6

A Favorable
Decision

AFTER MONTHS OF LIMBO, at the start of June 1940 Britain was launched into an all-out shooting war. The quiet home front began to transform into a place of bombs and blood and death.

Before a seaborne German invasion could take place, Goering and Hitler had to break the Royal Air Force. The Bore War gave way to the Battle of Britain. Every day, Luftwaffe bombers flew in swarms from their bases in France and Belgium to attack Britain’s airfields and factories, and every day the Spitfire and Hurricane fighters scrambled to oppose them. The RAF had become a coalition force, its British and Commonwealth pilots joined by exiles from Poland, France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and even some volunteers from the United States defying their country’s Neutrality Act.

During that hot early summer, the Luftwaffe’s targets were military, and the cities were mostly left alone. The press fixated on two things: the progress of the battle, and growing fears about a German fifth column infiltrating Britain—spies and saboteurs paving the way for the main invasion. The rumors had begun in April, before the Battle of France had even begun. The press—with the right-wing Daily Mail at the forefront—had played a major role in whipping up paranoia about fifth columnists, and although the Mail claimed to speak for “the people,” in fact the majority of Britons had had no notion of what a “fifth column” even was until the Mail began its campaign.1 In fact, there were spies and saboteurs at work in Britain, and dozens were eventually caught and convicted, but most were natural-born British citizens, not immigrants.

Nevertheless, the paranoia had quickly evolved into hysteria, and suspicious eyes were turned toward the German refugees who had settled in the country. At the very start of the war, thousands of German and Austrian nationals had been interned as enemy aliens. But the fifty-five thousand Jewish men, women, and children living in Britain were hardly likely to be spying for Hitler. Most were placed in Category C—exempt from internment—although 6,700 had been categorized B (subject to some restrictions), and 569 were judged a threat and interned.2 The overwhelming majority were allowed to get on with their lives.

But with the country under threat of imminent invasion, the Daily Mail and some politicians were strident in their demands that the government do something about the fifth column threat. All male German and Austrian nationals, regardless of status, ought to be interned for the sake of national security. When Winston Churchill took over as prime minister on May 9, he took the matter firmly in hand. Measures began for moving interned nationals to Canada and extending the categories subject to internment. Churchill’s cabinet considered them all: aside from Germans and Austrians, there were members of the British Union of Fascists and the Communist Party, and Irish and Welsh nationalists. When Italy declared war on June 10 and Italians were added to the list, Churchill lost patience and issued the order: “Collar the lot!”3

On June 21, the government instituted a new internment policy and issued instructions to local police forces. To avoid putting too much pressure on infrastructure, it would proceed in stages. Initially, Germans and Austrians—Jews, non-Jews, and anti-Nazis alike—who did not have refugee status or who were unemployed were to be arrested and interned. The second stage would sweep up all remaining Germans and Austrians living outside London, and the third would take those in London. The first-stage arrests began on June 24.4

Churchill told Parliament, “I know there are a great many people affected by the orders . . . who are the passionate enemies of Nazi Germany. I am very sorry for them, but we cannot . . . draw all the distinctions which we should like to do.”5

The Anglo-Jewish community was equivocal on the whole affair; they shared the fifth column paranoia and worried deeply about the rise in anti-Semitism that had been triggered by the influx of refugees. People in the north of England were circulating the kind of slurs that always arose against Jews in times of stress: they were black-marketeers, profiteers, evaded military service, enjoyed special privileges, had more money, better food, better clothes.6 Desperate to curtail the growth of anti-Semitism, the Jewish Chronicle breathtakingly recommended taking “the most rigorous steps” against refugees and supported the extension of internment.7

In Leeds, Edith Paltenhoffer’s fears had been growing for months. After marrying Richard, they had set up home together in an apartment in a large and rather run-down Victorian house in the Chapeltown Road district, close to the synagogue.8 Edith had left her live-in position with Mrs. Brostoff and switched to a daily job as a cleaner with a Mrs. Green, who lived nearby. This was no light undertaking, as changes of employment by refugees had to be registered and approved by the Home Office.9 Richard, for the time being, continued with his journeyman cracker baking, although it was hardly his ideal metier.

They should have been happy, but Edith was deeply unsettled. When the fifth column paranoia began in the press, life became uncomfortable for anyone with a German accent. Synagogues in England stopped allowing sermons in German, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews—also keen to avoiding provoking anti-Semitism—worked to suppress gatherings of German Jewish refugees.10

When France fell and a German invasion looked certain, Edith and Richard were consumed by fear. They had seen how quickly Austria had fallen to the Nazis, and it was only too easy to imagine storm troopers in Chapeltown Road and Eichmann or some other SS ghoul issuing orders from Leeds Town Hall.

Edith went through her belongings and dug out the affidavits from her relatives in America. It was time to try again to get out of Europe altogether. At the beginning of June, she inquired of the Refugee Committee whether her affidavits would still be valid now that she was married. It took nearly two weeks for the reply to find its way back from London: no, they were not. Edith would need to write to her sponsors and ask them to either issue new affidavits or swear a statement transferring the old ones to her married name. Because US immigration law did not give automatic entitlement to her husband, the sponsors would need to extend the affidavits to include him.11 And of course, there would remain the formalities of applying for an emigration visa at the US Embassy in London.

With the Battle of Britain escalating in the skies over their heads and the calls for internment growing louder in the press, Edith and Richard were looking at an excruciatingly long process. Edith had been through it before in Vienna, and it would be no better here. They would never discover just how long it would take; at the beginning of July, events overtook them. The second stage of the government’s program came into force, and the Leeds police arrested Richard.

It was only by luck that they didn’t take Edith too. Women with children were not exempt, but pregnant women were. This, the politicians reasoned, was where the public might draw a line; if they saw pregnant women being subjected to barrack-room life in camps, they might turn against the whole idea of internment. The same applied to mothers with very sick children.12

Edith wasn’t standing for this outrage. Her poor husband, only twenty-one years old, with the scars of a Nazi concentration camp on his body, had fled to this country seeking sanctuary. And now, to be torn from his wife and unborn child and sent to some awful internment camp by the very people who should be shielding him from the Nazis . . . It was beyond belief.

Applications for release could be submitted to the Home Office; it was no easy process, as the internees had to prove that they were not only no threat to security but that they could make a positive contribution to the war effort.13 Edith immediately lodged an application and submitted a medical report. Meanwhile, both the Leeds and London branches of the Jewish Refugee Committee lobbied the Home Office on behalf of the thousands now incarcerated. Many weren’t even in real camps with proper facilities—the numbers had been too great for existing camps to hold, and improvised centers had been set up in derelict cotton mills, disused factories, racecourses, anywhere that could be found. Many went to the main internment center on the Isle of Man, a small island between the coasts of northern England and Ireland, a popular vacation spot before the war.14

The weeks of July and August went by, Edith’s pregnancy advanced, and no word came. She wrote again to the JRC in late August. The secretary in London replied, advising her against pressing the matter: “We . . . feel that you have done everything possible at the present time and think it would be most unwise for our Committee to intervene. We have been advised by the Home Office that additional appeals and letters of enquiry . . . can result in delaying any decision.”15

A few days later, the decision was reached—and it went against Richard. He would stay in the camp.

For a concentration camp veteran, life in an internment camp could be relatively mild. There was no forced labor, no real punishments, no sadistic guards; internees—many of whom were scholars, scientists, and artists—played sports, set up newspapers, concerts, and educational circles. But they were prisoners nonetheless. And although there was no SS, Jews sometimes found themselves confined in the same camps—or even the same rooms—as Nazi sympathizers. Richard had the additional torment of knowing that Edith was having to cope with her pregnancy alone and without his wages.

In early September, now well into her third trimester, Edith submitted a second application for Richard’s release. The JRC assured her, “We sincerely trust that the application will receive a favourable decision.”16 The waiting began again. After two weeks, a brief note came from the Aliens Department of the Home Office, telling her that Richard’s case would come before committee “as soon as possible.”17

Two days later Edith’s contractions started. In no fit state to give birth at home, she was taken to the Maternity Hospital in Hyde Terrace in the center of Leeds. On Wednesday, September 18, 1940, she gave birth to a healthy boy, and named him Peter John. A real Yorkshire-born English baby son. Peter was five days old when the news came through from the JRC—his father had been released.18

The public mood had turned against interning harmless refugees. The catalyst had come in July, when a ship bound for Canada carrying several thousand internees—including some Jews—was sunk by a U-boat. The loss of life made Britain look at itself and realize what it was doing to innocent people. The policy was gradually reversed, and by the end of the year most interned refugees had been released. In Parliament, politicians expressed regret for what they had done in a fit of panic; one Conservative member said, “We have, unwittingly I know, added to the sum total of misery caused by this war, and by doing so we have not in any way added to the efficiency of our war effort.”19 A Labour member added: “We remember the horror that sprang up in this country when Hitler put Jews, Socialists and Communists into concentration camps. We were horrified at that, but somehow or other we almost took it for granted when we did the same thing to the same people.”20

Gustav opened his notebook and leafed through the pages. So few of them—just three sides covered in his strong script summed up the eons of the year 1940. “Thus the time passes,” he wrote, “up early in the morning, home late in the evening, eating, and then straight to sleep. So a year goes by, with work and punishment.”

A new punishment had been devised for the Jews by the deputy commandant in charge of the main camp, SS-Major Arthur Rödl, a bumptious crook whose low intelligence had not hindered his rise to senior rank. Each evening, when they returned from the quarry and the gardens and the construction sites, exhausted and hungry, while all the other prisoners went to their barracks, the Jews—thousands of them—were made to stand on the roll-call square under the glare of the floodlights and sing.

The “choirmaster” stood on top of a gravel heap at the edge of the square and conducted. “Another number!” Rödl would call out over the loudspeakers, and the weary prisoners would draw breath and struggle though another song. If the singing wasn’t good enough, the loudspeakers would bark out: “Open your mouths! Don’t you pigs want to? Lie down, the whole rabble, and give us a song!”

And down they had to lie, whatever the weather, in the dust, the dirt, muddy puddles or snow, and sing. The Blockführers would walk between the rows, kicking any man who didn’t sing loudly enough. The ordeal often went on for hours. Sometimes Rödl would grow bored and announce that he was going for dinner, but the prisoners would have to stay and practice: “If you can’t get it right,” he said, “you can stay and sing all night.” The SS guards, who resented having to stand by and supervise, would take out their wrath on the prisoners, administering kickings and beatings.

The most common tune was the “Buchenwald Song.” Composed by two Austrian prisoners, it was a stirring march tune, with words extolling courage in the midst of wretchedness. The song had been commissioned by Rödl himself, though he had nothing to do with its substance; “All other camps have a song,” he had declared in 1938. “We must get a Buchenwald song.”21 He 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:

When the day awakens, ere the sun smiles,

The gangs march out to the day’s toils

Out into the breaking dawn.

And the forest is black and the heavens red,

In our packs we carry a scrap of bread

And in our hearts, in our hearts, just sorrow.

 

Oh Buchenwald, I cannot forget you,

For you are my fate.

He who has left you, he alone can measure

How wonderful freedom is!

Oh Buchenwald, we do not whine and moan,

And whatever our fate may be,

We will say yes to life,

For the day will come when we are free!

The song had been composed by the Viennese songwriter Hermann Leopoldi with words by celebrated lyricist Fritz Löhner-Beda, both of whom were prisoners. The SS, including Major Rödl himself, abjectly failed to recognize the spirit of defiance. “In his weakness of intellect he absolutely did not see how revolutionary the song actually was,” recalled Leopoldi.22 Rödl had also commissioned a special “Jewish Song” with defamatory lyrics about the crimes and pestilence of the Jews, but it had been “too stupid” even for him, and he banned it. Some other officers later resurrected it and forced the prisoners to sing it late into the night.23 But still it was the rousing “Buchenwald Song” more often than not. The Jews sang it times without count on the roll-call square under the lights; “Rödl enjoyed dancing to the melody,” said Leopoldi, “as on one side the camp orchestra played, and on the other side the people were whipped.”24 They sang it marching to work in the red dawn, investing it with all their loathing and hatred of the SS. Many died singing it. “They cannot grind us down like this,” Gustav wrote in his diary. “The war goes on.”

Buchenwald continued to expand, month by month. The forest was eaten away and logged, and among the littered waste the buildings rose like pale fungus on the blighted back of the Ettersberg. The SS barracks were gradually completing their arc—a semicircular fan of sixteen two-story blocks, with the administrative building at one end and an officers’ casino in the center, all encompassing a large spruce grove.25 There were handsomely designed villas with gardens for the officers, a small zoo, riding and stable facilities, garage complexes and a gas station for SS vehicles, and even a falconry. This strange addition, which stood among the trees on the slope between the commandant’s villa and the quarry, comprised an aviary, a gazebo, and a Teutonic hunting hall of carved oak timbers and great fireplaces, stuffed with trophies and heavy furniture. It was intended for the personal use of Hermann Goering, in his capacity as Reich Hunt Master, but he was destined never to even visit the place, let alone use it. The SS was so proud of it that for a fee of 1 mark local Germans could come in and look around.26

All of this—houses, barracks, garages, offices, entertainment facilities—was built from the bones and timbers of the hill on which it stood, and fashioned with the blood of the prisoners whose hands transported and laid the stones and bricks and lumber.

Along the roads between the construction sites, Gustav Kleinmann and his fellow slaves hauled their wagons of materials, and his son was now one of those whose hands put up the buildings. Fritz’s nightmare period in the gardens had ended. His tireless benefactor, Leopold Moses, had used his influence again to have Fritz transferred to the construction detail building the SS garages, a sprawling complex laid out around a huge open area.27 The kapo of Construction Detachment I, which was undertaking the project, was Robert Siewert, a friend of Leo Moses.

Siewert, a German of Polish extraction, wore the red triangle of a political prisoner. He’d been a bricklayer in his youth, and he had served in the German army in the last war. A dedicated communist, he’d been a member of Saxony’s parliament in the 1920s. In 1935 the Nazis had imprisoned him for treason, transferring him to Buchenwald in 1938. Siewert was in his fifties but had an air of resilient strength and energy: thickset, with a broad face and narrow eyes under dark, heavy brows. On Leo’s request, he arranged Fritz’s transfer to his detachment.

At first the labor was as arduous as any Fritz had known. Again it was all about carrying—bring this here, bear this burden, and run! A sack of cement weighed fifty kilograms,*1 whereas Fritz himself weighed little over forty. Other laborers in the yard would lift the sack onto his shoulders, and he would carry it, staggering, trying to run, to wherever it was needed. But even this was better than the gardens or the quarry, for there was no abuse, no beatings—only grueling, crippling work. The SS valued the construction detachment highly, and therefore Siewert was able to prevent them abusing the prisoners under him.

For all his stern appearance, Robert Siewert had a kind heart. He took a liking to Fritz and couldn’t stand to see such a young, slightly built boy being worked into the ground. He took Fritz off carrying and reassigned him to mixing mortar. He also taught Fritz how to gain favor with the SS. “You have to work with your eyes,” he told him. “If you see an SS man coming, work fast. But if no SS are about, then you take your time, you spare yourself.” Fritz became so adept at watching for the guards and making a show of intense productive labor that he acquired a reputation for industriousness. Siewert would point him out to the construction leader, SS-Sergeant Becker, and say, “Look how diligently this Jewish lad works.”

One day Becker arrived at the building site with his superior, SS-Lieutenant Max Schobert, deputy commandant in charge of protective custody prisoners. Siewert called Fritz away from his work and presented him to the officer, extolling his performance. “We could train Jewish prisoners as bricklayers,” he suggested. Schobert, a brutal-faced individual with a perpetual sneer, looked down his large nose at Fritz. He didn’t like this suggestion at all; all that expense to train Jews! Nonetheless, a seed had been planted which had the potential to grow into a lifeline.

During that summer a large unit of SS troops arrived at Buchenwald to bump the garrison up to full strength. Their barrack buildings weren’t complete, and work had to be accelerated—a task beyond the capacity of the construction detail. Robert Siewert took the opportunity to press his case again, complaining to the camp administration that he didn’t have enough bricklayers. The only solution would be to train young Jews for the job. Commandant Koch’s reaction was the same as Schobert’s. But Siewert insisted that he simply couldn’t provide the labor force in any other way. Eventually Koch relented.

Fritz Kleinmann was the first apprentice. Siewert began by having him taught to lay bricks to build a simple wall under the supervision of Aryan workmen. With a string laid out as a guide, he pasted on the mortar and laid down brick after brick, neatly and correctly. Fritz had inherited his father’s aptitude for manual craft, and he learned quickly. Having mastered the basics, he was taught how to do corners, pillars, and buttresses, then lintels, fireplaces, and chimneys. In wet weather he learned plastering. Every day Siewert would come to talk to him and check on his progress. In double-quick time Fritz became a fully trained mason and builder—the first Jew in Buchenwald to do so.

His progress was so impressive, and the need so urgent, that the SS allowed Siewert to start up a training program for Jewish, Polish, and Roma boys. They would spend half of each day working on-site, and half in their block in the camp being taught construction theory and science.

In Fritz’s young mind, Robert Siewert became a hero, representing the spirit of resistance to the Nazis and the ethos of humane kindness. The young were his greatest concern, and he had set himself the goal of doing whatever 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, to which we had grown unaccustomed.”28 Fritz wondered where Siewert got the strength, at his age and after so many years of Nazi imprisonment.

Robert Siewert’s Jewish apprentices wore green bands on their sleeves with the inscription “Bricklayers’ School” and enjoyed certain privileges. A particular delight was the heavy laborers’ special food allowance; twice a week, they shared an extra ration of 2½ kilos of bread and half a kilo of blood pudding or meat pâté, which was brought to the construction site for them. This was on top of their standard daily ration of 2½ kilos of bread, 250 grams of margarine, a spoonful of curd or beet jam, acorn coffee, and three quarters of a liter of cabbage or turnip soup with little bits of meat in it.

When winter began to set in, Siewert got permission to set up oil drums as braziers on the construction site, on the pretext that the plaster and mortar was liable to crack in freezing conditions. His real purpose was the welfare of his workers, who labored all day in the bitter cold with only their thin prison uniforms to protect them. A humane and courageous man from heart to backbone, Robert Siewert was absolutely devoted to the well-being of his fellow men, and never failed in that duty, knowingly putting himself at unthinkable risk by interceding with the SS on behalf of Jews, Roma, Poles, and other oppressed people.

But Siewert’s influence did not extend far beyond the limits of the construction site and the bricklaying school. As soon as the day’s work ended and the prisoners returned to the main camp, they returned to the direct jurisdiction of the camp guards and the regime of enforced singing parades long into the night, random beatings, food deprivation, and capricious murders. Fritz would look at his fellow prisoners and silently give thanks that at least he ate better than they did and was not beaten at work or at risk of being driven over the sentry line or kicked to death. He ached for his papa, who slaved each day on the haulage column. Fritz saved what he could from his additional rations to give to him when they met in the evenings.

Extra morsels of food came to Fritz from an unexpected source. While working on the construction of a heating plant for the SS barracks, he was befriended by an Austrian prisoner who worked as a welder in one of the SS technical facilities.29 All Fritz knew of him was that he spoke in the dialect of Styria in southern Austria. He would meet Fritz every few days behind the heating plant and give him a piece of bread. Fritz never knew his name, only that he pitied the young Jewish boys in the camp and helped others besides Fritz, stealing from the SS food store to provide for them. Fritz asked Robert Siewert about the Styrian; he reluctantly gave his approval, warning, “Boy, be careful you don’t get caught.” To be apprehended by the SS would mean punishment for both of them—and death for the Styrian. Fritz’s heart was warmed by these gifts of food, and by the sense of solidarity.30

Gustav’s mind was eased by his son’s new status and the safety it brought. “The boy is popular with all the foremen and kapo Robert Siewert,” he wrote. “From Leo Moses we get our greatest support, which gives us further confidence.” To Gustav’s indomitably optimistic mind, it was beginning to seem that they might survive this ordeal. Meanwhile, for the poor men in the quarry their hell had no end, and they died in dreadful numbers every day. The fear of being sent back there was constant.

During his time on the construction detachment, Fritz was moved out of the youth block and transferred to block 17, which was on the same north-south street as his father’s block. It was painful to part from his friends. But the move proved formative; block 17 was where the Austrian VIP and celebrity prisoners—the Prominenten—were housed. Most had been incarcerated for their political activities but were of a higher status than most of the red-triangle men in the camp.31 Some of their names were familiar to Fritz, his father having known them—or at least known of them—during his time as an activist in the Social Democratic Party.

Fritz was welcomed into this new community by one of the room seniors, Josef Jellinek, who was in his forties and a veteran of left-wing politics. Along with his sister Adele, Josef, or Seppl as he was known,*2 had been a writer and editor with the Viennese social-democratic newspapers Das Kleine Blatt and Der Arbeiter-Sonntag. It was Seppl Jellinek who introduced the starstruck Fritz to the society of block 17.

They included Robert Danneberg, a Jewish socialist who had been president of the Vienna provincial council, a member of the National Assembly, and one of the leading figures in “Red Vienna”—the socialist heyday that had lasted from the end of the First World War until the right-wing takeover in 1934.

Contrasting with Dannenberg’s sober presence was the droll, round-faced Fritz Grünbaum, star of the Berlin and Vienna cabaret scenes, conférencier,*3 scriptwriter, and movie actor. He had also written librettos for the operetta composer Franz Léhar (who was one of Hitler’s favorite composers despite having a Jewish wife). As a prominent Jew and a political satirist, Grünbaum had been taken by the Nazis soon after the Anschluss. Aging and slightly built, with his bald, shaved pate and bottle-bottom spectacles he resembled Mahatma Gandhi. He had survived periods in the quarry and latrine details. His health and spirit had been broken by it, and he had attempted suicide. Even so, he managed to keep up a semblance of his old persona and would, on occasion, perform cabaret for the other prisoners. His comment on his plight as a Jew was simple and to the point: “What does my intellect benefit me when my name damages me? A poet called Grünbaum is done for.” He was right; he would be dead within months.32

Fritz got to know other artists in block 17, including another prominent librettist, the bespectacled, somber-looking Fritz Löhner-Beda. Like Grünbaum he had written librettos for Léhar’s operettas and operas. Also like Grünbaum, as a famous Jew living in Vienna, Löhner-Beda had been arrested in April 1938 and sent to the camps. He always hoped that Léhar, who had influence with both Hitler and Goebbels, would be able to have him freed, but he hoped in vain. To add to his torment, songs from Léhar’s operettas Giuditta and The Land of Smiles were often played over the camp’s loudspeakers, the SS apparently unaware that Löhner-Beda had authored the librettos for those very works. Even more hurtfully they played the popular song “I Lost My Heart in Heidelberg,” for which he had written the lyrics. Another of his works was sung every single day in the camp, for it was Fritz Löhner-Beda who had written the poignant, defiant lyrics of the “Buchenwald Song” to music by his friend and fellow prisoner, the composer and cabaret star Hermann Leopoldi. Leopoldi at least had managed to escape this miserable place; he’d been released in early 1939 and was now living with his wife in America.

One of the brightest of the block 17 Prominenten was Ernst Federn, a young Viennese Jew from a family of intellectuals and academics; his father, Paul Federn, was a well-known psychoanalyst who had studied under Freud, and Ernst himself had followed his father into the profession. He was also a Trotskyist, and wore the red-on-yellow star of a Jewish political prisoner. Ernst was a little forbidding to look at, with heavy features set in an almost thuggish-looking expression beneath his cropped scalp. But he was a soul of kindness. He had become known as the prisoners’ psychoanalyst, and anyone could come to him to talk about themselves or their problems. His irrepressible optimism gave marvelous encouragement to the other prisoners, some of whom regarded him as a little crazy for it.33

There were other men too who had been active social-democrats, Christian-socialists, Trotskyists, communists. In their free time in the evenings, young Fritz would sit and listen to their conversations about politics, philosophy, the war . . . Their talk was intellectual, sophisticated, and Fritz, keen to learn, strained to comprehend what they said. One thing that came through clearly was the strength of their belief in the idea of Austria. Despite their own hopeless situation, their country’s obliteration as an independent state, and its relegation as the mere “Ostmark” of the German Reich, they shared a vision of a future Austria, free from Nazi rule, renewed and beautiful. These men believed firmly that the Nazis must lose the war in the end, even though the trickles of news that found their way into the camp indicated that right now they were winning it on all fronts.

Fritz felt his faith and his courage grow in the light of these men’s vision of a better future. What he did not know, but could easily guess, was 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.”34 Fritz would always recall Fritz Grünbaum’s birthday celebration, it being the same day as Fritz’s sister Herta’s. The other blockmates saved portions of their rations to give old Grünbaum a decent dinner, and a little extra was stolen from the kitchens. After their meal, Löhner-Beda gave a speech and Grünbaum himself sang a few verses. As the youngest inmate present, Fritz was permitted to congratulate the humbled star.

Dozens of men—politicians, intellectuals, entertainers, from Vienna, Silesia, Bohemia, Brno, Prague, and one young apprentice upholsterer from Leopoldstadt, a playmate of the Karmelitermarkt—what could they possibly have in common? That they were Austrians by birth or by choice, and that they were Jews. In here, they had the whole world in common; they were a tiny nation of survivors surrounded by a poison sea.

And the deaths went on.

One of the first from block 17 was Hans Kunke, a young Jewish political radical and writer. Square set and good-looking, Hans was a musician by nature and a revolutionary by calling. In the days of Red Vienna he had been active in the Socialist Workers’ Youth organization, and even after socialist parties were suppressed after 1934, he and his wife, Stefanie (who was now in Ravensbrück concentration camp), had remained members of the central committee of the illegal Revolutionary Socialist Youth. Hans, who ate at the next table to Fritz, had a fine baritone voice and was said to be an accomplished pianist. He was only thirty-four years old, but his experiences in Buchenwald had damaged him severely, and he had been assigned to the sock-darning detail, a labor allotted to invalids. The SS would not let him be. One morning at roll call, a week after Fritz Grünbaum’s birthday celebration, Hans Kunke was called out and transferred to the quarry. He endured six months there as a stone carrier under the torment of kapos Vogel and Johann Herzog and the SS overseers Blank and Hinkelmann. On the last day of October 1940, Hans Kunke, utterly broken and driven by despair, ran across the sentry line and was shot.35

Another fatality was Rudi Arndt, a young Jewish communist from Berlin, who was block senior in block 22 (originally designated the “Jewish block” and still known by that name even though the Jewish prisoner population had long since overflowed it). Rudi organized secret musical performances and Jewish cultural celebrations. The SS called him the Judenkaiser because he had no fear of remonstrating with them on behalf of the other Jews when their rations were cut or they were barred from the prisoners’ infirmary. He conspired to steal medicines from the stores to treat sick Jews, smuggled them into the infirmary and hid them from the SS doctors, and set up an improvised hospital in block 22. To Stefan Heymann, who was his friend and assistant, and to Fritz and to every other Jew in Buchenwald, Rudi was a hero. But he was betrayed to the SS by a group of green-triangle prisoners and sent to the quarry, where he met the usual fate on the sentry line.36

The killings in the quarry were growing more frequent, and many of the dead were friends of Fritz’s or Gustav’s, some from the old days in Vienna. That year—the first full year of the war—across all the Nazi concentration camps prisoner deaths through murder and suicide increased tenfold, from around thirteen hundred to fourteen thousand.37 The atmosphere of war was the cause of it. While their fellows in the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht fought and conquered Germany’s enemies in Poland, France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Great Britain, the Totenkopf SS in the concentration camps felt their blood stirring and their tempers fired up, and they ramped up their war against the enemy within. News of military victories triggered spurts of triumphal aggression, and setbacks—such as the failure to subdue Britain, the only enemy still fighting—inspired retribution.

With the numbers of corpses needing to be disposed of rising beyond its ability to cope, in 1940 the SS began to equip all its concentration camps with their own crematoria.38 Buchenwald’s was constructed in a corner of the main camp, immediately beyond the now-defunct little camp. It was a small, unremarkable square building with a yard surrounded by a high wall. From the roll-call ground the square spike of its chimney could be seen rising, brick upon brick, until it was complete; then it began pouring out its first acrid smoke. From that day on, the smoke would scarcely stop. Sometimes it blew away across the treetops, often it drifted over the camp. But always there was the smell of it; the smell of death.

A change was coming to the concentration camps. Its first tremors had been felt during 1940; during the coming year of 1941 they would grow louder.

In the New Year, after endless months of frustration, a result came at last from the United States consulate in Vienna.

For more than a year Tini had struggled through every obstacle the authorities could throw in her way. Since March 1940, there had been a standing summons for an interview for emigration, but Tini had been advised that she needed to wait until Gustav and Fritz had been freed if she wanted the family to be able to go together.39 But since the SS would not release concentration camp prisoners unless they had all the necessary papers to emigrate, this was a hopeless dead end. Accordingly, Tini had registered her children separately from herself and Gustav, so as to give them the best chance.

All the affidavits were in place from the various relatives—affidavits for Tini herself, separate ones for Gustav, and for the children. The problem was getting American visas and valid tickets for travel (which had to be paid for) and having everything coordinated. Several opportunities for travel had been missed; when France remained free, it had provided a route out of Europe to America. But the German invasion in May 1940 had closed the French ports. In the fall, Lisbon in Portugal had become available to German Jewish emigrants, but the United States consulate in Vienna had simultaneously put a near-total freeze on issuing visas. Only three or four per month were given out. Tini was close to despair.

There was friction between refugee charities and the US government. Margaret Jones, a charity worker with the American Friends Service Committee in Vienna—an institution set up by the Quakers—inquired at the consulate why the flow of visas had all but dried up. A State Department official told her that tensions between President Roosevelt, Congress, and the press and public over refugees had hit a sticking point. Roosevelt’s stance in favor of giving a haven to refugees had withered in the face of America’s growing anti-Semitism and purported evidence that Jewish refugees were involved in fifth column activities. Capitulating to public opinion, the president had instructed the State Department to reduce the number of visas to near zero: “No more aliens.”

What particularly appalled Margaret Jones was the lack of any public announcement on policy, and no outward change in procedure. The consulate staff still called applicants for the standard succession of interviews, which was tortuous in itself, requiring expenditure of money they didn’t have for notarized documents, police certificates, steamship tickets, local anti-Jewish taxes, shuttling them back and forth from consulate to IKG to police and back again. And then, at the final interview, when the anxious applicant had miraculously got every document in order, hoping against hope that their visa would be granted and they could go to safety at last, they were told that they had failed to show they could make a contribution to the United States, and that they were therefore likely to “become a public charge.”40 Visa refused.

As of October 1940, virtually all applicants—people who were living in constant terror and had beggared themselves in their efforts to get everything they needed—received this verdict and went away heartbroken. The consular staff found it unpleasant, but had no choice but to obey orders.41

“We have everything,” Tini wrote to the German Jewish Aid Committee in New York, “but none of us has emigrated . . . Our local consulate is not giving us adequate answers.”42 She couldn’t understand the endless frustration; her husband was a hard worker with good skills—and a decorated war veteran—and they had affidavits in plenty.

Her only hope was for the children. At the beginning of 1941, Tini made her breakthrough. Her old friend, Alma Maurer, who had been at her wedding and now lived in Massachusetts, had obtained an affidavit for Kurt from a prominent Jewish gentleman in the town where she lived—a judge no less. And then a miracle—rare as a hen’s teeth or a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, a visa for immigration. The United States was willing to make an allowance—albeit a small and tightly guarded one—for Jewish children. In conjunction with the German Jewish Children’s Aid organization in New York, a limited number of unaccompanied minors would be received and placed with appropriate Jewish families in the United States. Kurt had been accepted.

It would hurt both Tini and Herta to let him go, but it was the only way to get him to safety. And there was more good news—the kind gentleman in Massachusetts would be willing to sponsor Herta as well. She wasn’t a child, but perhaps this extra step up would help Herta climb over America’s wall.