Fritz Kleinmann shifted with the motion of the train, shuddering convulsively in the subzero gale roaring over the sidewalls of the open freight car. Huddled beside him, his father watched, face drawn, exhausted. Around them sat dim figures, moonlight picking out the pale stripes of their uniforms and the bones in their faces. It would soon be time for Fritz to make his escape; if he left it any longer, it would be too late.
Eight days had passed since they’d left Auschwitz on this journey. They had walked the first sixty kilometers, the SS driving the thousands of surviving prisoners westward through the snow, away from the advancing Red Army. Fritz and his father had heard intermittent gunshots from the rear of the column as those who couldn’t keep up were murdered. Nobody looked back.
At Gleiwitz they’d been put on trains for other camps deeper inside the Reich. Fritz and his father managed to stay together, as they had always done. Their transport was for Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where the SS would carry on the task interrupted by the Russian advance, draining the last dregs of labor from the prisoners before finally exterminating them. One hundred and forty men were crammed into each open-topped freight car. At first they’d had to stand, but as the days passed and the cold killed them off one by one, it gradually became possible to sit down. The corpses were stacked at one end of the car and their clothing taken to warm the living.
They might have been on the brink of death, but these prisoners were the lucky ones, the useful workers—most of their brothers and sisters, wives, mothers, and children had been murdered or were being force-marched westward, dying in droves.
Fritz had been a boy when the nightmare began, seven years ago; now he was twenty-one, grown to manhood in the Nazi camps, learning, maturing, resisting the pressure to give up hope. He had foreseen this day and prepared for it. Beneath their camp uniforms he and his papa wore civilian clothing, which Fritz had obtained through his network of friends in the Auschwitz resistance. (Unfortunately, in the hurry of the evacuation he’d had to leave behind the guns he’d acquired.) Besides the clothing they had full heads of hair, having avoided the regular head-shaving for two months. They were back in their homeland now, and once they were free they could pass for local workmen.
The train had paused at Vienna, the city that had once been their home, then turned west through St. Pölten, then Amstetten, and now they were only fifteen kilometers from their destination. It was now or never. Fritz had been delaying the decision, worried about his father.
Gustav was fifty-three years old, exhausted—it was a miracle he had survived this far. In the last day or two Gustav had begun to realize that he couldn’t make the escape attempt. The strength wasn’t in him anymore. Yet he couldn’t deny his son the chance to live. It would be a wrenching pain to part after so many years of helping one another to survive, but he urged Fritz to go alone. Fritz resisted, begged him to come, but it was no good: “God protect you,” his father said. “I can’t go, I’m too weak.”
If Fritz didn’t make the attempt soon, it would be too late. He stood up and took off the hated uniform; then he embraced his papa, kissed him, and with his help climbed the slippery sidewall of the car.
The full blast of the wind at twenty-two degrees below zero hit him painfully hard. He peered anxiously toward the brake houses on the adjacent cars, occupied by armed SS guards. Fritz had tested their alertness by heaving some corpses over the side, and they hadn’t noticed. But the moon was brighter now—two days from the full, rising high and laying a ghostly glow across the snowy landscape, against which any moving shape would be starkly visible.1 The train was thundering along at its maximum speed. Screwing up his courage and hoping for the best, Fritz launched himself into the night and the freezing air.