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September 7 - September 20, 2020
The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future. —Elie Wiesel, Night
it reveals Gustav’s unbeatable strength and spirit of optimism: “. . . every day I say a prayer to myself,” he wrote in the sixth year of his incarceration: “Do not despair. Grit your teeth—the SS murderers must not beat you.”
Tini had a feeling of foreboding about it all which Gustav the optimist didn’t quite share. He always thought things would work out for the best; it was both his weakness and his strength.
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?
Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil! Down with the Jews! Down with the Catholics! One people, one Reich, one Führer, one victory! Down with the Jews!” Raw, fanatical voices rose in song: “Deutschland über Alles” and chanted: “Today we have all Germany—tomorrow we have the world!”
The world left Austria to the dogs. And Austria welcomed them.
From this day forward a specter would haunt every move, word, and thought of every Jewish person. They all knew what had happened in Germany in the past five years. What they didn’t yet know was that in Austria there would be no gradual onset; they would experience five years’ worth of
The suddenness with which genteel Vienna had turned was breathtaking—like tearing the soft, comfortable fabric of a familiar couch to reveal sharp springs and nails beneath. Gustav was wrong; the Kleinmanns were not safe. Nobody was safe.
People were warned not to buy from Jews; those who were caught doing so were made to stand with a sign: “I am an Aryan, but a swine—I bought in this Jewish shop.”24
Groups of brown-shirted storm troopers and Hitler Youth marched in the streets singing: When Jewish blood drips from the knife, Then we sing and laugh. Their songs extolled the hanging of Jews and putting Catholic priests against the wall.
In Leopoldstadt, a special procedure was employed. The cardholder, having had their card stamped, was taken into a room with a photographer and several male and female assistants. After being photographed, head and shoulders, the applicant had to strip naked. “Despite their utmost reluctance,” one witness recorded, “people had to undress completely . . . in order to be taken again from all sides.” They were fingerprinted and measured, “during which the men obviously measured the women, hair strength was measured, blood samples taken and everything written down and enumerated.”34 Every Jew was
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As November began, anti-Semitic feelings all across the Reich were looking for an outlet. The trigger was pulled far away in Paris, when a Polish Jew called Herschel Grynszpan, in a blaze of rage over the expulsion of his people from Germany—including his own family—took a new-bought revolver into the German Embassy and fired five bullets into Ernst vom Rath, an official chosen at random. In Vienna the newspapers called the assassination an “outrageous provocation.”39 The Jews must be taught a lesson. Vom Rath died on Wednesday, November 9. That night, the Nazis came out in force on the
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Among the first taken were Gustav and Fritz Kleinmann.
The interrogation was held together by a glue of insults—Jew-pig, traitor to the people, Jewish criminal. Each prisoner was forced to identify with these calumnies, to own them and repeat them. The questions were the same for every man: How much money have you in savings? Are you a homosexual? Are you in a relationship with an Aryan woman? Have you ever helped to perform an abortion? What associations and parties are you a member of?
Like the neighbors who had turned him and Fritz over to the SA, many of the new owners had been friends of the people whose shops they had taken.
With a whole class marked as enemies of the people, and the chance of an instant profit, friend had turned on friend without hesitation or qualm. Many of them reveled in the baiting, the intimidation, plundering, beatings, and deportations. 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.
An English journalist observed: “It is true that Jews in Germany have not been formally condemned to death; it has only been made impossible for them to live.”
For the Kleinmann family, their city had become, in the words of a British journalist: . . . a city of persecution, a city of sadism . . . no amount of examples of cruelty and bestiality, can convey to the reader who hasn’t felt it the atmosphere of Vienna, the air which the Austrian Jews must breathe . . . the terror at every ring of the front-door bell, the smell of cruelty in the air . . . Feel that atmosphere and you can understand why it is that families and friends split up to emigrate to the corners of the earth.19
“It is a shameful spectacle,” said Adolf Hitler, “to see how the whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor tormented Jewish people but remains hard-hearted and obdurate when it comes to helping them.”20 Hitler sneered at Roosevelt’s “so-called conscience,” while in Westminster MPs from all parties spoke earnestly about the need to help the Jews, but Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare warned of “an underlying current of suspicion and anxiety about an alien influx” and advised against mass immigration.21 However, the members, prompted by Labour MPs George Woods and David Grenfell,
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Many of the people imprisoned here called it not Buchenwald but Totenwald—Forest of the Dead.
This was the entrance to the prison camp itself. On the gateway were two slogans. Above, on the lintel, was inscribed: RECHT ODER UNRECHT—MEIN VATERLAND My country, right or wrong: the very essence of nationalism and fascism. And wrought into the ironwork of the gate itself: JEDEM DAS SEINE To each his own. It could also be read as Each person gets what he deserves.
The Nazis adored their grand designs, even in their concentration camps—an illusive appearance of elegance, order, and meaning to screen the nightmare.
For a man with poor eyesight, losing his glasses could effectively be a death sentence.
Many British people were glad to give German Jews a refuge, but some were not, and the government was caught between the two. The press spoke for and against them—emphasizing the contribution they made to the economy and the plight they faced in their home country—while on the other hand British workers worried about their jobs, and their fears were played upon by the right-wing papers. Allegations were made about the criminal tendencies and shiftlessness of Jews, and the threat they posed to the British way of life. But still, there were no actual Nazis, no SA or SS.
“The men-beasts hang in the reins,” Gustav wrote, turning his daily hell into a series of stark poetic images. “Panting, groaning, sweating . . . Slaves, cursed to labor, like in the days of the Pharaohs.”
“Every day another death,” Gustav wrote. “One cannot believe what a man can endure.” He could find no ordinary words to describe the living hell of the quarry. Turning to the back pages of his notebook, he began composing a poem—titled “Quarry Kaleidoscope”—translating the chaotic nightmare into precise, measured, orderly stanzas. Click-clack, hammer blow, Click-clack, day of woe. Slave souls, wretched bones, At the double, break the stones.15 In these lines he managed to find a midpoint between the experiences he lived each day and how it was perceived through
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Smack!—down on all fours he lies, But still the dog just will not die!18
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.19
As the hero laid down his shovel, Gustav suddenly felt the weight of the rock in his hands and his kapo’s eyes turning toward him. Hurriedly he went back to work, contemplating what he’d just witnessed. Man against machine; on this occasion, man had won a small victory. The machine, it seemed, could be beaten by a person with the necessary strength and will. Whether this was also true of the greater machine remained to be discovered.
The mechanic cleared the stone from the gears and restarted the engine. Rattling, clattering, the crusher went back to work, consuming the rocks fed into its insatiable gullet by the laboring prisoners, eating their strength, their sweat and blood, grinding them down as it ground down the stone.
They sang the “Buchenwald Song” more often than anything else. Composed by the Viennese songwriter Hermann Leopoldi with words by celebrated lyricist Fritz Löhner-Beda, both of whom were prisoners, it was a stirring march tune, with words extolling courage in the midst of wretchedness. It had been specially commissioned by Rödl: “All other camps have a song. We must get a Buchenwald song.”20 He’d offered a prize of ten marks to the successful composer (which was never paid) and was delighted by the result. The prisoners sang it when they marched out to work in the mornings: O
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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.
While the prisoners began forming up to march off for morning work, the call went up: “Prisoner 7290 to the gate!” Fritz reported to Schobert, who asked him what was the matter. This was the moment of no return. Steeling himself, Fritz explained that he couldn’t bear to be parted from his father, and requested formally that he be sent to Auschwitz with him. Schobert shrugged; it was all the same to him how many Jews were sent to be exterminated, and he granted the request. With a word, Fritz had done the unthinkable, stepping voluntarily from the roll of the saved to that of the condemned.
In the daylight leaking through cracks in the wagon walls, Gustav took out his diary, keeping it out of view of the others. Having been forewarned of the transfer, he’d ensured that he had it concealed under his clothing when they were moved to the isolation block. This battered little notebook had come to represent his grip on sanity, his record of the reality of life now, and he wouldn’t wish to be parted from it. But so long as he was with Fritz, he felt he could face anything.
“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.”
the promise that Israel had been built in Austria: that promise had been crushed under the wheels of this vast, insane, malfunctioning machine in its unstoppable, senseless drive to jolt life into an Aryan German greatness that had never existed, and never could exist, because its blinkered puritanism was the very antithesis of all that makes a society great. Nazism could no more be great than a strutting actor in a gilt cardboard crown could be a king.
Gustav managed to get himself and Fritz assigned to the same bed. It was like their first night in the tent in Buchenwald; at least here there was a floor and a sound roof over their heads. But there was also the certainty that life in Auschwitz would be both cruel and brief.
Auschwitz I had not been built by the SS; rather it had been converted from an old military barracks built by the Austrian army before the First World War. The Polish army had used it after 1918, and now the SS had turned it into a concentration camp. They’d put up additional barrack blocks and surrounded it with an electrified fence, but it was still recognizably the same place. It was here that the wounded Corporal Gustav Kleinmann had been in the hospital in 1915, in this very spot by the Soła, the river that flowed from the lake by the village where he’d been born. When he’d last seen it,
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As they marched, driven in the familiar violent fashion, the Buchenwalders felt relief out of all proportion with their circumstances. They were alive, and that was everything. Whether Fritz’s intervention had precipitated this move, by planting the idea that Jews could build, nobody knew, but Gustav believed it was so. “Fritzl came with me willingly,” he wrote in his diary. “He is a loyal companion, always at my side, taking care of everything; everyone admires the boy, and he is a true comrade to all of them.” In at least some of their minds, Fritz’s rash action had saved them all from the
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“Every day the departures. Sometimes it is heartbreaking, but I tell myself, Keep your head high; the day will come when you are free. You have good friends by your side. So don’t worry—there are bound to be setbacks.” But how many setbacks could a man take? How long could he go on holding up his head and avoiding death?
“Get rid of them,” Aumeier ordered. A kapo who was standing by unpicked Gustav’s star from his jacket, separated the two triangles, and gave the red one back to him. The same was done to the other sixteen men, leaving them clutching their red triangles, utterly mystified. “You are political prisoners,” Aumeier announced. “There are no Jews in positions of authority here. Remember this. From this moment you men are Aryans.” And that was that. As far as the regime was concerned, Gustav Kleinmann was officially no longer Jewish. By the mere alteration of a list and a badge, he officially ceased
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It took strength of character to share and love in a world where selfishness and hate were common currency. And survival was never guaranteed.
“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.
Jenö and Laczi Berkovits were brothers from Budapest, both skilled tailors who’d been assigned to Gustav’s blackout detail.24 One day, in a state of excitement, they approached Fritz and outlined their audacious plan. The black fabric they were using to make curtains was thick and sturdy, coated on one side with waterproofing. It would make excellent raincoats, which could be exchanged for a good price on the black market. They could be swapped for food or even be sold for cash to civilians.
The column trudged on. Behind them stretched a nightmare of trampled snow and scattered corpses, leading all the way back to Auschwitz, where the last evacuations were still in progress.
In the end the sheer weight of the crimes committed here would defy all efforts to erase the evidence.
The Holocaust was a crime made of journeys, criss-crossing Europe to the accompaniment of a tuneless score of protesting machinery. Wheels hissed on the rails; couplings groaned and jolted: the hissing-squealing-clanking-banging of steel-wheeled boxes on metal rails was a never-ending nightmare music.
Fritz was marched through the town two paces ahead of his guards, who kept their rifles trained on his back. The locals, accustomed to living in the shadow of the camp in the hills above the town, paid them no heed.
On the far side was a broad, steep staircase cut into the rock, curving upward in one enormous flight of 186 steps from the bottom of the pit to the rim. Up it, hundreds of prisoners were climbing, each carrying a square block of granite on his back. They called it the Stair of Death, and it was the symbol of all that was hideous about Mauthausen.
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.”
