At last the orderlies took the men to the bunk rooms and assigned them their places – two men to a bed, one blanket each. Gustav managed to get himself and Fritz assigned to the same bed. It was like their first night in the tent in Buchenwald; at least here there was a floor and a sound roof over their heads. But there was also the certainty that life in Auschwitz would be both cruel and brief.
אבא
On the third day they received their tattoos. This practice was unique to Auschwitz, introduced the previous autumn. They queued at the registration office; each man rolled up his left sleeve, and the tattoo was laid on his arm with a needle.
Gustav’s forearm still bore the scar of his bullet wound from January 1915. The number 68523 was pricked into his skin beside it in blue ink.28 He was entered as Schutz Jude – Jewish ‘protective custody’ – his place and date of birth were set down, and his trade.29 Having volunteered for the transport, Fritz was near the end of the list, and received the number 68629. His trade was written down as builder’s mate.
Then they went back to their block. Days passed, but the Buchenwalders weren’t assigned to any labour detail, and were left more or less alone, except for regular camp rituals.
There was no square, and roll call took place in the street outside the block. Food was doled out by the Polish room orderlies and the block senior – the blockowi as the Poles called him. The Poles hated and despised the Austrian and German Jews – both as Germans and as Jews – and made it plain that they stood no chance of surviving long in Auschwitz; they’d been sent here only to be killed. At mealtimes the Jews were made to queue up, and when a man’s turn came, he was given a bowl and spoon by the blockowi and shoved forward. An orderly doled out a splat of thin stew from a bucket, while a young Pole stood by with a spoon, quickly scooping out any pieces of meat he spotted in the bowl. Even the most phlegmatic among the Buchenwalders were aggravated by this ritual, but any man who complained received a beating.
Gustav, who was officially regarded as Polish by birth and spoke the language, was a little better treated than others. During those first few days he became acquainted with some of the older Poles, and they told him about the ways of Auschwitz, confirming what Gustav had heard about the terrible, fatal purpose of this place.
The enclosure was much smaller than Buchenwald, with only three rows of seven blocks. This, he learned, was the main camp, Auschwitz I.30 A couple of kilometres away, on the far side of the railway, a second camp, Auschwitz II, had been built at the village of Brzezinska, which the Germans called Birkenau – ‘the Birch Woods’ (the SS liked picturesque names for their places of suffering).31 Birkenau was vast, built to contain over a hundred thousand people and equipped to murder them on an industrial scale. Auschwitz I had its own killing facility: the infamous block 11 – the Death Block – in whose basement the first experiments with poison gas had been carried out. Most notoriously, the enclosed yard outside block 11 was the location of the ‘Black Wall’ against which condemned prisoners were shot.32 Whether the Buchenwalders would be sent to Birkenau or die here was yet to be discovered.
By daylight, the familiarity of the surroundings became clearer to Gustav – specifically the well-made brick buildings. Auschwitz I had not been built by the SS; rather it had been converted from an old military barracks built by the Austrian army before the First World War. The Polish army had used it after 1918, and now the SS had turned it into a concentration camp. They’d put up additional barrack blocks and surrounded it with an electrified fence, but it was still recognizably the same place. It was here that the wounded Corporal Gustav Kleinmann had been in hospital in 1915, in this very spot by the Sola, the river that flowed from the lake by the village where he’d been born. When he’d last seen it, it had been under snow and filled with Austrian soldiers, and he’d been a wounded hero. Treated for a bullet wound which now had a prisoner tattoo beside it.
It was as if this part of the world would not let him go; having birthed him, raised him and nearly killed him once, it was determined to drag him back.
בן
On the ninth day after the Buchenwalders’ arrival in Auschwitz, there was a demonstration of the camp’s infamous character. Two hundred and eighty Polish prisoners were taken to the Death Block for execution; realizing what was intended for them, some of them fought back. They were unarmed and weak, and the SS quickly butchered the resisters and led the rest to the Black Wall. One of the doomed men passed a note for his family to a member of the Sonderkommando, but it was discovered by the SS and destroyed.33
‘Many scary things here,’ Gustav wrote. ‘It takes good nerves to withstand it.’
There were some whose nerves were beginning to fail them; one was Fritz. A sense of dread, exacerbated by the limbo in which they were being held, had been growing in him. He’d become so accustomed to his daily work as a builder, and to the fact that he owed his survival to his position in the construction detail, that being unemployed played on his nerves. He felt that sooner rather than later he would be selected as a useless eater and sent to the Black Wall or the gas chambers, as would they all. Misgiving turned to anxiety and dread. He became convinced that the only way to save his life was to identify himself to someone with authority and ask to be assigned work.
He confessed his thoughts to his father and his close friends. They argued strenuously against this rash idea, reminding him of the fundamental rule of survival that you never drew attention to yourself in the slightest way. But Fritz was young and headstrong, and had convinced himself that he was doomed if he did not.
The first person he approached was the SS Blockführer. With the courage of desperation, Fritz identified himself. ‘I’m a skilled builder,’ he said. ‘I would like to be assigned work.’ The man stared at him in disbelief, glanced at the star on his uniform, and scoffed. ‘Who ever heard of a Jewish builder?’ Fritz swore it was true, and the Blockführer – unusually easygoing for an SS guard – took him to the Rapportführer, the genial-seeming Sergeant Gerhard Palitzsch.
Palitzsch was one of the few SS men who lived up to the Aryan ideal of athletic, chiselled handsomeness, and was pleasant and serene in his manner. This was a dangerous illusion. Palitzsch’s record as a murderer was second to none. The number of prisoners Palitzsch had personally shot at the Black Wall was beyond counting; his preferred weapon was an infantry rifle, and he would shoot his victims in the back of the neck with an insouciance that impressed his fellow SS men. Auschwitz’s commandant, Rudolf Höss, often watched Palitzsch’s executions, and ‘never noticed the slightest stirring of an emotion in him’; he killed ‘nonchalantly, with an even temper and a straight face, and without any haste’.34 If any delay occurred, he would put down his rifle and whistle cheerfully to himself or chat with his comrades until it was time to resume. He was proud of his work, and felt not the slightest brush of conscience. The prisoners considered him ‘the biggest bastard in Auschwitz’.35
And this was the man to whom Fritz had chosen to make himself conspicuous. Palitzsch’s reaction was the same as the Blockführer’s – he had never heard of a Jewish builder. But he was intrigued. ‘I will put it to the test,’ he said, adding: ‘If you’re trying to fool me, you’ll be shot at once.’ He ordered the Blockführer to take the prisoner away and make him build something.
Fritz was escorted to a nearby construction site. The bemused kapo provided materials and, thinking he’d fox this uppity Jew, instructed Fritz to try to make a pier – the upright section between two windows – an impossible task for anyone not properly skilled in bricklaying.
Despite the threat hanging over him, Fritz felt absolutely calm for the first time in weeks. Taking a trowel and a brick, he set to work. His hands moving quickly and deftly, he scooped mortar from the bucket and slapped it on to the first course, snaked the tip of the trowel through it, spreading the grey sludge, slicing the excess from the edges with quick strokes. He picked up a brick, buttered it and laid it, swiped off the mortar, then laid a
nother and another. He worked with the silent speed he had learned under the gaze of SS supervisors, and the courses soon stacked up, straight, level and even. To the kapo’s astonishment, he soon had the basis of a neat, perfectly sound pier.
Within two hours he was back at the camp gate, escorted by a very surprised Blockführer. ‘He really can build,’ the man told Palitzsch.
Palitzsch’s usually impassive face registered displeasure; the idea of a Jew being a builder – an honest working man – went against his sense of what was true and proper. Nevertheless, he noted down Fritz’s number and sent him back to his block.
Nothing changed immediately, but then, on 30 October, the eleventh day since their arrival, the moment of reckoning finally came for the Buchenwalders.
Following morning roll call, all the newly transferred Jewish prisoners were paraded for inspection by a group of SS officers. In addition to the four hundred from Buchenwald, there were over a thousand from Dachau, Natzweiler, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg and Sachsenhausen, as well as 186 women from Ravensbrück – in all, 1,674 people.36 They were ordered to strip naked and walk slowly past the officers so that they could be evaluated. Those who appeared old or sick were directed to go to the left, the others to the right. Everyone knew full well what being sent to the left would entail. The rate of selection appeared to be about half and half.
Fritz’s turn came. As he approached, the officer in charge looked him up and down, and immediately indicated the right.
Then Fritz stood and watched as the depressing spectacle progressed. Eventually his papa’s turn came. Gustav was over fifty years old and had suffered badly that year. Several hundred other men of his age – some younger – had already been sent to the left. Fritz watched with his heart thumping and breath halting as the officers looked his father up and down carefully. The hand went up – and pointed to the right. Gustav walked over and stood beside Fritz.
By the end, more than six hundred people – including around a hundred Buchenwalders and virtually all the men from Dachau – had been condemned as unfit. Many were old friends and acquaintances of Gustav and Fritz. They were marched away to Birkenau and never seen again.37
‘So this was the beginning in Auschwitz for us Buchenwalders,’ Fritz would recall later. ‘We knew now that we were doomed to death.’38
But not yet. Following the selection, the remaining eight hundred men were also marched out of the camp. But instead of heading west towards the railway and Birkenau, they were led east. The SS had work for them; there was a new camp to be built. They crossed the river, passing the town of Oświęcim, and marched on into the countryside.
As they marched, driven in the familiar violent fashion, the Buchenwalders felt relief out of all proportion with their circumstances. They were alive, and that was everything. Whether Fritz’s intervention had precipitated this move, by planting the idea that Jews could build, nobody knew, but Gustav believed it was so. ‘Fritzl came with me willingly,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘He is a loyal companion, always at my side, taking care of everything; everyone admires the boy, and he is a true comrade to all of them.’ In at least some of their minds, Fritz’s rash action had saved them all from the gas chamber.39
12. Auschwitz-Monowitz
If an aeroplane were to fly east over southern Poland on a day in November 1942, the people aboard would see little trace of the German occupation. Just small country towns and old mercantile cities straddling winding roads and rivers.
Towards Cracow, a shape emerges from the fields near the brown line of the railway – a vast rectangle over a kilometre long and nearly as wide, filled with row after row after row of oblong barracks. Watchtowers dot the perimeter fence, and on the near edge, among some trees, several buildings are set apart, pouring out smoke.
Farther on, a dense cluster of buildings on the other side of the railway – the Auschwitz camp, distinguishable among the grey mass of workshops by the terracotta roofs of its barrack blocks. The river winds southward, a silver line fringed with deep green woods, towards the old garrison town of Kenty – where Gustav Kleinmann was stationed before the Great War – and the Beskid Mountains. Beyond, just out of sight, the lake and the village of Zablocie, where Gustav was once a boy.
Several kilometres beyond Oświęcim, a new scar appears on the landscape: a vast, dark blight in a bend of the Vistula. Once, there was just the sleepy hamlet of Dwory here; now an area three kilometres long and over a kilometre wide lies stripped, gridded with roads and tracks and filled from end to end with construction sites, dotted with offices, workshops, factory buildings and the shells of many more, half-built, laced with cages of pipework, silos and shining steel chimneys. This is the Buna Werke chemical works, under construction and already way behind schedule.
Tucked in beside it at the far end, where the little village of Monowitz stood until the SS emptied it, lie the beginnings of a new camp. A simple oblong marked out among the fields – minuscule beside the spread of the factory complex, with just a handful of barrack blocks, a few incomplete roads and building sites, speckled with the dots of prisoners hard at work.
בן
Fritz kept his mind focused on the task before him, as if it were all that existed, as if his whole world consisted of this wall, and his whole being nothing but a machine making it slowly higher and longer. The only way to stay sane was to concentrate on the minuscule, the achievable, and one’s capacity to make it real.
‘Tempo, tempo! Faster, faster!’ The voice of the Polish kapo, Petrek Boplinsky, brayed across the site. The man knew only a few words of German, and the only one they ever seemed to hear was schneller! as he strode about with his cane, whipping the brick and mortar carriers. The drive to build the camp was furious; the pressure for speed came from the very top, and only the toughest and fittest could survive the pace. Few of the half-starved prisoners were up to it.
‘Pięć na dupę!’fn1 Boplinsky yelled, followed by the sound of the cane lashing some poor carrier five times across the buttocks. Without looking up, every other man put on a little extra speed.
A couple of weeks had passed since Fritz and the others had arrived in the Monowitz sub-camp.1 It had been a living hell, as bad as the worst of Buchenwald. Many had not survived the initial onslaught.
After the three-hour march from Auschwitz I, the new men had been herded into their blocks. There was almost no camp – just flat, open fields with a few wooden barracks, no fence and only a sentry line to keep the prisoners in.2 The barracks were primitive and incomplete, with no lights or washing facilities. The only water supply was a few standpipes out in the field. There were no kitchens yet, so food was delivered each day from Auschwitz I.
At first the new men had been put to digging roads. Fritz too. The Monowitz overseers didn’t seem to be aware of his skills. It rained heavily, turning the ground to mud which was hell to dig and bogged down the wheelbarrows. The men would return to the barracks each evening soaked to the skin and exhausted. There was no heating, but the SS Blockführers and Rapportführer still expected them to report each morning at roll call with clean, dry clothes and shoes. During those first days, Fritz regarded his older and less fit comrades with concern – especially his papa. They wouldn’t be able to stand this for long.
As they dug the wet mud, Fritz watched the camp beginning to take shape, with fences and the foundations for guard towers being laid; salvation, he knew, lay in getting transferred to the construction detail.
One day, SS-Sergeant Richard Stolten, Monowitz’s labour manager, happened to pass near. The SS here were unusually bad-tempered; there were no guard barracks yet, and they were trucked in from Auschwitz I each day in shifts; they hated doing duty at Monowitz and were easily riled. Fritz reckoned it was worth the risk; his papa would die if this went on.
Laying down his shovel he hurried after Stolten, calling out to him. ‘Number 68629. I’m a bricklayer,’ he said, speaking quickly before the sergeant could react. He indicated his workmates. ‘We’r
e from Buchenwald; many of us are skilled construction workers.’
Stolten studied him, then called the kapo over. ‘Find out which of these Jews are builders,’ he said, ‘and take their numbers.’
It had been as simple as that. At any other time, Fritz would have earned himself a beating, but the situation here was desperate. There was colossal pressure from Himmler and Goering to complete the Buna Werke and bring its factories on-line, which couldn’t be achieved until the camp was complete. Fritz could sense the urgency.
Many of Fritz’s comrades claimed to be builders in order to transfer with him – including his papa. Woodworking was among Gustav’s upholstery skills, and he passed himself off as a carpenter. While Fritz laid foundations and floors, his father helped with the prefabricated sections from which the barrack blocks were constructed.
On the other side of the Oświęcim–Monowitz road, the hulking Buna Werke loomed, half-built. The works belonged to the chemical giant IG Farben and when completed were to produce synthetic fuel, rubber and other chemical products for the German war effort.3 The war was proving far more intense and difficult than had been expected, and the demand for fuel and rubber was frantic. The company’s deal with the SS gave them an unlimited supply of slave labour from Auschwitz for construction and factory work, for which they paid the SS three to four marks a day per person (which went straight into the SS coffers). Besides being cheaper than paying civilian wages, the arrangement gave the company big savings on worker facilities, sickness benefits, recreation and other labour costs. Productivity would be lower because of the poor physical condition of the maltreated prisoners, but the company considered the savings worth it.4 Any workers who were too sick or broken-down to work could simply be sent to the gas chambers at Birkenau and replaced from the fresh intakes constantly arriving from all over Germany’s conquered territories.
The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz Page 18