17

Resistance and Betrayal

FRITZ KLEINMANN DID EVERYTHING he could to help save lives but he craved a more direct form of resistance, and he was not alone. By the middle of 1944, he was already deeply involved.

Putting up an armed resistance against the SS was impossible without weapons and support. As things stood, the only way to achieve that would be to make contact with the Polish partisans operating from their hideouts in the Beskids mountains, about forty kilometers to the south. Getting basic messages to them was one thing, but developing a proper relationship would require a meeting in person. Somebody would have to escape.

Word was passed to the partisans, and at the beginning of May a five-man team of escapees was chosen by the resistance leadership. First up was Karl Peller, one of the old Buchenwalder Jews, a thirty-four-year-old butcher. Then there was Chaim Goslawski, the senior in block 48 who had looked after Fritz after his staged death. Goslawski was a Polish-born Jew who had arrived in Auschwitz from Sachsenhausen at the same time as the Buchenwalders.1 He was a native of this region; if anyone could find a way to the partisans, it would be him. There was also a Jew from Berlin whose name Fritz never knew, plus two Poles known only to Fritz as “Szenek” and “Pawel,” who worked in the camp kitchen.2

Fritz was brought into the circle by Goslawski. He wouldn’t be among the escapees, but his help would be needed. He and Goslawski obtained civilian clothes from the Canada store, which the escapees would wear concealed under their camp uniforms. Meanwhile, other preparations were made, about which Fritz knew nothing.

On May 4, before morning roll call, Goslawski handed Fritz a small package, about the size of a loaf of bread, and instructed him to pass it to fellow conspirator Karl Peller, who worked on one of the Buna construction sites. As a block senior and functionary, Goslawski didn’t go out with the labor details.3 Fritz secreted it inside his uniform and they hurried off to roll call.

Later that morning, on his curtain-fitting rounds, Fritz managed to get to the site where Peller was at work and slipped the package to him. At noon, Szenek and Pawel arrived in the Buna Werke with the lunchtime soup for the prisoners. Fritz noticed that Chaim Goslawski had found some pretext to accompany them.

At roll call that evening, all five men—Peller, Goslawski, Szenek, Pawel, and the Berliner—were missing. They had walked out of the Buna Werke wearing their civilian disguises and disappeared. While the SS launched a search, an order was given that all prisoners were to remain standing on the roll-call square under guard.

There they remained as the hours ticked by, weary, aching. Midnight came and went, and the early hours of the morning wore away. Dawn found them still standing to attention, surrounded by a chain of armed sentries. Breakfast time approached, but there would be no bread or acorn coffee this morning. A whisper passed through the ranks; the SS were not only seeking the five missing men but also an unidentified prisoner who had been seen talking to Karl Peller on the construction site the previous morning. Fritz’s heart shrank in his breast; if he were identified, it would be the bunker for him this time, and the Black Wall. But despite his fear, he inwardly rejoiced. The escape had been a success. Eventually the prisoners were ordered to march off to work, and away they went with empty bellies, exhausted, but uplifted by hope.

Days went by and it seemed that Fritz was safe. Nobody identified him to the SS. Three weeks passed with no word, and then the blow fell. The two Poles, Szenek and Pawel, along with the Berliner, were brought back to the camp. They had been arrested by a police patrol in Cracow on May 26, twenty-two days after their escape.4 It was a shock and a mystery to the resistance, as Cracow was nowhere near the Beskids—almost in the opposite direction in fact. And where were Goslawski and Peller?

At roll call that evening, the three recaptured men were put on the Bock and lashed. And that, astonishingly, was the end of their punishment. Some time later, when a transport of several hundred Poles was sent from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, Szenek and Pawel were put on it.5 The Berlin Jew remained in Monowitz.

There the matter seemed to end, with a question mark over the fates of Goslawski and Peller and whether they were now with the partisans. Eventually, having been too scared to speak while the two Poles were still in the camp, the Berliner revealed what had happened after the escape. The package Fritz had conveyed from Goslawski to Karl Peller had been at the root of it. It had been stuffed with cash and jewelry stolen from the Canada store, which was intended as a payment to the partisans to secure their assistance. A rendezvous had been prearranged, but Goslawski and Peller never got there; on the first night after their escape, both men were murdered by Szenek and Pawel. The motive was the fortune they were carrying. The Berliner had been too terrified to intervene. The next day, instead of cutting loose with their booty, the three decided to head for the rendezvous after all. When they got there, the partisans were waiting for them. They weren’t happy; they’d been told to expect five men—where were the other two? Szenek and Pawel feigned ignorance, but the partisans weren’t satisfied with their excuses and evasions. They sheltered the three men for a week, but when Goslawski and Peller still didn’t show up, they called off the deal. Szenek, Pawel, and the Berliner were driven to Cracow and set loose. Lost and helpless, they simply wandered the streets until they were picked up by the police.

The Berliner’s confession was passed to Paul Kozwara, the camp senior. “P. K.,” as he was popularly known, was a tyrant, but a relatively benign one compared to the infamous Jupp Windeck (Kozwara liked to taunt the Muselmänner, for instance, but would whip any block senior he caught not distributing food fairly).6 Kozwara passed the confession on to the SS administration.

Nothing happened for a few weeks. Then one day Szenek and Pawel reappeared in Monowitz, brought back from Buchenwald on SS orders. A gallows appeared on the roll-call square and the prisoners were ordered out on parade. Fritz and his comrades marched into the square as if it were roll call, but this was different. Lined up in front of the gallows was a cordon of SS troopers with machine-pistols leveled at the ranks of prisoners. Commandant Heinrich Schwarz and SS-Lieutenant Schöttl stood on the podium as the two Poles were marched in. “Caps off!” came the order over the loudspeakers. Fritz and eight thousand others whipped off their caps and tucked them under their arms. Schöttl read the sentences into the microphone: both prisoners were sentenced to death for escape and for two counts of murder.

First Szenek was led up to the gallows, then Pawel. In typical SS fashion there was no drop; they were strung up, legs kicking and bodies jerking, twitching with diminishing force as the minutes passed and they slowly strangled. Eventually they were still. Fritz and the others had to stand motionless throughout the spectacle, a stark warning to anyone who dared resist or escape.7

The whole affair not only weakened the resistance through the loss of Goslawski and Peller but also revived all the old tensions and mistrust between the Poles and the German Jews.

And it sowed suspicion in the SS. Not long after the hanging, they claimed to have uncovered an escape plot among the roofing detail in the construction command. The prisoners were taken to the Gestapo bunker and subjected to horrific torture. On Commandant Schwarz’s orders, three of the suspects were hanged in a repeat of the same dreadful ritual. One of the victims was the brother of Freddi Diamant, the youngster who had been an unwilling sidekick of Jupp Windeck and was a friend of Fritz.8

More hangings followed—including three Russians accused of looting during the chaos following an air raid. In reality they had been searching for food in one of the bombed-out factory buildings. IG Farben’s own security guards had caught them and turned them in to the SS. Attacks from the air were a new thing in summer 1944 and gave new heart to the resistance, a sign that the Allies were getting closer.

In the late afternoon of Sunday, August 20, 1944, the first bombs fell out of clear blue sky. They exploded in the central and eastern end of the Buna Werke, close enough to shake the ground under the feet of people in the Monowitz camp. One hundred and twenty-seven American B-17 Flying Fortress bombers, flying from a base in Italy, drawing a comb of vapor trails across the blue five miles above Auschwitz, rained 1,336 bombs, each one a quarter-tonne of steel and high explosive.9

The terrified SS hid in their bunkers, but the prisoners were not provided for. In the camps they watched the pillars of black smoke, heard the titanic roar of the explosions, and felt the concussion through their bodies. The Luftwaffe flak batteries around the perimeter plumed smoke in answer, flinging up shells toward the distant bombers. Prisoners working in the factories threw themselves to the floor and rejoiced.

“The bombing was really a happy day for us,” one of them recalled years later. “We thought, they know all about us, they are making preparations to free us.” Another prisoner recalled, “We really enjoyed the bombing . . . We wanted once to see a killed German. Then we could sleep better, after the humiliation never to be able to answer back.”10

When the last echo died away and the bombers had gone, the ground in and around the Buna Werke was pocked with smoking craters. The buildings were dispersed over a vast area, and most of the bombs had failed to hit anything, but some found a mark. Buildings in the synthetic oil and aluminum production plants had been torn apart, as had various sheds, workshops, and offices. Some outlying bombs had landed in the various labor camps around the factory complex, including Monowitz. Altogether, around seventy-five prisoners were killed in the raid, and over one hundred and fifty injured.11

Seeing the SS terrified, seeing their invulnerability challenged by the American bombs, heartened many Jewish prisoners; on others it had the opposite effect. The young Italian Primo Levi, who had arrived in Monowitz in February, believed that the bombing hardened the will of the SS and brought about a solidarity between them and the German civilians in the Buna Werke; he even perceived it among the German green- and red-triangle prisoners: the criminals and politicals, some of whom recalled the Nazi propaganda about the influence of Jews on American and international policy. Levi despaired at the destruction in the factories, which he and his fellow slaves had to repair, and the interruption of the water and food supplies in the camp.12

The resistance did not despair, but they were disappointed. The appearance of bombers had prompted speculation that the Allies would start parachuting in soldiers and weapons. But they never came. In the days following the air raid, American airplanes were seen high overhead on a few occasions, but neither bombs nor parachutes fell; they were reconnaissance flights, carefully photographing the IG Farben works and the Auschwitz complex.

What particularly concerned the resistance was the relentless advance of the Red Army from the east and the prospect of the SS carrying out a last-minute mass liquidation of the whole camp, murdering all the prisoners before they could be liberated. Prisoners evacuated to Auschwitz from Majdanek before its liberation reported that all Jews in that camp had been murdered before the Red Army got there. Stefan Heymann and Gustl Herzog, who had planned in terms of a bloodless rescue, were shaken by this information.

The resistance drafted a letter addressed jointly to camp director Schöttl and Walther Dürrfeld, director of the IG Farben Buna Werke. It purported to be from a group of Polish partisans and informed the two men that their names were on a list of German war criminals that had been smuggled to the Allies. Their treatment after the war would depend on how they behaved toward the prisoners from now on, and they were explicitly warned against any liquidation attempt. The letter was smuggled out by a Czech civilian, Jiri Hubert, and mailed from the local post office.13 It prompted a search for the letter’s author by the Gestapo, who guessed that it originated in the camp. The search yielded nothing. Whether the letter had any effect or not remained to be seen.

Despite the executions, escape attempts didn’t stop. In October four Monowitz prisoners on an outside work detail overpowered their SS guard, seizing his rifle, and destroying it before making their escape.14 Other escapes were more elaborate. Fritz Sonnenschein was a relative newcomer to Monowitz, one of the Viennese Mischlinge; he was highly intelligent, and Gustl Herzog managed to maneuver him into a position doing clerical work in Schöttl’s office. There he picked up information about upcoming selections, which enabled the resistance to conceal vulnerable prisoners. Sonnenschein was a man of extraordinary resource and courage. One day he walked out of the camp disguised in a stolen SS sergeant’s uniform. He managed to get all the way to Vienna before the Nazis caught up with him, and he died in a shootout with Gestapo officers, defiant to the last.

Individual actions were inspiring, but the Jewish resistance needed more. Now that relations with the Polish prisoners had been soured, any further attempts to hook up with the partisans would be impossible. Instead, it was suggested that they try to make contact with the Soviet Red Army, which by winter 1944 had temporarily halted its advance, consolidating on a line running through Warsaw, west of Lublin, and about seventy to eighty kilometers east of Cracow. To stand any chance of contacting them, the resistance would need to establish a relationship with the Russian POWs held in Monowitz. There were several obstacles. The Russians were in a fenced-off section of the camp, in which they were subjected to “re-education” by the Nazis. But they worked in the Buna Werke, so they could be approached there via some of the Russian Jews who were known to the resistance. Another problem was that there were no loyal communists or Jews among them—they had all been shot immediately on capture—so there was little common ground. Nonetheless, Fritz Kleinmann and the others made the effort. Rudi Kahn, a German Jew who had been one of those Aryanized at the same time as Gustav, was a block senior in the Russian enclosure, and he helped. Eventually Rudi and some of his Russian friends succeeded in escaping. Everyone waited anxiously for news, and when none came they guessed he had evaded recapture.

This gave the resistance a glimmer of hope, but only a faint one. Listening to their discussions at meetings, gathering and weighing snippets of intelligence, Fritz felt a growing impatience. “It seemed to me too little to procure food, write letters, or to talk about resistance. If we were to be slain, we should at least take a few SS men with us.” He turned this thought over and over in his mind, but with no idea how to accomplish it, he kept it to himself and said nothing to his friends.

There was a second air raid by the Americans on September 13. They came for the oil plant in the Buna Werke, which was proving to be one of Germany’s most productive producers of synthetic fuel and therefore an important strategic target. Some of the bombers went off course and dropped their bombs mistakenly on Auschwitz I, where by good luck they hit the SS barracks, killing or badly injuring forty-three SS men; tragically a bomb fell on a sewing workshop, instantly killing forty prisoners, of whom twenty-three were Jews. Other stray bombs injured dozens more prisoners; a few fell on Birkenau, slightly damaging the rail tracks near the crematoria and killing about thirty civilian workers.15 Only slight damage was done to the oil plant, but bombs injured around three hundred prisoner workers, who as always were barred from entering the shelters. They had to find their own hiding places or take their chances in the open.

Many of them were glad to do so. Weekly in Monowitz prisoners were selected for the gas chambers—around two thousand of them on October 17 alone.16 In some prisoners’ minds, the American bombs symbolized resistance, in some imminent liberation. How long could it be now?

“We are coming to winter again—already our sixth,” Gustav wrote as the frost began to bite. “But we are still here, still our old selves.” News from the outside kept reporting the same thing—the Russians were at a standstill near Cracow. “I keep thinking that our stay here will soon come to an end,” wrote Gustav. How long could it drag on?

“I want you to get me a gun.”

Fredl Wocher was taken aback. He and Fritz often met up in the factory; normally Wocher would pass his friend some food or, on rare occasions when he’d been to Vienna, a letter or a package. This request was right out of left field.

“Can you do that for me?” Fritz asked urgently.

Wocher hesitated—he would have to think about it, he said relucantly. It was an extremely dangerous request.

“Think of all you’ve done for me,” Fritz insisted. “This is no more dangerous than any of that.”

Wocher wasn’t convinced. A decorated German soldier smuggling guns for a Jewish prisoner? That wasn’t merely dangerous, it was insane. Fritz was insistent; if there was a liquidation in Monowitz—as seemed increasingly probable—he wanted to be able to defend himself and his father.

A few days went by, and then they met again. To Fritz’s disappointment, Wocher didn’t have a gun for him. Instead he had an even more stunning suggestion. “We should escape together, you and I,” Wocher said. He had it all planned out. Once free of the camp, they would head west and south, making for the mountain country of the Austrian Tyrol. It would be easy to hide out there. As a Bavarian, Wocher knew the region; he would be able to arrange a safe sanctuary among the peasant mountain farmers. Besides being a secure place to hide, it was right at the nexus between the two Allied fronts: American and British forces were pushing hard into northern Italy, while Patton’s Third Army was driving through Alsace-Lorraine toward the Rhine and the German border. In no time, one or both of these advances would reach the Tyrol, and Fritz and Fredl would be liberated. It was better than waiting here and hoping to survive the Soviet onslaught. Wocher had fought against them and knew the pitiless violence of the Eastern Front: the mass murder, the callousness of the Red Army, which matched anything the SS was capable of.

Fritz thought it over. Wocher undeniably had a point. But it was out of the question for one simple reason: Fritz’s papa couldn’t make a grueling journey like that. Anyway, he probably wouldn’t agree to go; there were people in the camp and in the Buna Werke who depended on him, and he wouldn’t forsake them. And if Fritz went without him, as Fritz’s kapo, Gustav would probably be held responsible for his escape, and subjected to interrogation by the Gestapo.

No, escape was impossible. But Fritz still wanted a gun. Could Wocher get him one?

The German reluctantly gave in. “All right,” he said, “but I’ll need money. And Reichsmarks won’t do—make sure it’s American dollars or Swiss francs.”

The first person Fritz tried was Gustl Täuber, who worked in the clothing store where they kept the garments taken from new prisoners. It was a haunting place, stuffy, filled with racks of coats and jackets, stacks of folded pants, sweaters, shirts, bundles and heaps of unsorted stuff, shoes, suitcases, each with a name and address painted—a Gustav or a Franz, a Shlomo or a Paul, Frieda, Emmanuel, Otto, Chaim, Helen, Mimi, Karl, Kurt, and the last names: Rauchmann, Klein, Rebstock, Askiew, Rosenberg, Abraham, Herzog, Engel, Zuckermann, Adler, Eisenstein, Deutsch, Burgiel; and over and over again: Israel and Sara. Each one with a truncated address in Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, or just a number or birthdate. Every aisle between the racks and shelves redolent with their scents, their sweat and perfumes, mothballs and leather, serge, mildew, and decay.

Overseeing the store was Gustl Täuber, an old Buchenwalder. He was close to Fritz’s father’s age, a Jew from Jagielnice in Silesia,*1 born in the old days of the German Empire.17 Fritz had never liked him much; despite his long association with them all, Täuber was one of the very few who felt no bond of solidarity with his fellow prisoners and wouldn’t put himself out for anyone. But he was Fritz’s best hope of getting cash. They’d had a trading relationship for some time, Fritz giving Täuber his father’s bonus coupons in exchange for warm clothes that Fritz distributed to prisoners in need. Täuber used the coupons to buy vodka and (as an Aryanized Jew) visits to the brothel.

Without giving any details, Fritz asked him for cash, knowing that there was often money found in the clothing. Täuber immediately shook his head. Fritz pleaded in desperation, but Täuber was immovable; he wasn’t willing to put his privileges in jeopardy over some shady deal. This was a barefaced lie; he was happy enough to get involved in shady dealings when there was a brothel visit or a bottle of vodka in it for him.

From the clothing store Fritz went to the main bathhouse at the far end of the camp, next to the hospital. This was where new prisoners came for showers, disinfecting, and shaving. Cash and valuables that they had successfully concealed from the Canada searchers were often taken from them here. The bathhouse attendant was another old Buchenwalder, David Plaut, a Jewish salesman from Berlin.18 Plaut was a decent friend, and Fritz’s only remaining hope. Any pickings from the bathhouse were taken by the camp kapo, Emil Worgul, who was in overall charge, but Fritz reckoned Plaut, who did the actual work, must be able to sidetrack a little money for himself.

Again Fritz didn’t explain the real reason he needed the money; instead he spun a yarn about wanting to buy vodka with which to bribe Worgul to give some of his comrades transfers to easier labor details. It was a compelling argument, and it worked. Plaut went to his hiding place and came back with a little roll of bills, all US dollars.

Next day at work, Fritz met with Fredl Wocher and passed him the money. There followed several days of anxious waiting. Then one day Wocher showed up at their meeting wearing an expression of mingled triumph and fear and handed Fritz a pistol. It was a military-issue Luger. Although Wocher said nothing about how he’d obtained it, Fritz guessed it came from one of his friends in the Luftwaffe flak batteries. He showed Fritz how it worked—how to extract the magazine and load it with bullets, how to cock it and operate the safety catch. There were a couple boxes of ammunition with it.19

Now came the problem of getting it back to camp. Contraband food was one thing; firearms were in a different league. Retreating to a hiding place, Fritz dropped his pants and tied the Luger to his thigh. The pants were so baggy there was no chance of the outline of the gun being noticed. The ammunition went in his pockets. That evening he marched back to camp feeling both excited and terrified.

Fritz went straight to the hospital and found Stefan Heymann. Beckoning him to follow, he led his friend behind a mountain of dirty laundry and showed him the Luger. Stefan was horrified. “Are you crazy? Get rid of that thing! If you get caught with that it won’t just be you they kill—you’re putting our whole operation at risk.”

Hurt and indignant, Fritz replied: “You brought me up to be like this. You always taught me that I had to fight for my life.”

Stefan had no answer to that. Over the next few days they talked again and again; Fritz explained his thinking and gradually wore Stefan down. He described how he’d got the pistol from Fredl Wocher and said he was sure he could get more guns if he had more money. Stefan agreed to help, but he insisted that the whole thing be properly organized within the resistance.

Eventually Stefan managed to scrape together $200. Fritz took it to Fredl Wocher, and another period of waiting followed. Then one day Wocher led Fritz to a discreet spot in the factory and showed him where he had hidden another Luger and two MP 40 machine pistols—the distinctive submachine guns with pistol grips and long magazines, used by the SS and German soldiers everywhere. Again there were several boxes of ammunition for all three weapons.

This would be a much bigger challenge to smuggle into the camp. Fritz planned it carefully; it would take several trips. He obtained one of the huge pails used to bring soup to the prisoners in the factory and built a false bottom into it, under which he hid the ammunition. The Luger was hidden easily enough, like the last time, but the machine pistols were a different matter. Having been tutored in their use and maintenance by Wocher, he dismantled the first weapon and tied as many of the parts as he could to his bare torso.

That evening he marched back to the camp, sweating under the eyes of the SS and kapos. With winter deepening and the nights drawing in, it was dark at the end of his shift, so there was little chance that they’d notice his unusually bulky shape. Then he had to stand through roll call with the heavy, lethal items strapped to him. It dragged on painfully slowly for hours, with ritual punishments and sick and injured to be accounted for. The moment it ended Fritz hurried along to the hospital laundry. Inside, his friend Jule Meixner was waiting for him. Fritz hurriedly stripped off his uniform, untied the gun components, and passed them to Jule, who hid them. For security, Fritz wasn’t told exactly where—on the principle that nobody can give up a secret under torture if they don’t know it in the first place—but he suspected it was somewhere inside the building.20 Over the next several days, he repeated the dangerous operation until all the guns and ammunition were inside the camp.

Fritz felt pleased with himself; by bringing the Luger into the camp, he had forced Stefan’s hand and presented the whole resistance group with a fait accompli. They would never have done it without him. Now at least if the worst rumors about Majdanek were manifest here, they would be able to fight back.

As the days of December went by, Gustav went on with his work, turning out blackout curtains and coats in parallel. With no direct involvement in the resistance, he had no idea of the dangerous venture his beloved, difficult son had embarked on. Gustav was looking forward to Christmas, because Wocher would be going to Vienna again on leave. There had been a long interlude, and Olly, Lintschi, and the others had probably fallen prey again to the belief he and Fritz must be dead.

On Monday, December 18, Gustav’s workshop was busy with its output of curtains and coats when suddenly, over the soft, snickering clatter of sewing machines, they heard the rising moan of the air raid sirens, a pulsing, guttural howl echoing across the Buna Werke.21 Within seconds, doors were slamming, feet running, voices raised. The SS and the civilians were making for the shelters. Gustav and his staff looked at one another—some terrified, some resigned. There was no shelter for them to go to. Some people had prepared themselves makeshift hiding places, but these would be of little use if a bomb fell close.

After a few minutes, with the last panicked footsteps dying away, the distant drone of the bombers and the thumping of the flak guns began. The noise rose to a crescendo, and with it came the first earthshaking concussions of bombs—the crash when they exploded in buildings, the pounding as they blasted craters in the open ground. Gustav lay flat; this wasn’t a new terror for him; he’d spent whole weeks and months under near-constant bombardment in the trenches, and like every other veteran had learned to sit tight and wait for it to either pass or for one of the falling shells to find him and send him to oblivion. He knew well how useless and dangerous it was to panic. His great fear was always for Fritz, who was out on fitting work. Fritz had a hiding place among the buildings where he would at least be sheltered from flying debris.

Again the bombers were aiming for the synthetic oil plant but a lot of the explosions seemed farther away, as if they weren’t hitting their target. Suddenly, the floor beneath Gustav was rocked by a titanic explosion. Windows shattered, and there was a cacophony of tearing metal and masonry.

Eventually the shuddering from the last, distant explosions died away. Dust floated in the air, and beyond the bubble of silence immediately around him Gustav could hear distant screams and yelling, the pounding of the flak guns stuttering to a halt, and the drone of the bombers receding. The all-clear began to sound.

Climbing to his feet, Gustav found the workshop in disarray: sewing machines shaken loose and toppled from their benches, chairs knocked over, dust everywhere, shards of glass from the broken windows. The men and women stood up, coughing and blinking.

As soon as he was satisfied that nobody was hurt, Gustav’s first thought was for Fritz. He went outside, into the chaos of smoke and flame. Some buildings had been destroyed; there were dead prisoners scattered about in the open and among the rubble, injured men and women being helped out by their comrades.22 There was no sign of Fritz. Gustav hurried through the smoke, heading for Fritz’s hiding place, consumed by a rising sense of foreboding. Turning the corner, he reached the place. It wasn’t there anymore—there was just a hill of broken brickwork and twisted metal. Gustav stared in shock and disbelief at the wreckage; nobody could have survived in there. His Fritzl—his pride and joy, his dear, sweet, loyal Fritzl—was gone.

Gustav turned away and wandered back to the workshop in a daze of grief.

SS men and civilians were emerging from their shelters. The sentries had panicked at the start of the raid and made for the bunkers; hardly any had stayed at their posts. The fences were down in a few places, and several prisoners had escaped. Gustav stood and watched a moment as the SS tried to restore order. He was about to turn away when he saw two figures in stripes walking toward him through the smoke, one carrying a large toolbox and moving with a familiar gait. Gustav could hardly believe his eyes. He ran and threw his arms around Fritz. “My boy, my Fritzl, you’re alive!” he sobbed, kissing Fritz’s face and hugging him, repeating over and over, “You’re alive! My boy! It’s a miracle!”

He took the astonished Fritz by the arm and led him to the smoking remains of his hiding place. “It’s a miracle,” he kept repeating. Gustav’s faith in their good luck and fortitude, which had kept them alive and together for so long, was vindicated.

Another air raid fell on the Buna Werke the day after Christmas. The Americans had fixed on it as a prime target and wouldn’t let up until they’d reduced it to a desert of rubble. But each time they only succeeded in knocking down a few buildings, wounding a handful of SS men or IG Farben managers, killing dozens of prisoners and slave laborers, and reducing productivity for a few days or weeks. Each time, droves of slaves were forced to clear the rubble, repair, and rebuild. They sabotaged what they could and worked as slowly as they dared, and between themselves and the bombs they ensured that the Buna Werke would never produce any buna rubber, and its other plants would never approach full capacity.

On January 2, 1945, Fredl Wocher returned from Vienna with letters and packages from Olga and Karl. “We get the greatest joy from knowing that we still have good friends at home,” Gustav wrote in his diary. He and Fritz had the best of friends right here, in Fredl Wocher, who had proved himself true countless times, and in so many ways.

Fritz was growing worried about Wocher. With the Red Army not far away and likely to begin a new offensive any time now, Fritz tried to persuade his friend to disappear before they reached Auschwitz and discovered what had been happening here.

Wocher didn’t see the need. “My conscience is clear,” he said. “More than clear. Nothing will happen to me.”

Fritz wasn’t so sure. He reminded Wocher of the hatred the Russians felt for all Germans—which Wocher knew all too well from his service at the front. And Fritz pointed out that however the Soviet soldiers behaved, there were thousands of Russian prisoners in Auschwitz who would be thirsty for vengeance. Not many German civilians or soldiers had been as good or conscientious as Sergeant Alfred Wocher, and he couldn’t depend on there being any discrimination once the wave of revenge began sweeping through the camps. But Wocher was stubborn; he’d never run away before, and he wasn’t about to start now.

It was clear to Fritz that the end might come any day. His preparations had been in train for two months. Thanks to him, the resistance had a cache of weapons to defend themselves. Meanwhile, Fritz had taken the extra precaution of equipping himself and his father for escape. Having dismissed the idea of fleeing to the Tyrol, he had to accept that fighting might not be an option either. Since November, on Fritz’s initiative, he and his father had been dodging the weekly head shaving and letting their hair grow. Roll call was the only time prisoners routinely took their caps off in front of the SS, and in the winter months the ritual always happened during darkness. Fritz also acquired a cache of civilian clothes from David Plaut at the bathhouse, which he hid in a toolshed in the camp. There were enough jackets and pants for himself, his papa, and a few of their closest comrades.

For several months the Red Army had been content to hold the line along the Vistula, consolidating, preparing, reinforcing. On January 12 they launched their offensive—a colossal, well-planned assault along the whole length of the front line in Poland, involving three armies made up of two and a quarter million men. It was the final push, designed to drive the Germans back into their Fatherland. It worked; the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, outnumbered more than four to one, fell back under the onslaught, holding out in a handful of fortified Polish cities. Frustratingly, the sector of the front near Cracow moved slower than most. Each day the prisoners in Auschwitz heard the distant thump of Russian guns, like a clock ticking away the moments to deliverance.

On January 14, Alfred Wocher said a last good-bye to Gustav and Fritz. He had been drafted into the Volkssturm. This hastily organized army, made up of old men, underage boys, and disabled veterans, was tasked with conducting the last-ditch defense of the Reich. Any man capable of holding a rifle or wielding an antitank grenade was called up for service. So Wocher would not be found by the Russians at Auschwitz after all, and he was pleased to do this final duty for his Fatherland. Whatever its crimes, it was Germany after all, his home, a land full of women and children, and the Russians would tear it apart without mercy if they were permitted.

With winter deepening, the weather was deteriorating. There was thick snow on the ground, and on Monday, January 15, the day after Fredl Wocher’s departure, Auschwitz awoke to thick fog. The prisoners in Monowitz were kept standing at roll call for several hours until the fog thinned enough for the SS to feel safe marching them to work.23

In the factories, work went on at full pace. The previous night, an American plane had flown over Monowitz and the Buna Werke at low altitude, illuminating the whole area with parachute flares and taking photographs. Photos taken the day before had shown nearly a thousand bomb craters in the factory complex and forty-four wrecked buildings, but the nighttime images revealed that repairs were well in hand and that the synthetic fuel plant—the most important of all—was virtually untouched.24

On January 17 the prisoners in Monowitz were held back at roll call again. They remained on standby throughout the morning, and in the afternoon they were marched to the factories. After only two and a half hours’ work they were marched back again.

The SS were becoming extremely jittery. Each morning, the rumble of artillery was a little less distant. Cracow was still holding out, but on this day the chief of the General Government*2—most of which had now fallen to the Red Army—was strafed and bombed by Russian planes while departing the city, turning his withdrawal into a rout. By evening, the Soviet guns were nearer still, and the Auschwitz commandant, SS-Major Richard Baer, gave orders to begin evacuating the camps.

Invalids were to be left behind, and any prisoner who resisted, delayed, or escaped was to be shot immediately.25 “My dear ones!” wrote Jósef Cyrankiewicz, leader of the Auschwitz I resistance, to his partisan contacts in Cracow, “We are experiencing the evacuation. Chaos. Panic among the drunken SS.”26 He begged the partisans to arrange a visit to Auschwitz by the Red Cross, to prevent a massacre of the sick. In fact there wouldn’t be time; the evacuation was well under way.

That same evening, all the patients in the prisoner hospital in Monowitz were examined by the doctors; those who were well enough to march were struck off the patient list. The rest—numbering over eight hundred—were left to the care of nineteen volunteer medical staff.27

The following day, Thursday, January 18, all eight thousand prisoners in Monowitz were kept standing on the square all day—hour after hour in the bone-aching cold. Fritz and Gustav, aware that the end was imminent, had put on their civilian clothes under their uniforms, ready to make a break for it the moment they got the opportunity. At least with their extra layers they were slightly less painfully cold than their comrades. Dusk began to gather.

Finally, at 4:30 PM, the SS guards came among them, ordering them into columns. With their limbs numb and joints seizing up, the prisoners were assembled like an army division into company-size units of about one hundred, further grouped into battalion-size units of around a thousand, which in turn formed three larger units, each containing up to three thousand. SS officers, Blockführers, and guards took command of each unit.28 Anticipating trouble, every SS man had his rifle, pistol, or machine pistol ready in his hands. Fritz thought regretfully about his guns, concealed somewhere in the hospital laundry. It was impossible to get anywhere near them now. If he and his comrades were massacred, they’d have no chance of fighting back.

Disturbingly, SS-Sergeant Otto Moll was on hand. Moll wasn’t part of the Monowitz guard battalion; notoriously he’d been director of the Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria. He walked among the waiting columns as they were issued with their meager marching rations, dishing out abuse while they got their bread, margarine, and jam. Moll, personally responsible for tens of thousands of murders, was a deeply unsettling presence in these circumstances. He stopped beside Gustav, drawn by something about his appearance, looked him up and down, then gave him two hard slaps across the face, left and right. Gustav staggered and recovered. Moll moved on.29

At last the order was given and the columns began to move. Tired already from standing in the bitter cold all day, they marched off the roll-call square, five abreast, wheeling left onto the camp street. Passing the barrack blocks, the kitchens, the little empty building where the camp orchestra had lived, the prisoners walked out through the open gateway. They were leaving a place which for some of them had been home for over two years. A few of the old survivors like Gustav and Fritz—especially Fritz—had helped build it from bare grassy fields; their comrades’ blood had gone into its construction, and pain, blood, and terror had been the unrelenting life of the place ever since. But it was home nonetheless, by simple virtue of the animal urge to belong and attach oneself to the place where one ate and slept and shat; however much one hated it, it was where friends were, and where every stone and timber was familiar.

Where they were going, they had no idea. West, that was all they knew. All the Monowitz subcamps were on the move—over thirty-five thousand men and women taking to the snow-lined roads leading west from the town called Oświęcim.30