Category Archives: History

Arts, Books, History

Book Review: The Boy Who Followed His Father Into Auschwitz

REVIEW

Intro: When 19-year-old Fritz Kleinmann learned his father was being sent to the notorious concentration camp, he begged to go with him even though it meant almost certain death

THIS shattering book about the Holocaust is a must read, lest we forget the depravities to which humans can sink, and what the human body and spirit can endure.

We know about the use of the gas chambers, but this account informs us more about the living death outside such hell holes. Those selected to be slave labourers are worked until they drop and die of complete exhaustion.

. See also Book Review – ‘Hitler’s Scapegoat: The Boy Assassin And The Holocaust’

It is also the astonishing narrative of the unbreakable paternal bond between a father and a son, Gustav and Fritz Kleinmann, from a happy Viennese Jewish family – a bond that is so strong that the son volunteered to be transported to Auschwitz in order not to be parted from his father.

Jeremy Dronfield delivers a brilliantly researched and written book that offers searing clarity. Things are ghastly from the very beginning – Viennese Jews being made to scrub the pavements by their previously friendly neighbours who have become rabid anti-Semites overnight – and then get progressively worse. It is inconceivable or unimaginable they can get any worse, but they do.

Reading Dronfield’s deliberations could be deemed as a kind of torture. It’s almost unbelievable that the chief protagonists, Gustav and Fritz, lived every day of this hell for six years.

In one of the first round-ups of able-bodied Viennese Jews, on September 10, 1939, those two (aged 48 and 16) were carted off to Buchenwald concentration camp in Weimar.

On the very first day of their incarceration, when everyone, thirsty and terrified, was made to get out of the cattle wagons and run 8km uphill to the camp without stopping is just a mere taster of the daily torture and cruelty that was in store.

 

AS ALWAYS with the Holocaust, there are new details you learn that, once heard about, you can’t ever forget. Inside the hell of barbed-wire fences, searchlights, routine beatings and starvation that was Buchenwald, there stood a beautiful old oak tree, known as the “Goethe Oak”. So named, because under it, this is where Goethe used to sit while writing his poems.

From the branches of that oak, the enslaved prisoners were hung by their arms for hours on end, as a punishment for not working hard enough in the backbreaking quarries, where they were enforced to do 12-hour shifts pushing wagonloads of boulders uphill. Sadistic guards lashed them and called them “Jew-pigs”.

There can be no starker image to bring home the fact that those depraved atrocities happened in the “civilised” country of Goethe, Beethoven and Bach.

And there’s worse: the administration of lethal injections by smiling doctors of death, routine lashings and despicable starvation punishments.

A favourite sport for the guards was to throw a prisoner’s cap beyond the sentry line and encourage him to go and fetch it.

If he stepped beyond the line he was shot for trying to escape. A guard was awarded three days’ holiday for every “escapee” he killed.

Gustav managed to keep a tiny diary, which he hid, for the entire six years. He didn’t write much, as there wasn’t much space within the confines, but every now and then he wrote sentences of such humanity, using the vocabulary of a man of morals in a place of such depravity, that to read them is balm.

“One can scarcely drag oneself along,” he wrote, “but I have made a pact with myself that I will survive to the end. I take Gandhi as my model. He is so thin, yet survives. Every day I say a prayer to myself: ‘Gustl, do not despair. Grit your teeth: the SS murderers must not beat you.’”

Young Fritz was taken under the wing of some older fellow inmates, who had helped him to survive by teaching him the art of bricklaying.

A pivotal moment came when, on October 15, 1942, Fritz heard that his father had been put on the list of 400 prisoners to be transported to Auschwitz the next day.

He insisted on getting onto that list as well, but his chief mentor, a kind man called Robert Siewert, was aghast: “What you’re asking is suicide,” he said. “You have to forget your father. These men will all be gassed.”

Fritz was adamant. He could not bear to be parted from his father, and formally requested that he should be sent to Auschwitz, too.

So it was that father and son travelled to their next place of horror, where they were both selected for work rather than instant death.

To Gustav’s astonishment, he realised that he was in the same barrack building where he’d been hospitalised during World War I (he had been a decorated military hero).

Again and again, over the next few years, father and son came within a whisker of death, whether from random selection, punishment, illness (which nearly always led to the gas chambers) or American bombing raids.

Somehow, through a network of good luck and kindness, they survived – seasoned old “Buchenwalders”, toughened up through enduring years of the nightmare.

Many newcomers couldn’t cope with the shock: within days they were reduced to broken-spirited wrecks, especially when they found out that their wives and children had been sent straight off to Birkenau to be gassed.

Gustav and Fritz were spared till much later the knowledge that Tini and Herta (wife/mother, daughter/sister) had been transported to the east in 1942 and shot on arrival, their bodies thrown into a pit.

 

THANKFULLY, Fritz’s brother Kurt had succeeded in getting a visa for the U.S., and his sister Edith fortunately managed to get to England, where she fell in love with and married another refugee.

It is the generous acts of strangers that will likely pull at your heartstrings the most.

The slave labourers at Auschwitz worked alongside German civilians in the local factory, and one of these, Fredl Wocher, turned out to be a kind and trustworthy person who went to Vienna on leave, and brought back loving messages and food parcels from Gustav and Fritz’s old and loyal neighbours.

As the whole Nazi murder machine fell apart in 1945, the skeletal surviving prisoners were sent on death-marches or death-train journeys to Belsen.

By the time they were liberated by the Americans, both men were just skin and bone. Fritz weighed just five-and-a-half stone.

Amazingly, Gustav lived on until 1976, and happily remarried, or that Fritz (who married twice and had a son) lived until 2009.

Like so many held during those dark years, Gustav never wanted to talk about their ordeal. Fritz, however, seething with anger, was determined that the story should be told. He had the courage to do so.

His own memoir was entitled, And Still The Dog Just Will Not Die. The Nazis had tried to obliterate him and his father, but in the end they had failed.

Their living, breathing children and grandchildren are the Kleinmann’s final triumph.

– The Boy Who Followed His Father Into Auschwitz by Jeremy Dronfield is published by Michael Joseph for £12.99, 432pp

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Arts, Education, History

(Short Essay) The Agricultural Revolution

1730

ALONGSIDE the Industrial Revolution came a revolution in agriculture. When agriculture first began, selected grass seeds were sown so that gradually improved varieties with larger ears were produced; in this way wheat and barley were developed from grasses. In the same way livestock rearing used selection. The principle of selection and selective breeding was long established. It was only in the eighteenth century that they became scientific in approach, and then development became rapid. The first step in this new agricultural revolution was the invention of a seed drill by Jethro Tull in 1701. This simple device, which pioneered sowing in rows and facilitated weeding, was improved eighty years later by the addition of gears to ensure the even distribution of seed.

Charles Townshend resigned from the British government in May 1730, at the age of 56, to begin a new career as an agricultural improver. Townshend, who became known as “Turnip” Townshend, observed the progress that the Dutch farmers were making by using scientific methods, and applied what he learnt on his own estates. He found that he could keep livestock through the winter by feeding them on turnips. By reserving a field or two for growing turnips as a fodder crop, he eliminated the need to slaughter most of his flocks and herds each autumn. The animals could be kept alive through the winter and slaughtered as and when there was a demand. This development meant that for the first time within the British Isles fresh meat became available all the year round. It also reduced the need to use expensive spices to disguise the taste of rotting meat, improved the safety of food, and allowed the cattle to grow bigger. By 1732 the average bullock sold at Smithfield cattle market in London weighed 550 pounds, compared with 370 pounds in 1710. There were many gains from just one change in practice.

Selective breeding by Leicestershire farmer Robert Bakewell led to the creation of a new breed of sheep, the Leicester, in 1755. Five years later Bakewell started experimenting with selective breeding of beef cattle, and by 1770 he had produced animals with deeper, wider bodies on shorter legs, animals that carried much more meat. He worked on the simple idea that “like produces like”, each year only breeding from the most suitable stock.

Crop rotation was developed in a more scientific way, to ensure that each farm produced the maximum amount of food. This intensification of agriculture led to a marked increase in food production in Britain and other European countries following similar paths. By 1770, the UK was producing a surplus of potatoes for the first time. The potato had until that time been grown exclusively as a subsistence crop; now there was a surplus that was available for sale at markets and in shops.

In 1772 Thomas Coke started a programme of selective animal husbandry that would result in the creation of Devon Cattle, Suffolk pigs and Southdown sheep. By 1780 the agrarian revolution was well under way, with higher quality seed in general use, more scientific crop rotation (pioneered by Jethro Tull in 1720), more efficiently designed tools and generally increased productivity. Thomas Jefferson wrote rather apologetically in his Notes on Virginia about the extensive nature of agriculture in America at that time. “The indifferent state of agriculture among us does not proceed from a want of knowledge merely. It is from our having such quantities of land to waste as we please. In Europe the object is to make the most of their land, labour being abundant; here it is to make the most of our labour, land being abundant.”

In other words, it was the pressure of a high population density that produced the revolution, the intensification of agriculture in Europe. But the need to produce more food throughout the world would eventually come, as population levels rose.

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Arts, Books, History

Book Review – ‘Hitler’s Scapegoat: The Boy Assassin And The Holocaust’

REVIEW

NOVEMBER 7, 1938. A moody looking teenager walked into the German Embassy in Paris, which was proudly flying its swastika flag. In the boy’s pocket was a small pistol he’d bought earlier.

He asked to speak to an official and was sent in to talk to a young lawyer called Ernst vom Rath. Seated behind his desk, vom Rath greeted the boy politely. The boy sat down awkwardly and then, shouting out that he was acting on behalf of the persecuted Jews, he pulled out the gun and fired.

His aiming was “atrocious”, as it commonly is among those not properly practiced in the use of guns. Three of his five bullets missed vom Rath entirely, one passed through him and did no harm, but the other damaged his spleen, pancreas and stomach. Vom Rath was doomed: he took two days to die from his gunshot wounds.

Stephen Koch provides a gripping book and narrative which tells the whole story of the 17-year-old boy, Herschel Grynszpan, who made history by being the first Jew to take up arms against the Nazi regime.

Yet the assassination and its tragic aftermath are full of bitter ironies. For one thing, poor Ernst vom Rath was, in fact, no Nazi, but rather a vociferous critic of the government he was serving: Grynszpan “very likely shot the one man in the embassy who secretly agreed with him”.

It’s seductive to imagine Herschel Grynszpan’s act as one of supreme defiance on behalf of his people – as a heroic, youthful stand against Fascism, while dithering politicians were kowtowing, appeasing and making “peace at any price”.

 

THE immediate and devastating effect of the shooting, though, was an even more terrible persecution of the Jews. For the Nazis used it as an excuse to unleash Kristallnacht, the pogrom that many consider to be an initiating event of the Holocaust.

Just hours after the death of vom Rath was announced, Synagogues across Germany were burned to the ground, Jewish shops and businesses were looted and destroyed and some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, stripped of their property and sent to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen – prison camps, not yet death camps.

Elsewhere on that fatal night, more than 100 Jews were murdered by knifing, burning or brutal beating.

Herschel Grynszpan, pacing in his French prison cell, was in agony on hearing the news. “At night,” he wrote to a friend, “I dream about the ghetto, about Jewish women and children running away . . . God, oh my God! I didn’t want that.”

The funeral of vom Rath was an absurdly grandiose affair, staged in a huge hall in Dusseldorf. The dead man was hailed as “the first martyr to fall for the Third Reich” and his coffin was illuminated by huge spotlights “a la 20th Century Fox”.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis’ evil genius of propaganda, was given space to broadcast the party’s official interpretation of the assassination. “The Jew Grynszpan represents world Jewry.” He added: “The shooting in Paris was world Jewry’s attempt to shoot down the German people”. Any reprisals were therefore being justified.

Indeed, in the world view of the Nazis, the Jews and the Bolsheviks – more or less the same thing, as they saw it – were committed to a war of genocide against the Aryan/Germanic people, who must therefore fight a titanic, apocalyptic war of self-defence to save themselves.

Herschel, a Polish Jew by origin, was born and raised in Hanover. He was a clever, somewhat sickly boy, standing barely 5ft, dark-eyed and given to silent brooding.

When he was 15, he was sent to Paris to live with his aunt and uncle, while his family remained in Germany. Despite increasing persecution, they trusted that “Germany was still a nation of laws”.

On October 27, 1938, there came a knock on their door and the Grynszpan family were told to report to the police station – “a mere formality”. Taking only their coats and passports, they complied.

They never saw their home of more than 20 years again.

Along with some 18,000 other Polish Jews from all over Germany, the family were marched to the train station. Once on a train, the Gestapo moved down the crowded carriages, confiscating everything of value from the helpless passengers.

Two kilometres short of the Polish border, they were herded off the train and marched through the driving rain.

The sick and elderly who couldn’t walk were beaten in bloody savage attacks. “They shouted, ‘Run! Run!’” recalled Herschel’s father, Sendel, in later years.

Finally, they were shoved across the border and abandoned without any money, food, clothes or shelter.

On November 3, in Paris, Herschel received a distressing postcard from his sister – the final straw that triggered the murder of Ernst vom Rath.

On it, Berta wrote about their “great misfortune”, saying the family had no money. She begged for him to send some. But her brother had no money to send.

They were living in an army barracks, sleeping on sacks stuffed with straw, eating gruel and “snatching at bread tossed into the starving throng from trucks . . . In 11 days, nobody had been able to change clothes.”

Later, Berta would be just one more victim who vanished in the Holocaust, although we do not know the details. Miraculously, the rest of Herschel’s family survived and finally made it to Israel after the war.

When France fell in 1940, some 19 months after the killing of vom Rath, young Herschel was handed over by French authorities to the Gestapo, who planned to use him for a show trial to prove that “it was the Jews who started it”. But the trial never happened.

 

COMPLEX legal wranglings ensued, in which, the author suggests, Herschel himself played a cunning role – even at one time claiming that the real reason he had shot vom Rath was because they were homosexual lovers.

It was a lie, but a clever lie, embarrassing the Nazis and making it impossible for them to use the case as evidence of a widespread Jewish conspiracy.

Herschel’s dignified words are also on record: “It is not, after all, a crime to be Jewish . . . My people have a right to exist on this Earth.”

His final fate, like that of so many in this most awful of all wars, is unknown, but he certainly died before its end. Despite the uncertainty, Koch writes him the most handsome of epitaphs:

“He had been history’s pawn, a brave and foolish boy . . . he died for his people, forgotten and alone.”

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