. Every day Tini expected to hear similar news about Gustav and Fritz. It tormented her to know the kind of gruelling labour her husband was made to do – ‘He is not a young man any more,’ she wrote. ‘How can he bear that?’14 Every time a letter from them was delayed, it sent her into a panic. So she persevered and fought on, refusing to give up hope of at least getting Herta to safety. With the tiny sums of money she could scrape together, the necessary fees, taxes and bribes were virtually impossible. She’d had a brief stint working in a grocery store, but had been fired because as a Jew she was not a citizen.

  ‘Life is getting sadder by the day,’ she wrote to Kurt. ‘But you are our sunshine and our child of fortune, so please do write often and in detail … Millions of kisses from your sister Herta, who is always thinking of you.’15

  בן דוד

  Judge Barnet hadn’t tarried in putting Kurt to school, despite his speaking no English. He picked up the language quickly, thanks in large part to coaching from Ruthie, the Barnets’ niece, who came to live with them that summer.

  Ruthie had graduated from college and taken a job as a teacher at Fairhaven, across the estuary from New Bedford. Each day when Kurt came home from school Ruthie tutored him in English. She was a fine teacher, kind and good-natured, and Kurt grew to adore her; in time she would become a sister to him, in place of Edith and Herta. Cousin David next door would become a little brother, their relationship echoing Kurt’s bond with Fritz.

  In those first months, Kurt was photographed for the local newspaper, interviewed on the radio, and when he graduated fourth grade in June, the teacher placed him front and centre in the class photograph. That first summer, when he was still finding his feet, he was sent to Camp Avoda, a summer camp founded by Sam and Phil Barnet which took Jewish boys from deprived urban environments and gave them a grounding in traditional values.

  The camp was set among the trees on the shore of Tispaquin Pond, between New Bedford and Boston, a group of utilitarian dorm huts surrounding a baseball field. Kurt had the time of his life, playing sports and swimming in the warm, shallow waters of the lake; in Vienna he had floundered in the Danube Canal with a rope tied round his waist and a friend on the bank holding the other end; here he learned to swim properly. Had Fritz been able to see Camp Avoda, he might have been reminded of the paradise described in Makarenko’s Road to Life.

  Normally Kurt didn’t like to write letters, but now he wrote profusely to his mother, telling her all about this wonderful new world he had found.

  Tini devoured every detail of his news, heartened to know that two of her children were now safe. (She assumed Edith was all right, despite having been out of contact for nearly two years now.) But she couldn’t shed her anxiety that something would go wrong, that somehow Kurt’s idyll would be destroyed. ‘Please be obedient,’ she pleaded, ‘be a joy for your uncle, so that the counsellors have good things to say about you … Darling, please be well behaved.’ A photograph he sent her with the other Barnet children filled her with pleasure: ‘You look so nice … so handsome and radiant. I almost didn’t recognize you.’16

  Kurt was losing his old life in the brightness of the new.

  אבא

  Summer returned to the Ettersberg. ‘Fritzl and I are now receiving money regularly from home,’ Gustav wrote. It was little, but it helped make life bearable. Tini also sent occasional packages of clothing – shirts, underpants, a sweater – which were invaluable. Whenever a packet arrived, Gustav or Fritz would be called to the office to collect and sign for it, the contents itemized on their record cards.17

  Gustav’s love for his son had grown to fill his whole heart during their time in Buchenwald. So had his pride in the man Fritz was becoming – this June he would turn eighteen. ‘The boy is my greatest joy,’ he wrote. ‘We strengthen each other. We are one, inseparable.’18

  On Sunday 22 June, the camp tannoy announced momentous news. That morning, the Führer had launched an invasion of the Soviet Union. It was the biggest military action in history, with three million troops on a front spanning the whole of Russia intended to engulf it in one huge wave.

  ‘Every day the roar of the radio,’ Gustav wrote. The camp tannoy, always an intermittent source of unwelcome noise – blaring out Nazi propaganda, German martial music, terrifying commands and morale-grinding announcements – now played an almost constant stream of Berlin radio, crowing with triumphal news from the Eastern Front. The glorious crushing of Bolshevik defences by the might of German arms, the encirclement of Russian divisions, the seizing of city after city, the crossing of rivers, the victory of some Waffen-SS corps or Wehrmacht general, the surrender of hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers. Germany was devouring the lethargic Russian bear like a wolf disembowelling a sheep.

  For Jews under Nazi rule – especially those in the Polish ghettos – the inv
asion of the Soviet Union gave a glimmer of hope; Russia might win, after all, and liberate them from this miserable existence. But to the political prisoners in the concentration camps, most of whom were communists, the news of Soviet defeats was depressing. ‘The politicals hang their heads,’ Gustav noted.

  Unrest was stirring among the prisoners again. There were disturbances in the labour details, incidents of disobedience, minor acts of resistance. The SS dealt with it in their usual way. ‘Each day the shot and slain are brought into the camp,’ wrote Gustav. Each day, more work for the crematorium, more smoke from the chimney.

  In July, a new horror came to Buchenwald, a foreshadowing of the future. It was supposed to be veiled in secrecy, but the veil was thin.

  The previous September, an American journalist in Germany had reported a ‘weird story’ told to him by an anonymous source: ‘The Gestapo is now systematically bumping off the mentally deficient people of the Reich. The Nazis call them “mercy deaths”.’19 The programme, codenamed T4, involved specialized asylum facilities equipped with gas chambers, together with mobile gas vans which travelled from hospital to hospital, collecting those deemed by the regime ‘unworthy of life’. Negative public attention, particularly from the Church, had led to the T4 programme being suspended. In its place, the Nazis began applying it to concentration camp inmates. This new programme, codenamed Action 14f13, was to focus particularly on disabled Jewish prisoners.20 In Buchenwald, Commandant Koch received a secret order from Himmler; all ‘imbecile and crippled’ inmates, especially Jews, were to be exterminated.21

  The first the inmates of Buchenwald knew of Action 14f13 was when a small team of doctors arrived in the camp to inspect the prisoners. ‘We got orders to present ourselves at the infirmary,’ Gustav wrote. ‘I smell a rat; I’m fit for work.’22