THIS IS A TRUE STORY. Every person in it, every event, twist, and incredible coincidence is taken from historical sources. One wishes that parts of it were not true, that they had never occurred, so terrible and painful are they. But it all happened, within the memory of the still living, the survivors.
There are many Holocaust stories, but not like this one. The tale of Gustav and Fritz Kleinmann, father and son, contains elements of all the others but is quite unlike any of them. Very few Jews experienced the Nazi concentration camps from the first mass arrests in the late 1930s through to the Final Solution and eventual liberation. None, to my knowledge, went through the whole inferno together, father and son, from beginning to end, from living under Nazi occupation, to Buchenwald, to Auschwitz and the prisoner resistance against the SS, to the death marches, and then on to Mauthausen, Mittelbau-Dora, Bergen-Belsen. Fewer still went through all that and made it home again alive. Luck and courage played a part, but what ultimately kept Gustav and Fritz living was their love and devotion to each other. “The boy is my greatest joy,” Gustav wrote in his secret diary. “We strengthen each other. We are one, inseparable.”
This book tells not only their story, but also that of their family: Gustav’s wife, Tini; their daughters, Herta and Edith; and younger son, Kurt. Two escaped to freedom overseas; two met their end in a Nazi death camp. Between them, the Kleinmann family’s experiences track all those who lived through the Shoah or perished in it. This single family’s story is a history of a people’s suffering in microcosm, from invasion to liberation, by way of Auschwitz, English internment, American immigration, and the death camps of the Reichskommissariat Ostland.
Remembering the Kleinmanns’ experiences is timely now more than ever. Like hundreds of thousands of other Jews, they did all they could to escape the Nazi regime but were frustrated by other nations’ hostile immigration policies—Britain and America shunned all but a handful, while the press and public condemned and disparaged the foreign refugees.
I have brought the story to life with all my heart. It reads like a novel. I am a storyteller as much as historian. And yet I haven’t needed to invent or embellish anything; even the fragments of dialogue are authentic, quoted or reconstructed from primary sources. The bedrock is the concentration camp diary written by Gustav Kleinmann between October 1939 and July 1945, supplemented by a memoir by Fritz and a lengthy interview he recorded in 1997. None of these sources makes easy reading, either emotionally or literally—the diary, written under extreme circumstances, is sketchy, often making cryptic allusions to things beyond the knowledge of the general reader (even Holocaust historians would have to consult their reference works to interpret some passages). Gustav’s motive in writing his diary was not to inform the public but to help preserve his own sanity; its references were comprehensible to him at the time. Once unlocked, it provides a rich and harrowing insight into living the Holocaust week by week, month by month, and year after year. Most strikingly, it reveals Gustav’s unbeatable strength and spirit of optimism: “. . . every day I say a prayer to myself,” he wrote in the sixth year of his incarceration. “Do not despair. Grit your teeth—the SS murderers must not beat you.”
Interviews with surviving members of the family have provided additional personal detail. The whole—from Vienna life in the 1930s to the functioning of the camps and the personalities involved—has been backed up by documentary research, including survivor testimony, camp records, and other official documents, which have verified the story at every step of the way, even the most extraordinary and incredible.