14

Resistance and Collaboration:
The Death of Fritz Kleinmann

THE GREAT MACHINE IN which the concentration camps were the main components was a formidable but shockingly ramshackle work of engineering. Constructing it had been a process of extemporization—a component added here, a redesign there, parts bolted on. It ran at a juddering pace, misfiring, stuttering, consuming its human grist, pouring out bones and ashes, and ejecting an exhaust of nauseating smoke. The crusher was vast and growing all the time. The individual human, in drab blue and gray stripes, wasn’t only physically impressed into the machine but morally and psychologically too. Beyond the Blockführers and kapos, the 380-volt barbed wire and watchtowers, the SS commandants and guard dogs, beyond the roads and rail tracks, the commandeered village and construction sites, the camps, the camp system, the hierarchy of the SS, beyond all this was a nation, a government, and a society teeming with human beings whose base, animal emotions—fear, spite, lust for gain or some imagined former greatness—empowered the system that kept the stripe-uniformed beings shut, helpless, inside the wire.

Their incarceration was intended to be the simple solution to the society’s complex problems. The removal of its human toxins—criminals, left-wing activists, Jews, homosexuals—was supposed to bring back the nation’s great days. But the cure was not a cure but a poison, slowly but surely bringing their nation to the ground. The inefficient labor of starved slaves, the cost of the system that enslaved them, the weakening of science and industry by the removal of geniuses because they were tainted by race, hamstrung the nation’s economy. Becoming a pariah among nations had cost trade. Trying to solve these further problems by wars of conquest, more enslavement, more murder of the people falsely believed to be the root cause of the nation’s woes, the crusher rattled on, day and night, grinding and destroying and slowly wearing itself out.

Fritz Kleinmann found the helplessness and hopelessness of being trapped in the machine intolerable. His father was safe for now, which lifted a great weight from his heart. But the injustices and insane cruelty of the system could make a sane man crazy, and a pious one curse God. They lived out their enslavement, and in most cases died their ignominious deaths, within fences and walls their fellow prisoners had built. Fritz himself, with meticulous skill, had raised the walls, helped create this prison out of open fields. Across the road, in the Buna Werke, other men like him made walls and roads and structures of steel, within which other slaves, male and female, would labor for the benefit of the Reich and IG Farben’s bottom line. The very bricks and stones that Fritz laid had been molded and cut by yet other prisoners in stripes in the brick works and stone quarries run by the SS.1

From his earliest days in Buchenwald Fritz had learned that the key to survival was solidarity and cooperation. Deprivation and hunger bred hostility between prisoners, fracturing them along the lines of race, religion, and background, to the point where they would fight over an unfair portion of turnip soup, where a person might commit murder for a piece of bread. Even fathers and sons had been known to kill one another in the extremity of starvation. Only solidarity and friendship and acts of kindness were strong enough to keep humans alive for any length of time. Lone wolves and mavericks, or those who were isolated by their inability to understand German or Yiddish, never lasted long against the relentless terror of the SS and the green-triangle kapos.2

Bonding together made survival more likely, but nothing could safeguard it. Everywhere Fritz looked he saw the marks of abuse and deprivation and the signs of impending death in his fellow prisoners, even in himself.3

Even if there were no bruises or cuts or broken bones, there were sores and scabs, pallor and chapped skin, limping steps and gapped teeth. The inmates of Monowitz were able to shower once a week, but it was an ordeal. If a block senior was of the brutish kind and wished to get the business over quickly, his block inmates would have to strip in the bunk room then run naked to the shower block, wearing only shoes. After showering, only the first men out got dry towels; they were passed along, so if you lagged behind you got nothing but a soaking wet rag and had to walk back to the barrack dripping, even in the coldest winter weather. Pneumonia was endemic, and often fatal. There was a prisoner hospital but although it was large, taking up several barrack blocks, and well equipped by its prisoner staff,4 treatment under the SS doctors was rudimentary, and it was a fearful place, often full of typhus patients. Nobody went there unless they had to; admissions were subject to selections, and if the patient was deemed unlikely to recover quickly, he went to the gas chambers or received a lethal injection.

Every day the prisoners lived with hunger. Food was distributed in the barrack, but there were only a few bowls provided, so the first to get their helping of soup had to wolf it down so as not to keep the others waiting. Any man who took his time would be shoved impatiently. Each morning their acorn coffee was served in the same bowls. If you managed to acquire your own spoon, it was as precious to you as jewels; you would guard it with your life, and as knives were unobtainable, you would extend its usefulness by sharpening the handle on a stone. There was no toilet paper in the latrines, so scrap paper was another valuable commodity; torn-up cement bags from the construction sites could be obtained from friends who worked there. Sometimes a newspaper might be acquired from a civilian—perhaps left lying around at the factory and smuggled back to camp—and pieces could be used or traded for food.

The people suffering this humiliation might be regarded by Germans as human garbage, but their nation’s war economy was increasingly dependent on their labor. This was the new age of greatness that Hitler’s Germany had brought into existence: a world in which a little square of waste paper became a currency with a tangible value, either to spend or to keep one’s ass wiped.

Each man’s body was subjected constantly to a hundred shocks and irritations. Having a decent pair of shoes was absolutely fundamental. The wooden clogs with which many prisoners in Buchenwald had been issued ruined a laboring man’s feet in no time. But even regular shoes could be a prisoner’s undoing. If they were too large, they chafed and caused blisters that were prone to infection. If they were too small, the problem was even worse. Socks were rare, and many improvised with strips of fabric torn from the tails of their camp-issue shirts. This in itself was a risk, because damaging SS property was sabotage and could earn you a period of starvation or twenty-five lashes on the Bock. With no scissors or clippers, toenails grew and grew until they broke or became ingrown.

Heads were shaved every two weeks by the camp barber. Partly this was to prevent lice, but it also served, like the striped uniforms, to make prisoners conspicuous. The barber used no soap or antiseptic, so every man’s head and face had razor burn, pimples, and pustules, as well as ingrown hairs. Infections were common, and could lead to time in the hospital. Fritz was at least spared half the shaving ordeal—although twenty years old now, his beard had still not developed.

There was a camp dental station, but prisoners didn’t go there if they could help it—only if a toothache became so bad that it had to be pulled. Loose fillings led to caries and gum diseases, exacerbated by scurvy brought on by lack of fruit or vegetables. Fortunately, neither Fritz nor Gustav had any problems with their teeth.5 Gold teeth could be lifesavers or a deadly danger. Prisoners were murdered for them by certain kapos. But if the owner of a gold tooth possessed the strength of will to pull it out himself, it could be traded for luxuries. There was a fixed exchange rate among the civilian black marketeers at the Buna Werke: one gold tooth equalled one bottle of Wyborowa, a quality brand of Polish vodka. Within the camp, the tooth could buy five big loaves of Kommisbrot*1 and a stick of margarine. Any of these could be traded onward for other things. In a world where each week, each day, or even each hour might be one’s last, there was little point in storing up riches for some better or higher purpose. Anything that brought solace or comfort or a full stomach in the living moment was worth the price.

For the managers and board of IG Farben, on the rare occasions when they took any notice of how their slave workers were treated, the sacrifice was deemed worth it for the sake of their profits. Some of the staff felt guilt, but it was little and ineffective. Meanwhile, the company’s accountants and directors were conveniently blind to the huge quantities of their delousing chemical Zyklon B purchased by the SS, especially at Auschwitz.6

Fritz Kleinmann was in no doubt where the evil came from: “Let no one conclude that the prisoner hierarchy bears the blame for bringing about this state of affairs. Some of the functionary prisoners adapted themselves to SS practices for their own profit, but the sole responsibility belongs to the SS killing machinery, which achieved its perfection in Auschwitz.”7 Each prisoner who passed in through the gate could expect to survive, on average, for three to four months.8 Fritz and his father had so far survived more than eight, along with less than a quarter of the comrades who had come with them from Buchenwald.

In the business of murder Auschwitz had achieved a kind of industrial perfection, but as a machine the system was flawed, inefficient, and subject to failure. Its very brutality created in some a will to resist, and its corruption produced the cracks and flaws that allowed resistance to thrive.

During his first summer in Auschwitz-Monowitz, when Jupp Windeck’s dominance was at its height, the resilience and moral indignation that were defining parts of Fritz’s character led him to become involved in the camp’s underground resistance. In doing so he was putting his life in severe jeopardy. But he did that every day just by existing; every little scrape or misplaced glance or bout of freezing weather or contact with disease could start a chain reaction leading to incapacity and death. By resisting, it was at least possible to risk everything for something.

It began with a conversation in a quiet corner of the barrack and ended in a new job.

Construction work in the camp itself was more or less complete by the summer of 1943, and the need for construction workers at the Buna Werke was declining. Fritz was at risk of outliving his usefulness. Certain friends of his decided that he could both be preserved and be of service to them.

They took Fritz aside and spoke to him in utmost secrecy, all of them Buchenwalders he’d known for years—men who had helped him to grow to manhood. There was Stefan Heymann, Jewish intellectual, war veteran, and communist, who’d been in the camps since 1933. In Buchenwald he’d been like a second father to Fritz and the other young boys, teaching them to survive, reading to them in the evenings inspiring passages from Road to Life. Also present was his other old friend Gustl Herzog, along with Erich Eisler, the Austrian antifascist. They had a task for him—a vital and potentially dangerous one.

Despite having known them for so long in Buchenwald, Fritz had only been partially aware of the covert side of their activities. Along with others, they had been involved in a Jewish-communist resistance against the SS, acquiring positions of influence in order to gain information and help their fellow prisoners to survive. It was partly through the efforts of this network that Fritz and Gustav had been moved to less dangerous work details, that Robert Siewert’s builders’ school had been set up, and it was through prisoners in the administration offices that Fritz had learned of the content of his mother’s last letter and had advance warning that his father was listed for Auschwitz.

Since arriving here, these same Buchenwalders had worked their way into positions where they could resume their activities. The spur in their sides was the news of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto in January 1943, when the Jews heroically but vainly fought back against the SS. The men in Monowitz discussed whether they ought to do something similar. Intelligence-gathering and sabotage were all very well—Fritz himself participated in such acts on the construction sites; a bag of cement might be dropped heavily so that it burst, or a hose surreptitiously hooked over the side of a truck loaded with cement bags and the spigot turned on full—but the organized resistance wanted to do more. They settled on a continuation of the work they had previously done in Buchenwald: saving as many lives as possible. While Gustl Herzog worked in the prisoner records office, Felix “Jupp” Rausch, who’d been a businessman in Vienna and had become a good friend of Fritz’s father in Buchenwald, had a clerical job in the prisoner hospital; between them they were able to obtain all manner of intelligence about the other Auschwitz satellite camps, prisoner movements, selections, and special actions, as well as ensuring decent rations, acquiring medicines for the hospital, and educating the younger prisoners.9 Other members of their group held similar positions or were kapos or block seniors. Most of the resisters were communists, who had long experience of acting covertly.

Now they wanted Fritz to join them. The role they had in mind was simple; they would arrange to have him transferred to one of the labor details in the Buna Werke, where he would come into contact with civilian workers. He’d shown himself good at making friends with civilians, and in the factories there were thousands of them. A place was found for him in Schlosserkommando 90—the locksmith section of the construction command. One morning after roll call, for the first time since arriving in Monowitz, he marched with the other prisoners and their SS guards out of the camp, across the main road, and along the lane leading to the Buna Werke.

It was only upon entering the site that one realized just how vast it was. The whole complex—a grid of streets and rail spurs—was divided into sections: the synthetic oil plant with all its supporting workshops, the Buna rubber factory, the power plant, and smaller subsections to manufacture and process chemicals. A person could stand on one of the main east-west streets and scarcely be able to make out its far end in the haze nearly three kilometers away. The cross streets, running north-south, were more than a kilometer long. The rectangular lots were packed with factory buildings, chimneys, workshops, depots, oil and chemical storage tanks, and weird structures of pipework looking like truncated sections of fairground rides. Most of it was still dormant—the structures built but the internal workings far from complete. Only the methanol plant was fully operational, while the rubber factory was reckoned to be at least a year away from production.

The place wasn’t as busy as it would later become, but there were already several thousand men and women working in the factories. About a third of them were prisoners, the rest civilians. The locksmith section—which in fact undertook a variety of metalworking jobs in its workshop and around the factories—turned out to be a friendly, easygoing environment to work in. The prisoners were treated kindly by most of their kapos and encouraged to “work with the eyes,” taking it slow and easy while keeping a sharp eye out for the slavedriver kapos.10 Fritz’s kapo was a sympathetic political prisoner, a former Dachau man, who had helped arrange his work placement.

Rather than being placed in a workshop, Fritz was put in a subsection on one of the main factory floors as a general assistant.11 The German civilians here were mostly engineers, technical workers, and foremen, and the majority of their laborers were Polish and Russian prisoners, who found it hard to follow instructions in German and were treated abominably by their kapos. If the civilian foremen weren’t satisfied with the workers’ performance, IG Farben had them sent to Auschwitz I for “reeducation.” By contrast, the German-speaking prisoners had it much easier; Fritz became known to the civilian foremen and was trusted by them.

He developed a friendly relationship with one German in particular. Again it started with discreet gifts of bread and cigarettes, or occasionally a newspaper. From time to time the man stopped by and chatted briefly. This was what Fritz was here for, and he listened eagerly to the man’s news about the progress of the war, which flatly contradicted the propaganda dished out by the SS. It was going badly for Germany on all fronts; having lost Stalingrad, they were being battered ferociously by the Soviets. And in the Mediterranean German forces had been kicked out of North Africa by the British and Americans, who would soon be in Italy and driving north toward Germany.

It was clear to Fritz that this German was no Nazi; he hoped fervently that the war would end soon and that Germany would lose. Fritz cultivated the relationship, carrying back his news each day to his friends in the camp (along with the valuable gifts of bread and newspaper). Pleased with himself, he had little notion of the scale of the operation he’d become a part of, and although he knew it was hazardous, he couldn’t have guessed just how quickly it would turn and bite him.

There was resistance in all the concentration camps, but the sheer malevolence and huge scale of the Auschwitz complex caused resistance to rise to a new level. At its most passive it gathered intelligence that could help prisoners survive; at its most militant it involved sabotage, escapes, and even violent revolt against the SS. But it was all uncoordinated, haphazard. What was needed was an organized network. On May 1, 1943—which besides being the international workers’ day was a Nazi holiday when the SS operated a skeleton staff—a secret meeting had been convened in Auschwitz I, at which two groups of like-minded men of different nationalities agreed to cooperate and coordinate their resistance activities. They were dominated by a Polish group, including a number of former army officers, under the leadership of Jósef Cyrankiewicz, an educated and charismatic socialist from Galicia. Overcoming the anti-German and anti-Semitic objections from some of the Poles present at the meeting, Cyrankiewicz persuaded them to open up to cooperation with the Jews and with German and Austrian politicals. This would allow them to exploit all their various advantages—the Germans’ language and understanding of Germany and the Nazis, which was vital in intelligence, combined with the fact that Polish prisoners were allowed to receive mail, which enabled them to bring in supplies and communicate with Polish partisans.

The newly formed international group chose to call themselves Kampfgruppe Auschwitz—Battle Group Auschwitz—a measure of their militancy.12

Battle Group Auschwitz soon established contact with Stefan Heymann and the other Monowitz resisters. Their connection was aided by the constant shuffling of prisoners and labor details around the camps. The Monowitz group’s main value was its ability to cultivate relationships with civilians. But the resistance also carried out more active tasks. Sabotage in the Buna Werke had been extensive and constant. Prisoners in the electricians’ detail had managed to short-circuit a turbine in the power plant. Another group, taking advantage of the reduced guard on May 1, had caused an explosion in the half-complete synthetic fuel plant, while others destroyed fifty vehicles.13 Such acts of sabotage—together with constant smaller acts and a general go-slow principle of work—had contributed greatly to delaying the start of production in the various factories.

While Fritz Kleinmann went back and forth between factory and camp each day, carrying his little snippets of intelligence, he was only dimly aware of his connection with this network. Battle Group Auschwitz and its allies were wary of all contacts—the camp Gestapo was constantly endeavoring to penetrate it and discover who its leaders and members were, and the work of spotting and weeding out informers was unending. This was especially vital when it came to the most sensitive resistance operation: the planning and execution of escapes.

It was Saturday in June 1943, and the working day was over. At evening roll call, the prisoners in Monowitz stood to attention in the knowledge that tomorrow, although not a day of rest exactly, was at least a day of less toil and less danger.

Fritz stood in his place, uniform buttoned neatly, cap on straight and pulled to one side in the approved beret style, ready to whip it off mechanically at the “Caps off!” order. Everything was normal, the same slow, monotonous, grinding, day-in, day-out repetition he had known twice daily since October 1939, almost without variation.

The trained clock in his mind was anticipating the dismissal from the Rapportführer when he noticed a small knot of figures entering the square—two SS sergeants force-marching a man who limped and stumbled. They shoved and hit him like a prisoner, but he wasn’t dressed as one. As they came closer, with a sickening jolt Fritz recognized his friend, the civilian from the factory. He’d been violently worked over, his face bloodied and swollen. Fritz also recognized the SS men; one was SS-Staff Sergeant Johann Taute, head of the Monowitz subdivision of the political department: the camp Gestapo. The other was Taute’s subordinate SS-Sergeant Josef Hofer.

To Fritz’s horror, they ordered the civilian to identify which prisoners he’d had contact with at the factory. He surveyed the thousands of faces before him, but Fritz, buried deep in the mass, was well out of sight. With the two SS men pushing him, the civilian walked along between the ranks, back and forth, studying the faces. He came along Fritz’s row. Fritz stared straight ahead, heart thumping. The bruised, bloodshot eyes looked at him reluctantly, and a hand rose and pointed.

Fritz’s father and friends watched in helpless dismay as he was seized and marched out of the ranks. Together with the civilian, he was shoved along, past his comrades, and out of the square.

Stefan Heymann and the other resisters were doubly anxious; how long did they have before Fritz was broken and the Gestapo came back for the rest of them? The roll call was dismissed and they went back to their blocks to wait and talk and try to plan for what was coming. As for why the Gestapo had singled out that particular civilian, they could only speculate.

Fritz was put under guard in a truck and driven out of the camp. It traveled the few kilometers to Auschwitz I, but instead of entering the camp compound Fritz was taken to the political department, which stood outside the fence opposite the SS hospital and adjacent to a small underground gas chamber. Inside the Gestapo building, Fritz was force-marched along a corridor by Sergeants Taute and Hofer and shoved into a large room.

Inside was a table with straps attached to it, and there were hooks embedded in the ceiling. Fritz contemplated these things in terror. He’d been long enough in the camps to guess what they were used for.

After a while an SS officer entered the room. He looked Fritz up and down with lively, smiling eyes in a gentle, patrician face. Prematurely bald and graying, on looks alone he might be a university professor or a genial clergyman. Rarely can a man’s appearance have been more at odds with his character; this affable-looking gentleman was SS-Lieutenant Maximilian Grabner, head of the Auschwitz Gestapo, and his reputation for cold, pitiless murder was unsurpassed in this or any other camp. When Grabner spoke, Fritz recognized his accent as that of the rural region near Vienna, but although his voice was eerily soft, his manner of speech was rough and uneducated. Those prisoners who had much contact with Grabner imagined him having been a cowherd in some Alpine farm. In fact he’d been an officer in the anti-communist arm of Chancellor Schuschnigg’s security police, and after the Anschluss he had transitioned smoothly into the Gestapo.14 The prisoners in Auschwitz were terrified of Maximilian Grabner, as were the SS who served under him. He regularly purged the hospital and the block 11 bunker—“dusting off” he called it—sending the inmates to the gas chambers or the Black Wall. He’d instituted a program of exterminating pregnant Polish women, and by the time Fritz encountered him he was reckoned personally responsible for over two thousand murders. One member of the Auschwitz resistance said of him at the time: “No one, not even the commandant, is as feared as Grabner.”15

He studied Fritz a moment, then spoke. He said, quite matter-of-factly, that he knew prisoner 68629 to be involved in planning a large-scale escape from the Auschwitz-Monowitz camp, and that he had been doing so with the collaboration of the German civilian who had identified him. The Gestapo had been watching this civilian; his irregular behavior having caught their attention. What did the prisoner have to say about that?

Any expectations Fritz had had about the line his interrogation would take were confounded. He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t deny knowing the civilian, but the stuff about an escape was a total mystery. Were the Gestapo just fishing, or did they have real information? If so, how, and what? “You will give me the names of the prisoners who are involved in this plot,” Grabner said.

Taking Fritz’s stunned silence for a refusal, Grabner nodded to Taute and Hofer.

The first blow of Hofer’s cudgel didn’t jolt a confession out of Fritz, and neither did the second or third. Realizing that Fritz would be harder to break than the civilian had been, they pushed him facedown on the table and fastened the straps, pinning him down. The cane rose and flashed down, whistling, lashing him across the buttocks. And again, and again, until his backside was lacerated and on fire with agony. Even in this extremity of fear and pain he kept count of the lashes, and he’d suffered twenty by the time they unstrapped him. Grabner ordered him again to admit his wrongdoing and give up the identities of the prisoners he was planning to help escape. Again Fritz gave no reply. What could he say? Again he was forced down on the table, again the straps were fastened, again the cane whistled in the air.

He lost track of how many times he was strapped to the table, but he doggedly kept count of the lashes: sixty agonizing cuts of the cane, sixty weals on his flesh.

When they unstrapped him and hauled him to his feet, Grabner demanded again: confess, tell me the names.

At some point, sooner rather than later, it must occur to any person trapped in this nightmare of pain and terror to just say anything to make it stop. Fritz could name several of his friends who were involved in some form of resistance, and would not be human if he didn’t experience the overwhelming temptation to save himself. He could simply give Grabner their names—Stefan and Gustl and Jupp Rausch and the other resisters, his friends and mentors, condemning them to torture and death. Even though Fritz was smart enough to know that it wouldn’t save his life, it would at least bring the torture to an end.

He said nothing. Grabner nodded at Taute and Hofer and indicated the hooks in the ceiling.

Fritz’s hands were tied behind his back, so tightly that the circulation was cut off. The long end of the rope was thrown up over a hook, and the two sergeants hauled on it. Fritz’s arms were wrenched upward and backward, and with an indescribable, blinding agony he was dragged off his feet. He hung with his toes a foot above the floor, his bodyweight twisting his shoulders in their sockets, filling his brain with blinding white light. So many times he had seen the poor souls suspended like this from the Goethe Oak. The experience of it was worse than could ever be imagined.

“Give me the names,” Grabner repeated, again and again. Fritz hung there for nearly an hour, but all that came out of his mouth was inchoate squeaks and drool. “You won’t live through this,” said Grabner’s voice in his ear. “Give up the names.”

At a nod from Grabner, the rope was let go, and Fritz crashed to the floor. Give up the names, he was told, and it would be over. Still he said nothing. They dragged him up, hauled again on the rope, and raised him screaming into the air.

Three times they raised him off his feet by that infernal hook. By the third hoist, Grabner was losing patience. It was Saturday night, and he was keen to get home. This interrogation was wasting his precious leisure time. Fritz had hung for an hour and a half all told when they let go and he crashed to the floor for the third time. In his pain he was dimly aware of Grabner leaving the room. As he left he ordered the two sergeants to take the prisoner back to the camp. The interrogation would resume later.16

Gustl Herzog was still up and about when he heard that Fritz was back. He rushed to meet him and found him being carried along by two Viennese friends, Fredl Lustig, who had worked with his father on the Buchenwald haulage column, and Max Matzner, another close friend of Gustav’s, who had narrowly avoided death in the infamous Buchenwald typhus experiments.

Fritz couldn’t stand; aside from the visible bruises and blood, he was in excruciating pain, his joints wrenched and twisted. Gustl told Lustig and Matzner to take him to the hospital, then went in search of the other resisters.

The prisoner hospital in Monowitz was extensive. Occupying a group of blocks in the northeast corner of the camp, it had several departments: medical, surgical, infectious diseases, and convalescence. Although an SS doctor was in overall charge, it was staffed mainly by prisoners, and each department had a block senior in charge.17 By concentration camp standards, Monowitz’s hospital was a good one, but like all others it suffered from a starvation of medical resources and was subject to regular selections for the gas chambers.

Fritz was taken to a room in the general medical block. He was half-paralyzed, his arms useless and senseless, his backside welted and bleeding, and his whole body shot through with pain. A Czech doctor gave him some strong painkillers and massaged his arms.

After a while, Gustl Herzog came in with Erich Eisler and Stefan Heymann. All three regarded Fritz with both pity and fear. When the doctor had gone, they questioned him anxiously about what the Gestapo had wanted with him. He told them about Grabner’s accusations and the alleged escape plan. Had he given up any information? Of course not; he didn’t know anything. But had he given Grabner any names—any at all? No, he hadn’t. Despite his pain, his friends interrogated him over and over: had he named any names at all? No, he insisted; he’d told Grabner nothing.

Eventually they were satisfied. They were safe—for now. But Stefan and Erich were positive that Grabner wouldn’t let the matter end there. If it hadn’t been a Saturday, he’d have kept up Fritz’s torture until he either confessed or died. It was a marvel that he’d let him come back to camp; presumably the cells in Auschwitz I’s block 11 were jammed to bursting (as they usually were). Tomorrow, or maybe Monday, Grabner would send for Fritz again. The torture would resume, and sooner or later he would crack and start spilling out names. Something must be done to prevent that.

For the time being, they had Fritz moved to the infectious diseases block, where typhus and dysentery patients were kept; it was in the far corner of the camp, beside the shower block and adjoining the morgue. The SS doctor and his medical orderlies rarely went in there for fear of infection. Fritz was put in an isolation room. So long as he didn’t pick up an infection, he’d be safe for the time being. But he couldn’t hide in here forever, and his name would have to be entered in the hospital records. Otherwise, he’d be recorded as missing at morning roll call and a manhunt would be initiated. Whichever way they looked at the problem, there was only one solution: Fritz Kleinmann had to die.

With cooperation from Sepp Luger, the camp senior responsible for the hospital, the death of prisoner 68629 was recorded in the register. No details were required; the register provided only a single line for each entry, with admission number, prisoner number, name, dates of admission and departure, and reason for departure. In this column there were only three options: Entlassen (discharged); nach Birkenau for those selected for the gas chambers; or a stamped black cross denoting the dead. Once Fritz’s death had been entered, Gustl Herzog recorded it in the general prisoner records office where he worked.18

Between them the conspirators broke the news to Fritz’s many friends. Even his father could not be let into the secret—the risk was too great—and so Gustav was given the devastating news that his beloved son had died. After all they had been through together to survive this far, it was utterly heartbreaking. Gustav couldn’t bring himself to record it in his diary, which had lain untouched for weeks.

While Gustav grieved and Fritz’s friends absorbed this latest in a never-ending train of deaths, there remained the pressing matter of what to do with the living, breathing Fritz. While he began to recover from his injuries, he was kept in isolation in the hospital. Each time an inspection was carried out by the SS doctor or his male nurse, Fritz was helped out of his bed by his old Buchenwald friend Jule Meixner and hidden in the storeroom of the hospital laundry where he worked. All the while Fritz wondered what would become of him now. Watching the dysentery patients drag themselves to the latrine buckets in the outer room and the typhus patients writhing in their sweat-soaked beds in a febrile delirium, he knew he couldn’t stay in this place much longer, injuries or no injuries. Word had come through from the Monowitz Gestapo that Grabner had dropped the investigation because of Fritz’s death. It was time to move on.

Fritz was given the identity of a typhus patient who had just died. He was in no state of mind to recall the poor man’s name—only that he was a Jew from Berlin, a relatively recent arrival whose prisoner number was up in the 112,000s. It was impossible to erase Fritz’s tattoo or give him a new one with the dead man’s number, so they just bandaged his forearm and hoped that no SS demanded to see it. Stefan Heymann spent a lot of time with him, and they grew closer than ever; he advised Fritz on how they would need to proceed and the precautions they would need to take when assigning him to a labor detail.

It was all one to Fritz; since his interrogation a lassitude had entered his soul and he no longer cared much whether he was discovered or not. The long grinding of grief, starvation, and hopelessness had worn down his resistance at last, and he had entered the mind state that led to becoming a Muselmann. He confessed to Stefan and his other friends that he was considering ending it all as soon as possible—it was so simple to rush the sentry line while on an outside work detail, or to throw himself on the electrified fence in the camp. One gunshot—a single fleeting instant—and the pain and wretchedness would all be over.19

Stefan had no patience with these thoughts. Couldn’t Fritz imagine what committing suicide would do to his father? Gustav believed right now that his son was dead, but in time—perhaps soon—he would learn the truth and be overjoyed. But if he were to discover that Fritz had been alive all along and had then committed suicide—just imagine the utter devastation he would feel. After all they had survived together, the risks they had taken for each other, their shared endurance—for Fritz to not only cave in to the SS but to allow them to finish him off, it was too much. “They cannot grind us down like this,” Gustav had said; endurance was all, misery was only for a time, hope and spirit were undying.

Fritz and Stefan talked it over at length. Stefan promised to do everything he could to keep Fritz safe in the hospital, to prevent his being selected for Birkenau. When he was well enough to go to work, a place would be found in some outside detail where he could remain obscure and unnoticed. Fritz trusted Stefan with his life, but he had grave doubts. People knew his face—including some of the SS. And sooner or later his father must find out. At least seven men in the resistance knew Fritz’s secret; could they all keep it hidden forever from Gustav, who was their friend? Gustav was prominent in the camp now, well-known to the SS and the functionary prisoners, some of whom were hostile. His status made possession of so explosive a secret extremely dangerous for him. Moreover, he would find it hard to stay apart from his son and not acknowledge him. The incident with the Blockführer who had battered Fritz for claiming to be Gustav’s son was a painful reminder of that fact. Gustav was conspicuous.

After three weeks, Fritz was recovered enough to leave the hospital. His friends smuggled him to block 48, where the senior was Chaim Goslawski, a member of the resistance. Like Fritz’s father, Goslawski had been born in this part of the world, in the town of Sosnowiec, and his block was mainly populated by German and Polish prisoners who didn’t know Fritz.

The next day, Fritz went to work. A position had been found for him in a different section of the locksmith detail where he could pass unnoticed as a warehouseman; one of the kapos, a man named Paul Schmidt, was in on the secret and kept an eye on him. Marching out through the gates each morning and back in the evening, Fritz went through suffocating terror, expecting to be recognized by an SS guard or hostile kapo. He kept in the middle of the group, marching with his eyes fixed forward and his face expressionless while his heart pounded. Nobody noticed him, and as the weeks passed, he began to feel more settled at work. For the time being, his secret was safe.

One evening Gustav was sitting in the day room of block 7 when he was told that Gustl Herzog was outside, asking to see him.

Gustav stepped outside and found his old friend in a state of visibly suppressed eagerness. Follow me, he indicated, and led Gustav down the side of the building, away from the road. Behind the row of barrack blocks, in the space between it and the next row, stood a row of smaller buildings—two latrines, the Gestapo bunker, and a small bath house. Herzog led Gustav to the bath house, where the prisoner in charge was keeping watch at the door. They indicated that Gustav should go inside.

Wondering, he entered the building, inhaling the familiar smell of musty, soapless damp. In the gloom, he saw the shape of a man standing back in the shadows of the boiler room. The figure came forward, his features resolving in the half light, unbelievably, miraculously, into the face of Fritz. For Gustav, who never abandoned hope, to hold his son in his arms again, to inhale the smell of him, to hear his voice was beyond all hope, beyond everything.20

After that first reunion, they met whenever they could, always at night in the bath house. The bath supervisor was yet another veteran of the “Buchenwald school” who’d been with Fritz in the youth block. Now that his grief was gone, Gustav’s mind was invaded by all the cares of fatherhood, redoubled now that Fritz was in so much more danger than he’d ever been in before. Gustl Herzog and the others assured him that they were doing all they could for Fritz, but would it be enough?

In the late fall of 1943, the gravest risk to Fritz’s security was unexpectedly lifted when SS-Lieutenant Grabner was suddenly removed from his post.

For a long time, there had been questions in Berlin about Grabner’s conduct of the Auschwitz Gestapo. Even by SS standards the number of deaths he ordered raised an eyebrow—not so much at the scale of the murder but the disorderly way in which it was done. In the minds of Himmler and his senior officers, the Final Solution—and killing generally—was an industrial business, to be conducted cleanly, efficiently, and systematically. It wasn’t a game or a personal fetish. However, it was not Grabner’s sadism or taste for murder that brought about his fall; it was his corruption. Like many senior concentration camp officers he had used his position to misappropriate property and enrich himself. He had done so on a colossal scale, stealing the valuables of Jews murdered in Birkenau and sending home whole suitcases crammed with loot. Unfortunately for him, the scale of his corruption drew the attention of an SS investigation. He was suspended from his post, and on December 1 was placed under arrest, along with fellow mass-murderer Gerhard Palitzsch. Grabner was permanently replaced, along with some of his accomplices.21 SS-Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, was one of them.

Höss’s replacement, Arthur Liebehenschel, took up his post as commandant on November 11, 1943, and initiated a shake-up of the whole Auschwitz complex; staff were replaced, and order and discipline were imposed more firmly on the SS.22

Amid all this turmoil, there was little chance of one prisoner in Monowitz being taken much notice of by the camp Gestapo. Not only that, on the night of December 7, an accomplice of the dismissed SS officers started a fire in the main Gestapo building, destroying the records of their misdeeds.23 Not long afterward, Fritz Kleinmann quietly came back to life. His entry in the camp register was reinstated, and the Berlin Jew who had died of typhus was forgotten.

But although the need for absolute secrecy had passed, Fritz still had to be careful; if he were noticed by any SS guards who had been aware of his death—especially the Gestapo sergeants Taute and Hofer—there would be trouble. But among the thousands in Monowitz, the hundreds of thousands who entered and were transferred back and forth between the Auschwitz camps, and the tens of thousands of dead, who would take notice of one prisoner’s discreet resurrection?

As winter came on, Gustav used his position to achieve the unthinkable—he had Fritz transferred to join him in block 7. Now they could be together in the evenings without worrying about being seen by suspicious SS men. It was a socially tricky situation; because of his low status, Fritz wasn’t permitted to sit in the block day room when his papa went there to talk with his friends; instead he had to sit on his bunk alone.

Still, at least it was warm and safe. It was certainly better than the place he’d been in before his death, where his block senior, a man named Paul Schäfer, hadn’t been able to stomach the stench of men’s bodies in the bunk room—an unavoidable ingredient of concentration camp barrack life—and had kept all the windows open to ventilate it, even in the cold weather. Simply for sadism’s sake, he’d also turned off the heating, so the men’s damp clothes wouldn’t dry. If anyone was caught trying to keep warm by sleeping in his clothes, Schäfer would beat him up and confiscate his bread and margarine ration. Confinement in the bunk room of block 7 was luxury by comparison.

“And so the year of 1943 goes by,” Gustav wrote. Winter was upon them again; snow began to fall, and the ground hardened. This would be his and Fritz’s fifth winter since being taken from their home. That it would not be their last was both a blessing and a curse.