The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

by Jeremy Dronfield

No matter what occurred in the world, no matter how near danger might be, life went on, and what could one do but live it?

The Nazis were louder, growing bolder, and most of them were youths, empty of life experience and pumped full of ideology.

German’ being synonymous with ‘Nazi’ in Hitler’s mind).

International resistance fell apart before it had even formed. The world left Austria to the dogs. And Austria welcomed them.

In the eyes of all but a few, Jews could not be friends, for how can a dangerous, predatory animal be a friend to a human being? It was inconceivable.

‘It is true that Jews in Germany have not been formally condemned to death; it has only been made impossible for them to live.’

Each man an individual with a mother, a wife, children, cousins, a profession, a place in the life of Vienna. But to the men in uniforms outside the wagon – just livestock.

joined by exiles from Poland, France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia. Britain still liked to think of itself as a sole nation, but it was nothing of the sort.

The press – with the Daily Mail at the forefront – had helped whip up paranoia about fifth columnists.

The loss of life had made Britain look at itself and take stock of how it was treating innocent people just because they were foreign.

‘They cannot grind us down like this,’ Gustav wrote in his diary. ‘The war goes on.’

She’d had a brief stint working in a grocery store, but had been fired because as a Jew she was not a citizen.

I tell myself that a man can only die once.’

The mind of a Nazi was beyond fathoming, let alone reasoning.

‘We know everything that’s going on. They are all Hungarian Jews – and all this in the twentieth century.’

‘Yes, it is the smell, the odor of the death camp that makes it burn in the nostrils and memory. I will always smell Mauthausen.’

Gustav Kleinmann died on 1 May 1976, the day before his eighty-fifth birthday. He had been severely ill for some time, yet his prodigious inner strength had kept him going in his final days.

Two years later, Fritz, who was only in his mid-fifties, had to take early retirement. The torture he had endured in the Gestapo dungeon at Auschwitz had left him with permanent back injuries which, despite spinal operations, eventually caused partial paralysis. Nonetheless, he had his father’s toughness, and he lived a long life, passing away on 20 January 2009, aged eighty-five.