The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival

by Jeremy Dronfield

Here was the key to survival: “It was not

good luck; neither was it God’s blessing,” he recalled later. Rather, it was the kindness of others.

To Fritz, Robert Siewert was a hero, representing the spirit of resistance and the essence of human kindness. The young were his greatest concern, and he did all he could to equip them with skills and knowledge that could save their lives. “He spoke to us like a father,” Fritz would recall, “with patience and kindness.”26 Fritz wondered where he got the strength, at his age and after so many years of imprisonment. When winter began to set in, Siewert got permission to set up oil drums as braziers on the building site, on the pretext that the plaster and mortar were liable to crack in freezing conditions. His real purpose was the welfare of his workers, who had only their thin prison uniforms to protect them. A humane and courageous man from heart to backbone, Robert Siewert never failed in his duty, knowingly putting himself at risk by interceding with the SS on behalf of Jews, Roma, and Poles.

Fritz’s faith and courage grew in the light of these men’s vision of a better future, even while guessing that few of them would live to see it. “The camaraderie I learned in block 17 changed my life fundamentally,” he would recall. “I became acquainted with a form of solidarity unimaginable in life outside the concentration camps.”30

With these politicians, intellectuals, and entertainers, what could one young apprentice upholsterer-turned-bricklayer from Leopoldstadt, a playmate of the Karmelitermarkt, possibly have in common? That they were all Austrians either by birth or by choice, and that they were Jews. It was enough. In Buchenwald, they were a tiny nation of survivors surrounded by a poison sea. And the deaths went on.

Flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood, soul of her soul, gone from her. Kurt was her hope; he would have a new beginning in an altogether new world. Perhaps he would return one day, and she would see a new person in his place, shaped by a life that was wholly strange to her.

Spring was coming to New Bedford, and the trees lining the street turned green. If you squinted along it, you could almost imagine that you were in the Hauptallee in the Prater, and that none of this had happened—the Nazis coming, the family sundered. Kurt could already sense—if it hadn’t been for the lack of his mother and father, and of Fritz, Herta, and Edith, and the vast distance that lay behind him—that he had found something that felt like a home.

“Life is getting sadder by the day,” she wrote to Kurt. “But you are our sunshine and our child of fortune, so please do write often and in detail . . . Millions of kisses from your sister Herta, who is always thinking of you.”15

Gustav’s love for his son had grown to fill his whole heart during their time in Buchenwald. So had his pride in the man Fritz was becoming—this June he would turn eighteen. “The boy is my greatest joy,” he wrote. “We strengthen each other. We are one, inseparable.”18

A summer sun lay hot and lazy on the slow-moving surface of the Danube Canal. The faint, delighted squeals of children drifted over the water from the grassy banks where families sat with picnics or strolled under the trees. Pleasure boats cruised and row boats scudded across the expanse between them. It was all far away from Tini’s senses as she pulled on the oars—a pleasant, distant background music of laughter. Sunlight sparkled on the splashes with each lift of the oar blades from the water, illuminating the faces of her children. Edith, smiling serenely, Fritz and Herta still little kids, and Kurt, the last-born and beloved, a tiny speck scarcely out of diapers. Tini smiled and heaved at the oars, sending the boat surging across the water.39 She was a good rower—had been since her girlhood. And she doted on her family; at the age of twelve she had been made a counselor to the younger schoolchildren because she loved it so much; to nurture and succor was part of her makeup, and in motherhood it had its purest expression. The sounds of the other boats and the revels on the far banks faded, as if a mist had descended, closing off the boat from the world. The oars dipped and splashed, and the boat glided on. In a drawer in a chest in faraway Massachusetts, Tini’s last letters to Kurt lay gathered. The German in which they were written was already leaking away from his comprehension as his child’s mind adapted to his new world. He had absorbed her meaning, but was already ...

That night, after the Sonderkommando had backfilled the pit, dusk fell on the silent clearing among the young pines. Birds returned, night creatures foraged among the weeds and ran over the disturbed soil of the pit. Beneath lay the remains of nine hundred souls who had boarded the train in Vienna: Rosa Kerbel and her four grandchildren—Otto, Kurt, Helene, and Heinrich—and the elderly Adolf and Amalie Klinger, five-year-old Alice Baron, the spinster sisters Johanna and Flora Kaufmann, Adolf and Witie Aptowitzer from Im Werd, Tini Kleinmann and her pretty twenty-year-old daughter, Herta. They had believed that they were going to eke out a new life in the Ostland, and that perhaps one day they would be reunited with their dear ones—husbands, sons, brothers, daughters—who had been scattered to the camps and far countries.40 Beyond all reason, beyond all human feeling, the world—not only the Nazis but the politicians, people, and newspapermen of London, New York, Chicago, and Washington—had closed off that future and irrevocably sealed it shut.

“Everyone is saying it is a journey to death,”10 he wrote, “but Fritzl and I do not let our heads hang down. I tell myself that a man can only die once.”

Nazism could no more be great than a strutting actor in a gilt cardboard crown could be a king.

Gustav was thankful for the consolation of having Fritz by his side through these hours. How he would have coped if the boy hadn’t come of his own free will did not bear thinking about. The spirit of that crushed promise of long ago lived on in Fritz, in the bond that held father and son together and had kept them alive so far. If they were indeed going to die here, at least it would not be alone.

But there was also the certainty that life in Auschwitz would be both cruel and brief.

Even the fittest had little chance. The Final Solution was being enacted, and even those Jews who were strong, useful laborers were being deliberately, methodically worked to death. Their labor value was of little consequence; if one died, well, that was one less Jew to trouble the world. There were a dozen more to do his work. If a person was to survive, it must be by skill, companionship, and an extraordinary portion of luck.

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.

“They cannot grind us down like this,” his papa always said; endurance was everything, misery was only for a time, hope and spirit were undying.

“And so the year of 1943 goes by,” Gustav wrote. Winter was upon them again; snow began to fall and the ground hardened. This would be his and Fritz’s fifth winter since being taken from their home, their fifth year of relentless nightmare. And yet, as much as they had endured and suffered so far, the worst was yet to come.

When darkness fell, the journey resumed. Gustav again pleaded with Fritz to escape. “You must, before it’s too late. Please go, Fritzl. Please.” Fritz gave way. The pain of it would never leave him: “After five years of shared destiny, that I should now sever myself from my father,” he recalled in anguish.

Gustav felt a last squeeze of his hand; then Fritz launched himself into the air. In an instant he was gone. Sitting alone on the floor of the wagon, by the light of the moon Gustav wrote in his diary: “The Lord God protect my boy. I cannot go, I am too weak. He wasn’t shot at. I hope my boy will win through and find shelter with our dear ones.”

By Gustav’s reckoning, fifty to sixty people a day were dying of starvation and abuse—“the perfect bone mill.” But there was a grit in him that even now would not submit. “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, the Indian freedom fighter, as my model. He is so thin and yet lives. And every day I say a prayer to myself: Gustl, do not despair. Grit your teeth—the SS murderers must not beat you.” He thought of the line he’d put in his poem “Quarry Kaleidoscope” five years earlier: Smack!—down on all fours he lies, But still the dog just will not die! Recalling that image of resistance now, he wrote: “I think to myself, the dogs will make it to the end.” His faith in that outcome was a rock, as firm as his belief that his boy was safe. Fritz, he was certain, must have reached Vienna by now.

“At last one is a free man, and can do as one pleases,” he wrote. “Only one thing nags at me, and that is the uncertainty about my family at home.”

The 107th Evacuation Hospital was housed in tents and buildings on the bank of the river Regen where it flowed into the Danube.2 When Fritz was checked in, he was scarcely alive, his weight recorded as seventy-nine pounds. The hideous, miraculous, haphazard chain of events that had allowed him to evade death for five and a half years had nearly finished him off at the end. Resting on his cot in the hospital tent, he knew that the ordeal that had begun on that day in March 1938, when the Luftwaffe dropped their snowstorm of leaflets all over Vienna, was finished. Except it wasn’t, quite. The journey that had started that day would not be complete until he returned to Vienna and discovered whether it was still his home—and, most important, whether his father had survived. And as for the nightmare—why, that would never end so long as life and memory lasted. The dead remained dead, the living were scarred, and their numbers and their histories would stand for all time as a memorial.

At last, on Monday, May 28, 1945, Fritz set foot in Vienna, five years, seven months, and twenty-eight days since leaving it on the transport bound for Buchenwald. His train came in at the Westbahnhof, the very station from which he had departed. Fritz later discovered that of the 1,035 Jewish men who had been on that transport, only twenty-six were still alive.

On a day in September Gustav Kleinmann entered Vienna. He saw the devastation, the massive concrete flak towers looming over the pretty parks, and he saw all the familiar landmarks. The Karmelitermarkt was still there, and the apartment buildings of Im Werd overlooking it, and his old workshop on the ground floor of number 11, under new occupancy now. He went into number 9, up to the second floor, and knocked on the door of Olly’s apartment. And there she was, his dearest, truest friend, regarding him with utter astonishment, recovering her senses and welcoming him joyfully home. There was only one thing missing, and it was quickly resolved. Gustav found the one person he had most longed to see, living alone in an apartment in the same building. His pride and delight, his beloved boy. Gustav threw his arms around Fritz and together they wept for joy. They were home and together again.

It was hard to recover the lost years. His father didn’t want to talk about his time in the camps, and Kurt’s relationship with Fritz was altogether different. Raised as an all-American boy, Kurt was dismayed by his brother’s communist sympathies. Fritz had acquired his politics by inheritance from their father’s socialism, and in the camps from heroes like Robert Siewert and Stefan Heymann. Life as a worker in Soviet-controlled postwar Austria had confirmed him in his beliefs. There were also religious differences. None of the family aside from Kurt had ever been very devout, and Fritz had abandoned his faith entirely along the Auschwitz road.2 “No talking about politics or religion,” decreed Gustav, and they stuck to safer subjects.

Fritz was unable to work at first due to poor health, and lived for a time on a disability pension. He and his father discussed what they should do about Kurt. Should they bring him home? He was a child still, and they missed him. But what was there for him here? His mother was dead, and his father aging and poor. They concluded that he was better off where he was. So Gustav and Fritz carried on together, just the two of them, supporting each other as they had through so many trials.

While his father tried to forget the Shoah, it was Fritz Kleinmann’s abiding concern to ensure that the world did not.

his father’s poem, “Quarry Kaleidoscope,” with its unforgettable central image: It rattles, the crusher, day out and day in, It rattles and rattles and breaks up the stone, Chews it to gravel and hour by hour Eats shovel by shovel in its guzzling maw. And those who feed it with toil and with care, They know it just eats, but will never be through. It first eats the stone and then eats them too. But it hadn’t crushed them all. A few, like the tall prisoner in the poem, had managed to outlast the machine, to keep going until the stone crusher clattered itself to a halt, malfunctioning, choked by its own appetite.

In the end the Kleinmann family had not only survived but prospered; through courage, love, solidarity, and blind luck, they outlasted the people who had tried to destroy them. They and their descendants spread and multiplied, perpetuating through the generations the love and unity that had helped them through the darkest of times. They took their past with them, understanding that the living must gather the memories of the dead and carry them into the safety of the future.

“The boy is my greatest joy,” Gustav wrote in Buchenwald. “We strengthen each other. We are one, inseparable.”