The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

by Jeremy Dronfield

  Aumeier inspected the selected men closely, looking with distaste at the Jewish stars on their uniforms. In most cases, they were of the two-colour kind: a Star of David made up of red and yellow triangles, dating from the old days when the Nazis still required a pretext for sending Jews to the camps.

  ‘Get rid of them,’ Aumeier ordered.

  A kapo who was standing by unpicked Gustav’s star from his jacket, separated the two triangles, and gave the red one back to him. The same was done to the other sixteen men, leaving them clutching their red triangles, utterly mystified.

  ‘You are political prisoners,’ Aumeier announced. ‘There are no Jews in positions of authority here. Remember this. From this moment you men are Aryans.’

  And that was that. As far as the regime was concerned, Gustav Kleinmann was officially no longer Jewish. By the mere alteration of a list and a badge, he officially ceased to be an intrinsic threat and burden to the German people. And there, neatly played out in one simple, self-satirizing ritual, was the whole towering idiocy of Nazi racial ideology.

  From that moment, life for the Jews in Monowitz was transformed. The seventeen Aryanized men were now on a higher plane, and although they weren’t immune from punishment, they were safe from outright persecution and no longer beasts in the eyes of the SS.

  With their positions as foremen and kapos secure, they were able to gain influence and help their fellow Jews acquire good positions. (With the ritual over and the top brass gone back to Berlin the blanket ban on Jews holding functionary positions was quickly forgotten by Schöttl.) Gustl Herzog became a clerk in the prisoner records office, eventually rising to be its head functionary with a staff of several dozen prisoners.6 Jupp Hirschberg, another Buchenwalder, became kapo of the SS garage, where staff cars and other vehicles were maintained; he became privy to all manner of gossip from the chauffeurs, as well as intelligence about events in the wider camp and the world outside. Others acquired jobs ranging from block senior to carpenters’ kapo to camp barber. Between them, they brought the conditions for other Jews to a new level. The new Aryans were able to speak out to prevent beatings, obtain decent rations, and resist the brutal green-triangle kapos.

  For Gustav it meant his comfortable working life was given an additional security. There was little danger now of his being selected for the gas chambers, and so long as he was careful, he would be safe from random acts of violence by the SS.

  But his change of status had an unforeseen effect, and it was heartbreaking. He and Fritz, living in separate blocks, had grown so used to meeting in the evenings after roll call that they thought little of it; it was routine, habitual. One evening they were so deep in conversation – reminiscing about the old days, weighing up the future, exchanging news about the camp – they failed to notice an SS Blockführer eyeing their intimate conversation with deep suspicion.

  He interrupted, shoving Fritz hard. ‘Jew-pig, what d’you think you’re doing, talking to a kapo like that?’ Fritz and his papa both jumped to attention, startled out of their wits. ‘What d’you mean by it?’

  ‘He’s my father,’ said Fritz, bemused.

  Without warning, the Blockführer’s fist slammed sickeningly into Fritz’s face. ‘He has a red triangle; he can’t be a Jew’s father.’

  Fritz was stunned, pain rebounding through his skull; he’d never been punched right in the face like that. ‘He is my father,’ he insisted.

  The Blockführer punched him again. ‘Liar!’

  Fritz, absolutely bewildered, couldn’t help repeating his answer, and received another savage blow. Gustav stood by in horror, helpless, knowing that if he intervened it would make things worse for both of them.

  Fritz was knocked to the ground by the enraged Blockführer, who finally ran out of steam. ‘Get up, Jew.’ Fritz picked himself up, bruised and bleeding. ‘Now get the hell out of here.’

  As Fritz walked away, nursing his head, Gustav said to the Blockführer, ‘He really is my son.’

  The Blockführer stared at him as if he were a madman. Gustav gave up; if he’d told the man he was in fact an Aryanized Jew, it would probably change nothing. Indeed, it was quite possible that the Blockführer knew that already, but would still think the same way. The mind of a Nazi was beyond fathoming, let alone reasoning.

  אחים

  Auschwitz-Monowitz, now completely built, was a small, simple camp. It had no gatehouse: just a plain gateway in the double electrified fence. A single street ran the length of the enclosure, a distance of just 490 metres.7 Barrack blocks lined the road: three rows to the left, two to the right. About halfway along was the roll-call square, with a smiths’ workshop and kitchen block to one side. There was a grass border, carefully tended, as were the verges and flower beds in all concentration camps; the contrast between the care given to these patches of decoration compared with the abuse and murder of human beings was a paradox which drove some prisoners mad.8

  A little farther along, on the left-hand side of the street, stood block 7. Outwardly it was no different from the others: a wooden barrack, not particularly well made. But inside it was very special, for this block belonged to the Monowitz Prominenten. These were not like the Prominenten Fritz had known in Buchenwald; there were no celebrities or statesmen here; just the kapos, foremen and men with special duties – the functionary prisoners, the inmate aristocracy.9 Gustav Kleinmann, camp saddler and new-minted Aryan, was one of them. Having come here as the lowest of the low, he was now among the most privileged.

  In his personal contentment, Gustav was slowly becoming less conscious of the sufferings of others, or at least less disturbed by them. He worked indoors, and the abuse happened mostly out of his sight. On the rare occasions he took out his diary, it was to record how peace had settled on the camp, and that fewer prisoners were being sent to the gas chambers – albeit because the selections at Birkenau were becoming more thorough in weeding out and murdering the weak. By Gustav’s reckoning, about 10 to 15 per cent survived from each transport – ‘The rest are gassed. The most gruesome scenes play out.’ But still, ‘Everything is more peaceful in Monowitz, a proper work camp.’ To Gustav’s experienced eye, its primary purpose was to exploit, not to destroy its inmates, and the horror of life within its fences was diminished compared with what he had seen. It was as if he had finally lost the ability to perceive it all in comparison with the normal, civilized world.

  Even so, two things weighed on him severely. One was separation from Fritz. The other was the man who hovered above all the Prominenten like a malevolent, bloodsucking bat: Josef ‘Jupp’ Windeck, the camp senior and chief of all the kapos and functionary prisoners. The SS could not have picked an enforcer more suited to their ideal than Jupp Windeck.

  He wasn’t much to look at – small and slight, with the bearing of a weakling. But his appearance was belied by the temperament of a tyrant.10 His bland, characterless features expressed disdain and scorn; he loved to lord it over his fellow men, and trample them down to enhance himself. A German, Windeck had been a petty criminal since the age of sixteen, in and out of prisons and concentration camps since the early 1930s. He wore the black triangle of an ‘asocial’, a catch-all which included addicts, alcoholics, the homeless, pimps, the unemployed and the ‘immoral’. A camp senior in Auschwitz I, he’d been transferred to Monowitz along with the Buchenwalders.

  In no time at all he’d established a reign of corruption, terror and extortion. ‘Well, so much stuff came with the Jews,’ Windeck recalled later, ‘and we filched from it, of course we did … as kapos we always got ourselves the best.’11 His chief ally was an SS Rapportführer called Remmele, who benefited from Windeck’s money-making schemes.

  Windeck dressed as he liked, favouring riding boots with breeches and a dark jacket – probably in an attempt to mimic the look of an SS officer. He strutted self-importantly about the camp, never without his dog whip. There were allegations that he sexually abused younger prisoners. He murdered with impunity, beating or
kicking his victims to death or drowning them in the washroom basins.12 It was Jupp Windeck who had murdered the lyricist Fritz Löhner-Beda, lashing the weakened, broken old man with his dog whip.13 His henchman described how he ‘particularly liked to beat up feeble, half-starved, and sick inmates … When these miserable fellows lay on the ground before him, he trampled on them, on their faces, their stomachs, all over, with the heels of his boots.’ He was extremely proud and vain about his riding boots: ‘God help the man who dirtied Windeck’s boots, for he could be murdered for that.’14

  Gustav and his high-status friends were able to hold off Jupp Windeck’s cruelties and protect their fellow Jews. They were helped by the communist prisoners, with whom they formed an alliance.15

  The balance of power swung against them when a transport of six hundred prisoners arrived from Mauthausen, reputedly one of the regime’s harshest camps. They were all green-triangle men, with some real savages among them. Windeck quickly gathered them around him, steering them into positions as kapos and block seniors. The Aryanized Jews and the communists resisted, but Windeck and his cronies were too powerful. Any prisoner who showed fight was beaten – sometimes to death. The misery in Monowitz redoubled.

  Relief only came when Windeck’s barbaric green men began to fall into traps of their own making. One would go on a drunken bender, another would steal from the camp, yet another would pick a fight with an SS guard or a civilian worker. They were removed and sent to the unspeakable purgatory of Auschwitz’s coal-mining sub-camps.16 As the months went by, Jupp Windeck’s power base eroded until eventually it was gone.

  It was Windeck’s own corruption that brought on the final crisis. Gustl Herzog, in his position as clerk in the prisoner records office, discovered evidence that Windeck had acquired a precious necklace and was intending to post it to his wife. This intelligence was conveyed to the camp Gestapo at Auschwitz I. Windeck was seized and sentenced to two weeks in the bunker, after which he was sent to a punishment company in Birkenau. He never troubled Monowitz again.17

  Gustav and his friends regained their influence. The atmosphere among the prisoners became comradely again; they received their proper allowance of food, had showers once a week and fresh laundry once a month. There was order, and all that remained to worry about were routine hazards: the SS, sickness, the ceaseless dangers of work, the periodic selections of the ill and weak for the gas chambers. By contrast with what they had just been through, it could almost be called civilization, albeit a civilization carved out with bleeding fingers inside the fences of hell.

  14. Resistance and Collaboration: The Death of Fritz Kleinmann

  בן

  The Nazi system was a formidable but ramshackle piece of engineering. It had been built through improvisation and ran at a juddering pace, misfiring, stuttering, consuming its human fuel, pouring out bones and ashes, and ejecting an exhaust of nauseating smoke. The individual human, in drab stripes, was forced not only physically into the machine but morally and psychologically too. Beyond the Blockführers and kapos, the electrified wire and watchtowers, the SS commandants and guard dogs, beyond the roads and railways, the camp system and the hierarchy of the SS, stood a whole nation, a government and society of human beings whose base, animal emotions – fear, spite, lust for gain or some imagined former greatness – empowered the system.

  The prisoners’ incarceration was meant to be the clean, simple solution to the society’s complex, muddy problems. The removal of human toxins – criminals, left-wing activists, Jews, homosexuals – was supposed to bring back the nation’s glory days. In fact it was not a cure but a poison, slowly but surely bringing the nation to the ground. The inefficient labour of starved slaves, the cost of the system which enslaved them, the weakening of science and industry by the removal of geniuses tainted by race: all these things hamstrung the nation’s economy. Becoming a pariah among nations had cost trade. Germany tried to solve these further problems by wars of conquest, more enslavement, more murder of the people believed to be the root cause, the stone crusher rattling on, day and night, grinding and destroying and slowly wearing itself out.

  Fritz Kleinmann found the helplessness and hopelessness of being trapped in the machine intolerable. His father was safe for now, which lifted a great weight from his heart. But the injustice and cruelty of the system could make a sane man crazy, and a pious one curse God. They lived, and in most cases died meaningless deaths, within fences and walls built by their fellow prisoners. Fritz himself, with meticulous skill, had helped create this prison out of open fields. The very bricks and stones that Fritz laid had been moulded and cut by yet other prisoners in the brickworks and stone quarries run by the SS.1

  The bond he shared with his father, and their ties with their friends, were far from universal traits. Solidarity and cooperation, the keys to survival, rarely come naturally to men in extreme circumstances. Deprivation and hunger bred hostility between prisoners, to the point where they would fight over an unfair portion of turnip soup, where a person might commit murder for a piece of bread. Even fathers and sons had been known to kill one another in the extremity of starvation. Yet only through solidarity and kindness could people stay alive for any length of time. Lone wolves and mavericks, or those unfortunates who were isolated by their inability to understand German or Yiddish, never lasted long against the relentless terror.2

  It took strength of character to share and love in a world where selfishness and hate were common currency. And survival was never guaranteed. Fritz saw the marks of abuse and deprivation and the signs of impending death in all his fellow prisoners, including himself:3 bruises, cuts and broken bones, sores and scabs, pallor and chapped skin, limping gait and gapped teeth.

  The prisoners were able to shower once a week, but it was an ordeal. Those with harsh block seniors had to strip in the bunk room and then run naked to the shower block. After showering, only the first men out got dry towels; they were passed along, so if you lagged behind you got nothing but a soaking rag and had to walk back to the barrack dripping, even in the coldest winter weather. Pneumonia was endemic, and often fatal. There was a prisoner hospital, but although it was kept decently equipped by its prisoner staff,4 treatment under the SS doctors was rudimentary, and it was a fearful place, often full of typhus patients. Nobody went there unless they had to; patients were subject to selections, and if deemed unlikely to recover quickly, they went to the gas chambers or received a lethal injection.

  Food was distributed in the barrack. Only a few bowls were provided, so the first to get their helping of soup had to wolf it down so as not to keep the others waiting. Any man who took his time would be shoved impatiently. Their acorn coffee was served in the same bowls. If you managed to acquire your own spoon, it was as precious to you as jewels; you would guard it with your life, and as knives were unobtainable, you would extend its usefulness by sharpening the handle on a stone. There was no toilet paper in the latrines, so scrap paper was another valuable commodity; torn-up cement bags from the construction sites could be obtained, and sometimes a newspaper might be acquired from a civilian – perhaps left lying around at the factory and smuggled back to camp. Pieces could be used or traded for food.

  The people suffering this degradation were regarded by the Germans as human garbage, but the nation’s war economy was increasingly dependent on their labour. This was the new age of greatness that Hitler had brought into existence: a world in which a square of waste paper became a currency with a tangible value, either to spend or to keep one’s arse wiped.

  Each man’s body was subjected constantly to shocks and irritations. Having a decent pair of shoes was absolutely fundamental. If they were too large or too small, they chafed and caused blisters which were prone to infection. Socks were rare, and many substituted strips of fabric torn from the tails of their camp-issue shirts. This in itself was risky, because damaging SS property was sabotage and could earn you twenty-five lashes or a period of starvation. With no scissors or clippe
rs, toenails grew and grew until they broke or became ingrown.

  Heads were shaved every two weeks by the camp barber. Partly this was to prevent lice, but it also served, like the striped uniforms, to make prisoners conspicuous. The barber used no soap or antiseptic, so every man’s head and face had razor burn, pimples and pustules, as well as ingrown hairs. Infections were common, and could lead to time in the hospital. Fritz was at least spared half the shaving ordeal – at twenty years old, his beard had still not developed.

  There was a camp dental station, but prisoners didn’t go there if they could help it. Loose fillings led to caries and gum disease, while scurvy brought on by poor diet loosened teeth. Gold teeth could be lifesavers or a deadly danger. Prisoners were murdered for them by certain kapos, but if the owner of a gold tooth possessed the strength of will to pull it out himself, it could be traded for luxuries. There was a fixed exchange rate among the civilian black marketeers: one gold tooth equalled one bottle of Wyborowa, a quality brand of Polish vodka. Or it could buy five big loaves of Kommisbrotfn1 and a block of margarine. These things could be traded onwards for other goods. In a world where each week, each day, or even each hour might be one’s last, there was little point in storing up riches for some better or higher purpose. Anything that brought solace or comfort or a full stomach in the living moment was worth the price.

  For the managers and board of IG Farben, the sacrifice of their slave workers was justified by profit. Some of the staff felt guilt, but it was minimal and ineffectual. Meanwhile, the accountants and directors turned a blind eye to the huge quantities of their delousing chemical Zyklon B purchased by the SS, especially at Auschwitz, where its toxic fumes fed the gas chambers.5

  Fritz Kleinmann was in no doubt where the evil came from: ‘Let no one conclude that the prisoner hierarchy bears the blame for bringing about this state of affairs. Some of the functionary prisoners adapted themselves to SS practices for their own profit, but the sole responsibility belongs to the SS killing machinery, which achieved its perfection in Auschwitz.’6 Each prisoner who passed the selection at Birkenau could expect to survive, on average, for three to four months.7 Fritz and his father had so far lasted more than eight. Less than a quarter of their four hundred tough, seasoned comrades from Buchenwald were still alive.