Family’s story covers shameful time in our history

The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz (a true story)

By Jeremy Dronfield, Michael Joseph, $38

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In 1939 the peaceful life for the Kleinmann family came to an end. Hitler’s planes bombarded their country with propaganda leaflets.

These rained down outside Fritz Kleinmann’s little upholstery shop under his family’s apartment.

For years now Hitler, an Austrian by birth, had been planning to annexe Austria. Councillor Schuschnigg had planned a plebiscite through secret channels, Hitler had warned Schuschnigg if he didn’t call off the plebiscite there would be bloodshed. German troops were already massing on the border.

So virtually without any opposition Hitler took over Austria.

News of the treatment of the Jewish people in Germany plus the propaganda leaflets alarmed the tens of thousands of Jewish people living in Austria.

It did not take long for the Nazi sympathisers to start welcoming the troops.

The brown shirted storm troopers of the SA were now free to put on their swastika bands and bring out their weapons. They were marching and the police joined them “down with the Jews, the Catholics, one people, one Reich, one Fuhrer”.

The playwright Carl Zuckmayer witnessing this turnaround wrote “the netherworld had opened its portals and spewed out its basest, most horrid and filthiest spirits . . . what was being unleashed here was envy, bitterness, blind, vicious vengefulness”.

For the Kleinmann family, along with tens of thousands of Jewish people, their situations became intolerable. Socalled friends and neighbours turned upon them. They lived in fear of their lives.

Tini Kleinmann, seeing the writing on the wall, went to great lengths to get her youngest son Kurt to a distant relation in the US. She gave her younger fun-loving daughter a crash course in housework and managed to get her out of Austria into a domestic position in England.

She tried for Fritz, her older son, but by that time he and his father Gustav had been arrested and placed in the first concentration camp.

Tini and her older daughter were now trapped in their own hell. They were soon rounded up and put on a train with hundreds of other women and young girls. The train stopped at an open pit and they were never heard of again.

During the next five years Fritz and his father endured the unspeakable conditions and brutality of five different concentration camps. Separated by an escape attempt they both unbeknownst to each other ended up in the most brutal camp of them all Mauthausen.

When finally liberated Gustav weighed one and a half stone. Fritz suffered for the rest of his life from the severe beatings and torture he had experienced.

On the time of his arrest Gustav had a notebook and pencil in his pocket. During his internment he had managed to keep a diary. Jeremy Dronfield, an historical biographer and writer discovered this diary and using testimony from Gustav’s surviving son Kurt and meticulous research has brought their story to life. He has written a simple but starkly told story of the Kleinmann family. It is the story of man’s inhumanity to man. It is a reminder to all of us of a shameful time in our history and a time we should never forget. —

For the Kleinmann family, along with tens of thousands of Jewish people, their situations became intolerable.