3

Blood and Stone:
Konzentrationslager Buchenwald

MAKING SURE HE WAS ALONE, Gustav took out a little pocket notebook and pencil. He opened the book and wrote in his clear, angular hand: “Arrived in Buchenwald on the 2nd October 1939 after a two-day train journey.”

He’d managed to keep the notebook concealed, knowing that it would be the death of him if he were found with it. But he felt a need that he couldn’t ignore, to record what had occurred and what would yet happen. There was no way of telling how long he could keep going, or whether he would ever get out of this place. Whatever happened, this diary would be his witness.

Over a week had passed since that dreadful arrival, and there was a lot to record. Even the most concise account would eat up the notebook’s precious leaves. He smoothed down the page and wrote on:

“From Weimar train station we ran to the camp . . .”

The boxcar door groaned and clanged open, flooding the inside with light; instantly a hell’s chorus of shrieked orders and snarling guard dogs erupted. Fritz blinked and looked around, stunned by this barrage on his senses.1

Over three weeks had passed since Wickerl Helmhacker and his pals had torn Fritz away from his family. The only thing he had to console him was that, since he had not been released, that must mean his papa had got away safely. Fritz’s arrest had been utterly terrifying. The local police had brought him across the Danube Canal to the Hotel Metropole, headquarters of the Vienna Gestapo. He was just one among thousands of Jews who had been arrested in recent days. As in the November pogrom, the Viennese authorities struggled to accommodate them; they were transferred to the Praterstadion, the huge international football stadium on the far side of the Prater. They were kept there under guard for nearly three weeks. Eventually, on September 30, they were taken by relays of police cars and trucks to the Westbahnhof, where they were loaded into cattle cars.

For two days Fritz had been confined in the press of bodies inside the car, hardly able to move, rocked by the jolting of the train and oppressed by the proximity of strangers, a sixteen-year-old boy among a crowd of anxious, sweating, muttering men. They gradually resolved into individuals as the journey went on, Fritz growing used to the darkness and each man’s unique presence: the middle-class father, the businessman, the spectacled intellectual, the bristle-cheeked workman, the ugly, the handsome, the portly, the terrified, the man who took it all calmly, the man simmering with indignation, the man scared to his bowels. The frightened far outnumbered the angry; some were silent, some muttered or prayed, some chattered incessantly. Each man an individual with a mother, a wife, children or cousins, a job, a place in the life of Vienna. But to the men in uniforms outside the boxcar—just livestock.

“Out! Out, Jew-pigs—now! Out-out-out!”

Out they came, into the dazzling light. One thousand and thirty-five Jews—bewildered, seething, confused, scared, dazed—pouring down from the boxcars onto the loading ramp of Weimar train station, into a hailstorm of abuse and blows and snarling dogs.2 A crowd of local people had turned out to watch the transport come in; they stood beyond the SS guards, jeering, smirking, calling out insults.

The prisoners, some of them carrying bags and suitcases, were pushed, beaten, and yelled into ranks. From the loading ramp they were herded into a tunnel, then out into the air again. They were driven along at a run. The crowd followed for a while along the northbound city street and out onto the open road. “Run, Jew-pigs, run!” Fritz ran with the rest. If a man paused or dropped back, turned aside, even looked like he was slackening his pace, or if he spoke to another, the hammer-blow of a rifle-butt would fall on his shoulders, his back, his head.

These camp SS were worse than any Fritz had seen before. Christened by Himmler Totenkopfverbände—Death’s Head Units—their caps bore skull-and-crossbones badges and their cruel brutality was beyond all human reason. Drunkards, sadists, stunted or twisted minds, deformed souls—inadequate human beings vested with a sense of destiny and almost limitless power, trained to believe that they were soldiers in a war against the enemy within.

Fritz ran and ran into a seemingly endless hell. Block after block of city street went by, then turned to country road. The prisoners were mocked and spat on. Men stumbled, weakened by age or fatigue or the burden of their luggage, and were shot. A man might stoop to tie a shoelace, or fall over, plead for water, and he would be gunned down without hesitation. The road, climbing a long slope, led into a thick forest, then forked. The prisoners were driven up the left branch, onto a new concrete road called by veterans the Blutstrasse, Blood Road. Built by hundreds of prisoners—many of whom had died in its making—it was still under construction. Their blood was joined by that of new arrivals driven along it.

They had gone about four kilometers when Fritz thought he recognized a familiar figure running ahead of him. He increased his pace and drew level. He had been right—here, in spite of all reason, all justice, was Papa, laboring along, dripping with sweat, with his little package of spare clothing under his arm. To Gustav, it was as if Fritz had miraculously materialized out of nowhere. This was no occasion for emotional reunions. Sticking close together, they edged deeper into the pack to avoid the random blows, shutting their minds to the sporadic gunshots, and ran on with the herd, up the hill, deeper and deeper into the forest.

This was the Ettersberg, a broad-backed hill covered in dense beech woodland. For centuries it had been a hunting ground of the dukes of Saxony-Weimar, and more recently a popular spot for picnics. It was known best as a retreat for the artists and intellectuals of the ducal court of Weimar and famously associated with writers like Schiller and Goethe, whose plays had been performed in an amateur theater in the parkland.3 The city of Weimar was the very epicenter of German classical cultural heritage, and for that reason it had been chosen after the First World War as the seat of the new democratic republic. The Weimar Republic was now long dead, and with the founding of a concentration camp on the Ettersberg, the Nazi regime was placing its own imprint upon Weimar’s heritage. Buchenwald—named for the picturesque beech forest that made the mountain so pleasant—was more than just a prison camp; it was a model SS settlement whose scale would eventually rival that of the city itself.4 What happened here among the beeches would one day cast all of Weimar’s Germanic heritage in shadow. Many of the people imprisoned here called it not Buchenwald but Totenwald: Forest of the Dead.5

At last, after eight uphill kilometers—more than an hour’s worth of grueling running—the Blood Road bent northward and emerged into a vast open space cleared in the forest. Scattered across it were buildings of all shapes and sizes, some complete, some still under construction, many hardly begun.6 They had reached Buchenwald.

Ahead the road was straddled by a wide, low gatehouse in a massive fence studded with guard towers. This was the entrance to the prison camp itself; the small town being built outside its fences comprised the barracks and facilities of the SS, the infrastructure of the machine in which the prisoners were both fuel and grist. On the gateway were two slogans declaring the ideology that made the machine. Above, on the gate 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 interpreted as Each person gets what he deserves.

Exhausted, sweating, bleeding, the new arrivals were herded through the gate. There were now one thousand and ten of them; twenty-five of those who had set out from Vienna were now corpses along the Blood Road.7

They found themselves within an impenetrable cordon: the huge camp was surrounded by a barbed wire fence with twenty-two watchtowers at intervals, decked with floodlights and guns; the fence itself was three meters high and electrified, with a lethal 380 volts running through it. The outside of the fence was patrolled by sentries, and within was a sandy strip called the “neutral zone”; any prisoner stepping on it would be shot.8

Immediately inside the gate was a large parade ground—the Appellplatz, or roll-call square. Ahead and along one side were long, low barrack huts that marched in orderly, radiating ranks down the hill slope, with bigger two-story blocks beyond, and a grid of streets between the blocks. The newcomers were ordered into ranks in the roll-call square, and stood there at gunpoint, awkward and disheveled in their assortment of soiled and ruined business suits and work clothes, sweaters and shirts, raincoats, fedoras and office shoes, caps and hobnail boots, bearded, bald, slicked hair, tousled mops: a thousand men and boys with a thousand identities. While they stood, the bodies of the men who had died along the road were carried in and dumped among them.

A group of finely uniformed SS officers appeared. One, a middle-aged, pouchy-faced man with a slouching posture, stood out. This, they would learn later, was Camp Commandant Karl Otto Koch. “So,” he said, “you Jew-pigs are here now. You cannot get out of this camp once you are in it. Remember that—you will not get out alive.”

The men were entered one by one in the camp register and each assigned a prisoner number: Fritz Kleinmann: 7290; Gustav Kleinmann: 7291.9 Orders came at them in a confusing barrage that Fritz and many of the Viennese found hard to understand, unaccustomed to the German dialects. They were made to strip naked and march to the bath block, where they showered in almost unbearably hot water (some were too weak to stand it and collapsed), followed by immersion in a vat of searing disinfectant.10 They sat in a yard to have their heads sheared, and under yet another rain of blows from rifle-butts and cudgels, were made to run naked back to the roll-call square. There they were issued with ill-fitting camp uniforms: long drawers, socks, shoes, shirt, and the distinctive blue-striped pants and jacket. If desired, for twelve marks a prisoner could buy a sweater and gloves, but few had so much as a pfennig, and would never know warmth again.11 All their own clothes and belongings—including the little package of warm clothing Gustav had carried from home—were taken away.

With their hair gone, in uniform, the new arrivals were no longer individuals but a homogeneous mass, the only distinguishing features a rare fat belly or a head standing higher than the rest. The violence of their arrival had impressed on them that they were the property of the SS, to do with as it saw fit; they had no identities beyond their numbers. Each man had been issued a strip of cloth with his prisoner number on it, which he was required to sew onto the breast of his uniform, along with a symbol: in this assembly all were Jews. They were given a Star of David made up of a yellow and a red triangle superimposed; the red denoted that, having been arrested on the pretext that they were Jewish-Polish enemy aliens, they were under Schutzhaft, so-called protective custody, a rubric under which political opponents were imprisoned as “protection” for the state.12

Looking at the new prisoners, Deputy Commandant Hans Hüttig, a dedicated sadist with a flat face like the back of a shovel, shook his head and said, “It’s unbelievable that such people have been allowed to walk around free until now.”13

These annulled humans were marched to the “little camp,” an enclosure on the western edge of the muster square surrounded by a double cordon of barbed wire fences: the quarantine area. Inside, rather than barrack huts, were four huge tents lined with wooden bunks four tiers high.14 There wasn’t nearly enough room for all. In recent weeks, over eight thousand new prisoners had arrived at Buchenwald, more than twenty times the usual rate of intake, and the largest since the Kristallnacht pogrom nearly a year earlier.15 The tents were full to bursting. Gustav and Fritz found themselves sharing a bunk space only two meters wide with three other men. There were no mattresses, just bare wooden planks, but they had a blanket each, so they were at least warm. Squeezed in like sardines and their bellies empty, they were so dead tired they fell asleep right away.

The next day, the new prisoners were registered with the political department—the camp Gestapo. They were photographed, fingerprinted, and briefly interrogated, a process that took all morning. In the afternoon they received their first warm food: a half-liter of soupy stew containing unpeeled potatoes and turnips, with a little fat and meat floating in it. The evening meal consisted of a quarter-loaf of bread and a little 50-gram*1 piece of sausage. This proved to be the standard camp ration. The bread was provided in whole loaves, and as there were no knives, sharing it out was a haphazard business which usually led to disputes and jealous quarrels.

For eight days they were left in quarantine, then on October 10 they were put to work. Most were set to hard labor in the nearby stone quarry, but Gustav and Fritz were put to work on maintaining the canteen drains. All day long the workers were hazed and slave-driven. Gustav wrote in his diary: “I have seen how prisoners get beaten by the SS, so I look out for my boy. It’s done by eye-contact; I understand the situation and I know how to conduct myself. Fritzl gets it too.”

So ended his first entry. He looked back over what he had written so far, just two and a half pages to bring them this far, through this much distress and danger. Eight days gone. How many more to come?16

As Gustav had observed, to stay safe it was vital to remain unnoticed, invisible. But within two months of arriving in Buchenwald, both Gustav and Fritz had drawn attention to themselves—Gustav unwillingly, Fritz deliberately.17

On their second day at work they were both switched to the quarry detail. Each morning, an hour and a half before dawn, shrill whistles yanked them from the exquisite forgetfulness of sleep in their comfortless bunk. Then came the kapos and the block senior, yelling at them to hurry. The kapos and block seniors were a shock to new arrivals; they were fellow prisoners—mostly “green men,” criminals who wore the green triangle on their striped uniforms—appointed by the SS to act as straw bosses and barrack overseers. The kapos drove the workforce, did the dirty work of slave-driving, and enabled the SS guards to keep a distance from the mass of prisoners. A kapo was expected to be harsh, if not downright sadistic, and was motivated by the knowledge that if the SS removed his status, he would be placed back among the prisoners, who would exact their revenge.18

As the whistles shrilled, Fritz and Gustav put on their shoes and scrambled down, sinking to their ankles in cold mud on the bare floor. Outside, the camp was ablaze with electric light along the fence lines, atop the guard towers, and in the walkways and open areas. They were herded to the square for roll call, and dished out a cup of acorn coffee each. It was sweet but caffeine-free, with no power to stimulate, and always cold by the time they got it. Doling it out was a long process, and they all had to stand there in silence, motionless and shivering in their thin clothes for two hours. When it was time to go to work, dawn was lightening the sky.

The mass of men in the quarry detail were marched out through the main gate, turning right to follow the road leading between the main camp and the SS barrack complex, a set of uniform two-story brick buildings, some still under construction, arranged in a great arc like the blades of a fan. The Nazis adored their grand designs, even in their concentration camps—especially in their concentration camps—creating an illusive appearance of elegance, order, and meaning to screen the chaotic nightmare played out within.

A little way down the hill, the prisoners passed through the inner sentry line. Out here there were no fences, and the work areas were surrounded by a well-manned cordon of SS sentries about a dozen meters apart. Every second sentry was armed with a rifle or sub-machine gun, and every other with a cudgel. Once inside it, any prisoner who crossed the sentry line was shot without hesitation or challenge. For the desperate, those who had been driven to the limit of what they could endure, running into the sentry line was a common means of suicide. For certain SS guards, forcing prisoners to run over the line to their deaths was one of their favorite means of entertainment. An “escape register” was maintained, recording the names of the SS marksmen and awarding credit for kills, which added up to rewards of vacation time.

The quarry was large—a pale, raw limestone scar on the green wooded hillside. From it, if one raised one’s head, and the mist and rain permitted, a broad, rolling countryside stretched to the hazy western horizon. But one didn’t raise one’s head, not for more than a moment. The work was hard, grueling, dangerous; the men in stripes dug stone, broke stone, carried stone, and were beaten if they slacked, beaten if they carried too little.

There was a narrow railroad in and out, on which huge steel dump wagons ran, each the size of a farm cart, carrying the stone from the quarry to the construction sites around Buchenwald. Gustav and Fritz were assigned as wagon haulers—which meant they and fourteen other men had to heave and push a laden wagon weighing around four and a half tonnes up the hill, a distance of half a kilometer, intermittently lashed and yelled at by kapos.19 The rails were laid on beds of crushed stone, which slipped and grated under the men’s flimsy shoes or painful wooden clogs. Speed was imperative, and as soon as the wagon was emptied, it had to get back to the quarry with all haste, running down the return track propelled by its own weight, with the sixteen men holding on to prevent it speeding out of control. Falls were frequent, with fractured limbs and broken heads. Often a wagon would jump the rails, sometimes directly in the path of the next wagon, leaving a trail of men crushed, broken, and dismembered. The badly injured would be carried off to the infirmary if they weren’t Jews, or to the death block—a holding barrack for the terminally sick—if they were.20 Men with crippling injuries would be given a lethal injection by an SS doctor.21 With no hospital treatment, even slight wounds could be life-threatening in the insanitary conditions in which the prisoners lived and worked. For a man with poor eyesight, losing his spectacles could effectively be a death sentence.

Gustav and Fritz toiled on, managing to avoid both punishment and injury. “We are proving ourselves,” Gustav wrote in his diary.

So it went on for two weeks. Then, on October 25, dysentery and fever broke out in the little quarantine camp. With over three and a half thousand weakened men crammed into its bunks (about one third of them Jews, the rest Poles), and sanitation consisting of nothing but a latrine pit, it was a fertile ground for disease. Each day the population was eroded by twenty-five to fifty deaths. And the grinding life of the camp went on. Each day, impoverished rations; each day, standing for hours at roll call in the cold and rain; each day, beatings and injuries. The SS waged a special vendetta against a chief rabbi called Merkl, who was singled out every day and beaten bloody until eventually he was forced to run through the sentry line. And all the while the dysentery went on unchecked and the death toll rose.

Some Poles, driven by hunger, cut their way out of the little camp and broke into the main camp kitchens. They managed to bring back twelve kilos of syrup, a delight that brightened the prisoners’ diets a little. It was a short-lived pleasure. The theft was discovered, and the whole of the little camp was punished with two days’ withdrawal of rations. A few days later, on November 5, a crate of jellied meat was stolen from the store. Again the prisoners were starved for two days, this time with an additional punishment: they were forced to stand at attention on the roll-call square from morning until evening. While the punishment parade was still going on, there was a break-in at the piggery in the farm site at the north end of the camp, and a pig was taken. Camp Commandant Koch—who lived in a pleasant house in the Buchenwald complex with his wife and went for Sunday walks in Buchenwald’s own zoo just outside the main camp—personally ordered starvation for everyone until the thieves were caught. Every prisoner’s clothing was inspected for signs of blood or sawdust from the pigpen; there were interrogations for three days. It was finally discovered that the culprits were some SS men.22

Weakened by starvation, subjected to soul-breaking labor, with dysentery running unchecked in the camp, the prisoners died in dozens each day. The living walked silent and hunched like specters of the already dead.

Then, suddenly, things got even worse.

On Wednesday, November 8, 1939, Adolf Hitler flew to Munich. He was there to lead the Nazi Party’s annual commemoration of the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, when he and his followers made their first attempt to seize power in Bavaria. The following day the Nazi leaders who were veterans of the putsch were scheduled to reenact their legendary march through the city.23 Tonight, according to tradition, Hitler would open the occasion with an address before an audience in the grandiose Bürgerbräukeller beer hall.

With the war only just begun and his planned invasion of France facing postponement due to bad weather, the Führer’s participation in the commemorations were hurried and brief; tonight he would be rushing back to Berlin, and therefore he gave his beer hall address an hour earlier than scheduled. Afterward, at two minutes past nine, he left the Bürgerbräukeller for his train. Eighteen minutes later—when he should have been in the midst of his speech—a bomb concealed in a pillar next to Hitler’s podium exploded with colossal force, bringing down a gallery above, blowing out doors and windows, obliterating the handful of people standing nearby, and injuring dozens of others.24 The perpetrator was apprehended the same evening. Georg Elser, a German communist paramilitary, had spent a year planning the operation and weeks carefully building and concealing the time bomb, hiding in the beer hall after hours and working through the night. His plan had been perfect—only thwarted by a last-minute change of plan.

Germany was appalled, and the reaction predictably furious. Although Elser was a Protestant with no Jewish connections, in Nazi eyes the Jews were responsible for every ill deed.25 In the concentration camps next day—which happened to be the anniversary of Kristallnacht—they took brutal revenge. In Sachsenhausen the SS subjected the inmates to intimidation and torture, while at Ravensbrück the Jewish women were locked in their barracks for nearly a month.26 But these cruelties paled beside what occurred that day at Buchenwald.

Early in the morning, all the Jewish prisoners, including Gustav and Fritz, were taken from the quarry and marched back to the confines of the main camp, along with all the Jews from the construction, farm, and other work details. They were ordered back to their barrack blocks, and when all were confirmed present and correct, SS-Sergeant Johann Blank went to work. Blank was a born sadist, addicted to all forms of cruelty. A former forestry apprentice and poacher from Bavaria, he was a particularly enthusiastic participant in the game of forcing prisoners to cross the sentry line and be shot, carrying out many of the murders personally.27 Blank, accompanied by other SS men, still hungover from the previous night’s Putsch celebrations, went from block to block, picking out twenty-one Jews (including a seventeen-year-old boy who had the bad luck to be outdoors on an errand). They were marched to the main gate, where they had to stand while the SS men performed a little parade to coincide with the commemorative march taking place in Munich. When it was over, the gate was opened, and the selected Jews were herded out and down the hill toward the quarry.

Inside their tent, Gustav and Fritz knew nothing of what was going on, other than the sounds that carried their way. For a long while, there was silence broken only by the shouts of the SS and the faint sounds of the remaining work details. Then, suddenly, there came a crackle of gunfire; then another and another, followed by sporadic shots. Then silence again.28

It didn’t take long for the story of what had happened to circulate around the camp. The twenty-one had been marched to the quarry entrance, where they had all been shot. A few had managed to run, only to be hunted down and murdered among the trees.

The day wasn’t over yet. SS-Sergeant Blank, accompanied by Sergeant Eduard Hinkelmann, who between them were the principal tyrants of the little camp, now turned their attention to their own domain. They carried out an inspection, finding fault with everything and working themselves into a fury. They ordered a ritual punishment. When the prisoners were mustered outside, the kapos went among them, counting, grabbing every twentieth man and shoving them forward. They came along Gustav and Fritz’s line: one, two, three . . . the counting finger danced along, pulsing the beats . . . seventeen, eighteen, nineteen: the finger went past Gustav . . . twenty: the finger jabbed at Fritz.

He was seized and pushed toward the other victims.29

A heavy wooden table was being dragged onto the roll-call square. Any prisoner who had been here more than a week or two recognized it as the Bock—the whipping bench, a table with a sloping top, straps, and ankle loops. The Bock had been introduced by Deputy Commandant Hüttig both as a means of punishment for the prisoners and of entertainment for his men.30 Every prisoner had witnessed its use and was terrified by the sight of it. Blank and Hinkelmann very much enjoyed putting the Bock to work.

Fritz was gripped by the arms and, with his insides dissolving, was rushed to the Bock. His jacket and shirt were removed and his pants pulled down. Hands shoved him facedown on the sloping top, forced his ankles through the loops, and tightened the leather strap over his back.

Gustav watched in helpless horror as Blank and Hinkelmann prepared; they relished the moment, stroking their bullwhips—ferocious weapons of leather with a steel core. Camp rules allowed for a minimum of five lashes, and a maximum of twenty-five. Today the rage of the SS could be sated by nothing less than the maximum.

The first lash landed like a razor cut across Fritz’s buttocks.

“Count!” they yelled at him. Fritz had seen this ritual before; he knew what was expected. “One,” he said. The bullwhip cut across his flesh again. “Two,” he gasped.

The SS men were methodical; the lashes were paced to prolong the punishment and heighten the pain and terror of each blow. Fritz knew that he must concentrate, that if he lost count the lashes would start over again. Three . . . four . . . an eternity, an inferno of pain . . . ten . . . eleven . . . fighting to concentrate, to count correctly, not to give in to despair or unconsciousness . . . twenty-four . . . twenty-five.

At last the strap was loosed and he was forced to his feet. Before his father’s eyes he was helped away, bleeding, on fire, his mind stunned, as the next unfortunate was dragged to the Bock.

The obscene ritual dragged on for hours; dozens of men, hundreds of blows. Many succumbed to the distress of the moment, miscounted their strokes and had to begin again. None walked away unbroken.

Gustav and Fritz stood side by side at roll call—Fritz with some difficulty. Only two days had passed since the dreadful day of the shootings and the Bock, and Fritz had hardly begun to heal. But to succumb to pain or sickness here was to give in to death. Besides, he was worried about his papa. The starvation punishment had been renewed, and there had been no food for days; dysentery and fever still plagued the camp, and now Gustav, weakened by labor and hunger, had caught the disease. He was pale, feverish, and afflicted by diarrhea. Fritz watched him anxiously as they stood there and the minutes ticked slowly by. He couldn’t possibly work; he could scarcely stand through roll call. Gustav swayed, shivering, his senses withdrawing. Sounds grew faint and muffled, a black haze closed in around his vision, his extremities growing suddenly numb, and he felt himself falling, falling, into a black pit. He was unconscious before he hit the ground.

When Gustav woke, he was on his back somewhere indoors. Not the tent. Above him floated the faces of Fritz and another man. They had carried him here—Fritz struggling with his still-unhealed injuries. He appeared to be in one of the barrack buildings in the main camp. It couldn’t be the infirmary, which was closed to Jews. In his hazy, febrile state, Gustav was dimly aware that this must be the block set aside for Jews and hopeless cases, the one from which people rarely emerged alive. The air was thick, stifling, filled with a susurrus of groans and an atmosphere of hopeless, helpless death. But it was the closest thing there was to medical care for Jews.

There were two doctors. One, a German named Haas, was callous and stole from the sick, leaving them to starve. The other was a prisoner, Dr. Paul Heller, a young Jewish physician from Prague, who dedicated himself to doing the best he could for his patients with the meager resources the SS provided.31 Gustav lay helpless, running a temperature of 38.8°C,*2 sometimes lucid, sometimes in a fever dream, for days.

Meanwhile, in the little camp the prisoners were starving. The announcement on the loudspeakers had been heard so many times it was like a mantra: “Food deprivation will be imposed as a disciplinary measure.” In November alone the little camp had endured eleven days of total starvation. Some of the younger prisoners suggested begging the SS for food. Fritz, who had scarcely begun recovering from his whipping, was among them. But the older, wiser prisoners, many of them veterans of the First World War, warned them against it. Taking action meant exposure, and exposure usually meant punishment or death.

Fritz talked it over with a Viennese friend, Jakob Ihr—nicknamed “Itschkerl”—a boy from the Prater. Itschkerl was determined to do something: “I don’t care if we have to die—I’m going to speak to Dr. Blies when he comes.”

SS-Lieutenant Dr. Ludwig Blies was the camp doctor and made regular inspection visits to the little camp. He was hardly a kind man, but he was more humane—or at least less brutally callous—than some other SS doctors. He had on rare occasions intervened to halt excessive punishments.32

Fritz agreed but didn’t trust Itschkerl to do it alone. “All right,” he said. “But I’m coming with you. And I’ll do the talking; you just back me up.”

When Dr. Blies entered the little camp for his next inspection, Fritz and Itschkerl caught his attention. Blies was, at first sight, an approachable figure: in his late forties, some found him disarmingly comical in appearance.33 Fritz, being careful not to seem demanding, made his voice quaver with weepy desperation. “We have no strength to work,” he pleaded. “Please give us something to eat.”34

Blies stared at them. Fritz had hardly needed to adapt his voice; his thinness and gait said it all. It was sensible to appeal to the SS view of prisoners as a labor resource—but it was also extremely dangerous to draw attention to one’s current uselessness in that regard. This apparently went through Blies’s mind, competing with his humane streak, as he surveyed the two boys. Abruptly he said, “Come with me.”

Fritz and Itschkerl followed the doctor across the roll-call square to the camp kitchens. Commanding them to wait, Blies went into the food store and came out a few minutes later with a large 1½-kilo loaf of ration-issue rye bread and a two-liter bowl of soup. “Now,” he said, handing over this astonishing bounty, “back to your camp. Go!”

They shared the food—equivalent to half a dozen men’s rations—with their closest bunkmates. The following day the whole camp was put back on full rations, apparently on Blies’s orders. The boys’ appeal to the doctor was the talk of the camp, and from that day forward Itschkerl became one of Fritz’s best friends.

While this was going on, Gustav still lay sick in the death block. So far, the dysentery had failed to kill him. Fritz visited when he could, but although the worst was past, it was obvious to Gustav that he would never recover in this unhealthy environment. After two weeks in the pestilential block, Gustav begged to be discharged, but Dr. Heller refused to let him go. Gustav was determined; disobeying the doctor’s orders, he asked Fritz to help him get out. Father and son slipped away and made their way back to the little camp, Fritz guiding his papa’s faltering steps. The moment he was out in the fresh air Gustav began to feel better, and even in the tent the atmosphere felt fresher than in the death block.

The following day he was given light work as a latrine cleaner and furnace stoker;35 he ate well, and regained his health a little. Fritz too was recovering from his injuries. But there was always a limit to one’s health in Buchenwald. They were both thin; Gustav, who had always been lean, had declined to 45 kilos*3 during his illness, although he was regaining some weight now. On the whole, he felt that things were looking up, since they could hardly get any worse. Fritz’s new reputation for cleverness had made him popular not only with the regular prisoners but even with the camp seniors—the very highest of the prisoner functionaries, who had authority over the block seniors and ordinary kapos; they all thought highly of him.

But still the reality remained: the perks were menial and the consolations little more than a stay of death. “I work to forget where I find myself,” Gustav wrote.

The only thing that held a man together was comradeship. Fritz would often wonder, now and in later years, how he survived all this: “It was not good luck; neither was it God’s blessing.” Rather, it was the kindness of others, especially the older prisoners, many of whom were long-term veterans of Gestapo dungeons and concentration camps; they knew nothing about Fritz, yet sometimes they would risk their lives to help him. He was just a boy, and short for his age. “All they saw was the Jewish star on my prison uniform, and that I was a child.”36 He and Itschkerl often got extra tidbits of food, sometimes medications when they needed them. Later, when systematic exterminations and transportations began, the older prisoners would help the boys evade the selections.

With winter beginning to bite, Fritz and Gustav were grateful to receive a parcel of fresh underwear from home. They were allowed to receive such things but could send out no communications; the SS was extremely sensitive about what went on in the camps, even though the atrocities were known throughout the world by now.

Little news accompanied the parcel. Tini was still trying to arrange for the children to leave the Reich and getting nowhere. Of Edith there was no news at all. With Germany and Britain at war, the family was entirely cut off from their eldest daughter. Where she was and what she might be doing were a blank.