11

A Town Called Oświęcim

ANOTHER TRAIN, ANOTHER TIME . . .

Gustav woke from a doze with the sunlight rippling across his eyelids, and his nostrils filled with the odors of serge, sweaty male bodies, tobacco smoke, leather, and gun oil. His ears filled with the steady clatter of the train and the mutter of men’s voices, suddenly raised in song. The boys were in good spirits, even though they might be on their way to their deaths. Gustav rubbed his neck, sore where he’d rested his head on his pack, and retrieved his rifle, which had slipped to the floor.

Standing up and peering out through the side slot, he felt the warm summer wind on his face and smelled the scents of the meadows, coming to him fleetingly through the shreds of smoke from the locomotive. The rolling wheat fields were at the green-gold stage, ripening toward the harvest. A village spire broke through a gap in the distant rise; beyond stood the green of the Beskid mountains, and beyond that the ghostly curtain of the Babia Góra, the Witches’ Mountain. This was the land of his childhood. After six years in Vienna it looked strange, in that peculiar way of a vivid memory suddenly unearthed.

He’d been drafted into the Austrian Imperial and Royal Army in the spring of 1912, his twenty-first year.1 As a born Galician he’d been placed in the 56th Infantry Regiment, which was based in the Cracow district.*1 For most young working-class men their three years’ army service was a welcome interlude. Conditions for conscripts were good by military standards, and it opened their horizons. Many were illiterate, most had never been farther than the next village, and all they knew was low-paid agricultural work or journeyman trades. In Galicia the majority didn’t even speak German; many couldn’t even tell the time.2 Gustav had seen more of the world than most of his fellow recruits, having been a resident of Vienna for the past six years, and he spoke both Polish and German; but as an apprentice upholsterer he was poor, and the army provided some stability. It was a transition to manhood, and provided an exciting environment—the army was still in its imperial heyday of hussars and dragoons, colorful, dashing dress uniforms, and endless pomp with the flags and banners of the imperial Double Eagle fluttering over it all.

Austria was immensely proud of its imperial history and of its army, which contained in its ranks Slavs, Jews, Hungarians, and many other nationalities and ethnic groups besides Austrian Germans; it had once been the greatest empire in Europe, and although reduced considerably by its wars with Napoleon and various other nineteenth-century enemies, Austria-Hungary remained a great and extensive power, at least equal to its upstart neighbor, Germany. It was said that the cryptic Habsburg heraldic device “AEIOU” stood for either a German phrase meaning “All the Earth is subject to Austria” or a Latin one meaning “Austria will stand until the end of the world.”3 Either way, it was a nation of gigantic pride and hubris, and to be in its army was to be part of a martial history going back to the Holy Roman Empire.

For Gustav it had meant a return to his homeland, and he had spent most of the first two years in the garrison at Kenty,*2 a small town in the farmlands north of the Beskid mountains, about halfway between his home village of Zablocie and a town called Oświęcim, a pretty, prosperous, but otherwise unremarkable place on the Prussian border, remembered by soldiers of the neighboring 57th Infantry as the scene of a minor battle in the 1866 war against Prussia.4

And so it went on, barrack life week in, week out, parades, boot-blacking and brass-polishing, with occasional field exercises and maneuvers. And then, in 1914, just when the young men of the 1912 intake thought they would soon be done with the army and going back to their farms and workshops with their manhoods made, the war came. The ecstatic thrill of impending combat galvanized bored and glory-hungry young men all over Europe, none more so than those of Austria.

All of a sudden, the 56th Infantry Regiment was on alert, and along with the rest of the 12th Infantry Division, they marched to the train station to embark for the fortress town of Przemyśl on the right flank of First Army.5 This would be the regiment’s jumping-off point for the advance north into Russian territory.6 Gustav and his comrades marched with a lively step under their heavy packs as the band blared out the vibrant tune of the regimental Daun march, immaculate in their gray field uniforms with steel-green facings, their mustaches waxed and backs straight, grinning to the waving girls and as pleased with themselves as only young men can be. They were with friends and comrades, and off to chase the Russians all the way to St. Petersburg.

They were marching with less spring in their step by the morning of August 22, five days later. The railheads were well short of the Russian border, and there had been a long, punishing forced march to the advance. After hours and many kilometers, under their twenty-kilo packs, with winter overcoats strapped on, carrying ammunition, spade, and rations for days, with their rifle straps chafing and feet sore, Lance Corporal Gustav Kleinmann and his platoon mates were more ready for bed and bottle than for battle. And they got neither that day. Their objective was the city of Lublin, where they were supposed to link up with a Prussian advance from the north. While I and V Corps on their left flank met heavy Russian resistance and took a lot of casualties, X Corps barely made contact, and just marched all day long, pushing into Russian territory.7

Gustav eased his leg into a more comfortable position. Outside, a hard Galician frost bit at the edges of the window panes, and snow lay thick on the ground.

It had been a wretched winter, following on from a terrible fall. In that first glorious week of the war, they had achieved their objective, capturing Lublin and driving the Russian army back in disarray. But they’d been let down by poor leadership and tactics, and the Germans had failed to support them with an advance from the north. By the middle of September the Russians had rallied and begun recapturing ground.8 Their counterattacks turned into a rout, with Austrian regiments breaking and falling back all along the line.

The civilian population, with their towns and villages under Russian bombardment or threatened with being swallowed up, panicked, and the train stations and roads were choked with refugees. The large Jewish population was especially terrified. They knew about Russia’s anti-Semitic laws and had heard stories of dreadful pogroms; many, indeed, were the descendants of Jews who had fled Russia. In the territories captured by the tsar’s army, Jewish property was expropriated, Jews were dismissed from public offices, and some were seized as hostages and taken away to Russia; throughout captured Galicia, Russian officials extorted money from the Jewish population with threats of violence.9 A flood of refugees headed west and south toward the heartlands of Austria-Hungary. At first they sought sanctuary in Cracow, but by the autumn even that city was under threat, and the refugees began heading for Vienna; the authorities set up embarkation stations for them at towns behind the lines, including at Wadowitz*3 and Oświęcim.10

Eventually Austria’s forces fought the Russians to a standstill, and the front line settled just short of Cracow, with Russia in possession of a swathe of eastern Galicia. All along the line, the armies dug trenches and began the dreadful attrition of bombardment, raids, and hopeless attacks.

In the New Year, Gustav and the 56th Regiment—what remained of them after the retreat—found themselves in the front line outside Gorlice, a town about a hundred kilometers southeast of Cracow. Their defenses were poor—the trench line was little more than a series of shallow ditches protected by a single strand of barbed wire—and they had little or no reserve line. What was more, to get from the rear to the trenches, units had to cross open ground that was subjected to Russian artillery fire.11 The Russians held the town and dominated the ground in front of it from a stronghold in a large hilltop cemetery on the western outskirts.

And there they sat through the biting winter. For Gustav, it had been a kind of reprieve when he was wounded—a bullet through the left forearm and calf. He’d spent a short while in the auxiliary hospital at Bielitz-Biala,*4 a large town close by Zablocie; he knew the place well, having worked there as a baker’s boy between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Then, in mid-January he’d been moved here, to the reserve hospital in the next town—Oświęcim, or Auschwitz, as it was known in German.12

The town itself was pleasant in peacetime, with fine civic buildings and an ancient, picturesque Jewish quarter that attracted tourists.13 Gustav knew it from childhood; it stood at the confluence of the Vistula and the Sola, the river that meandered down from the lake by the village where he’d been born. The military hospital at Oświęcim was a little way from the town, across the Sola in the outlying hamlet of Zasole. A complex of modern barracks had been constructed here, standing in neat rows near the riverbank. It wasn’t an ideal spot; the ground was marshy and in summer plagued with insects. It had been intended as part of a transit camp for seasonal migrant workers flowing from Galicia into Prussia, but the outbreak of the war had curtailed it, and the lines of wooden workers’ barracks stood empty.14

For Gustav, worse than the ache of the wounds—which were almost healed now—was the wrench of being away from his comrades when they were still in the line. Gustav was determined not to malinger; his wounds weren’t debilitating, and despite his rather slight appearance, he was proving a tough young fellow with a surprising capacity for taking hardship and injury.

But for now there was peace here, and silence but for the brisk footsteps of the nurses and the low murmur of voices. The bandages and missing limbs were reminders of the howling, exploding hell from which he had come, and to which he would return soon enough.

Bullets smacked into sides of the tombs and the trees, flinging stone splinters in their faces. But Gustav and his men held on and returned fire, pressing ahead, meter by meter, into the cemetery.

Gustav was only a month out of the hospital and already back in the thick of it—back to Gorlice, back to the frozen trenches at the foot of the slope leading up into the town, back to the sporadic fall of shells and the steady attrition. Then came this day—February 24, 1915—when the regiment launched an assault on the heavily defended Russian positions in the cemetery.

To Corporal Gustav Kleinmann’s eye it had looked like a suicide mission: an uphill frontal attack against a large force in a secure, easily defended position. The cemetery was a traditional Catholic one; rather than a field of headstones it was a city of little stone tombs—structures of limestone and marble packed close together with narrow alleys between. It was a veritable fortress, and Gustav’s platoon was cut to pieces in the first approach. With their sergeant and platoon officer killed, Gustav and his right-hand man, Lance Corporal Johann Aleksiak, came up with a plan of their own to try to make a success of the attack without wasting any more lives.15 Leading the remnants of the platoon—which now consisted of just themselves, two lance corporals, and ten privates—they skirted to the left flank of the enemy position, where they were sheltered from the Russian fire, and advanced from there.

They had infiltrated the fringes of the cemetery and were among the tombs before the Russians knew they were there. As soon as they were noticed, withering gunfire lashed at them. They returned fire as best they could and pressed on. The Russians began lobbing hand grenades, but still Gustav and his squad pushed forward, firing and driving back the Russians. The alleys between the tombs became too narrow for effective firing, so they paused and fixed bayonets. They were now about fifteen meters inside the enemy perimeter and might be encircled at any moment. With bayonets fixed and their blood hot and furious, Gustav and his men launched their final, savage assault.

It worked; the Russians were prized at bayonet-point out of their positions, and with the pressure taken off by Gustav’s flank attack, the rest of 3 Company was able to advance into the cemetery. Between them they took around two hundred Russian prisoners that day, part of a total haul of 1,240 captured by the regiment.

In the face of the setbacks the Austrian army had suffered since the start of the war, the capture of the cemetery was a major achievement—significant enough to earn a passing mention in a report by Field Marshal von Höfer, Deputy Chief of the General Staff.16 Not for the first time, nor the last, a knife-edge battle had turned on the initiative of two lowly noncommissioned officers.

Rabbi Frankfurter chanted the last blessings of the Sheva Brachot, the seven blessings of marriage, his voice echoing hauntingly through the synagogue chapel. Beneath the wedding canopy held up by his soldier comrades, Gustav stood in his best dress uniform, the Silver Medal for Bravery 1st Class gleaming on his breast. Beside him was his bride, Tini Rottenstein, radiant, with bright splashes of her white lace collar and silk flowers against the dark fabric of her coat and broad-brimmed hat.

Two years had passed since that day on the cemetery hill in Gorlice. They hadn’t been easy. Gustav and Johann Aleksiak had both received the Silver Medal 1st Class for their actions that day, one of Austria’s highest awards. In his citation, their commanding officer had called it a “clever, unprecedentedly courageous approach” in which the two corporals had “excellently distinguished themselves.”17 The twelve men with them had received the 2nd Class medal. It had been a fierce battle, and over a hundred men of the 56th Infantry Regiment had received decorations.18 It had all turned out to be for nothing, as the Russians later recaptured the cemetery. However, in May 1915 the Austrians launched the Gorlice-Tarnow offensive, which drove the tsar’s army back across the Vistula and out of Galicia. Eventually they had retaken the fortress towns of Przemyśl and Lemberg,*5 as well as the Russian cities of Warsaw and Lublin. In August that year Gustav had been wounded again, this time a much more serious injury to the lung.19 He recovered eventually and returned again to action.

And now had come the precious day—Tuesday, May 8, 1917—when he and his girl went with their friends and family to the pretty little synagogue chapel in Vienna’s Rossauer barracks. Like Gustav’s, Tini’s ancestry was from the outer parts of the empire. Her father, Markus Rottenstein, and her mother, Eva, were from Neutra in Hungary,*6 and had moved to Vienna after their marriage.20

“May the barren one rejoice and be happy at the gathering in of her children in joy.” Rabbi Frankfurter’s chanting filled the room. “Blessed are You Lord, who created joy and happiness, groom and bride, gladness, jubilation, cheer and delight, love, friendship, harmony and fellowship . . . who gladdens the groom with the bride.” Then he laid the traditional glass on the floor by Gustav, who brought his boot heel down and shattered it. “Mazel tov!” yelled the chorus of soldiers, family, and friends.

The rabbi spoke, reminding Tini of the solemnity of wedding a soldier, and touched on the goodness of the Austro-Hungarian empire to its Jewish people. He likened the new emperor, Karl, to the sun shining on the Jews; his forebears had brought down the walls of the old ghettos and “installed Israel” in their realm.21 Austria had always had its share of anti-Semitism, it was true, but since the emancipation of the Jews under the Habsburg emperors, they had lived well and achieved much. With this foundation, Gustav and Tini and their fellow Jews could make their way with their own hands and hearts.

Gustav and Tini Kleinmann walked out of the synagogue that day into a new era. Gustav wasn’t done with fighting; he would see more action on the Italian front and earn more decorations, helping Austria and Germany fight their slow, inevitable, bloody defeat. But he survived in the end and came home to Vienna. In the summer of the first year of peace, Edith was born, the first child of many. The old empire had gone, broken up by the victorious Allies; Galicia had been ceded to Poland, Hungary was independent, and Austria was reduced to a rump. But Vienna was still Vienna, the civilized heart of Europe, and Gustav had more than earned his family’s place in it.

Many didn’t see it that way. In the last year of the war, trapped in a mire of impending defeat, people in Austria and Germany had begun telling themselves stories to relieve the shame of losing. It was the fault of the Jews, many said; they had thrived in the wartime black market, it was alleged. Fingers were pointed at the rivers of Jewish refugees fleeing the front, and how they had worsened the food crisis in the cities; stories were told about how Jews had shirked their duty to their country and avoided military service. The pernicious influence of Jews in government and commerce had been a knife in Germany’s and Austria’s back, people claimed. In the Vienna parliament there was anti-Jewish agitation from German nationalists and the conservative Christian Social Party; newspapers began to print dire threats of pogroms.22

Yet the promise lived on, the outburst of anti-Semitism settled down to a murmur, and the Jews of Vienna continued to thrive. Gustav struggled but never despaired, throwing himself into socialist politics in a bid to ensure a brighter future for all working people and to win prosperity for his growing family.

Another train, another time, another world . . . and yet the same.

Gustav sat in darkness, rocked by the motion of the train. Around him the air was thick with the familiar stench of unwashed bodies, stale uniforms, and the latrine pail, and alive with the dull murmur of voices. There were forty men in a space so small that they had barely half a square meter*7 per man, packed so close together they could scarcely move, and getting to the piss bucket in the corner was an ordeal. Two days had passed since boarding the train at Weimar; two days locked in darkness. Gustav’s eyes had adapted to the slivers of light leaking through cracks around the door and gratings, just enough to write a few brief phrases in his diary. It must be around noon now; the light was at its brightest, and the faces of his comrades were discernible. Gustl Herzog was there, and the long, earnest features of Stefan Heymann, as well as Gustav’s friend Felix “Jupp” Rausch, and Fritz sitting close to some of his young friends, including Paul Grünberg, a Viennese who was the same age as him and had been a trainee bricklayer. The mood was profoundly depressed, and without water or blankets they were thirsty and cold.

Although he could neither see it nor smell it, Gustav knew the landscape through which they must be passing by now; he knew those fields, those green distant hills and ghostly mountains, the quaint little villages and towns. He had been born here, grown up here, bled for his country here, and now the rail tracks were bringing him back one last time, to die. Behind him, the family he had begun with such hope lay broken and scattered. The promise of 1915, when they pinned the medal to his chest, and of 1917, when he’d stomped the glass beneath his heel and joined with Tini in marriage beneath the canopy in the blue and white synagogue, and the promise of 1919, when he’d held baby Edith for the first time, the promise that Israel had been built in Austria; that promise had now been crushed under the wheels of this vast, insane, malfunctioning machine in its unstoppable, senseless drive to jolt life into an Aryan German greatness that had never existed, and that never could exist because its blinkered puritanism was the very antithesis of all that makes a society great. Nazism could no more be great than a strutting actor in a gilt cardboard crown could be a king.

The train, huffing its way past fields of stubble where the wheat had been harvested and woods turning golden in the fall, began to lose speed. Slowing to a crawl, it turned south and heaved into the station in the small town of Oświęcim.23

Shedding billows of steam, the locomotive shunted its train of cattle cars up to the loading ramp. And there it stayed. Inside the cars, the Jews of Buchenwald wondered if they had reached their destination yet. The hours of that October afternoon ticked by but nothing happened. The slivers of light faded, and Gustav and his companions were left in total darkness, aching, hungry, parched. And frightened. Would the door never open? Would they never move?

At least Gustav had the consolation of Fritz by his side; how Gustav would have coped if the boy hadn’t come of his own free will did not bear thinking about. The spirit of that crushed promise of long ago lived on in Fritz, in the bond that held father and son together and had kept them alive so far. If they were indeed going to die here, at least it would not be alone.

Eventually they heard movement outside: car doors crashing open all along the line, accompanied by barked orders from the SS. Their door opened, and a blaze of flashlights and electric lanterns dazzled their eyes. “Everyone out!” They disembarked into a ring of light surrounded by the growling of guard dogs. They were ordered to form five ranks between the tracks. Well-trained by years of roll calls they quickly formed up, and expecting the usual rain of abuse and beatings, the Buchenwalders were astonished—and a little unsettled—to receive neither. The guards called out an order from time to time, but otherwise they were eerily silent, walking up and down the rows, observing the new prisoners closely. Time passed, and the men grew more and more nervous. Whenever no SS men were nearby, Gustav reached out and hugged Fritz close to him.

The last time Gustav had set foot in this station had been in 1915, when he was discharged from the reserve hospital and sent back to the front line. Nothing about it was familiar.

It was a little after 10:00 PM when a tramp of marching boots along the ramp heralded the arrival of the camp standby squad under the command of SS-Lieutenant Heinrich Josten of the detention department.24 He was a hard-faced individual, middle-aged, with a grim slant to his mouth and steel-rimmed spectacles. Checking off the new arrivals on a list, he asked whether any man had any watches or other valuables, such as gold. “If so, you are to give them up. You will not need them now.” Then he gave the nod to his men, and they began marching the prisoners in orderly fashion along the ramp.

They marched down a long, straight street between what looked in the gloom like a complex of light industrial buildings and rows of wooden huts or barracks. Now, this did look vaguely familiar to Gustav.

Turning left, they were marched along a short road to a gateway flooded with arc lights; the gates swung wide, the barrier before them lifted, and the 404 Buchenwalders marched in under the wrought iron arch with its slogan ARBEIT MACHT FREI—work brings freedom.25 The barrier descended and the gates clanged shut behind them. They were marched along a camp street lined by large, well-built, two-story barrack blocks; they were similar to the SS barracks at Buchenwald, but to Gustav’s eye there was a different kind of familiarity, more distant. He had been here before.

Arriving at a block in the far corner of the camp, they were ordered inside. It was constructed as a bathing block, with changing rooms. Their names were checked off against the transport list, and they were ordered through into a changing room staffed by prisoners. Here they were ordered to strip naked; they would be given a medical inspection, showered, and their uniforms deloused before going to their accommodation.26

Fritz glanced at his father and friends; the nervousness that had been growing among them increased still more. They knew this ritual from their first arrival at Buchenwald, but it felt different now; they had all heard the rumors of gassings at Auschwitz, and that the pretext for getting prisoners to enter the gas chamber was to tell them it was a shower room.27 Nevertheless, the men did as they were told, stripping off their old, soiled uniforms and underwear. They filed through yet another room, where they were scrutinized by a doctor, and another, where their heads were freshly shaved—right down to the scalp, without leaving the furze of stubble they normally wore. Their bodies were also shaved, including their pubic hair. There followed a louse inspection. Fritz noticed a sign painted in sinister Teutonic letters on the white wall—“ONE LOUSE IS YOUR DEATH.”28

Next came the shower room. Fritz and Gustav and the others watched anxiously as the first batch were herded through the door.

Minutes passed; a restlessness began to spread among the prisoners. Fritz could feel it growing and hear the low murmuring. When their turn came, would they obey and walk meekly to the lethal chamber? Suddenly, a face appeared in the doorway, gleaming wet, with water dripping from his chin, and grinning. “It’s all right,” he said, “it really is a shower!”

The next batches went through in much better spirits. Finally, certified louse-free, they were issued with their deloused and disinfected uniforms and fresh underwear.29 To his relief, Gustav’s diary, with its pages of priceless testimony, was still secreted inside his clothes.

When they were dressed, they were inspected by SS-Captain Hans Aumeier, deputy commandant and head of Department III—the “protective custody” section, which covered most Jews. Drunk and in a foul temper, Aumeier slapped the block senior who’d been sent to collect the new arrivals for turning up late. Aumeier was everything that caused the SS to be feared: a walking embodiment of malevolence, a glowering martinet with a tight little slit for a mouth and a reputation for torture and mass shootings. Once he was satisfied with the new prisoners, he ordered the block senior to take them to their accommodation.

They were placed in block 16A, in the middle of the camp. As soon as they were inside, the block senior—a German wearing a green triangle—demanded that they all hand over any contraband articles and told his room orderlies—all young Poles—to search them. The belongings taken ranged from paper and pencils to cigarette holders and pocket knives, as well as money and sweaters—all precious items in the camps. Some of the bolder spirits, including men like Gustl Herzog who had been block seniors in Buchenwald, argued and refused to hand over their possessions and were beaten with rubber hoses. Any man who spoke up got a beating. Somehow, Gustav managed to keep his little notebook concealed. Others lost objects they had treasured—keepsakes that had kept their spirits alive, or in the case of warm clothing, had kept body and soul together through the previous winter.

At last the room orderlies took the men to the bunk rooms and assigned them their places—two men to a bed, one blanket each. Gustav managed to get himself and Fritz assigned to the same bed. It was like their first night in the tent in Buchenwald, three years ago almost to the day. At least here there was a floor and a sound roof over their heads. But there was the same abuse, the same inhuman debasement, and the same prospect that life would be both cruel and brief.

On the third day they received their tattoos. This practice was unique to Auschwitz, introduced the previous fall. The new arrivals lined up at the registration office; each man rolled up his left sleeve and presented his forearm, and the tattoo was laid on the skin with a needle (the SS had experimented with a stamping device at one time, but it hadn’t worked very well).30

The men were called in and registered in the order in which they had been placed on the original list in Buchenwald. Gustav laid out his forearm, where he still bore the scar from his bullet wound of January 1915, and the number 68523 was seared into his skin in blue ink. Like most of the others he was entered as Schutz Jude—a “protective custody” Jewish prisoner—and his place and date of birth were set down, and his trade.31 Having volunteered, Fritz was near the end of the list, and he received the number 68629. His trade was listed as builder’s mate.

All the while, the Buchenwalders wondered what would be done with them. Days passed, and they weren’t assigned to any labor detail and were left more or less alone. As seasoned camp inmates, they kept their ears and eyes open and learned a lot about Auschwitz. The camp they were in was much smaller than Buchenwald, with only three rows of seven blocks. This, they learned, was the main camp, Auschwitz I.32 A couple kilometers away, on the far side of the railroad, a second camp had been constructed at the village of Brzezinska, which the Germans called Birkenau—“the birch woods” (the SS did like their picturesque names for places of suffering).33 Auschwitz II-Birkenau was vast, built to contain over a hundred thousand people and equipped to murder them on an industrial scale.

Auschwitz I had its own killing facility, which the new men learned about soon enough—the infamous block 11, the Death Block, in whose basement the first experiments with poison gas had been carried out, where interrogations were conducted, and in whose tiny Stehzellen (“standing cells”) prisoners were tortured by being forced to stand upright for days at a time. Most notoriously, the enclosed yard outside block 11 was the location of the Schwarze Wand—the “Black Wall”—against which condemned prisoners were shot.34 SS-Captain Aumeier had overseen many such executions. Whether the Buchenwalders would be sent to Birkenau or die here was yet to be discovered.

Day-to-day life during that first week was familiar yet strange. There was no square, and roll call took place in the street outside the block. Food was doled out by the Polish room orderlies and the block senior—the Blockowi as the Poles called him—and was wretched. The Poles hated and despised the Austrian and German Jews—both as Germans and as Jews—and made it plain to them that they stood no chance of surviving long in Auschwitz; they had been sent here only to be killed. They took out their loathing at meal times; the Jews were made to line up, and when a man’s turn came, he was shoved forward by the Blockowi, who handed him a bowl and spoon and doled out a splat of stew from a bucket. A young Pole stood by with a spoon and quickly removed any pieces of meat he spotted in the bowl. Even the most laid-back and phlegmatic among the Buchenwalders were aggravated by this ritual, but any man who complained received a beating.

Gustav was a little better treated than others; he was regarded as Polish by birth and spoke the language. During those first few days he became acquainted with some of the older prisoners, and they told him about the ways of Auschwitz—about Birkenau, the gas chambers, and block 11, and confirmed what Gustav had heard about the terrible, fatal purpose of this place.

In daylight, the familiarity of the surroundings became clearer—the well-made brick buildings and the general air of the place. He had been here before. Auschwitz I had been created from the old military barracks built in the hamlet of Zasole by the Austrian army before World War I. The Polish army had taken it over after 1918, and now the SS had turned it into a concentration camp by constructing extra barrack blocks and surrounding it with an electrified fence. The familiar-looking huts and buildings Gustav had seen along the road from the station were the remnant of the barracks intended for migrant workers. This was where he had been in the hospital in 1915, in this very spot by the Sola, the river that flowed from the lake by the village where he’d been born. When he’d last seen it, it had been under snow and filled with soldiers, and he’d been a wounded hero. Now there was a prisoner tattoo beside the bullet wound for which he’d been treated here. It was as if this part of the world would not let him go; having birthed him, raised him, and nearly killed him once, it was determined to call him back.35

On October 28—the ninth day since the Buchenwalders’ arrival—Auschwitz demonstrated its character. Two hundred and eighty Polish prisoners from block 3 were taken to the Death Block for execution. Realizing what was intended for them, some of them fought back in the vestibule of block 11. They were unarmed and weak, and the SS quickly butchered them and led the rest to the Black Wall. One of the doomed men passed a note for his family to a member of the Sonderkommando, but it was discovered by the SS and destroyed.36 “Lots of scary things here,” Gustav wrote. “It takes good nerves to withstand it.” There were many whose nerves were beginning to fail them; one was Fritz.

Fritz had come to a decision. A sense of dread had been growing in him in the week since coming to Auschwitz. He’d become so accustomed to his daily work as a builder and to the fact that he owed his survival thus far to his position in the construction detail that to be without work in a place whose whole purpose was death was wearing away at his nerves. He felt that sooner rather than later, his turn would come; he would be selected as a useless eater and sent to the wall or the gas chambers. Misgiving turned to anxiety and dread, and then solidified into certainty. It preyed on his mind. He became convinced that the only way to save his life was to identify himself to the labor commander or someone else with authority and ask to be assigned work.

He confessed his thoughts to his father and some of his close friends. They argued strenuously against this rash idea. It was a fundamental principle of survival that you never drew attention to yourself in the slightest way. For Fritz to single himself out in such a blatant, obtrusive way was suicidal. But Fritz was young and headstrong, and he had convinced himself that he was doomed otherwise.

The first person he approached was the SS Blockführer. With the courage of desperation, Fritz identified himself and said he was a skilled builder and wished to be assigned work. The man stared at him, glanced at the yellow star on his uniform, and scoffed. “Who ever heard of a Jewish builder?” Nonetheless the Blockführer took him to the Rapportführer, SS-Sergeant Gerhard Palitzsch.

Palitzsch was a good-looking man—one of the few SS men who lived up to the Aryan ideal of athletic, chiseled handsomeness, pleasant and serene in his manner. In fact Gerhard Palitzsch had a reputation as a murderer second to none; not even his commander Hans Aumeier was more dedicated to killing. The number of prisoners Palitzsch had personally shot at the Black Wall was beyond counting. His preferred weapon was an infantry rifle, and he would shoot his victims in the back of the neck with an insouciance that impressed his fellow SS men. The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, often watched Palitzsch’s executions “but never noticed the slightest stirring of an emotion in him. He performed his horrifying tasks nonchalantly, with an even temper and a straight face, and without any haste.”37 If any delay occurred, he would put down his rifle and whistle cheerfully to himself or chat casually to his comrades until the killing was resumed. He was proud of his work and felt not the slightest brush of conscience. The prisoners considered him “the biggest bastard in Auschwitz.”38

And this was the man to whom Fritz Kleinmann had chosen to make himself conspicuous. Palitzsch’s reaction was the same as the Blockführer’s—he had never heard of a Jewish builder. “I will put it to the test,” he said. “If you’re trying to fool me, you’ll be shot at once.” He ordered the Blockführer to take the prisoner away and make him build something.

Fritz was escorted to a nearby construction site where the kapo provided materials and ordered him to try and make a pier—the upright section between two windows, an impossible task for anyone not properly trained. With death hanging over him, Fritz felt absolutely calm for the first time in two weeks. Taking his trowel and a brick, he began his task, scooping up the mortar and slapping it down deftly.

Within two hours he was back at the camp gate, escorted by a very surprised Blockführer. “He really can build,” the man told Palitzsch. Palitzsch’s impassive face registered displeasure; it went against his sense of what was proper. Nevertheless, he noted down Fritz’s number and sent him back to his block.

Nothing changed immediately, but then, on October 30, the eleventh day since their arrival, the moment of reckoning came for the Buchenwalders. After morning roll call, all the Jewish prisoners recently transferred from other camps were paraded together for inspection by a group of SS officers. In addition to the 404 men from Buchenwald, there were 1,084 from Dachau, Natzweiler, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg, and Sachsenhausen, as well as 186 women who had just arrived from Ravensbrück—in all, 1,674.39 They were ordered to strip naked and to walk slowly past the officers so that they could be evaluated. Those who appeared old or sick were directed to go to the left, the others to the right. The rate of selection appeared to be about half and half. Fritz approached; the officer looked him up and down and immediately indicated the right. Gustav’s turn came. He was over fifty years old and had suffered badly that year. Several hundred other men who were Gustav’s age—some even younger—had been sent to the left. They looked him up and down carefully, the hand went up—to the right. He walked over and stood beside Fritz.

By the end, more than six hundred people—including around a hundred Buchenwalders and virtually all the men from Dachau—had been condemned as unfit. Many were old friends and acquaintances of Gustav and Fritz. They were marched away to Birkenau and never seen again.40

“So this was the beginning in Auschwitz for us Buchenwalders,” Fritz would recall later. “We knew now that we were doomed to death.”41

But not yet. Following the selection, the remaining eight hundred men were also marched out. But instead of heading west toward the railroad and Birkenau, they were driven east. The SS had work for them; there was a camp to be built. They crossed the river, passing the town of Oświęcim, and marched on into countryside.

As they marched, driven in the familiar fashion with curses and blows from SS rifle butts and kapos’ canes, the Buchenwalders felt a sense of relief not at all in keeping with their circumstances. They were alive, and that was everything. Whether Fritz’s intervention had precipitated this move, nobody knew, but Gustav believed it was so. “Fritzl came with me willingly,” he wrote in his diary. “He is a loyal companion, always at my side, taking care of everything; everyone admires the boy, and he is a true comrade to all of them.” In at least some of their minds, Fritz’s rash action had saved them all from the gas chamber.42