15

The Kindness of Strangers

“CATCH!”

Fritz leapt in the air, stretching to reach the ball as it sailed over his head; it bounced off the bracket of one of the empty market stalls and skittered into the road. Fritz ran after it, whipped it up, and glanced up to see a policeman coming around the corner into Leopoldsgasse. The policeman stared hard at him, and he stood up straight, hiding the ball behind his back. Soccer wasn’t allowed on the streets. When he’d gone, Fritz turned and ran back into the market, dropping the ball—just a tightly wrapped bundle of rags—onto the cobblestones and kicking it back toward his friends.

It was the end of the day and the last of the farmers were clearing away their unsold wares. As each one finished, he mounted his cart and chucked the reins, clopping off along the street. Fritz and his friends ran among the empty stalls, tossing the ball back and forth. Only Frau Capek the fruit seller was still at her post; she never packed up until it got dark. In the summer she would give the kids corn cobs. A lot of them were poor and would take all the free leftovers they could get—ends of sausage from the butcher, bread crusts from Herr König at the Anker bakery, whipped cream from Herr Reichert’s cake shop in the Grosse Sperlgasse, just around the corner from the Sperlschule where they all went to school.

Fritz caught the ball as it came his way and was about to toss it back when they all heard the distant, familiar hooting of horns: ta-raa ta-raa. The fire truck was on its way to a fire. In a welter of excitement they ran back through the market and along Leopoldsgasse, following the sound, dodging among the passersby—the late housewives with their shopping, the Orthodox Jews in their black coats and beards hurrying home for the start of Shabbat before the light began to fade. “Wait!” Fritz turned and saw the little figure, legs pumping, running after him. Kurt! He’d forgotten all about him. He waited for his little brother, but by the time he caught up, Fritz’s friends were out of sight and the fire truck was inaudible.

Kurt was only seven—a whole generation apart from Fritz, who was nearly fourteen, but they were close already, and Fritz let the kid tag along when he played with his friends, learning their games and the ways of the streets around the Karmelitermarkt and beyond. Kurt had his own gang of little pals, and Fritz’s gang acted as their guardians.

Fritz noticed old Herr Löwy, who’d been blinded in the Great War, trying to cross the street, which was busy with trucks and heavy wagons from the coal sellers and breweries, clattering along pulled by massive Pinzgauer horses. Fritz took Herr Löwy’s hand, waited for a gap, and helped him across. Then, beckoning Kurt to follow, he took off after his friends.

They caught up with them coming back along Taborstrasse, their faces streaked with cream and icing sugar. They hadn’t found the fire, but they’d passed by Gross’s confectioners in the Novaragasse and bagged about a ton of leftover cream cakes. One of them—his schoolfriend Leo Meth—had saved a cream slice and gave it to Fritz, who divided it with Kurt.

Cheeks bulging with pastry and cream, they walked back toward the Karmelitermarkt, Fritz holding Kurt by his sticky, sugary hand. Fritz enjoyed the comfort of comradeship; the fact that some of his friends were different, that while his parents neglected to go to synagogue, their parents stayed away from church, or that Christmas meant something slightly more to them than it did to him—these things seemed of no significance, and the thought that he and Leo and the other Jewish kids might ever be divided from their friends by these trivial things never crossed their minds.

It was a warm evening; summer was well on its way. Tomorrow was Saturday—perhaps they’d go swimming in the Danube Canal. Or they might join with the girls to play theater in the basement of number 17. Frau Dworschak the building supervisor—whose son Hans was one of Fritz’s playmates—often let them light the place up with candles, and Herta and the other girls would put on a fashion show, dressing up in scavenged clothes and parading up and down like great ladies, or they’d all do a version of William Tell in front of an audience who paid two pennies each for admission. Fritz loved these burlesques.

Fritz and Kurt walked home in the warm summer dusk. Today had had been a good day in an unbroken string of good days. The kids of Vienna picked their joy from the streets like apples from a tree; all you had to do was reach up and it was there for the taking. Life was outside of time, invincible.

Fritz was torn from a pleasant dream by the shrill screech of the camp senior’s whistle. His eyes opened, staring into darkness, and his nostrils woke to the stench of three hundred unwashed bodies and three hundred sets of sweat-soured clothes. His brain, startled out of its bliss, registered the shock of his situation—as it did every dark pre-dawn morning.

The man in the bunk below climbed down and pulled on his jacket, as did about a dozen others who were on coffee duty. Fritz wrapped his blanket tightly about him and closed his eyes, settling into the straw mattress, squeezing the last embrace out of sleep and chasing the tatters of his dream.

An hour and a quarter later he was woken again by the bunk room lights flicking on. “All up!” barked the room orderly. “Up, up, up!” In an instant the three-tiered bunks sprouted legs, arms, bleary faces, clambering, treading on one another, pulling on striped uniforms. Fritz took down his mattress, shook it out, then folded his blanket and laid it all straight. After the men had splashed and scrubbed their faces in cold water in the washhouse—jam-packed with the inhabitants of the six surrounding blocks—and polished their shoes from the barrel of greasy boot-polish scavenged from the Buna Werke, they lined up in the bunk room for their acorn coffee, brought in in huge thirty-liter thermos canisters. They drank it standing up (sitting on the bunks was forbidden). Those who’d managed to save a bit of bread from the evening before ate it now, washing it down with the sweet, lukewarm coffee. The orderly inspected them to see that their bunks were in order, their uniforms presentable, and their shoes clean and polished.

The atmosphere was less anxious, more convivial than in any block Fritz had been in before. The Prominenten of block 7 looked after themselves in greater comfort. His previous block had been so overcrowded by an influx of new prisoners during the summer that they’d slept two to a bed.1 The foremen, the kapos, the block senior, and the orderlies had treated the rest of them as second-class, especially the Jews. In block 7 there was more mutual respect, although Fritz, here only on sufferance and the influence of his father, was excluded.

At 5:45, still in darkness, they all trooped outside and formed rows in front of the building. All along the street prisoners were spilling out of their blocks and lining up to be counted by their block seniors. Every man had to be there, without exception. Not even the sick or the dead were excused—usually each block would produce at least one or two corpses of men who’d died in the night. They were carried out and laid down to be counted with the rest. The assembled prisoners marched along the street and wheeled into the roll-call square, lit by floodlights. Columns of hundreds came from each block, forming up on the open parade ground in orderly ranks of ten, each man with his assigned place within his block, each block in its assigned place among the others. The sick and the dead were carried along and put at the back.

The SS Blockführers prowled up and down the columns, looking for men out of place, lines not straight, counting up the prisoners of their block, taking a tally of the dead. Any infraction of perfect drill—especially if it led to a counting error—resulted in a beating; whole rows were made to lie down, stand up, lie down, until they got their lines perfectly straight. When the Blockführers were satisfied, they took their reports to the Rapportführer, who watched over the whole proceeding from a podium at the front. Then, while the prisoners continued to stand motionless—however cold or wet the weather—he went meticulously through the whole count.

By the time SS-Lieutenant Vinzenz Schöttl, the dough-faced director, arrived on the square to take roll call, they had been standing at attention for about an hour. Fritz watched warily as Schöttl took the podium; with the whole Auschwitz complex still going through the process of transitioning from the Höss-Grabner regime he was still afraid of being recognized and singled out; it was a fear that would never entirely leave, and recent events had put him more on edge than ever.

During the final days of the Grabner regime in September, an informer had been discovered among the prisoners.2 The Gestapo were constantly putting out feelers to try and detect subversive activities, and the resisters had to be constantly vigilant. The ones to watch out for in particular were certain kinds of kapos and civilian workers. Fritz Beck, who was an orderly in block 7 and particularly alert to traitors, had made the discovery. Beck had learned from a fellow prisoner who was a clerk in the Monowitz Gestapo that Polish kapo Bolesław “Bolek” Smoliński—one of the heavy-handed kapos, a bigot and anti-Semite with a particular loathing for communists—was a stool pigeon working for SS-Sergeant Taute.

This vital intelligence was passed among the resisters. They realized at once the acute danger Smoliński presented; Curt Posener (known as Cupo), one of the old Buchenwalders, knew that Smoliński was friendly with the camp senior responsible for the prisoner hospital, which was a main nexus for the resistance. This was a terrible vulnerability. Cupo talked it over with Erich Eisler and Stefan Heymann. Eisler suggested that they try talking to Smoliński, to make him see the error of his ways. Stefan and Cupo argued strongly against this; it was far too dangerous. Nonetheless, for reasons which nobody would ever discover, Eisler disregarded the warnings and went ahead and talked to Smoliński. The reaction was instantaneous—Smoliński went straight to the Gestapo and gave them the names of several conspirators, including Erich Eisler and Curt Posener, as well as six others, including Walter Petzold and Walter Windmüller, both of whom were well-liked, highly respected functionary prisoners and members of the resistance. All were seized and taken to Auschwitz I, where they were put in the block 11 bunker and subjected to days of interrogation and torture. Despite being the Gestapo’s informer, Smoliński was held with them.

Eventually Walter Petzold and Curt Posener were brought back to Monowitz, battered and physically broken. Like Fritz, they had resisted the torture and given up no information. Smoliński was also released and resumed his position. Walter Windmüller and Erich Eisler did not come back. Windmüller had succumbed to his injuries and died in the bunker. Poor Erich Eisler, who had outed himself as a resister by talking to Smoliński in the first place, was taken to the Black Wall and shot on October 21, 1943.3 The rest were also shot. Eisler’s death was heartbreakingly tragic. He had dedicated himself utterly to people’s welfare; even before becoming a prisoner himself, he’d worked for the Rote Hilfe (Red Aid), a socialist organization that provided welfare to prisoners’ families.4 He’d been arrested in 1938 and sent to Dachau, then Buchenwald, where he’d become part of the circle of friends and resisters who now mourned him. In the end, it had been his humane temperament that was his downfall, thinking he could talk a man like Smoliński into behaving decently.

“Attention! Caps off!” yelled a sergeant’s voice through the loudspeakers, and five thousand hands whipped the caps off five thousand heads and folded them neatly under their arms. They stood at attention while Schöttl checked through the assembled lists of prisoners, noting new arrivals, deaths, selections, and assignments.

Finally: “Caps on! Work details, move!”

The parade dissolved into chaos as each man ran to his allotted detail, coalescing into units and forming up in columns, counted off by their kapos. They marched along the street to the main gate, which swung open. Many were lethargic, Fritz noted—as always, there was a percentage who had reached the last of their strength; before long they would be selected for Birkenau or be among the corpses brought out to be counted at roll call.

As the columns passed, the prisoner orchestra, in their little building beside the gate, played stirring tunes. They were an international ensemble, led by a Dutch political, with a German Roma on violin, and the rest Jews from various countries. Yet it struck Fritz that they never seemed to play German tunes—only Austrian marches from the days of the empire. When his papa had been Fritz’s age, he had marched to exactly these tunes on the parade grounds of Vienna, Cracow, and Kenty. He’d gone to war accompanied by the same martial airs. The camp orchestra were good musicians, and sometimes on a Sunday Schöttl permitted them to put on a concert for the more privileged prisoners on the roll-call square. It was a surreal sight—the motley musicians playing classical music to an audience of prisoners standing in uniforms, with SS officers in chairs to one side.

The sky was starting to grow light now as they marched along the road toward the checkpoint at the gates of the Buna Werke, each column guarded by an SS sergeant and sentries. Depending on where in the factory complex they worked, some of them had up to four kilometers to march, and then a twelve-hour shift and a four-kilometer march back to another several hours of roll call in the floodlit cold and rain. Each day the same as the last, each day another pit of gloom in an unbroken landscape of gray hopelessness.

Fritz went to his work in the warehouse: another day of moving stock about. As it turned out, this day was not entirely like all the others, although Fritz had no way of knowing it just yet.

He was chatting to another Jewish prisoner when one of the civilian welders who happened to be nearby broke in on their conversation. He was German and had noticed they were speaking his language. He hadn’t come across many fellow Germans since coming to work here—most of the prisoners seemed to be Poles or other foreigners. Glancing at their prison uniforms he asked, rather impolitely and presumptuously, what crimes they had committed.

Fritz looked at the civilian in surprise. He was a youngish man who moved with a lame, halting manner suggesting some kind of disability. That would explain why he wasn’t in the army. “Crime?” Fritz said. “We’re Jews.”

The man was mystified. “But the Führer would never lock up anyone who hasn’t done anything wrong,” he said.

“This is Auschwitz concentration camp,” said Fritz. “Do you know what Auschwitz stands for?”

The man shrugged. “I’ve been in the army, on the Eastern Front. I’ve got no idea what’s been going on at home.” So that explained his lameness: wounded, presumably.

Fritz pointed out his and his friend’s Jewish stars, explaining what they denoted, but the man refused to believe that that was the sole reason for their imprisonment. For Fritz, this blindness was stupefying—the man might have missed the escalation since 1941 while he was at the front, but where had he been since 1933 when the persecutions began, or 1938 when Kristallnacht happened and they started sending the Jews en masse to the concentration camps? Presumably he’d bought into the propaganda that Jews had merely been deported or emigrated of their own free will, and that those in the camps were criminals and terrorists.

Eventually Fritz accepted that it was hopeless and gave up trying to convince him of the truth. When the former soldier tried to restart the conversation again later, with the stunningly glib and pompous observation that everyone must pull together to defend home and Fatherland, and that even prisoners had their part to play, Fritz bit his tongue. Here was a man whose company he could grow extremely tired of very quickly indeed. The man went on and on, and at last Fritz couldn’t stand it any longer. “Can’t you see what’s happening here?” he cried angrily, gesturing around him to take in the factories, Auschwitz, the whole system. Then he walked away.

But the civilian wouldn’t leave the matter—or Fritz—alone. The whole business perplexed him, and throughout that day he came up to Fritz again and again, raising the matter of duty and Fatherland and that surely prisoners must be prisoners for a good reason. But despite his persistence, each time he raised the matter he sounded less sure of himself.

Eventually he fell silent, and for the next few days he went about his welding work in the factory without speaking. Then one morning he approached Fritz, quietly passed him a piece of bread and a large stick of sausage, then walked off. Surprised and puzzled, Fritz hid the gifts away, and as he did so he noticed that the bread was half a long loaf of Wecken, an Austrian bread made from very fine flour. He tore off a piece and put it in his mouth. It was blissful; nothing like the military Kommisbrot they were given in the camp. This was a taste of home and heaven—a reminder of the morsels he and his friends used to get at the close of day from the Anker bakery. There was a lot here, and the sausage was large; he would smuggle them back to camp and share with his father and friends.

Later the same morning, the civilian came back. “There aren’t many Germans here,” he said. “It’s nice to have someone to talk to.” He hesitated, and there was a look in his face Fritz hadn’t seen before. On his way in to work that morning, he said, he’d seen a sight which had distressed him. Even as a veteran of the Eastern Front who was no stranger to atrocity, he’d been shaken by it. A prisoner’s corpse was hanging on the barbed wire of the Monowitz camp. He’d been told it was a suicide, and not uncommon—prisoners would throw themselves on the fence and die either by electrocution or shooting. Fritz nodded; it was a common enough sight. The SS always left the bodies up for a few days to intimidate other prisoners. “This is not what I fought for,” said the civilian. His voice shook with emotion, and Fritz saw tears in his eyes. “Not that. I want nothing to do with that.”

Fritz was astounded—a German soldier standing before him, in tears over a dead concentration camp inmate. In Fritz’s experience, Aryan Germans—soldiers, police, SS, green-triangle prisoners—were all of a kind: with few exceptions they were callous, bigoted, and brutal.

The man told Fritz his story. His name was Alfred Wocher. He was Bavarian-born but married to a Viennese woman, and his home was in Vienna—hence the Wecken loaf. Fritz had learned discretion and didn’t mention that he was from Vienna too; instead he just listened while Wocher told him about serving in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, how he’d been awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class and reached the rank of sergeant. After being severely wounded he’d been sent home on indefinite leave; he would never be fit again for active service. He hadn’t actually been discharged from the army but as a skilled welder he’d been sent to IG Farben to do civilian work.5

Back in camp that evening, Fritz went to the hospital to talk it over with Stefan Heymann; he described Alfred Wocher and repeated everything he’d said. Stefan was unsettled by the whole thing. He advised Fritz to be careful—you couldn’t trust Germans, especially not a veteran soldier from Hitler’s army. After Smoliński and the deaths of Erich Eisler and Walter Windmüller, the resistance was more wary than ever about potential informers. And surely Fritz had learned his lesson the hard way—the last time he’d become friendly with a civilian it had nearly cost him his life, besides putting his friends and his father through a world of grief and risk.

Fritz understood the danger all too well and had every reason not to trust this man Wocher. Therefore, given those facts, he would never understand why he did what he did the next day. He went back to work and, in defiance of Stefan’s advice and his own good sense, continued conversing with the old soldier.

It wasn’t as if he could easily keep away from him—Wocher came to him, usually because he wanted to get something off his chest, some query or other about Auschwitz. To Fritz it seemed suspiciously like probing. Wocher would bring copies of the Völkischer Beobachter, the official Nazi Party newspaper, to show Fritz what was going on in Germany. (Fritz didn’t mind—newspaper torn into squares had a value in the camp, and it had to be said that wiping the asses of Jews was as good a use for the Beobachter as one could imagine.) Wocher brought Fritz gifts of bread and sausage, and one day he even offered to convey letters for him. If Fritz had anyone in the outside world he wanted to communicate with, he would get messages to them.

So there it was—entrapment. Or so it seemed. Fritz’s instinct told him to test this man in some way. But to what purpose? If Wocher was a Nazi informer, what good would it do to prove it? Fritz discussed the matter again with Stefan Heymann. Knowing that Fritz would always go his own way, Stefan told him that it was up to him alone; he couldn’t help him with this.

Not long afterward, Wocher happened to mention that he was about to go on leave and would be traveling through Brno and Prague—cities in what had formerly been Czechoslovakia, now German-occupied. Here was Fritz’s opportunity; he came to work next day with a couple of letters directed to fictional addresses in both cities, claiming he had family there. He guessed that if Wocher was false, he naturally wouldn’t bother trying to deliver the letters and wouldn’t discover that the addresses weren’t real.

When Wocher reappeared at work a few days later, he was livid. He’d tried to deliver both letters, and been unable to find either address. He’d guessed right away that Fritz had duped him—presumably for no better reason than to make a fool of him—and was hurt as well as angry. Fritz was apologetic, concealing his delight and relief; he was now almost sure that Wocher wasn’t an agent provocateur.

Although he still didn’t wholly trust the man, Fritz began to reveal more to him about what Auschwitz really was; gradually, over several days, he told Wocher about how Jews came in transports from Germany, Poland, France, the Netherlands, and countries in the east; about the selections in Birkenau; the children, the old, the unfit, and most of the women sent to the gas chambers, while the others were put to slave labor. Wocher had seen glimpses of it for himself; now he understood the long trains of closed cattle cars he’d seen coming in along the southeastern railroad past Monowitz, heading toward Oświęcim. Also, on one of the big factory floors he’d heard civilians talking about these things. He was beginning to realize that he’d missed a lot being in the army at the front.6

It was becoming harder to miss what was going on. Like a metastasizing cancer, Auschwitz was spreading and growing. With a new commandant in overall charge, sweeping organizational changes had been made, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz (its official name as of November 1943) became a principal camp along with Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Monowitz was now the administrative hub for a growing number of subcamps pustulating throughout the countryside around the Buna Werke. Accordingly it had a commandant installed above camp director Schöttl, a pallid, blank-eyed man called SS-Captain Heinrich Schwarz who liked to take a personal hand in the beating and murder of prisoners, working himself into a foaming rage in the process. Former commandant Rudolf Höss called Captain Schwarz “the choleric type, easily aroused and irascible” and praised his enthusiastic, meticulous devotion to enacting the Final Solution, often raging against Berlin if ever there was a lull in the number of transports of Jews.7

New transports for the IG Farben camps sometimes came directly to Monowitz now, and for the first time Fritz witnessed with his own eyes what he had previously only heard about—the bewildered people herded from the freight cars onto the ground near the camp, loaded down with luggage: men, women, and children, thinking they had come to be resettled.8 Many were frightened, others happy and relieved to find friends again among the mass after days in the dark, suffocating cars. The healthy men were separated and marched to the camp. Meanwhile, the women, children, and elderly were put back on the train, which rolled on to Birkenau. In Monowitz the men were made to strip naked in the roll-call square, leaving all their clothes and belongings in a heap. Many tried to keep hold of precious possessions, but they were nearly always found out. Everything was taken to the special storage block for sorting and searching. This place, like its larger counterpart in Birkenau, was known as “Canada” (which was believed to be a land of riches). The prisoner detail responsible for handling the plunder were very thorough.9 Working under close SS oversight, they searched through it like prospectors panning dirt, prying open seams to look for concealed valuables. Any that were found were often pocketed by the SS supervisors. Everything else was held in storage.

Among the new arrivals, Fritz took a particular interest in the Jews from the ghetto at Theresienstadt, many of whom had been deported there from Vienna. Fritz sought them out, looking for news of home. They had little to tell; they’d been away from Vienna a long time. More up-to-date news came when deportations directly from Vienna began arriving. Virtually all the registered Jews had gone from the city now, and the Nazi authorities had begun deporting those who fell in the no-man’s-land between Jewish and Aryan—the Mischlinge, those who were born from the intermarriage of Jews and Aryans and were therefore both and neither. The Nuremberg Laws defined two categories of Mischling: those with two Jewish grandparents (“half Jewish”) were of the first degree, and those with only one (“quarter Jewish”) were of the second degree. The Nazis had never reached a consensus on how they felt about Mischlinge, especially whether those of the first degree should be treated as Jews if their parents practiced Christianity. Jews married to Aryans lived in a world of fearful uncertainty; those who had converted to Christianity could never be sure that the state would recognize their conversion or the special status they gained from their Aryan spouses. With the extermination of the Jews approaching a climax, more and more Mischlinge were being deported to the camps. Fritz talked to those who came from Vienna but could get no more than general information about life there—nobody could tell him anything about his remaining relatives and friends, if any were still alive.

When Alfred Wocher mentioned that he would be going to Vienna on a short leave, Fritz saw his chance. He felt he could trust him now, and hoped the trust was reciprocated. Fritz gave him the address of his aunt Helene, who lived in Vienna-Döbling, a suburb on the northern outskirts, across the Danube Canal from Leopoldstadt. Helene had married an Aryan and been baptized a Christian, so had remained secure from the Nazis. Her son was Viktor, the cousin from whom Kurt had acquired his hunting knife, and her husband was a German officer. Fritz wanted her to know that he and his papa were still alive and well, and to pass the news on to any other surviving relatives. Wocher took the address and set off.

He returned a few days later. The mission hadn’t been much more fruitful than the previous one. The address had been genuine enough, but the lady who’d answered the door to him had been decidedly unfriendly—she’d denied all knowledge of any Fritz Kleinmann and slammed the door in Wocher’s face.

Much later, Fritz pieced together what had happened. What he hadn’t realized was that when he was away from the factory, Alfred Wocher reverted to army uniform. His appearance on Aunt Helene’s doorstep had scared the poor woman out of her wits. Her husband had died in the war, and she felt terrifyingly exposed without the protection his Aryan status had given her. What if the Nazis decided she was a Jew after all? When this total stranger in a Nazi sergeant’s uniform came knocking on her door and mentioned Fritz being in Auschwitz, she’d thought her time had come, and she panicked.

One thing at least had come out of the affair: Fritz now trusted Alfred Wocher completely. With Christmas approaching, he was off to Vienna again. This time Fritz gave him some more addresses—a cousin and some friends of his papa’s from the local neighborhood. He also gave him the address of Im Werd 11/16, his home, and a letter for his mother; despite everything he knew now about what was going on in the world, and despite having heard nothing from his mother or Herta for a year and a half, Fritz couldn’t give up hope completely. He needed to believe that they were all right.

Leopoldstadt had lost its heart. It was still a populous area, but the excision of its Jewish people had taken the life quite literally out of it. Shops were still untenanted, businesses still boarded up. When Alfred Wocher ascended the stairs of the apartment building at Im Werd 11, the apartments where Jews had lived—around half of the twenty-three in the building—were unoccupied.10 So much for the Nazi claim that Jews were taking up scarce living space that was needed for true Germans. There was no answer when he knocked on the door of number 16.11 It had probably never been opened since Tini Kleinmann turned the key in the lock in June 1942. Wickerl Helmhacker, who’d overseen her eviction, was still living in the building. But so was Karl Novacek, an old friend of Gustav’s. Karl worked as a cinema projectionist and was one of the handful of Aryan friends who had remained loyal to the Kleinmanns throughout the Nazi persecutions.12 He was overjoyed to learn that Gustav and Fritz were still alive in body and spirit.

He wasn’t alone. There were other true friends in the same street—Olga Steyskal, a shopkeeper who had an apartment in the building next door, and Franz Kral, a locksmith who lived in the next building along. The reaction was the same from all of them. As soon as they heard the news, Olga, Franz, and Karl hurried across the street to the Karmelitermarkt and came back with baskets of food for Wocher to take back to Auschwitz for Gustav and Fritz. Word also reached Fritz’s cousin, Karoline Semlak—Lintschi, as she was better known—who lived a few streets away from the Karmelitermarkt. Lintschi was Aryan by marriage, but unlike poor Helene in Döbling she had no qualms about exposing her Jewish origins. She put together a package of food and wrote a letter in which she enclosed photographs of her children. The food assembled by the three friends, together with Lintschi’s package and letter, filled two suitcases. Olga also wrote a letter for Gustav. She was deeply fond of him, as he was of her; there might have been sparks between them if he hadn’t already been married.

It was an incongruous, improbable occasion: a group of Aryan friends and a converted Jew packing off a Bavarian soldier in Wehrmacht uniform with suitcases full of loving gifts for two Jews in Auschwitz. It was strangely beautiful, but it left Wocher with a problem: conveying all this bounty to Fritz in safety was going to be quite a challenge.

Somehow he overcame the problem, smuggling the gifts into the factory and passing them over to Fritz.13 The food was very welcome, but even more so was the news of Lintschi and their friends. Fritz asked eagerly after his mother and sister, but Wocher shook his head gravely. Everyone he’d spoken to had said the same—Tini Kleinmann and her daughter had gone with the deportations to the Ostland and never been heard of since. Fritz’s disappointment was bitter; his last hope had been taken away from him. But he still clung to the faint possibility that they weren’t dead. Fritz’s aunts, Jenni Rottenstein and Bertha Teperberg, had been deported too; after a few months’ anxious suspense, in September 1942 they had both been summoned and put aboard one of the last Ostland transports to leave Vienna. Jenni had no family of her own other than her talking cat, but Bertha left behind her daughter and grandson. The two sisters went to their end together among the pines at Maly Trostinets.14

Fritz shared the food among his comrades in his work detail and took the news and the letters back to his papa. Despite the crushing news about Tini and Herta, Gustav was heartened to hear from his dear friends. His nature rebelled against giving up hope, and it gave him joy to think that he would be able to write to people he loved.

There was a much bleaker reaction from Gustl Herzog and Stefan Heymann when Fritz told them what he’d done; despite his own confidence in Alfred Wocher’s trustworthiness, Stefan in particular was deeply suspicious. It was too soon after Erich and Walter and the others. He warned Fritz against any further involvement with the German. Fritz’s respect for Stefan was great, but his longing for the old world and his family was greater.