9

A Thousand Kisses

SPRING HAD COME TO Buchenwald again. The forest was alive with greenery, the singing of blackbirds in the warm mornings a counterpoint to the harsh scrawk of the crows. The breeze whispered in the leaves. Each morning, not long after the rising of the sun, would come the rasp of saws biting into tree trunks, the grunts of the slaves wielding them, and the snapped insults and orders of the kapos and guards. Occasionally there was a yell, a long, creaking tear, and a great beech or oak would come crashing down. The slaves set about its corpse, lopping branches, stripping twigs, reducing it to logs and a carpet of leaves.

Gustav and his team, already tired, their shoulders raw, stood by as sweltering laborers stacked up logs for them to transport to the construction sites. Gustav was doing well; he was a foreman now, in charge of his own twenty-six man team of Singing Horses. They’d had a terrible winter but had made it through. “My lads are true to me,” he wrote in his diary; “we are a brotherhood, and stick tightly together.” In February another transport of invalids had left Buchenwald—several of them Gustav’s friends, “all strong fellows”—followed the next day by the usual returning crop of clothes, prosthetics, and eyeglasses. “Everyone thinks, tomorrow morning it will be my turn,” he wrote. “Daily, hourly, death is before our eyes.” More of Gustav’s friends had died, including haulage column kapo Willi Gross and his brother, blamed for sabotage and sent to the punishment detail. Subjected to weeks of carrying earth in the gardens, they collapsed one by one and were killed off.

Around the same time, the SS had murdered another old acquaintance, Rabbi Arnold Frankfurter. Formerly the Austro-Hungarian army’s Jewish chaplain in Vienna, Rabbi Frankfurter was the man who had married Gustav and Tini in 1917. Arrested in the summer of 1938, he’d been sent to Dachau then transferred here. The SS made his life hell, flogging him on the Bock and tormenting him until his aged body could take no more. In the wreck that remained of him, it was hard to recognize the portly, bearded rabbi of the Vienna barracks. Before he died, Rabbi Frankfurter spoke with an Orthodox friend, with whom he had shared long evenings debating the Talmud. The rabbi gave him a traditional Yiddish blessing, asking him to pass it on to his wife and daughters: Zayt mir gezunt un shtark—“Be healthy and strong for me.”1 Gustav remembered his wedding day clearly, in the pretty little synagogue in the Rossauer Kaserne, the grand army barracks in Vienna: Gustav in dress uniform, the Silver Medal for Bravery gleaming on his breast, Tini in a picture hat and dark coat, almost plump before decades of hardship and mothering sculpted her into handsome maturity.

Taking off his cap and running a hand over the bristles of his shaved scalp, Gustav looked up into the canopy of swaying leaves. With a feeling that was like a faint ghost of contentment, he replaced his cap and sighed. “In the forest it is wonderful,” he had written in his diary. “If only we were free; but always we have the wire before our eyes.”

During the first half of 1942, Buchenwald had completed its transformation. In January, Commandant Koch had been relieved of his position and replaced by SS-Major Hermann Pister, an aging administrator who’d served time in Himmler’s motor pool. “From now on a new wind blows in Buchenwald,” he had told the assembled prisoners at roll call upon his arrival, and he meant it.2 In addition to Commando 99, the Typhus Research Station, and the invalid extermination transports, an exercise regime had been introduced, in which prisoners were roused half an hour earlier than usual for roll call and made to do exercises half-dressed.

For Jewish prisoners the situation had grown worse than ever. Hitler’s hatred against Jews was swelling beyond all control or constraint. The invasion of the Soviet Union had failed to achieve the clean, decisive conquest envisaged by the Führer and had stalled badly during the winter. A food crisis had taken hold in the Reich, and German aggression against the USSR had inspired communist partisans in occupied territories from France to Belarus and Ukraine. In the dank workings of the Nazi mind, the Jews were behind communism—therefore they were behind the communist fifth column. Having caused the war in the first place, Jews were now hobbling German progress.3 In January 1942 the Wannsee Conference had taken place in Berlin, at which the heads of the SS had agreed at last upon the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. For several years the final solution had been thought to be mass deportation and emigration. Now they decided it had to be something far more drastic and decisive. The exact nature of it was kept secret from the public, but it transformed the concentration camp system. In Buchenwald, Jews came under even closer, even more hostile attention than before. Euthanasia of invalids, starvation, abuse, and murder whittled down the Jewish population until by March there were only 836 left, out of a total of 8,117 prisoners.4 The only thing keeping Buchenwald’s remaining Jews alive was their usefulness as workers, and that might not hold out for long under the pressure from the top to bring about a “Jew-free Reich.”

Commandant Pister had broken up the existing kapo appointments in the labor details and barrack blocks, replacing many of the Jewish and political kapos and block seniors with green-triangle men—career criminals—thereby sparking a conflict between the green men and the politicals known as the “inmates’ war.” Forty-eight politicals had been put into a punishment detachment, and four were put into the Bunker.5 The atmosphere in the labor details had gone from brutal to fanatically harsh.

Gustav’s momentary idyll, gazing up at the swaying trees, was ended by yells from the SS sergeants in charge of the logging detail. Under Gustav’s direction, his team lifted and shouldered the logs. They had no wagon for this job; the timber had to be transported by hand up the steep wooded hillside. A few of Gustav’s lads were worn out; they wouldn’t survive another step with a tree trunk gouging their shoulders. He told them to just tag on with the others; so long as they were discreet and looked like they were carrying, they should pass. Gustav shouldered his own end of a log, and they set off.

Climbing the slope was arduous, and they had a long day of this ahead of them. It was best just to exist in the moment, to slog on, shut off the pain and weariness, not think at all. Reaching the destination was the worst part—under the eye of a construction kapo and SS supervisor, the last yards and the stacking of the logs had to be done at top speed. Men had been maimed and even killed by hastily stacked trunks slipping and rolling on them.6

“What do you think you’re doing, Jew-pigs?” SS-Sergeant Greuel’s face appeared in front of Gustav, apoplectic with fury, brandishing a hefty cane. “Some of these beasts aren’t carrying anything!”7

Gustav began to explain that some of his lads weren’t up to carrying, but he scarcely got a word out before Greuel’s cane lashed him across the face, knocking him sideways. Gustav put up his hands to protect his head, and the cane whipped furiously back and forth, battering his fingers; he twisted, and the blows fell on his back. Then Greuel turned his rage on the other men, beating them until they bled. “You’re a foreman, Jew,” he seethed at Gustav. “So drive your Jew animals harder. I’ll make a report about this lapse.”

Greuel was a notorious sadist, and some said there was a sexual element in his cruelty; he occasionally held individuals back from work details and beat them alone in his room for his own pleasure.8 Once he’d fixed on a victim, he wouldn’t let up. The next day it happened again—Gustav and his men were beaten for not working hard enough. At roll call, Gustav was called to the gate and interrogated by the Rapportführer, the sergeant in charge of the SS Blockführers, who oversaw roll calls and handled camp discipline. Satisfied by Gustav’s answers, he tore up Greuel’s report.

On the third day, Gustav and his team were hauling stone from the quarry, supplementing the work of the teams on the rail wagons. Their wagon was loaded up with two and a half tonnes of rocks, and even with twenty-six men at the ropes it was a killing strain to haul it step by step up the road to the top of the hill. This time Gustav was reported for not driving his team fast enough, and this time the Rapportführer passed the report on for further action.

Gustav was given five Sundays on the punishment detail, without food. He was fifty-one years old, and tough as he was, his body couldn’t take this treatment for much longer. Like Fritz before him, he was put on Scheissetragen—shit carrying. Each Sunday, while the prisoners not on punishment duty took it easy, he carried buckets of liquid feces from the latrines to the gardens, always at a running pace. Although his friends slipped him morsels of food, he lost 10 kilos*1 in the course of a month. He’d always been lean; now he was starting to become skeletal.

Eventually the punishment stint was over, and his weight loss halted. He was relieved of his position as a foreman on the haulage column, but his friends managed to get him less arduous work on the infirmary wagon, carrying food and supplies, although he still had to work evening shifts in the haulage column. He began to recover from his ordeal. That he had survived Greuel’s persecution at all was little short of miraculous.

Fritz Kleinmann had learned that even miracles couldn’t last in a place like this. Every day the circle of probability was closing in on each man, his days shortening and the odds on his surviving the hardships and the lottery of selection growing longer.

In the spring Fritz lost one of his dearest friends, Leopold Moses, the man who had protected him, nurtured and tutored him in the art of survival, steered him toward safer work. A large transport of prisoners was being sent to a new camp the SS was building in Alsace, called Natzweiler. Leo was selected and sent off with them. Fritz never saw him again.9

One evening in June, Fritz was sitting in his regular spot at the table in block 17, having finished up his small ration of turnip soup and piece of bread, listening to the conversation of his elders. He would be nineteen in a couple weeks, still a boy in years and, by comparison with some of these men, a child in intellectual development and understanding of the world. He always listened, always keen to learn. His attention was taken by the appearance of his kapo and mentor Robert Siewert’s distinctive figure in the doorway, beckoning.

Fritz went to him and found him looking grave, his heavy brows frowning. When they were outside, Siewert spoke softly and quickly: “There’s a letter from your mother in the mail office. The censor won’t let you have it.” Through a contact in the mail room—which employed prisoners as staff—Siewert had managed to learn the letter’s contents. It was like a stab to the heart. “She and your sister Herta have been notified for resettlement. They’ve been arrested and are waiting for deportation to the east.”10

The words sank in. Arrest . . . resettlement . . . deportation. Fritz hurried down the street to block 29, with Siewert following behind. He asked one of the block inmates to tell his papa that he wanted to see him urgently. (Prisoners were forbidden from entering barracks other than their own.) After a few moments, Gustav came out, and Siewert repeated what he recalled of Tini’s letter.

They could only speculate what it meant. They received news and rumor all the time and had acquired an acute sensitivity to the truth about Nazi actions, no matter how euphemistically they were named. It would be impossible to live three years in a concentration camp and not develop a fine nose for evil. But deportation? Resettlement? This was what the Nazis had wanted all along—to send the Jews away from the Reich. Perhaps they really had designed a way to do that. And yet Fritz, his father, and Robert Siewert all knew too well what was being done to the Soviet POWs and had heard whispers about the SS massacres in the Ostland, the conquered region east of Poland.11 Only one thing could be known for certain—there would be no more packages, no more letters, no more link with their dear ones once they were gone from Vienna and sent to Russia or who-knew-where.

Tini stood by the gas cooker in the kitchen. That day when they took Fritz and she threatened to gas herself if Gustav didn’t run away and hide was still a vivid memory. And now they had come for her.

She turned off the main gas tap, as she was required to do. The detailed list of instructions issued by the authorities lay on the kitchen table, along with the keyring with which she had been provided, with the apartment key attached to it.

Tini looked at Herta, who stood in her coat with her little suitcase by her side. That was all they were permitted—one or two cases per person, total not to exceed 50 kilos. There was little chance of that; all they possessed between them wouldn’t come close. Everything was gone—taken from them or sold. They had clothes and bedding—as required in the resettlement instructions—along with plates, cups, spoons (knives and forks were forbidden), and food to last for three days’ travel. Those who were able were required to bring equipment and tools suitable for establishing or maintaining a settlement. Tini would be permitted to keep her wedding ring, but all other valuables had to be surrendered. She’d never possessed many treasures, and they were all gone now, anyway; neither could she have conjured up more than a fraction of the 300 marks in cash the deportees were allowed to take to the Ostland.12

Tini picked up her small case and bulky pack of bedding, and, with a last look around the apartment, closed the door and locked it. Wickerl Helmhacker and his friends—the same men who’d been given authority over the building and its tenants and who had taken Fritz and Gustav—were waiting there on the landing. Tini handed Wickerl the key, and turned away. Their slow footsteps echoed mournfully in the stairwell as they descended.

Escorted by policemen, they crossed the Karmelitermarkt, passing between the stalls, conscious of eyes on them. Everyone—even those who didn’t know them personally—knew where they were going, and why. Wearing the Jewish star, carrying luggage, accompanied by police—they were being sent away, like the thousands who had preceded them. “Evacuation” of Jews had begun the previous fall. After an interruption during the winter, they had resumed in May. The evacuees went once a week, hundreds of people at a time, and nobody knew quite where their destination was, other than that it lay somewhere in the vast, vague regions of the Ostland.13 No news ever came back, and neither did any of the settlers; presumably they were too busy making new lives for themselves in the land that the Reich had established for them.

After passing through the market, Tini and Herta knew where to go: a few steps along Hollandstrasse, then left into Kleine Sperlgasse, where the Sperlschule—the local elementary school—stood. The cobblestones were as familiar as the soles of their own feet—especially for Herta. All the local children had attended the Sperlschule: Edith, Fritz, and Herta herself had spent a large part of their lives in its halls and classes. Kurt had been a student here when the Nazis came. He’d been barred for a while along with all the Jewish children but had returned later when the Sperlschule was redesignated as a Judenschule. It had no students at all now—the SS had closed it down in 1941 and turned it into a holding center for deportations.

Tini and Herta passed through the guarded gateway and walked along the alleyway between the tall buildings. The school consisted of a group of four-story buildings set back from the street, surrounding a large L-shaped schoolyard. Where children had once run and played ball on the cobblestones, SS guards now stood sentry. Trucks were parked, loaded with crates and bundles. Tini and Herta presented their identity cards and papers and were taken into a building.

The classrooms had been converted into makeshift dormitories filled with people. Everywhere they saw the faces of friends, acquaintances, neighbors, as well as strangers from more distant parts of the district. Most were women, children, and men over forty. There were very few young men; most had gone to the camps. There weren’t many elderly people either; those over sixty-five were slated for separate deportation to the ghetto for elderly Jews at Theresienstadt.*2

Tini and Herta were put in a room and left to join in with its little community. News was exchanged among them, little snippets of information and grapevine gossip, inquiries about relatives and mutual friends. The news was almost never good. Nobody knew for certain what their own fate was to be. Their resettlement in the Ostland had been presented to them not as a punishment or imprisonment but as an opportunity for a new life. Tini abhorred the very idea of being taken from her native city and was innately suspicious of the future. From the very beginning she had expected the worst from the Nazis, and they hadn’t proven her wrong so far.

She had written to Fritz and Gustav but could tell them little other than the bare, devastating fact of their selection. Mistrusting the future, Tini had given some possessions to a non-Jewish relative, including her last photograph of Fritz—the one taken in Buchenwald—and had given a package of spare clothing for him to her sister Jenni, who lived around the corner in Blumauergasse. Two years older than Tini and unmarried, Jenni was in as precarious a position as Tini herself, but so far she’d been omitted from the deportations.14 The same was true of their elder sister Bertha, who also lived nearby in Haidgasse. As a widow of the First World War who had never remarried, Bertha also lived alone.15

After a day or two, the detainees were alerted that they would be departing imminently.16 Everyone was ordered out into the yard. Those who had brought equipment and materials were ordered to load it up onto waiting trucks. People crowded the corridors, spilling out through the doors, all carrying luggage and bundles. Some had come from Im Werd, many dozens of others from the streets around the Karmelitermarkt, and hundreds from all over Leopoldstadt. In all, they numbered just over a thousand. Their identity cards were inspected again, each one stamped Evakuiert am 9. Juni 1942,*3 and they climbed aboard the trucks.

The convoy passed down Taborstrasse and the broad avenue alongside the Danube Canal. Herta looked down at the water, drifting, gleaming under the summer sun; come the weekend it would be teeming with pleasure boats and dotted with swimmers. She recalled the time she and her papa had challenged each other to a swimming race, as Fritz and his friends always did. Her beloved Papa, gentle and warm. Those had been good days. Sometimes her mother, who loved to row, would take the kids out in a boat, all of them together. It was like a dream now, vivid but remote. Jews weren’t allowed to use the Danube Canal anymore, or to walk on the broad, verdant banks under the trees.

After crossing the canal, the convoy drove another three kilometers through the streets and pulled in at the Aspangbahnhof, the train station serving the southern half of the city.

There was a small crowd of spectators gathered around the entrance, held in order by dozens of police and SS troopers. Tini and Herta climbed down from their truck and joined the crush slowly filtering in through the doors into the gloom of the station interior.

Waiting at the platform was a train made up of sixteen passenger cars in the attractive cream and crimson livery of the Deutsche Reichsbahn. Well now, this didn’t look so bad. Everyone knew of the awful cattle cars in which their menfolk had been taken away to the camps. This seemed much more promising.

The evacuees were ordered to load their luggage into a boxcar at the rear of the train; food supplies and medicines had already been stowed. It was a long, slow process, and the evacuees had been at the station several hours when there was a loud whistle and a voice boomed: “One hour to departure!”17 The announcement was repeated all along the platform, and people began hurrying to their places. Each person had been assigned a car to go to. Tini, holding tightly on to Herta, pushed through the milling crowd to their assigned place, where a car supervisor equipped with a list and an air of flustered importance was marshaling his charges. He was an official appointed by the IKG, not a police officer or SS, and his presence was also reassuring.

The sixty or so people assigned to his car gathered about him. Tini recognized some of them: an elderly lady from Im Werd, all alone; a woman about Tini’s own age from Leopoldsgasse, also unaccompanied; many of the women were on their own, their husbands and sons having gone to the camps. Their children—the fortunate ones—had been sent to England or America. Some remained, however. A woman Tini had never seen before, aged sixty or so, was traveling with four children, three boys and a girl, evidently her grandchildren. The youngest, a boy named Otto, was about Kurt’s age, and the eldest was a girl of about sixteen.18 Gray-bearded men in rumpled hats, fellows with pouchy cheeks and jowls, neat, careworn wives in headscarves, mingled with young women whose faces were prematurely lined, and the disorientated children, some as young as five, staring about in wonder and confusion. The car supervisor called their names from his list, checking them off against their transport numbers.

“One-two-five: Klein, Nathan Israel!” A man in his sixties held up his hand. “Here.”

“One-two-six: Klein, Rosa Sara!” His wife answered.

“Six-four-two: Kleinmann, Herta Sara!”

Herta raised her hand.

“Six-four-one: Kleinmann, Tini Sara!”

“Here,” said Tini.

The list went on: Klinger, Adolf Israel; Klinger, Amalie Sara . . . Along the length of the platform the fifteen other car supervisors were calling the rolls of their own sections of the list of 1,006 men, women, and children who were going on the journey.

At last they were told their destination: the city of Minsk, where they would either join the ghetto and work in the various local industries, or farm the land, depending on their skills.

When the car supervisors were satisfied that nobody was missing, the evacuees were finally allowed to board, with the stern instruction that they were to do so in silence and keep to their designated seats. The passenger cars were second class and divided into closed compartments—comfortable enough, if a little overcrowded. As Tini and Herta took their seats, it was almost like the old days, when they had been free to travel. For a long while now it had been illegal for Jews to venture outside their districts, let alone leave Vienna. It would be interesting to see a little of the outside world again.

Smoke and steam poured across the platform, and the axels squealed as the long train began to move, slowly snaking out of the station, heading north. It crossed the Danube Canal and rolled past the west end of the Prater on the bridge over the Hauptallee, past the Praterstern and the street where Tini had been born, and in a few moments reached the Nordbahnhof.19 This would have been a more convenient station for the Jews of Leopoldstadt to depart from, but the Aspangbahnhof was more discreet and out of the way.20 A few minutes later the broad River Danube passed beneath the compartment window, then the final suburbs and the rolling farmland northeast of Vienna.

The train went briskly, and although it stopped occasionally at stations, the evacuees were strictly forbidden to get off unless they had an extremely good reason. The hours of the long June day dragged by. People read, talked, slept in their seats. Children grew restless and fretful in their confinement, others catatonic with exhaustion, staring. At regular intervals the car supervisor came along and peered into each compartment to check that his charges were behaving themselves and had no problems. A doctor—also appointed by the IKG—was on hand if anybody felt unwell. It was a long time since any Jew had been looked after so solicitously by strangers.

They passed through what had once been Czechoslovakia and entered the land that had been Poland. It was all Germany now. To Tini and Herta the southern Polish landscape was of particular interest; this region had once been part of the kingdom of Galicia, in which Gustav had been born during the great days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when the Jews had enjoyed a golden age of emancipation. While Tini had experienced that era in Vienna, Gustav had spent his childhood here, in this beautiful landscape, in a little village called Zablocie bei Saybusch,*4 by a lake at the foot of the mountains. The train didn’t go there, but it passed nearby, through countryside Gustav himself would have recognized if he were here, not just from his childhood but from his military service in the war, when he had fought for these same fields and towns against the army of the Russian tsar.

The train also passed near but did not visit another small town, about fifty kilometers north of Zablocie, named Oświęcim. The Germans called that town Auschwitz, and the SS had established a new concentration camp there. The Vienna train chugged in a wide arc to the west, then resumed its northeastward route.21

The sun sank behind them, dusk gathered, and the train steamed on, leaving the mountains of southern Poland and passing into rolling plain. The evacuees spent the night in comfortless dozing, with aching backs and dead limbs. The next morning they passed through the city of Warsaw, where there was a great Jewish ghetto, but they didn’t halt there. Beyond Bialystok they crossed the border, leaving Greater Germany behind and entering the Reichskommissariat Ostland, formerly part of the Soviet Union. About forty kilometers farther on, the train reached the small city of Volkovysk.*5

Here it stopped.

For a while it seemed no different from any previous stop. Tini and Herta, like everyone else, glanced out the window, wondering where they were. The car supervisor looked in on the compartment, then moved off. Somehow there was a sense that something wasn’t quite right. There was a sound of raised voices at the far end of the corridor, car doors opening, and heavy boots coming briskly along from both ends. Armed SS troopers appeared at the compartment door, and it was flung open.

“Out! Out! All out!” Although shocked and confused, the people had been conditioned by years of experience not to hesitate. They stood, grabbing for their belongings, mothers and grandmothers clutching their children. “Come on, Jew-pigs! Out now!” Tini and Herta found themselves in the corridor, crushed by people hastening to get to the doors. Any who were slow were kicked or shoved with rifle butts. They poured on to the platform, where there were more Waffen-SS troopers.

The SS men were like none that Tini had ever seen in Vienna: fiercer and with the Death’s Head insignia of the concentration camp division on their collars.22 They were accompanied by men in the uniforms of the dreaded Sipo-SD, the Nazi security police.23 They yelled and cursed at the Jews, driving them along the platform—men and women, elderly and children; those who stumbled or fell, or who couldn’t go fast enough, were kicked and beaten, some so badly that their unconscious bodies were left lying on the ground.24

They were herded to another train, this one made up of boxcars. Into these they were driven at gunpoint, crushed in with scarcely room to move. Then the doors slammed. Tini and Herta, clinging to each other, found themselves in a darkness filled with sobbing, the moans of the injured, and the crying of terrified children. Outside they could hear the guards yelling and car doors grinding shut all along the train.

After the last door had slammed, they were left in darkness for hours, not moving. A few people, broken by the sudden, violent shock, lost their reason during that awful night; they screamed and raved. The SS hauled out the mad and the sick and put them all together in a separate car, where they suffered a special hell almost beyond imagining.

The next day, the train began to move. It went painfully slowly. The transport was no longer behind a speedy Reichsbahn locomotive but a plodder from the Haupteisenbahndirektion Mitte,*6 the network serving the German eastern territories. In the two days since leaving Vienna they had covered over a thousand kilometers; now it took a further two days to cover a quarter of that distance.25

Eventually the train came to a halt. The sounds coming from outside suggested that they were in some kind of station. The terrified people waited for the doors to open, but they didn’t. Night came, and nothing happened, then another day. The train sat there, unattended except for periodic inspections by the Sipo-SD guards, for two whole days. It had arrived on a Saturday, and the German railroad workers in Minsk had recently been awarded the right not to work weekends.26

Cramped together in darkness, illuminated only by tiny cracks of daylight in the car walls, frightened, with little or nothing to eat or drink, and only a bucket in the corner as a toilet, the deportees endured the dragging nightmare hours in horrible uncertainty. Had the plan for them changed? Had they been tricked? What would become of them? On the morning of the fifth day since leaving the comfort of the passenger train, the imprisoned were jolted from their stupor; the train was moving again. Dear God, would this never end?

“Please dear child,” Tini had written to Kurt, almost a year ago now, “pray that we are all reunited in good health.” She had never quite let go of that hope. “Papa wrote . . . thank God he is healthy . . . the knowledge that you are well taken care of by your uncle is his only joy . . . Please, Kurtl, be a good boy . . . I hope they have good things to say about you, that you keep your things and your bed in order and that you are nice . . . You have a wonderful summer, soon the beautiful days will be over . . . All the kids here envy you. They don’t even get to see a garden.”27

With a shrieking of steel on steel and a thump and rattle of cars bumping, the train halted again. There was silence, and then the car door slammed wide open, flooding the imprisoned with blinding light.

Precisely what befell Tini and Herta Kleinmann that day will never be known. What they witnessed, what they did or said or felt was never recorded. And the exact details of what happened to them were also lost to history. Not a single one of the one thousand and six Jewish women, children, and men brought to the freight yard at Minsk railroad station on the morning of Monday, June 15, 1942, was ever seen again or left any account.

But general records were kept, and there were other transports from Vienna to Minsk during that summer from which a handful of individuals brought back their stories.28

When the car doors opened, the people inside—bone-weary, aching, starving, dehydrated—were ordered out. They were yanked about and scrutinized by Sipo-SD men, and quizzed about their skills. An officer addressed them, reiterating what they had been told back in Vienna—that they would be put to work in industry or farming. Most of the people, unable to do without hope, were reassured by this speech. A few dozen of the healthier-looking adults and older children were selected and taken aside. The remaining multitude were herded to the station barrier, where their belongings were taken from them. The carloads of luggage, food, and supplies that had been brought from Vienna were also seized.29 Trucks and closed vans were waiting in the road, into which the people were loaded.

The convoy drove out of the city, heading southeast into the Belarusian countryside—a vast, flat plain of field and forest, dusty under a huge sky.

When the German forces took this land from the Soviet Union the previous summer, they had rolled through it like a consuming wave. Immediately in their wake came a second wave: Einsatzgruppe (Task Force) B, one of seven such units deployed behind the front line armies. Commanded by SS-General Arthur Nebe, formerly head of the German criminal police, Einsatzgruppe B comprised a total of around a thousand men—mostly drawn from the Sipo-SD and other police branches—divided into smaller subunits, or Einsatzkommandos. The role of these units was to locate and exterminate Jews in captured towns and villages, a task in which they were often willingly assisted by units of the Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht, and in some areas such as Poland and the Baltic state of Latvia, by local police.30

Not all Jews were murdered immediately. That was impracticable, given the millions who inhabited these regions. Besides, the Nazis had learned in Poland how to make Jews contribute to the war economy. A ghetto was established in Minsk, and its industry made to serve the Reich and line the pockets of corrupt officials inside and outside the ghetto. It was to this ghetto that the first transports of German and Austrian Jews had been brought in late 1941, with local Jews massacred to make way for them. Then, in 1942, the implementation of the Final Solution had begun, and Minsk had been chosen as one of its principal centers.

The task of organization fell to the local commander of the Sipo-SD, veteran Einsatzgruppe officer SS-Lieutenant Colonel Eduard Strauch. He surveyed the area and chose a secluded spot in the countryside about a dozen kilometers southeast of Minsk. The little hamlet of Maly Trostinets had been a collective farm under the Soviets. Strauch took it over and ordered a concentration camp built there. Maly Trostinets camp was only small, never intended to hold more than about six hundred prisoners to work the farmland and provide a Sonderkommando*7 for its main purpose, which was mass murder. Another task was to sort the plundered belongings of the victims, which provided a cash source for the SS.31

Of the tens of thousands of people—mostly Jews—brought to Maly Trostinets, few ever saw the camp. When each trainload of deportees—usually around a thousand at a time—arrived at Minsk railroad station, the Sipo-SD selected a few dozen for the camp. The trucks carrying the remaining hundreds drove out in the direction of Maly Trostinets; accounts vary, but it seems that they would normally stop off at a meadow outside the city.32 From there, at intervals of an hour or so, individual trucks would drive on while the rest waited.

The trucks drove to a half-grown pine plantation about three kilometers away from the camp. There, one of two possible fates awaited the captives. For the majority it was quick, for some slower. But the end was the same. There was a clearing among the trees where a huge pit had been excavated by a Sonderkommando, about fifty meters long and three meters deep. Waiting beside it was a platoon of Waffen-SS under SS-Lieutenant Arlt. Each of Arlt’s men was armed with a pistol and twenty-five rounds of ammunition; more boxes of cartridges were stacked nearby.33 About two hundred meters out from the clearing, a ring of sentries from a Latvian police unit stood guard, to prevent any victims escaping or any potential witnesses venturing near.34

Disembarked from the truck, the women, men, and children were forced to strip to their underwear, leaving behind any possessions they had on them. At gunpoint, in groups of about twenty, they were marched to the edge of the pit, where they had to stand in a line, facing the edge. Behind each person stood an SS trooper. On the order, the victims were shot in the back of the neck at point-blank range, and fell into the pit. Then came the next batch. When they had all been shot, a machine-gun that had been set up at the end of the pit opened fire on any corpses that seemed to be still moving.35 After a short interval, the next truck would arrive, and the process would be repeated.

What made those people submit? From the first who faced the empty pit to those who saw it already half-filled with the corpses of their neighbors and friends, and who heard the shots being fired—what enabled them to stand and be shot down? Were they paralyzed by terror? Had they resigned themselves to their fate, or suffered an existential self-negation? Or did they still retain, until the very last split second with the pistol at their neck, a hope that the shot would not fire, that somehow they would be reprieved? A few did try to run, although they didn’t get far, but overwhelmingly the victims went quietly to their deaths.

At Maly Trostinets there was none of the undisciplined fury and euphoria that had often characterized Einsatzgruppe killings elsewhere, in which infants had their backs broken and were hurled into the pits, and the murderers laughed and raged as they killed. Here it was just cold, clockwork execution.

And yet it told on the killers’ minds. Even these men had consciences of a sort—wizened, stunted consciences, just enough to be rubbed raw by the endless blood and guilt. It had happened among the murderers in Buchenwald’s Commando 99. Arlt’s men were provided with vodka to numb the feeling, but it didn’t heal the damage.36 For this reason the SS had experimented with alternative methods that would allow them to exterminate but avoid bloodying their hands.

At the beginning of June, mobile gas vans had been introduced at Maly Trostinets. They had three of them—two converted from Diamond cube vans, and one larger Staurer furniture removal van. The Germans called them S-Wagen, but the local Belarusian people called them dukgubki—soul suffocators.37 While the majority of Jews were shot at the pit, some—probably two or three hundred from each transport—went to the gas vans. The lottery happened at the station in Minsk, where some were loaded into the regular trucks, and some into the S-Wagen parked among them, crammed in so tightly that they crushed and trampled one another.

Once the shootings had been completed, the gas vans started up and drove to the plantation, where they parked beside the corpse-filled pit. Each driver or his assistant connected a pipe from the exhaust to the van interior, which was lined with steel. Then the engine was started. The people trapped inside immediately began to panic; the vans shook and rocked with the violence of their struggle, and there were muffled sounds of screaming and hammering on the sides. Gradually, over the course of about fifteen minutes, the noise and shuddering lessened and the vans grew still.38

When all was quiet, each vehicle was opened. Some of the bodies, which had piled up against the door, fell out onto the ground. A Sonderkommando of Jewish prisoners climbed up and began hauling out the rest of the corpses, heaving them into the pit on top of the victims of the shootings. The van interior was a scene of indescribable horror; many of the bodies were streaked with blood, vomit, and feces; the floor was littered with broken eyeglasses, tufts of hair, and even teeth lying in the mess, where the victims had fought and clawed the people near them in their demented efforts to escape.

Before the vans could be used again, they were taken to a pond near the camp and the interiors thoroughly washed. The delay this caused, together with the small number of vans available and frequent mechanical failures, was the reason why firing squads were still used. The SS was still working to refine its methods of mass murder.

SS-Lieutenant Arlt wrote in his log for that day: “On 6/15 there arrived another transport of 1000 Jews from Vienna.”39 That was all. He had no interest in describing what was just another day’s work, over which the SS felt it was better to draw a veil of discretion.

A summer sun lay hot and lazy on the slow-moving surface of the Danube Canal. The faint, delighted squeals of children drifted over the water from the grassy banks where families sat with picnics or strolled under the trees. Pleasure boats cruised along, and rowboats scudded across the expanse between them.

It was all far away from Tini’s senses as she pulled on the oars—a pleasant, distant background music of laughter. Sunlight sparkled on the splashes with each lift of the oar blades from the water and illuminated the faces of her children. Edith, smiling serenely, Fritz and Herta still little kids, and Kurt, the last-born and beloved, a tiny speck scarcely out of diapers. Tini smiled at them, and heaved at the oars, sending the boat surging across the water.40 She was good at rowing—had been since her girlhood. And she doted on her family; at the age of twelve she had been made a counselor to the younger children because she loved it so well; to nurture and to save was part of her makeup, and in motherhood it had its purest expression.

The sounds of the other boats and the revels on the far banks faded, as if a mist had descended, closing off the boat from the world. The oars dipped and splashed, and the boat glided on.

 

In a drawer in a chest in faraway Massachusetts, Tini’s last letters to Kurt lay gathered. The German in which they were written was already leaking away from his comprehension as his child’s mind adapted to his new world. He had absorbed her meaning, but was already slowly, insensibly beginning to forget how to read her words.

My beloved Kurtl . . . I am so happy that you are doing well . . . write often . . . Herta is always thinking of you . . . I am afraid every day . . . Herta sends hugs and kisses. A thousand kisses from your Mama. I love you.

That night, after the Sonderkommando had backfilled the pit, dusk fell on the silent clearing among the young pines. Birds returned, night creatures foraged among the weeds and ran over the disturbed soil of the pit. Beneath lay the remains of Rosa Kerbel and her four grandchildren—Otto, Kurt, Helene, and Heinrich—and the elderly Adolf and Amalie Klinger, five-year-old Alice Baron, the spinster sisters Johanna and Flora Kaufmann, Adolf and Witie Aptowitzer from Im Werd, and Tini Kleinmann and her pretty twenty-year-old daughter Herta, along with the other nine hundred souls who had boarded the train in Vienna.

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.41 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.