20

The End of Days

BY THE CLOSE OF MARCH, when he’d been at Ellrich about a month and a half, things had improved a little for Gustav; not much, but just enough to nourish his iron will and keep his body bound to his soul. He’d been taken off track-laying and was working in the tunnels as a carpenter. His kapo was a decent man named Erich who had secret sources of food for himself and gave Gustav his soup ration.1 Nonetheless, like everyone, Gustav was starving and grew more filthy and infested with lice with every passing day. He lived his days underground, and the society in which he lived likewise descended into the fourth circle of the pit of Hell: most of the slaves were on the brink of death from starvation, the stronger preying on the weak, robbing them of their meager rations. The only plentiful thing was corpses, and there had been occurrences of cannibalism. Over a thousand prisoners had died in March, and a further sixteen hundred walking skeletons had been sent by the SS to an army barracks in Nordhausen that served as a dump for the spent and useless.2

In April, with American forces only days away, the SS began pulling the plug. On April 3, all work was halted and final preparations began for the evacuation of Mittelbau-Dora and its subcamps. That same night, the British Royal Air Force firebombed Nordhausen, hitting the barracks and killing hundreds of the sick prisoners. The raid spurred on the SS evacuation, which began the next day. That night the RAF bombers visited again, razing the town and adding more prisoners to the death toll.3

The evacuation of Ellrich began on April 4 and took until the next day to complete. All the prisoners who were fit to move were loaded into cattle cars. As the final train prepared to leave on April 5, the last SS man to depart the camp personally shot the dozen or so remaining sick prisoners. The SS left the camp empty, and when the US 104th Infantry Division reached Ellrich a week later they found not a living soul.4

Gustav thought back on the journey from Auschwitz. The weather was far milder now, and they were in closed cars. Gustav had room to sit, and they even got a little food. Not nearly as much as they should have received, however—supply cars stocked with bread and canned food had been coupled to the rear of the train when it left Ellrich, but at some point they had been disconnected; peering through gaps in the car side, the prisoners could see that the food cars were no longer there. A little relief came around the fourth day when the train stopped off at a town in which there was a bread factory, where they were intended to pick up rations. Gustav met an English prisoner of war who gave him two kilos of bread and pumpernickel—enough to keep him and his comrades going for three days.5

The train had come far into the north of Germany, past Hanover and on in the direction of Bremen. On April 9 it reached its final destination: the small town of Bergen, the unloading place for Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

With the ring of enemies closing in more and more tightly, the SS, under Himmler’s instructions, was determined to hold on to its prisoners, who were intended to serve one final purpose—as hostages.

Bergen-Belsen was one of the last handful of concentration camps remaining on German-held soil. By the time Gustav Kleinmann arrived, the camp, designed for only a few thousand, had swollen beyond all sense or reason, and despite thousands of deaths every month from starvation and disease—seven thousand in February, eighteen thousand in March, nine thousand in the first days of April—the living population had climbed to over sixty thousand souls, existing among piles of unburied corpses in an atmosphere rife with typhus. In Himmler’s peculiar mind, he was saving them, trying to win favor with the Allies by showing himself merciful to the Jews rather than the architect of their mass murder.6

Into this boiling mass of humanity, Gustav and the other survivors of Mittelbau-Ellrich were to be driven. Many had not survived the journey, and there was the usual cargo of corpses to be unloaded from the train. As they marched from the station toward the camp, an astonishing thing happened that was both terrible and wonderful. The column of ghosts met another marching in the same direction; they were all Hungarian Jews—men, women, children, all starving and wretched. Many of the Ellrich survivors were Hungarian also, and to Gustav’s wonder, first one person then another and another from one column recognized relatives in the other. They broke ranks and ran to them, calling their names. Beloved friends, mothers, sisters, fathers, children, long separated and thinking their dear ones dead, found them again on the road to Belsen. It was both joyous and heartrending, and Gustav could not find the words to describe what he saw—“one can only imagine such a reunion.” What he would not give to be so reunited with Tini and Herta and Fritz. But not here, not in this place.

There were no anchors left, no touchstones, no certainties; even the regime of the camp system had broken down. Bergen-Belsen was full to bursting, and the fifteen thousand who arrived from the Mittelbau camps were turned away by the commandant, Josef Kramer. Their SS escorts found accommodation for them at a Wehrmacht panzer training school a kilometer away, between Belsen and Hohne. Its barracks were pressed into service as an overflow concentration camp, designated Belsen Camp 2, under the command of SS-Captain Franz Hössler, who had accompanied the transports from Mittelbau.7 This man was notorious; a thuggish-looking individual with a jutting chin and sunken mouth, before Mittelbau Hössler had been in command of one of the women’s sections in Auschwitz-Birkenau, participating in selections and gassings and countless acts of individual murder and brutality. It had been Hössler who had selected the women “volunteers” sent to the Monowitz brothel.8

Physically the barracks in the panzer training school were a pleasant change for the prisoners; clean, airy white buildings set around asphalt squares dispersed among pleasant woodland. The Wehrmacht staff—now consisting of a Hungarian regiment—supplemented the SS guards and helped manage the prisoners. The rations they were given were better quality, but the quantities were pathetically inadequate for so many people. Gustav and his comrades were reduced to foraging potato and turnip peelings from the garbage bins outside the barrack kitchens—“anything to relieve the hunger,” he noted in his diary. In all his time in the camps, he had never been surrounded by so much tight-pressed humanity—or seen helpless starvation on such a scale. The faith that had kept him going was beginning to ebb away. What made him special? Why should he make it to the end when all these thousands had not or would not?

In their own way, the Hungarian troops were as brutal as the SS. Most of the officers were well-groomed, with pomaded hair, and had instilled in their mostly illiterate men an anti-Semitic fascist ideology that was on a par with anything the SS could provide. They were callous and apt to shoot inmates for entertainment. Their main duty, aside from keeping the prisoners under general guard, was to protect the kitchens, and they would stand in the square between the barracks taking shots at the prisoners foraging for food, killing dozens of them; in the main camp it was the same, with hundreds shot each day.9 Some of the Hungarian troops retained a mystic devotion to the Nazi cause. One Jewish woman encountered a Hungarian near the perimeter of the camp; seeing her Star of David, he regretted that the work of exterminating the Jews had not yet been completed, telling her that Hitler would return, “and again we shall fight side by side.”10

On the first night in Belsen Camp 2, Gustav stood vigil in the upper story of his building. Looking out the window toward the south, he saw the dark sky glowing orange. It looked to him as if a town—possibly Celle, twenty or so kilometers away—was in flames. Even as Gustav watched, it flashed and erupted with explosions. That wasn’t aerial bombing—that was a battle front.11 His sinking heart began to rise. “I think to myself, now the liberators must be here soon—and I have faith again. I think to myself still, the lord God does not forsake us.”

On April 12, with the tacit consent of Commandant Kramer, local Wehrmacht commanders made contact with the British forces advancing toward them and negotiated for the peaceful surrender of Bergen-Belsen. In order to contain the epidemic of typhus, a zone of several kilometers around the camp would become neutral territory.

In the barracks, Gustav noticed that most of the Hungarian soldiers had begun wearing white armbands as a token of neutrality. Even some of the SS were doing the same—including the camp leader, SS-Corporal Sommer, whom Gustav had known in Auschwitz as “one of the bloodhounds.” At last Gustav felt sure that the prisoners would be handed over to the British without bloodshed. “It is high time,” he wrote, because the SS “wanted to make of us a St. Bartholomew’s Night massacre under English illumination, but the Hungarian colonel didn’t want any part of it, and so they have left us alone.”

Two days later, on April 14, Gustav saw the first British tanks in the distance. In the barracks there was unconstrained joy, and the celebrations went on all night. Soon they would be set free.

Captain Derrick Sington struggled to make himself heard over the convoy of tanks clanking and roaring along the road leading through the town of Winsen an der Aller. Following a race to catch up with the tanks and scout cars of the 23rd Hussars leading the advance, Sington had found the regiment’s intelligence officer and was trying to inform him of his special mission over the din of military traffic.

Derrick Sington was commander of the No. 14 Amplifying Unit of the British Army Intelligence Corps. Equipped with light trucks mounted with loudspeakers, the unit’s role was to disseminate information and propaganda. His commanding officer had ordered him to proceed with the advance column of the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery, to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. That regiment would be establishing and taking control of a neutral zone surrounding the camp. The prisoners—or “internees” as the British were officially calling them—must not be allowed to leave the zone. Information from the Wehrmacht indicated a typhus epidemic in the camp, and it could not be allowed to spread into the areas behind the British front line. Once the camp had been secured, Captain Sington was to take his loudspeaker truck inside and make the requisite announcement to the inmates. As a German-speaker, he would also act as an interpreter for Lieutenant Colonel Taylor, commander of the 63rd AT, who would be in overall command of the zone.12

Yelling at the top of his voice over the clattering squeal of tracks and roaring engines, Sington explained all this to the Hussars intelligence officer, who leaned out of the turret of his tank with his hand cupped over his ear. He nodded and told Sington to fall into line. Sington jumped back into his seat, gestured to his driver, and they pulled into the road, joining the flow of armored vehicles.

Beyond Winsen, the column passed through open countryside that gave way to thick woodlands of firs, whose powerful scent mingled with the exhaust fumes and the stench of burning. The infantry advancing ahead of the armor were torching the undergrowth on either side with flamethrowers. There had been a tough fight for Winsen, with tanks lost to unseen German 88-mm guns, so they weren’t taking any chances today. If there were snipers concealed in the thickets, they’d soon be flushed out.

Not far up the road, Sington saw the first warning notices—DANGER TYPHUS—marking the perimeter of the neutral zone. Sington pulled over and was met by two German NCOs, who handed him a note written in bad English inviting him to meet the Wehrmacht commandant at Bergen-Belsen. Meanwhile, the column of Sherman and Comet tanks carried on rolling.

Sington followed them, and as the road swung eastward he spotted the camp—an enclosure of high barbed-wire fences and watch towers cut out of the forest, flanking the left-hand side of the road for about one and a half kilometers. Sington’s truck pulled off the road at the main gate, where he was met by a small group of very smartly dressed enemy officers: one in the field-gray of the Wehrmacht, a highly decorated Hungarian captain in khaki, and a bulky, fleshy-faced SS officer with a simian jaw and a scar on his cheek. This man proved to be SS-Captain Josef Kramer, commandant of Bergen-Belsen.

The Englishman introduced himself. While they waited for the arrival of Colonel Taylor, Sington fell into polite conversation with Kramer. He asked him how many prisoners were in the camp; Kramer answered forty thousand here, and an additional fifteen thousand in Camp 2 up the road. And what kind of prisoners were they? “Habitual criminals and homosexuals,” said Kramer, looking furtively at the Englishman. Sington said nothing in answer to this but later noted that he had “reason to believe it was an incomplete statement.”13

Their conversation was mercifully cut short by the arrival of Colonel Taylor’s jeep. He ordered Sington to go into the camp and make his announcement, then roared on up the road toward Bergen.

After a show of reluctance, Kramer allowed the barrier to be lifted, then at Sington’s invitation he climbed up on the running board of the loudspeaker truck, and they drove in through the gates. With Kramer giving directions, the truck passed through the first compound, containing the SS facilities, then on through the inner gate into the main camp.

To Sington, who had tried many times to imagine what the inside of a concentration camp would be like, it was unlike anything he had pictured. There was a straight street through the center, with separately enclosed compounds on either side, each filled with wooden barrack blocks. The place was suffused with “a smell of ordure” that reminded Sington of “the smell of a monkey-house” in a zoo; “sad blue smoke floated like a ground mist between the low buildings.” The excited inmates “crowded to the barbed wire fences . . . with their shaven heads and their obscenely striped penitentiary suits, which were so dehumanising.” Sington had been with the advance from Normandy through France, Belgium, and Holland, and had witnessed gratitude from many different liberated peoples; but the cheers from these skeletal, wasted ghosts, “these clowns in their terrible motley, who had once been Polish officers, land-workers in the Ukraine, Budapest doctors, and students in France, impelled a stronger emotion, and I had to fight back my tears.”14

He drove through, stopping his truck at intervals, the loudspeakers blaring out the announcement that the camp zone was in quarantine under British administration. The SS had surrendered control and would now withdraw; the Hungarian regiment would remain, but under direct command of the British Army. Prisoners must not leave the area due to risk of spreading typhus. Food and medical supplies were being rushed to the camp with all haste.

It was greeted with explosions of joy. The inmates spilled out of the compounds, surrounding the truck. Kramer was alarmed, and he wasn’t the only one. A Hungarian soldier began firing his rifle directly over the heads of the prisoners. Sington jumped out of his truck. “Stop shooting!” he ordered, pulling his revolver, and the soldier lowered his rifle. But no sooner had the shooting stopped than, to Sington’s amazement, a band of men in prisoner uniforms armed with cudgels ran into the crowd, lashing and beating the prisoners with appalling brutality. Sington, who had no idea of the existence of kapos and block seniors, was stunned by this spectacle. One poor skeletal wretch was on the ground, but still the kapo kept up the rain of blows.

When they arrived back at the main gate, Sington said to Kramer, “You’ve made a fine hell here.”15

Sington hadn’t seen the half of it. His brief tour had shown him only the throng of survivors, and it would be a day or two before he finally discovered the burial pits, the crematorium, and the grounds strewn and stacked with thousands of naked, emaciated corpses.

Pulling out of the gate, he turned his truck toward Camp 2, to repeat his round of announcements.

There had been celebrations the day before when Gustav saw the tanks in the distance. Today, the British column had come rolling up the main Bergen road, passing by the camp, and little seemed to happen. Then the loudspeaker truck arrived. Captain Sington’s announcement was drowned out by cheering.

The prisoners in Camp 2, although in a dreadful state, weren’t nearly as wretched as those in the main camp. As soon as the loudspeaker truck departed, the lynchings began. Hundreds of men, exalted in their fury and encouraged by their strength in numbers, singled out the individuals who had tortured them. Gustav watched dispassionately as certain SS guards and green-triangle block seniors were strung up or beaten to death. Gustav saw at least two murderers from Auschwitz-Monowitz die and felt no pity or remorse for it. The Hungarian troops made no move to intercede. That afternoon, when the killing was done, the remaining SS were made to remove the bodies and buried them the next day with their own hands.

On April 17, the British began taking records of all the surviving prisoners in Camp 2, ordering them by nationality; Bergen-Belsen had been transformed into a displaced persons camp, and the inmates were being prepared for repatriation. Gustav remained with the Hungarian Jews; he’d made many good friends among them, and with his long experience of the camps they had chosen him to be a room senior.

It was a liberation and yet not a liberation. Gustav and his comrades were no longer under the heel of the SS; the British brought in food and medical supplies, and they ate well and began to recover their health. It was very different from the main camp, where the inmates were in such a terrible state that thousands died in the weeks following liberation. Yet they were all still prisoners. Because of the quarantine, the Hungarian soldiers were under orders from the British to prevent anyone from leaving. As far as Camp 2 was concerned, this was preposterous—the was no typhus here, and no need to keep the prisoners incarcerated. Gustav began to chafe, longing to experience freedom again after all these years.

His first priority, though, was to let his family know that he was alive and well. He wasn’t the only one. The liberation of Belsen was a huge international story; there were newsreels and radio reports, and the papers were full of it. Across Europe and in Britain and America, the relatives of people taken by the Nazis heard the reports and sent desperate inquiries. Periodically, Captain Sington’s loudspeaker truck would tour the camp, broadcasting the names of people whose families had inquired.16

Gustav thought of Edith and Kurt. He hadn’t seen Edith since her departure for England in early 1939 and had heard no news of her since the beginning of the war. Kurt too had been cut off since December 1941. Gustav wrote a message detailing his whereabouts and block number. Providing Edith’s last known address in Leeds, he entrusted it—along with the thousands of messages from other inmates—to the British administration.17

Meanwhile, the British got on with the enormous task of looking after the liberated people. The main camp was the first priority. Food and water were brought in, and medical staff began their work of trying to save as many lives as possible. Handling the dead blasted the minds of those who witnessed it. The corpses lay in heaps in the thousands, and the half-dead, half-living moved around them as if they weren’t there, stepping over them, sitting down to their scraps leaning against stacks of the dead.18 Great pits were excavated, dozens of meters long and several meters deep. At first the SS were forced to carry the dead into the pits by hand, jeered at and cursed by survivors; a few SS men made a run for the forest, but they were shot down and their comrades had to drag their bodies back. Into the pits they went, along with their victims.19 The task proved overwhelming in the end; there were just too many bodies to bury by hand, and the bulldozers that had dug the pits had to push the stacks of decomposing corpses into them. It took nearly two weeks before the last were buried.20

The main camp was gradually evacuated, and the survivors moved to the clean, solid buildings of the panzer training school; the former Camp 2 was converted into a huge hospital, named Bergen-Hohne. The transfer would take about a month, due to the weakness of most of the survivors. As the infected, insanitary, broken-down wooden barracks in the main camp were emptied, they were burned down with flamethrowers.

Experts in typhus and famine relief were brought in, along with general medical staff. It was traumatic for all of them. One English nurse who arrived on April 19 felt shame and remorse that, having heard of the existence of such camps as early as 1934, she had never realized—and hadn’t wanted to realize—that they could be like this. She and her colleagues were “stirred with a cold anger against those primarily responsible, the Germans, an anger which grew daily at Belsen.”21 Others were shocked by how abuse and extreme degradation had reduced many survivors to an animalistic state, fighting for food, eating voraciously from bowls that they had just used as bedpans, with only a wipe with a rag between uses, living among rotting corpses without noticing the choking stench.22

It was measure of the state of these survivors that the Mittelbau transferees, wasted and starved as they were, were considered relatively fit and healthy. The influx from the main camp raised a problem for them: it brought typhus into their vicinity. The infected were put in a set of buildings that were cordoned off, but their presence still increased the risk that it would spread throughout the barracks.

Gustav was not alone in desperately wanting to leave this terrible, haunted place. He wasn’t sick, but like everyone else he was under quarantine. Also, there was still fighting going on outside the neutral zone, and it was still dangerous out there. Nonetheless, Gustav was itching to go.

On April 25, the first repatriation transports were allowed to leave. Those who departed were a selection of French, Belgian, and Dutch survivors. The way to their homelands lay to the west, in liberated countries. Those who came from Germany, Austria, Poland, Russia, and Hungary would have to wait, regardless of their state of health. Their countries were either war zones or still in German hands. Some were now Soviet-occupied territory, and repatriation would present a whole new world of difficulties. Moreover, within German-held territory there were still concentration camps not yet liberated—Mauthausen-Gusen, for one, where at that very moment the SS leadership were plotting to murder all the prisoners by trapping them in the tunnels.

Gustav watched the transports go with longing. It gave him hope, but as the days passed and no further transports left, he started growing impatient. It was now over two weeks since the British had liberated the camp. It didn’t matter that it was irrational, that Austria wasn’t yet free, Gustav was sure he could find his way home. He believed that Fritz would be in Vienna now, waiting for him. Gustav needed to get back there somehow.

He waited until the weekend was over, and on the morning of Monday, April 30, Gustav set out. Taking his few belongings and a little food, he walked out of his barrack block and along the asphalt path, heading for the road. A Hungarian soldier stepped in front of him, rifle raised. Where did he think he was going? Gustav told him he was leaving, going home. There was a look in the soldier’s eyes no different from the expression Gustav had seen in hundreds of SS guards—the look of an anti-Semitic fascist regarding a Jewish prisoner. Until two weeks ago this soldier had been fighting alongside the Nazis. Gustav went to walk past him. The soldier swung his rifle-butt and smacked Gustav in the chest. “Try that again and I’ll shoot you,” he said.

Gustav staggered, then turned and went back to his barrack. He was trapped in this place, liberated but not free.

Fritz stood waiting amid the dense crowd of prisoners in the chilly, dripping, cavernous tunnel, wondering what was going on. Minutes ticked by, but there were no sounds of airplanes, no thump of explosions: just the echoing susurrus of tens of thousands of prisoners breathing and murmuring to one another. Hours passed. The prisoners, who were accustomed to standing at roll calls that dragged on just like this, thought little of it. A false alarm, presumably. At least they weren’t having to work.

Most of them would never learn the true reason why they’d been lured into the tunnels, would never be aware of the complications that kept them standing there for so many hours. The explosive charges, bombs, and mines embedded around the entrance were failing to detonate. Paul Wolfram, the DESt manager in charge of blowing up the tunnel entrance, would later claim that it was reluctance on his part to commit mass murder, adding that the bombs and mines had no detonators. Commandant Ziereis—who spent much of this period drunk—claimed that he had reservations about the whole business. But a story among some of the survivors claimed that a Polish prisoner named Władvsłava Palonka, an electrician, had discovered the detonation wires and cut them.23

At 4:00 PM the all-clear sounded, and the prisoners who had walked in unknowingly to their deaths walked out again and filed back to their blocks in the camps. For the time being they were safe, rescued at the last minute either by an uncharacteristic failure of the SS’s murderous instincts or an ingenious act of daring by a resourceful prisoner. Had it succeeded, it would have killed over twenty thousand and would have been one of the largest single acts of mass murder in the history of Europe.24

Routine resumed for a couple days, but on Tuesday, May 1, the prisoners were not sent to work. For Fritz there was a sense of déjà vu; the mood among the SS was like at Monowitz in the middle of January, but now the panic was deeper.

On May 3, all the SS guards disappeared from the camp. The fanatical Nazis among them had gone off intending to fight a last-ditch defense in the mountains, while the rest shed their uniforms and went into hiding among the civilian populations in the cities. Command of Mauthausen-Gusen was officially handed over to the Vienna civil police force, and camp administration fell to the Luftwaffe. They were aided by a detachment of the Vienna fire service who had come here as political prisoners in 1944.25 There would be no evacuation from Mauthausen. There was nowhere left to go.

The Allies were closing in on Austria from three directions. In the south, the 15th Army Group—an international force of Americans, British, Canadians, Poles, Indians, New Zealanders, and one Jewish Brigade—was pushing into the South Tyrol, the mountainous borderland between Italy and Austria. It was here that the Nazis had been hoping to make a last stand in an imaginary “Alpine Fortress” that they had never gotten around to creating.

In the east, the Red Army had crossed the Hungarian-Austrian border at the end of March and immediately began moving to encircle Vienna. By April 6, the city was surrounded by two Soviet armies and under siege. The German forces remaining in Vienna—around forty thousand troops with only twenty-six functioning tanks—were hopelessly insufficient to defend it against the vastly superior Soviet force, and the siege was short lived. By April 7, Soviet troops were in the southern part of the inner city, and on April 10 the Germans evacuated the districts east of the Danube Canal, including Leopoldstadt. The Danube bridges were captured, and on April 13, the last SS armored unit abandoned the city.26 Vienna was liberated from the Nazis seven years almost to the day since Hitler had held his bogus plebiscite to consolidate his political grip on Austria. Now he was trapped in his Berlin bunker and his grand Reich was reduced to a tiny, bleeding stump.

The third spearhead into Austria came from the northwest, where the American 65th Infantry Division, part of General Patton’s Third Army, crossed the Bavarian stretch of the Danube on April 27 against stiff German resistance. Forced to hold back his desired drive into Austria at several points due to an agreement with the Soviet Union, Patton juggled his divisions and sent his XII Corps into Austria north of the Danube, less than a hundred kilometers northwest of Linz and Mauthausen. They faced heavy fighting from fanatical German forces who had taken to hanging deserters from roadside trees.27 Leading the American advance was the 11th Armored Division, and on May 5, as the advance pushed down the Danube, the very tip of the spearpoint consisted of a patrol from the 41st Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron and a platoon from the 55th Armored Infantry Battalion. Probing the Danube valley east of Linz they came to the villages of St. Georgen and Gusen, and first laid eyes on the camps.

For sheer horror, Mauthausen and Gusen rivaled Bergen-Belsen, which had been liberated three weeks earlier. Like Belsen, Mauthausen had been a sink into which the SS concentration camps had drained. Tens of thousands of prisoners had been transferred here, and the death rate had spiraled to over nine thousand a month. The walking cadavers in striped uniforms who greeted the American liberators were found to be living among tens of thousands of their unburied, half-buried, or half-burned dead. The stench of it was what stuck in the minds of the GIs. “The smell and the stink of the dead and the dying, the smell and the stink of the starving,” recalled one officer. “Yes, it is the smell, the odor of the death camp that makes it burn in the nostrils and memory. I will always smell Mauthausen.”28

Olive-green tanks bearing the white American star, scarred and weathered, rolled into the camp compounds. In Gusen I, Sergeant Albert J. Kosiek from Chicago stood on top of his Sherman and yelled in English to the crowd of emaciated prisoners, “Brothers, you are free!”29 His announcement was translated into all the prisoners’ languages by a representative of the International Red Cross; bursts of various national anthems came from the crowd, and the Volkssturm officer in command of the German guards presented his sword to Sergeant Kosiek.

In Gusen II, Fritz Kleinmann greeted his liberation without any overwhelming joy. He was too weak and demoralized to celebrate with any fervor. The typical life expectancy for a prisoner in Mauthausen-Gusen was four months, even if he began from a state of robust health. Fritz, having been only passably healthy when he arrived, had experienced three months. He was scarcely alive, little more than bones shrouded in skin, marked with bruises and sores.

The spirit of resistance and the system of support that had kept Fritz going in Buchenwald and Auschwitz had been absent in Mauthausen-Gusen. He had no real comrades, only fellow sufferers. “I was utterly demolished there,” he wrote.30 Now that he was free, he was too weak and sick to go home, if there was even a home to return to.

Nursing his bruised ribs, Gustav walked back to his block. Getting out of Bergen-Belsen was going to be trickier than he’d anticipated. He talked it over with a fellow Viennese, a man named Josef Berger, who was also desperate to go home.

That afternoon, the two men left the building and hung around, watching the sentries. At last came the moment they were waiting for: the changing of the guard. While the soldiers were distracted, Gustav and Josef made a dash for it—not toward the road this time but in the direction of the woodlands fringing the northern and western edges of the camp. They were between sentry posts when there was a shout in Hungarian and the crack of a rifle, the bullet snapping over their heads. Another shot zipped past, and they both threw themselves flat on the ground. Bullets thwacked into the turf around them, and they crawled on. As soon as there was a pause in the shooting, the two men jumped to their feet and made a break for the woods, dodging, hurling themselves among the trees and out the other side. They ran on through the Russian section of the camp and into the forest on the far side.

After a kilometer or so, Gustav and Josef stopped to catch their breath. There were no sounds of pursuit; just birdsong and the muffled silence of the forest. They sank down to rest. Gustav looked around him, gazed up at the sky, and inhaled the fir-scented air. The very smell of it gave him joy; it was the scent of freedom. “Finally free!” he wrote in his diary. “The air around us is indescribable.” For the first time in years, the atmosphere was untainted by the odors of death and labor and unwashed human hordes.

They weren’t safe yet; they had to keep going. The front lines lay east, so for the time being they turned their backs on their homeland and pressed on west by north through the forest. All afternoon and into the evening they walked, passing several tiny hamlets scattered among the woods—German places, where they didn’t dare ask for help. Eventually, after around twenty kilometers, they emerged from the forest into the small village of Osterheide. On the outskirts there was a large prisoner of war camp—Stalag XI—that had been liberated by the British the day after Belsen.31 It had been evacuated several days ago and was in the process of being converted into an internment camp for Nazi party members. However, there was still a population of Russian POWs, who gave the itinerant Viennese bed and board for the night.

Next morning, May 1, Gustav and Josef walked on into the nearby town of Bad Fallingbostel, which was in British hands. It was a small, pleasant spa town, choked with refugees and troops. Gustav and Josef presented themselves to the British authorities in charge but were told that nothing could be done for them right away—they ought to be in one of the displaced persons camps for refugees and former camp inmates. They tried applying to the German mayor’s office, where they fared much better, assigned accommodation in a hotel and a food ration.

Gustav found himself a week’s employment as a saddler with a local upholsterer named Brokman. For the first time in seven years, he worked for decent pay, earned his bread, and was treated as a citizen. He began to recover from the ordeal he’d been through. In his room at the hotel, he brought out the little green notebook that had accompanied him since the early days. On the first page was the entry: “Arrived in Buchenwald on the 2nd October 1939 after a two-day train journey. From Weimar train station we ran to the camp . . .” So began the record of his captivity. Now he started recording his liberty.

“At last one is a free man, and can do as one pleases,” he wrote. “Only one thing nags at me, and that is the uncertainty about my family at home.”

It would continue to prey on his mind, so long as the remnants of the Nazi regime remained, still fighting, across the territory between himself and his homeland.