The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

by Jeremy Dronfield

  Here it stopped.

  For a while it seemed no different from any previous halt. Tini and Herta, like everyone else, peered through the window, wondering where they were. The carriage supervisor looked in on the compartment, then moved off. Somehow there was a sense that something wasn’t quite right. There was a sound of raised voices at the far end of the corridor, carriage doors opening and heavy boots coming briskly along from both ends. Suddenly, armed SS troopers appeared at the compartment door, and it was flung open.

  ‘Out! Out!’ they barked. ‘All out now!’ Shocked and confused, the evacuees scrambled to their feet, grabbing for their belongings, mothers and grandmothers clutching their children. The SS troopers lashed out. ‘Come on, Jew-pigs! Out now!’ Tini and Herta found themselves in the corridor, crushed by people hastening to get to the doors. Any who were slow were kicked or thumped with rifle butts. They poured on to the platform, where more SS troopers were standing by.

  The troopers were like none that Tini had ever seen in Vienna; these were Waffen-SS, fighting troops, fiercer and with the Death’s Head insignia of the concentration camp division on their collars.21 They were accompanied by men in the uniforms of the dreaded Sipo-SD, the Nazi security police.22 They yelled and cursed the Jews, driving them along the platform – men and women, elderly and children; those who stumbled or fell or who couldn’t go fast enough were kicked and beaten, some so badly that their unconscious bodies were left lying on the ground.23

  They were herded on to another train, this one made up of freight wagons. Into these they were driven at gunpoint, crushed in with scarcely room to move. Then the doors slammed. Tini and Herta, clinging to each other, found themselves in a darkness filled with sobbing, the moans of the injured, praying, and the crying of terrified children. Outside they could hear wagon doors grinding shut all along the train.

  After the last door had slammed, they were left in darkness, not moving. Hours dragged by. A few people, broken by the sudden, violent shock, lost their reason during that awful night; they screamed and raved. The SS hauled out the mad and the sick and put them all together in a separate wagon, where they suffered a special hell almost beyond imagining.

  The next day, the train began to move. It went painfully slowly. The transport was no longer behind a speedy Reichsbahn locomotive but a plodder from the Main Railway Administration, which served the eastern territories. Since leaving Vienna they had covered over a thousand kilometres in two days; now it took a further two days to cover a quarter of that distance.24

  Eventually the train came to a halt. Sounds from outside suggested that they were in some kind of station. The terrified people waited for the doors to open, but they didn’t. Night came and passed in fear and hunger. Then another day and night. The train sat unattended except for periodic inspections by the Sipo-SD guards. It had arrived on a Saturday, and the German railway workers in Minsk had recently been awarded the right not to work weekends.25

  Cramped together in darkness, illuminated only by tiny cracks of daylight in the wagon walls, frightened, with little or nothing to eat or drink, and only a bucket in the corner as a toilet, the deportees endured the dragging hours in horrible uncertainty. Had the plan for them changed? Had they been tricked? On the morning of the fifth day since leaving the comfort of the passenger train, the imprisoned were jolted from their stupor; the train was moving again. Dear God, would this never end?

  ‘Please, dear child,’ Tini had written to Kurt, almost a year ago now, ‘pray that we are all reunited in good health.’ She had never quite let go of that hope. ‘Papa wrote … thank God he is healthy … the knowledge that you are well taken care of by your uncle is his only joy … Please, Kurtl, be a good boy … I hope they have good things to say about you, that you keep your things and your bed in order and that you are nice … You have a wonderful summer, soon the beautiful days will be over … All the kids here envy you. They don’t even get to see a garden.’26

  With a shrieking of steel on steel and a thump and rattle of wagons bumping, the train halted again. There was silence, and then the wagon door slammed wide open, flooding the imprisoned with blinding light.

  Precisely what befell Tini and Herta Kleinmann that day will never be known. What they witnessed, what they did or said or felt was never recorded. Not a single one of the 1,006 Jewish women, children and men brought to the freight yard at Minsk railway station on the morning of Monday 15 June 1942 was ever seen again or left any account.

  But general records were kept, and there were other transports from Vienna to Minsk during that summer from which a handful of individuals brought back their stories.27

  When the wagon doors opened, the people inside – bruised, bone-weary, aching, starving, dehydrated – were ordered out. They were pushed around, scrutinized by Sipo-SD men, and quizzed about their trade skills. An officer addressed them, reiterating what they had been told back in Vienna – that they would be put to work in industry or farming. Most of them, unable to do without hope, were reassured by this speech. A few dozen of the healthier-looking adults and older children were selected and taken aside. The remaining multitude were herded to the station barrier, where their belongings were taken from them. The wagonloads of luggage, food and supplies that had been brought from Vienna were also seized.28 Waiting outside the station were lorries and closed vans, into which the people were loaded.

  The convoy drove out of the city, heading southeast into the Belarusian countryside – a vast, flat plain of field and forest, dusty under a huge sky.

  When the German forces took this land from the Soviet Union the previous summer, they had rolled through it like a consuming wave. Immediately in their wake had come a second wave: Einsatzgruppe (Task Force) B, one of seven such units deployed behind the front lines. Commanded by SS-General Arthur Nebe, Einsatzgruppe B comprised about a thousand men – mostly drawn from the Sipo-SD and other police branches – divided into smaller sub-units, or Einsatzkommandos. Their role was to locate and exterminate all Jews in captured towns and villages, a task in which they were often willingly assisted by units of the Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht, and in some areas, such as Poland and Latvia, by local police.29

  Not all Jews were murdered immediately. That was impracticable, given the millions who inhabited these regions. Besides, the Nazis had learned in Poland how to make Jews contribute to the war economy. A ghetto was established in Minsk, and its industry made to serve the Reich and line the pockets of corrupt officials. Now, with the implementation of the Final Solution, Minsk had been chosen as one of its principal centres.

  The task of organization fell to the local Sipo-SD commander, SS-Lieutenant Colonel Eduard Strauch, a veteran Einsatzgruppe officer. He surveyed the area and chose to establish a concentration camp at the secluded little hamlet of Maly Trostinets, a former Soviet collective farm about a dozen kilometres southeast of Minsk. The camp was small, never intended to hold more than about six hundred prisoners to work the farmland and provide a Sonderkommandofn6 for its main purpose, which was mass murder.30

  Of the tens of thousands of people – mostly Jews – brought to Maly Trostinets, few ever saw the camp itself. After the Sipo-SD had selected a handful from each transport for the labour force, the lorries carrying the remaining hundreds drove out in the direction of Maly Trostinets. Along the way, they would stop off at a meadow outside the city. Sometimes the selection for the camp would be made here if it hadn’t already been done at Minsk railway station.31 From the meadow, at intervals of an hour or so, individual trucks would drive on while the rest waited.

  The trucks drove to a half-grown pine plantation about three kilometres from the camp. There, one of two possible fates awaited the captives. For the majority it was quick, for some slower. But the end was the same. There was a clearing among the trees where a huge pit had been excavated by a Sonderkommando, about fifty metres long and three metres deep. Waiting beside it was a platoon of Waffen-SS under SS-Lieutenant Arlt. Each man was armed with a pistol
and twenty-five rounds of ammunition; more boxes of cartridges were stacked nearby.32 About two hundred metres out from the clearing, a cordon of sentries from a Latvian police unit stood guard, to prevent any victims escaping or any potential witnesses venturing near.33

  Disembarked from the truck, the women, men and children were forced to strip to their underwear, leaving behind any possessions they had on them. At gunpoint, in groups of about twenty, they were marched to the edge of the pit, where they had to stand in a line, facing the edge. Behind each person stood an SS trooper. On the order, the victims were shot in the back of the neck at point-blank range, and fell into the pit. Then came the next batch. When they had all been shot, a machine gun mounted at the end of the pit opened fire on any corpses that seemed to be still moving.34 After a short interval, the next truck would arrive, and the process would be repeated.

  What made those people submit? From the first who faced the empty pit to those who saw it already half-filled with the corpses of their neighbours and friends, and heard the shots being fired – what enabled them to walk into place, stand and be shot down? Were they subdued by terror? Had they resigned themselves to their fate, or suffered an existential self-negation? Or did they still retain, until the very last split second with the pistol at their neck, a hope that the shot would not fire, that somehow they would be reprieved? A few did try to run, although they didn’t get far, but overwhelmingly the victims went quietly to their deaths.

  At Maly Trostinets there was none of the undisciplined fury and euphoria that had often characterized Einsatzgruppe killings elsewhere, in which infants had their backs broken and were hurled into the pits, and the murderers laughed and raged as they killed. Here it was just cold, clockwork execution.

  And yet it told on the killers’ minds. Even these men had consciences of a sort – wizened, stunted consciences, just enough to be rubbed raw by the endless blood and guilt. Arlt’s men were provided with vodka to numb the feeling,35 but it didn’t heal the damage. For this reason the SS had experimented with alternative methods which would allow them to exterminate but avoid bloodying their hands. This had brought about the second, slower, method of execution employed simultaneously at Maly Trostinets.

  At the beginning of June, mobile gas vans had been introduced. There were three of them – two converted from Diamond goods vans, and one larger Staurer furniture removal van. The Germans called them S-Wagen, but the local Belarusian people called them dukgubki – soul suffocators.36 While the majority of Jews were shot at the pit, some – probably two or three hundred from each transport – went in the vans. The lottery happened at the station in Minsk, where some were loaded into the regular lorries, and some into the S-Wagen, crammed in so tightly that they crushed and trampled one another.

  Once the shootings had been completed, the gas vans started up and drove to the plantation, where they parked beside the corpse-filled pit. Each driver or his assistant connected a pipe from the exhaust to the van interior, which was lined with steel. Then the engine was started. The people trapped inside immediately began to panic; the vans shook and rocked on their suspension with the violence of their struggle, and there were muffled sounds of screaming and hammering on the sides. Gradually, over the course of about fifteen minutes, the noise and shuddering lessened and the vans grew still.37

  When all was quiet, each van was opened. Some of the bodies, which had piled up against the door, fell out on to the ground. A Sonderkommando of Jewish prisoners climbed up inside and began hauling out the rest of the corpses, heaving them into the pit. The van interior was a scene of unbearable horror; the bodies were streaked with blood, vomit and faeces; the floor was littered with broken spectacles, tufts of hair and even teeth lying in the mess, where the victims had fought and clawed the people near them in their demented efforts to escape.

  Before the vans could be used again, they were taken to a pond near the camp and the interiors thoroughly sluiced out. The delay this caused, together with the small number of vans available and frequent mechanical failures, was the reason why firing squads were still used. The SS was still working to refine its methods of mass murder.

  SS-Lieutenant Arlt wrote in his log for that day: ‘On 15/6 there arrived another transport of 1,000 Jews from Vienna.’38 That was all. He had no interest in describing what he and his men had done; it was just another day’s work, over which the SS felt it was best to draw a veil of discretion.

  אמא

  A summer sun lay hot and lazy on the slow-moving surface of the Danube Canal. The faint, delighted squeals of children drifted over the water from the grassy banks where families sat with picnics or strolled under the trees. Pleasure boats cruised and rowing boats scudded across the expanse between them.

  It was all far away from Tini’s senses as she pulled on the oars – a pleasant, distant background music of laughter. Sunlight sparkled on the splashes with each lift of the oar-blades from the water, illuminating the faces of her children. Edith, smiling serenely, Fritz and Herta still little kids, and Kurt, the last-born and beloved, a tiny speck scarcely out of nappies. Tini smiled and heaved at the oars, sending the boat surging across the water.39 She was a good rower – had been since her girlhood. And she doted on her family; at the age of twelve she had been made a counsellor to the younger schoolchildren because she loved it so much; to nurture and succour was part of her make-up, and in motherhood it had its purest expression.

  The sounds of the other boats and the revels on the far banks faded, as if a mist had descended, closing off the boat from the world. The oars dipped and splashed, and the boat glided on.

  In a drawer in a chest in faraway Massachusetts, Tini’s last letters to Kurt lay gathered. The German in which they were written was already leaking away from his comprehension as his child’s mind adapted to his new world. He had absorbed her meaning, but was already slowly, insensibly beginning to forget how to read her words.

  My beloved Kurtl … I am so happy that you are doing well … write often … Herta is always thinking of you … I am afraid every day … Herta sends hugs and kisses. A thousand kisses from your Mama. I love you.

  That night, after the Sonderkommando had backfilled the pit, dusk fell on the silent clearing among the young pines. Birds returned, night creatures foraged among the weeds and ran over the disturbed soil of the pit. Beneath lay the remains of nine hundred souls who had boarded the train in Vienna: Rosa Kerbel and her four grandchildren – Otto, Kurt, Helene and Heinrich – and the elderly Adolf and Amalie Klinger, five-year-old Alice Baron, the spinster sisters Johanna and Flora Kaufmann, Adolf and Witie Aptowitzer from Im Werd, Tini Kleinmann and her pretty twenty-year-old daughter, Herta.

  They had believed that they were going to eke out a new life in the Ostland, and that perhaps one day they would be reunited with their dear ones – husbands, sons, brothers, daughters – who had been scattered to the camps and far countries.40 Beyond all reason, beyond all human feeling, the world – not only the Nazis but the politicians, people and newspapermen of London, New York, Chicago and Washington – had closed off that future and irrevocably sealed it shut.

  10. A Journey to Death

  אבא

  The summer sun was lowering, spreading an orange cast over the branches and long, coal-grey shadows across the forest floor. Gustav’s ears were filled with the rasp of saws on tree-trunks and the urgent grunts of men, the pumping of his own blood and the heave of his breath as he and his workmates hoisted a tree-trunk on to their wagon.

  In a way it was pleasant to be out in the woods again, away from the grit and dust and mud, but the kapo, a vindictive sadist called Jacob Ganzer, was a hard driver. ‘Faster, pigs! You think those logs will stack themselves? Move!’

  At such a speed the work was not only exhausting but dangerous. Gustav and his mates raised the massive log and launched it on to the stack atop the creaking wagon. Not a second to spare to catch their breath or ensure that the stack was stable – another log was ready to be hea
ved up, and Ganzer was barking furiously. Gustav took one end of the massive trunk, his mate, a prisoner named Friedmann, applied his shoulder to it, and other hands took up the weight; muscles cracking, they strained it upwards, over the sideboard, up towards a space on the pile. With Ganzer’s hectoring in their ears, somebody let go before the trunk was settled. It rolled back, an unstoppable mass weighing hundreds of kilos, bringing others with it.

  The trunk rolled over Gustav’s hand; his brain scarcely had time to feel the cracking pain in his fingers before it slammed into his body and Friedmann’s, knocking them to the ground and landing on top of them.1

  Gustav lay pinned like a butterfly on a card, staring up at the swirling canopy of leaves flickering in the evening sun, his body a mass of pain, his ears filled with screams and groans and shouting. Then striped uniforms were in his vision, hands scrabbling at the trunk, lifting it off him, but he still couldn’t move. Looking around, he saw men picking themselves up, with bloodied hands and faces, others sprawled and moaning. Friedmann lay a few feet away, motionless, whimpering hoarsely; he had taken most of the force of the falling trunk on his chest. Blood was oozing from his mouth.

  Hands clasped Gustav’s body, and he was picked up and carried from the clearing. Through the pain, he saw the trees flit by, the sky fading and tilting, heard the grunting of the men bearing him. The gatehouse passed by him, and then he was entering the infirmary and being laid on a pallet.2

  Seven other men from his detail came after him, either carried or hobbling by themselves. Friedmann arrived last on a stretcher. He couldn’t move; his ribcage was crushed and his spine broken. He lay in helpless agony.