Another air raid hit the Buna Werke on Boxing Day. The Americans had fixed on it as a prime target, and were determined to annihilate it. But each time they only succeeded in flattening a few buildings, wounding a handful of Nazis, killing or injuring hundreds of prisoners and reducing productivity. Droves of slaves cleared the rubble, repairing and rebuilding. They sabotaged what they could, and worked as slowly as they dared, and between them and the bombs they ensured that the Buna Werke would never produce any rubber, and its other plants would never reach full capacity.
On 2 January 1945 Fredl Wocher returned from Vienna with letters and packages from Olly Steyskal and Karl Novacek. ‘We get the greatest joy from knowing that we still have good friends at home,’ Gustav wrote in his diary.
Not only that, he and Fritz had the very best of friends in Fredl Wocher himself. He had proved himself countless times, and in so many ways. With the Red Army now positioned just the other side of Cracow, Fritz tried to persuade him to disappear before the Russians reached Auschwitz and discovered what had been happening here.
Wocher didn’t see the need. ‘My conscience is clear,’ he said. ‘More than clear. And I’m just a civilian, a worker; nothing will happen to me.’
Fritz wasn’t convinced. He reminded Wocher of the hatred the Russians felt for all Germans – which Wocher knew all too well from his service at the front. Also, there were thousands of Russian prisoners in Auschwitz who would be thirsty for revenge the moment they got the chance. Wocher couldn’t depend on being spared once the wave of vengeance swept through the camps. But he was stubborn; he’d never run away before, and he wasn’t about to start now.
It was clear to Fritz that the end might come any day. His preparations had been in train for two months. Thanks to him, the resistance had weapons. At the same time, Fritz had taken the extra precaution of equipping himself and his father for escape. Having dismissed the idea of fleeing to the Tyrol, he had to accept that fighting might not be an option either. Therefore, on Fritz’s initiative, he and his father had been dodging the weekly head-shaving and letting their hair grow to a normal length. Roll call was the only time prisoners routinely took their caps off in front of the SS, and in the winter months that always happened during the hours of darkness. Fritz had also acquired a cache of civilian clothes from David Plaut at the bathhouse, which he hid in a toolshed in the camp. There were enough jackets and trousers for himself, his papa and a few of their closest comrades.
On 12 January the Red Army launched its long-anticipated winter offensive in Poland – a colossal, well-planned assault along the front line, involving three armies of two and a quarter million men. This was the final push, designed to drive the Germans back into their Fatherland. The Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, outnumbered more than four to one, fell back under the onslaught, holding out in a handful of fortified Polish cities. Frustratingly, the sector of the front near Cracow moved slower than most. Each day the prisoners in Auschwitz heard the distant thump of Russian guns, like a clock ticking away the moments to deliverance.
On 14 January Alfred Wocher said a last goodbye to Gustav and Fritz. He had been drafted into the Volkssturm, a hastily organized army of old men, underage boys and disabled veterans, tasked with the last-ditch defence of the Reich. So he would not be found by the Russians at Auschwitz after all. He was happy to do this final duty for his Fatherland. Whatever he felt about its crimes, it was Germany after all, his home, a land full of women and children, and the Russians would tear it apart without mercy if they were permitted.
With winter deepening, the weather was deteriorating. There was thick snow, and on Monday 15 January, the day after Wocher’s departure, Auschwitz awoke to thick fog. The prisoners in Monowitz were kept standing at roll call for several hours until the fog thinned enough for the SS to feel safe marching them to work.19
In the factories, work went on at full pace. The previous night, an American plane had flown over, illuminating the whole area with parachute flares and taking photographs. Photos taken twenty-four hours before had shown nearly a thousand bomb craters in the factory complex and forty-four wrecked buildings, but the night-time images revealed that repairs were well in hand, and that the synthetic fuel plant – the most important of all – was virtually untouched.20
On Wednesday the prisoners were held back at roll call again. They remained on standby throughout the morning, and in the afternoon they were marched to the factories. But after only two and a half hours’ work they were marched back to camp again.
The SS were getting jittery. Each morning, the rumble of artillery was a little less distant. By evening on the 17th, the sound was nearer still, and the Auschwitz commandant, Major Richard Baer, at last gave the order to begin evacuating the camps. Invalids were to be left behind, and any prisoners who resisted, delayed or escaped were to be shot immediately.21 The leader of the Auschwitz I resistance alerted his partisan contacts in Cracow: ‘We are experiencing the evacuation. Chaos. Panic among the drunken SS.’22
That evening, all the patients in the prisoner hospital in Monowitz were examined by the doctors; those who were well enough to march were struck off the patient list and herded back to their blocks. The rest – numbering over eight hundred – were left to the care of nineteen volunteer medical staff.23
The following day, Thursday 18 January, all eight thousand prisoners in Monowitz were kept standing on the roll-call square all day in bone-aching cold. Fritz and Gustav, aware that the end was imminent, had put on their civilian clothes under their uniforms, ready to make a break for it the moment they got the opportunity. At least with their extra layers they were slightly less cold than their comrades. Dusk began to gather.
Finally, at 4.30 p.m., the SS guards began ordering the prisoners into columns. With their limbs numb and joints seizing up, they were arranged like an army division into company-size units of about one hundred, further grouped into battalion-size units of around a thousand, which in turn formed three larger units, each containing up to three thousand. SS officers, Blockführers and guards took command of each unit.24 Anticipating trouble, every SS man had his rifle, pistol or machine pistol ready in his hands, with the safety catch off. Fritz thought regretfully about his guns, concealed somewhere in the hospital laundry. It was impossible to get anywhere near them now.
Disturbingly, the infamous SS-Sergeant Otto Moll was on hand. He wasn’t part of the Monowitz guard battalion – he’d been director of the Birkenau gas chambers – yet here he was, walking among the waiting columns as they were issued with their marching rations, dishing out abuse while they got their bread, margarine and jam. Moll, a stocky little man with a bull neck and a head as wide as it was high and the blood of tens of thousands on his hands, made a deeply unsettling presence in these circumstances. He stopped beside Gustav, drawn by something about his appearance, looked him up and down, then gave him two hard slaps across the face, left and right. Gustav staggered and recovered. Moll moved on without a word.25
At last the order was given and the columns began to move. Tired already from standing all day, they marched off the square, five abreast, wheeling left on to the camp street. Passing the barrack blocks, the kitchens, the little empty building where the camp orchestra had lived, the massed prisoners passed out through the open gateway for the last time.
They were leaving a place which for a few had been home for more than two years. The old survivors like Gustav and Fritz – especially Fritz – had helped build it from grassy fields; their comrades’ blood had gone into its construction, and pain and terror had been the unrelenting life of the place ever since. Yet it was home nonetheless, by the simple virtue of the animal instinct to belong, to attach oneself to the place where one ate and slept and shat; however much one hated it, it was where friends were, and where every stone and timber was familiar.
As for where they were going, they didn’t know. Away from the Russians, that was all they knew. All the Monowitz sub-camps were on the move – over 35,000 men
and women26 taking to the snow-lined roads leading west from the town called Oświęcim.
Part IV
* * *
SURVIVAL
18. Death Train
אב ובן
Fritz sat on the ground close beside his papa, shivering convulsively. Around them sat their friends. It was early morning, and the cold was beyond imagining. They had no shelter, no food, no fires: just one another. They were almost dead from exhaustion and exposure. Some would never get to their feet again when this rest stop was over.
For the first few kilometres after leaving Monowitz, Fritz and Gustav and the other reasonably healthy prisoners had helped their weaker comrades along. Anyone who lagged behind was beaten by the SS with a rifle butt and driven onward. If a person fell down in the middle of the pack, the semi-conscious marchers following behind would trample over him. Fritz and the others did what they could, but comradeship only stretched so far. They were scarcely past Oświęcim when they ran out of strength and had to leave the weakest to fare as best they could. They hugged their jackets tight about them and closed their ears to the sporadic gunshots from the rear of the column as stragglers were murdered.
To Fritz and Gustav it was like a repeat of the forced march, so many years ago, along the Blood Road to Buchenwald. But this was infinitely, inconceivably worse. They kept close for protection, father and son, heads down, one foot in front of the other on the compacted snow and ice, numbed in mind and spirit, hour after hour through darkness swirling with white flakes. Close by Fritz a Blockführer marched, pistol in hand; Fritz could sense the man’s terror of the pursuing Russians, and the violence in him.
By Gustav’s reckoning they had trudged forty kilometres when they reached the outskirts of a town in the dawn light. The column was directed off the road into an abandoned brickworks. The SS guards needed a rest almost as much as their charges. Finding what shelter they could among the stacks of bricks, the prisoners sat close for warmth. Fritz and his papa stayed awake, despite their consuming weariness, guessing that anyone who slept would never wake again. Talking with some comrades who had been in different parts of the column, they discovered that several Poles – including three of Fritz’s friends – had escaped.
‘We should do that,’ Gustav said to Fritz. ‘We should make a run for it. I speak Polish; we’d have no trouble finding our way. We could find the partisans or just head for home.’
For all his preparations, all his determination to resist, Fritz’s heart quailed at the thought. There was one very big problem: he spoke no Polish. If they were separated, he’d be sunk.
‘We should wait until we reach German soil, Papa,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll both speak the language.’
His father shook his head. ‘It’s a long way to Germany.’ He looked around at their exhausted comrades. ‘Who knows if we’ll ever reach it? Even assuming the SS intend us to survive that far.’
Their discussion was cut short by the order to move. When they hauled themselves to their feet, some men who had fallen asleep remained where they were. Hypothermia had taken them, and their bodies were already beginning to freeze. Others were still alive but too weak to stand; the SS went among them, kicking and chivvying, shooting any who couldn’t be roused.1
The column trudged on. Behind them stretched a nightmare of trampled snow and scattered corpses, leading all the way back to Auschwitz, where the last evacuations were still in progress. Jews too weak to evacuate were being forced to burn the stacks of corpses around the gas chambers. The crematoria were dynamited and SS clerks burned records. Some pilfered from the Canada stores, where the incriminating mountains of loot were also being put to the torch. In the end the sheer weight of the crimes committed here would defy all efforts to erase the evidence.
That evening, the column reached the town of Gleiwitz,fn1 where there were several sub-camps belonging to the Auschwitz system. The Monowitzers were herded into an abandoned enclosure which had been built for only a thousand inmates. The prisoners had been evacuated the previous day.2 The Monowitzers were given nothing to eat, but were thankful at least for shelter in which they could sleep.
Two days and nights they remained in Gleiwitz while the SS organized the next stage of the journey. Unlike most of the poor souls marching from Auschwitz, the men of Monowitz would be going by train.
Rousted from their huts, they were herded to the city freight yard, where their transports were waiting. Instead of the usual closed freight cars, the four long trains were made up of open-top wagons, normally used for carrying coal and gravel. Rations were doled out – half a loaf of bread each, with a piece of sausage – then the loading began. Fritz and Gustav climbed into a wagon along with more than 130 other men, clambering up the sheer sides and dropping down with a clang on the steel floor, which echoed less with each pair of feet until the last few had to squeeze in between the rest.
Every other wagon had a brake house – a little hut raised above the level of the wagons. In each one an SS guard was posted, armed with a rifle or machine pistol. ‘Anyone putting their heads above the sides will be shot,’ warned the Blockführer in charge of loading.
The train began to vibrate. Steam and smoke from the locomotive made a thick fog in the icy air. At last, with the clang and bang of couplings and shriek of wheels, the train moved, dragging its load of four thousand souls.3 As it built up speed, the wind, chilled to twenty degrees below zero, roared across the open wagons.
אבא
The Holocaust was a crime made of journeys, criss-crossing Europe to the accompaniment of a tuneless score of protesting machinery. Wheels hissed on the rails; couplings groaned and jolted: the hissing-squealing-clanking-banging of steel-wheeled boxes on metal rails was a never-ending, nightmare music.
Gustav’s body rocked from side to side with the motion of the train. He sat with his knees drawn up to his chest, with Fritz close beside him, hugged up against the terrible cold.
After leaving Gleiwitz, this train had diverged from the other three, heading south while they went west. The next morning it stopped to take on hundreds more prisoners evacuated from the Charlottengrube sub-camp4 before crossing into Czechoslovakia. Despite the Blockführer’s warning, Gustav peeped over the side from time to time, gauging the progress of their journey, noting the towns through which they passed. The train never stopped, but it went painfully slowly, and took two freezing nights and a day to cross Czechoslovakia.
They’d been told that they were being taken to Mauthausen concentration camp. The thought was simultaneously thrilling and terrifying for the Austrians; Mauthausen’s reputation for violence was dire. But it was in Austria, in the beautiful hill country near Linz. Austria! Soon Gustav and Fritz would be on their home soil for the first time in over five years.
And there they would surely die. In Mauthausen they would have none of the support system they’d built up in Auschwitz, and would be subjected to an even harsher regime.
That was assuming they made it that far. Even as Gustav turned these thoughts over in his mind there was a stir among his fellow prisoners. Another had passed away. Weakness, sickness and hypothermia had been killing them off steadily. A friend of the dead man stripped the jacket and trousers off the body and put them on over his own clothes in an attempt to keep the cold out. The body was passed across the wagon and stacked in the corner with the other corpses, all stripped to their underwear and frozen solid. That corner also served as the latrine, and even in the cold the stench was abominable.
The deaths at least created more room to sit. Gustav looked around at the gaunt faces, the deep shadows beneath the eyes, the cheekbones whittled to ridges by starvation. Some had managed to eke out their ration, and as the fourth day of the journey passed, they nibbled their last crusts. Gustav and Fritz had none left. Gustav could already feel his strength slipping away; a slow ebb tide eroding his will. Only one thought was on his mind now: escape.
‘We have to go soon,’ he said quietly to Fritz. ‘Otherwise it�
�ll be too late.’ If they could slip over the side during the night, they might not be noticed by the guards. Soon they’d be in Austria, and language would be no problem. They could make their way to Vienna in their disguises and find a hiding place. ‘Olly or Lintschi will take care of us.’
‘All right, Papa,’ said Fritz.
That night they tested the watchfulness of the guards. With help from a couple of friends, they lifted a corpse from the stack, heaved it up to the rim of the sidewall, and pushed it over. As it went flailing away into the darkness, they waited for a yell from the brake house and a burst of gunfire … but nothing came. This would be easy. All they had to do was wait until they crossed into Austria.
By morning, the train reached Lundenburg,fn2 just a few kilometres from the Austrian border. There, frustratingly, it halted. Hour followed hour, and nothing happened. A peek over the side showed that the whole train was surrounded by SS. It was dusk when they finally started moving again and the Czech countryside gave way to Austria. Now was their time. With each passing kilometre the situation in the wagon was getting worse, descending into savagery. Some of their comrades had reached the point where they would strangle a friend for a mouthful of bread. Through cold, hunger and murder, the corpses were piling up in the corner at the rate of eight to ten every day.
Fritz nudged his father. ‘Papa! Wake up! It’s time to go.’
Gustav drifted awake, and tried to rise. He couldn’t get up; his frozen muscles were too weak. He looked at Fritz’s eager face. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said.
‘You have to, Papa. We have to leave while we can.’
But nothing Fritz said could raise him. ‘You have to go alone,’ said Gustav feebly. ‘Leave me and go.’
Fritz was appalled at the very idea. If you want to go on living, you have to forget your father. That was what Robert Siewert had said to him that day in Buchenwald. It had been impossible then, and it was impossible now.
The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz Page 27