The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

by Jeremy Dronfield

  Gustav’s momentary idyll, gazing up at the swaying trees, ended abruptly. Under his direction, his team lifted and shouldered the logs. (They had no wagon for this job; the timber had to be transported by hand up the thickly wooded hillside.) Gustav took great care distributing the loads; he was conscious that some of his lads were too worn out to survive another trek up the hill with a tree-trunk gouging their shoulders. He instructed them quietly to tag on with the others; so long as they were discreet and looked like they were carrying, they should be OK. Gustav shouldered his own end of a log, and they set off.

  Approaching the building site, in view of a construction kapo and SS overseer Sergeant Greuel, the men forced themselves to pick up the pace. The last few yards and the stacking of the logs were done at top speed. This was dangerous; men had been maimed and killed by hastily stacked trunks slipping and rolling on them.5

  ‘What do you think you’re doing, Jew-pigs?’

  Sergeant Greuel’s apoplectic face appeared in front of Gustav; he pointed his hefty cane. ‘Some of these beasts aren’t carrying anything!’6

  Gustav looked at his men; they hadn’t been as careful as he’d asked. They could hardly be blamed; they were worn half to death. ‘I’m sorry, sir. Some of my lads are worn ou—’

  Greuel’s cane lashed him across the face, knocking him sideways. Gustav put up his hands to protect his head, but the cane whipped furiously back and forth, battering his fingers. He twisted, and the blows fell on his back. As Gustav dropped to the ground, Greuel turned his rage on the other men, striding among them, beating them until they bled. When the storm had spent itself, he turned back to Gustav, breathing heavily from his exertions. ‘You’re a foreman, Jew,’ he said. ‘Drive your Jew animals harder. I’ll make a report about this lapse.’

  The next day it happened again – Gustav and his men were beaten for supposedly not working hard enough. At roll call, Gustav was called to the gate and interrogated by the Rapportführer, the sergeant who oversaw roll calls and handled camp discipline. By SS standards he was a reasonable man, and, satisfied by Gustav’s answers, he tore up Greuel’s report.

  But Greuel wasn’t deterred. He was a sadist. Some believed there was a sexual element in his cruelty; he was known to hold individuals back from work details and beat them alone in his room for his own pleasure.7 Once he’d fixed on a victim, he wouldn’t let go. On the third day, Gustav and his team were hauling stone from the quarry. Their wagon was loaded with two and a half tonnes of rocks, and even with twenty-six men at the ropes it was a killing strain to drag it step by step to the top of the hill. Greuel was watching, and submitted another report against Gustav for not driving his team fast enough. This time the Rapportführer passed the report on for further action.

  At roll call Gustav was summoned to the gatehouse again. For his dereliction of duty he was sentenced to five Sundays on the punishment detail, without food. Like Fritz before him, he was put on Scheissetragen – shit-carrying. Each Sunday, while most prisoners were taking it easy, he carried buckets of faeces from the latrines to the gardens, always at a running pace. He was fifty-one years old and, tough as he was, his body surely couldn’t take this treatment for much longer. His friends slipped him morsels of food on punishment days, but he lost ten kilosfn1 in the course of a month. He’d always been lean; now he was becoming skeletal.

  Eventually his sentence was completed and he returned to work. He was relieved of his position as foreman on the haulage column, but his friends managed to get him less arduous work on the infirmary wagon, carrying food and supplies. However, he still had to work evening shifts on haulage. He began to recover from his ordeal. That he had survived Greuel’s persecution at all was little short of miraculous. Without his own strength of spirit and the support of his friends, it would have destroyed him as it did so many others.

  בן

  Fritz had learned that even miracles couldn’t last in a place like this. Every day the circle of probability was closing in on each man, his days shortening and the odds on his survival growing longer.

  That spring Fritz had lost one of his dearest friends, Leo Moses, the man who had protected and tutored him in the art of survival, who had secured safer employment for both Fritz and his papa. A large transport of prisoners had been sent to a new camp being built in Alsace, called Natzweiler. Leo was sent with them. Fritz never saw him again.8

  One evening in June, Fritz was sitting in his regular place at the table in block 17, listening to the conversation of the older men. They had finished dinner – a small ration of turnip soup and a piece of bread – and fell to talking. Fritz listened keenly, but was too in awe of them to participate. He would be nineteen in a couple of weeks, still a boy in years and, by comparison with these men, a child in intellectual development and understanding of the world. Keen to learn, he soaked up their political discussions, tales of show business and grand schemes for the future of Europe.

  Fritz’s attention was caught by the appearance of a familiar figure in the doorway. He looked up and saw kapo Robert Siewert, beckoning. Leaving the table and stepping outside into the mild evening air, Fritz found Siewert looking grave. He spoke softly and quickly: ‘There’s a letter from your mother in the mail office. The censor won’t let you have it.’

  Siewert was part of the prisoner network, with contacts in all the administrative offices where trusted prisoners were employed – including the mail room. He had managed to learn the letter’s contents. The summer warmth shrank away from Fritz as the words sank in. ‘Your mother and your sister Herta have been notified for resettlement. They’ve been arrested and are waiting for deportation to the east.’9

  In a panic, Fritz rushed down the street to his father’s block, with Siewert hurrying behind. Some inmates were hanging about outside, and Fritz asked them to tell his papa that he wanted to see him urgently. (Prisoners were forbidden to enter blocks other than their own.) After a few moments, Gustav came out. ‘Tell him,’ said Fritz, and Siewert repeated his summary of Tini’s letter.

  Resettlement, deportation. They could only speculate what it meant. Rumours circulated all the time, and they had acquired an acute sensitivity to Nazi euphemisms. Fritz and Gustav had heard the whispers about SS massacres in the Ostland, the conquered region east of Poland.10 One thing at least was certain – there would be no more letters, no more link with Tini and Herta once they were gone from Vienna and sent to Russia or who-knew-where.

  Tini stood by the gas cooker in the kitchen. She recalled the day they took Fritz and she threatened to gas herself if Gustav didn’t run away and hide. A lot of good that threat had done. And now they had come for her.

  She turned off the main gas tap, as she was required to do. The detailed list of instructions issued by the authorities lay on the kitchen table, along with the key ring with which she had been provided, with the apartment key attached to it.

  Herta stood by in her patched coat with the yellow star on the breast, her little suitcase by her side. They were permitted only one or two cases per person – total not to exceed fifty kilos. They had packed clothes and bedding – as required in the resettlement instructions – along with plates, cups and spoons (knives and forks were forbidden), and food to last for three days’ travel. Those who had them were required to bring equipment and tools suitable for establishing or maintaining a settlement. Tini would be permitted to keep her wedding ring, but all other valuables had to be surrendered. She’d never possessed many treasures, and they were all gone now, anyway, stolen from her or sold; neither could she have conjured up more than a fraction of the three hundred marks in cash which the deportees were allowed to take to the Ostland.11

  Tini picked up her case and bundle of bedding and, with a last look around the apartment, closed the door and locked it. Wickerl Helmhacker was waiting on the landing. Tini handed him the key and turned away. The two women’s slow footsteps echoed mournfully in the stairwell as they descended.

  Escorted by policemen, they cr
ossed the marketplace, conscious of eyes on them. Everyone knew what was being done with them. For months, periodic batches of Jewish deportees had been leaving, hundreds of people at a time; nobody knew quite where their destination was, other than that it lay somewhere in the vast, vague regions of the Ostland.12 No news ever came back, and neither did any of the settlers; presumably they were too busy making new lives for themselves in the land that the Reich had set aside for them.

  After passing through the market, Tini and Herta were led to the local elementary school. The paving stones in these streets were as familiar to Herta as the soles of her own feet. All the local children had attended the Sperlschule: Edith, Fritz, Kurt and Herta herself had spent a large part of their lives in its halls and classrooms. It had no pupils now – the SS had closed it down in 1941 and turned it into a holding centre for deportations.

  They passed through the guarded gateway and along the cobbled alleyway between the tall buildings. The school consisted of a cluster of four-storey buildings set back from the street, surrounding an L-shaped schoolyard. Where children had once run and played, SS guards now stood sentry. Lorries were parked, loaded with crates and bundles. Tini and Herta presented their papers and were taken into a building.

  The classrooms had been converted into makeshift dormitories, filled with people. In all, the deportees numbered just over a thousand. Everywhere were the faces of friends, acquaintances, neighbours, as well as strangers from more distant parts of the district. Nearly all were women, children and men over forty. Most young men had gone to the camps, and elderly people over sixty-five were slated for separate deportation to the ghetto at Theresienstadt.fn2

  Tini and Herta were put in a room and left to join in with its little community. News was exchanged, grapevine gossip, enquiries about relatives and mutual friends. The news was almost never good. Their resettlement had been presented to them as an opportunity for a new life, but Tini hated the idea of being taken from her native city, and was innately suspicious of the future. She had always expected the worst from the Nazis, and they hadn’t proved her wrong so far.

  In her letter to Fritz and Gustav she had only been able to tell them the bare, devastating fact of their selection. But fearing the worst, she had given a few personal effects to a non-Jewish relative, including her last photograph of Fritz – the one taken in Buchenwald – and had given her sister Jenni a package of clothing to send him. Jenni was in as precarious a position as Tini herself, but so far she’d been omitted from the deportations.13 The same was true of their widowed elder sister, Bertha.14

  Tini and Herta had been in the holding centre for a day or two when the deportees were alerted for departure.15 Everyone was ordered out into the yard. People crowded the corridors, spilling out through the doors, all carrying luggage and bundles, some burdened with tools and equipment. Their identity cards were inspected, each one stamped Evakuiert am 9. Juni 1942,fn3 and they climbed aboard the waiting lorries.

  The convoy passed down Taborstrasse and along the broad avenue beside the Danube Canal. Herta looked down at the water, gleaming under the summer sun; come the weekend it would teem with pleasure boats and swimmers. She recalled the time she and her papa had challenged each other to a swimming race, in imitation of Fritz and his friends. Her beloved papa, so gentle and warm. Those had been good days, with summer picnics under the trees by the water. Sometimes her mother, who loved to row, would take the kids out in a boat. It was like a dream now, vivid but remote. Jews had long been barred from the Danube Canal and its verdant banks.

  After crossing the canal, the convoy rumbled on through the streets, eventually pulling in at the Aspangbahnhof, the railway station serving the southern half of the city. A small crowd had gathered around the entrance, held in check by dozens of police and SS troopers. Some were friends and relatives hoping for a last glimpse of their dear ones; others were there simply to gawp at the Jews being herded off like cattle. Tini and Herta helped each other down from their lorry and joined the crush as it slowly poured in through the doors into the gloom of the station interior.

  Everyone knew of the awful freight wagons in which their menfolk had been taken away to the camps, so it was heartening to find a train waiting for them at the platform made up of passenger carriages in the attractive cream-and-crimson livery of the Deutsche Reichsbahn. Well now, they thought, this didn’t look so bad.

  They were ordered to load their luggage into a wagon at the rear of the train; food supplies and medicines had already been stowed. It was a long, slow process. Eventually there came a loud whistle and a voice boomed: ‘One hour to departure!’16 The announcement was repeated all along the platform, and people began hurrying in all directions.

  Tini, holding tightly on to Herta, pushed through the milling crowd to their assigned place, where a carriage supervisor equipped with a list and an air of flustered importance was marshalling his charges. He was a Jewish official appointed by the IKG, not a police officer or SS, and his presence was reassuring. The sixty or so people assigned to his carriage gathered about him. Tini recognized Ida Klap, an elderly lady from Im Werd, all alone; and a woman about Tini’s own age from Leopoldsgasse, also alone; many of the women were unaccompanied, their husbands and sons having been taken and their children – the fortunate ones – having been sent to England or America. Some little ones remained, however. A woman Tini didn’t recognize, aged sixty or so, was travelling with three boys and a girl, evidently her grandchildren; the youngest, a boy named Otto, was about Kurt’s age, and the eldest was a girl of about sixteen.17 Around them, grey-bearded men in rumpled hats, fellows with pouchy cheeks and jowls, neat, careworn wives in headscarves mingled with young women whose faces were prematurely lined and the disorientated children, some as young as five, staring about in wonder and confusion. The carriage supervisor called their names from his list, checking them off against their transport numbers.

  ‘One-two-five: Klein, Nathan Israel!’

  A man in his sixties held up his hand. ‘Here.’

  ‘One-two-six: Klein, Rosa Sara!’ His wife answered.

  ‘Six-four-two: Kleinmann, Herta Sara!’ Herta raised her hand.

  ‘Six-four-one: Kleinmann, Tini Sara!’

  The list went on: Klinger, Adolf Israel; Klinger, Amalie Sara … Along the length of the platform the fifteen other carriage supervisors called the rolls of their own sections of the list of 1,006 souls who were going on the journey.

  At last their destination was revealed: the city of Minsk. There they would either join the ghetto and work in the various local industries, or farm the land, depending on their skills.

  When the supervisors were satisfied that nobody was missing, the evacuees were finally allowed to board, with stern instructions that they were to do so in silence, and keep to their designated seats. The carriages were second class and divided into compartments – comfortable enough, if a little overcrowded. As Tini and Herta took their seats, it was almost like the old days. For a long while now it had been illegal for Jews to venture outside their districts, let alone leave Vienna. It would be interesting to see a little of the outside world again.

  Smoke and steam poured across the platform, axles squealing as the long train began to move, slowly snaking out of the station, heading north through the city. It crossed the Danube Canal and rolled over the bridge at the west end of the Prater, past the Praterstern and the street where Tini had been born,18 and a few moments later passed through the northern railway station. This would have been a more convenient place for the Jews of Leopoldstadt to depart from, but the Aspangbahnhof was more discreet.19 A few minutes later the broad River Danube passed beneath the compartment window, then the final suburbs and the rolling farmland northeast of Vienna.

  Though the train stopped occasionally at stations, the evacuees were forbidden to get off. The hours of the long June day dragged by. People read, talked, slept in their seats. Children grew restless and fretful, or catatonic with exhaustion, staring. At regula
r intervals the carriage supervisor came along and peered into each compartment to check on his charges. A doctor – also appointed by the IKG – was on hand if anybody felt unwell. It was a long time since any Jew had been looked after so solicitously.

  They passed through the former Czechoslovakia and entered the land that had been Poland. It was all Germany now. To Tini and Herta the countryside was of particular interest; Gustav had been born in this region during the great days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when the Jews had enjoyed a golden age of emancipation. Tini had experienced that era in Vienna, while Gustav had spent his childhood in this beautiful landscape, in a little village called Zablocie bei Saybusch,fn4 which stood by a lake at the foot of the mountains. The train didn’t go there, but it passed nearby, through places which Gustav himself would have recognized, not just from his childhood but from his military service in the war, when he had fought for these same fields and towns against the army of the Russian Tsar.

  The train also passed near another small town, about fifty kilometres north of Zablocie, named Oświęcim. The Germans called it Auschwitz, and had lately established a new concentration camp there. The Vienna train chugged in a wide arc to the west, then resumed its northeastward route, turning away from the setting sun.20

  There followed a night of ceaseless movement and comfortless dozing, with aching backs and dead limbs. The next morning they passed through the city of Warsaw. Beyond Bialystok they crossed the border, leaving Greater Germany behind and entering the Reichskommissariat Ostland, formerly part of the Soviet Union. About forty kilometres farther on, the train reached the small city of Volkovysk.fn5