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

by Jeremy Dronfield

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.