Devoted son chose who to go to Auschwitz
When 19-year-old Fritz learned his father was being sent to the notorious concentration camp, he begged to go with him — even though it meant almost certain death
HISTORY THE BOY WHO FOLLOWED HIS FATHER INTO AUSCHWITZ by Jeremy Dronfield (Michael Joseph €18.19,) YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM
WE SHOULD all perhaps force ourselves to read this shattering book about the Holocaust lest we forget the depravities to which humans can sink, and what the human body and spirit can endure.
We know about the gas chambers, but this account tells us more about the living death outside such hell holes, where those selected to be slave labourers were worked until they dropped and died.
It is also the astonishing story of the unbreakable bond between a father and a son, Gustav and Fritz Kleinmann, from a happy Viennese Jewish family — a bond so strong that the son volunteered to be transported to Auschwitz in order not to be parted from his father.
Brilliantly researched and written with searing clarity by historian Jeremy Dronfield, it’s a book where things are horrible from the very beginning — Viennese Jews being made to scrub the pavements by their previously friendly neighbours who have become rabid anti-Semites overnight — and then get progressively worse. You can’t believe they can get any worse, but they do.
Even to read it is a kind of torture. It’s almost unbelievable that the chief protagonists, Gustav and Fritz, lived every day of this hell for six years.
In one of the first round-ups of able-bodied Viennese Jews, on September 10, 1939, those two (aged 48 and 16) were carted off to Buchenwald concentration camp in Weimar.
I felt I would have died on the very first day, when everyone, thirsty and terrified, was made to get out of the cattle wagons and run 8km uphill to the camp without stopping. That was a mere taster of the daily torture and exhaustion in store.
AS ALWAYS with the Holocaust, there are new details you learn that, once heard, you can’t ever forget. Inside the hell of barbedwire fences, searchlights, routine beatings and starvation that was Buchenwald, there stood a beautiful old oak tree, known as the ‘Goethe Oak’, because Goethe used to sit under it while writing his poems.
From the branches of that oak, the enslaved prisoners were hung by their arms for hours on end, as a punishment for not working hard enough in the backbreaking quarries, where they had to do 12-hour shifts pushing wagonloads of boulders uphill. Sadistic guards lashed them and called them ‘Jew-pigs’.
There can be no starker image to bring home the fact that those depraved atrocities happened in the ‘civilised’ country of Goethe, Beethoven and Bach.
And there’s worse: lethal injections administered by smiling doctors of death, routine lashings and starvation punishments.
A favourite sport for the guards was to throw a prisoner’s cap beyond the sentry line and encourage him to go and fetch it.
If he stepped beyond the line he was shot for trying to escape. A guard got three days’ holiday for every ‘escapee’ he killed.
Gustav managed to keep a tiny diary, which he hid, for six years. He didn’t write much, as there wasn’t much space, but every now and then he wrote sentences of such humanity, using the vocabulary of a man of morals in a place of depravity, that to read them is balm.
‘One can scarcely drag oneself along,’ he wrote, ‘but I have made a pact with myself that I will survive to the end. I take Gandhi as my model. He is so thin, yet survives. Every day I say a prayer to myself: “Gustl, do not despair. Grit your teeth: the SS murderers must not beat you.” ’ Young Fritz was taken under the wing of some older fellow inmates, who had helped him to survive by teaching him the art of bricklaying. A pivotal moment came when, on October 15, 1942, Fritz heard that his father had been put on the list of 400 prisoners to be transported to Auschwitz the next day. He insisted on getting on to that list as well, but his chief mentor, a kind man called Robert Siewert, was aghast. ‘What you’re asking is suicide,’ he said. ‘You have to forget your father. These men will all be gassed.’ Fritz was adamant. He could not bear to be parted from his father, and formally requested that he should be sent to Auschwitz, too.
So it was that father and son travelled to their next place of horror, where they were both selected for work rather than instant death.
To Gustav’s astonishment, he realised that he was in the same barrack building where he’d been hospitalised during the First World War (he had been a decorated military hero).
Again and again, over the next few years, father and son came within a whisker of death, whether from random selection, punishment, illness (which nearly always led to the gas chambers) or American bombing raids.
Somehow, through a network of good luck and kindness, they survived — seasoned old ‘Buchenwalders’, toughened up through enduring years of the nightmare.
Many newcomers couldn’t cope with the shock: within days they were reduced to broken-spirited wrecks, especially when they found out that their wives and children had been sent straight off to Birkenau to be gassed.
Gustav and Fritz were spared till much later the knowledge that Tini and Herta (wife/mother, daughter/sister) had been transported to the east in 1942 and shot on arrival, their bodies thrown into a pit.
THANKFULLY, Fritz’s brother Kurt had succeeded in getting a visa for the US, and his sister Edith fortunately managed to get to England, where she fell in love with and married another refugee.
It was the generous acts of strangers that pulled at my heartstrings the most.
The slave labourers at Auschwitz worked alongside German civilians in the local factory, and one of these, Fredl Wocher, turned out to be a kind and trustworthy person who went to Vienna on leave, and brought back loving messages and food parcels from Gustav and Fritz’s old and loyal neighbours.
As the whole Nazi murder machine fell apart in 1945, the skeletal surviving prisoners were sent on death-marches or deathtrain journeys to Belsen.
By the time they were liberated by the Americans, both men were just skin and bone. Fritz weighed five-and-a-half stone.
I could hardly believe that Gustav lived on until 1976, and happily remarried, or that Fritz (who married twice and had a son) lived until 2009.
Gustav never wanted to talk about their ordeal, but Fritz, seething with anger, was determined that the story should be told.
His own memoir was entitled And Still The Dog Just Will Not Die. The Nazis had tried to obliterate him and his father, but in the end they failed.
Their living, breathing children and grandchildren are the Kleinmanns’ final triumph.