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

by Jeremy Dronfield

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.