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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, 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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Arts, Books, Britain, History, United States

Book Review: Lords Of The Desert

REVIEW

Traditional and conventional wisdom has it that after 1945 Soviet Russia swiftly became Britain’s most deadly foe, while our great ally was the United States.

But this orthodox version of history is now in urgent need of reassessment according to James Barr’s magnificently researched new book. He demonstrates that the U.S. was just as determined, if not more so, to destroy Britain’s global power and influence as Joseph Stalin’s Russia.

The United States wanted to establish itself as the new global hegemon. According to Barr, this meant subverting Britain at every turn and, as the author shows, was prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to do so. He infers that, while Britain had an official enemy in the shape of Russia, it had, too, a much more insidious and unofficial enemy in the U.S.

This process culminated in Britain’s total humiliation when the United States pulled the plug on Britain’s failed attempt to seize back the Suez Canal in 1956.

Some five years earlier the U.S. had sabotaged a carefully-planned attempt by MI6 to take control of Iranian oil production – a move which sent a message round the Arab world that British influence was severely dented if not doomed.

American contempt for Britain started even before World War II was over, with a disastrous visit to Egypt in 1942 by Wendell L Wilkie, the Republican opponent to Franklin D Roosevelt for the Presidency two years earlier.

Wilkie arrived in Cairo full of vim and admiration for the British. Then he had dinner with a senior British official and was filled with horror: “What I got was Rudyard Kipling, untainted even with the liberalism of Cecil Rhodes,” he recorded.

These men, executing policies made in London, had no idea the world was changing. And Wilkie had no doubt that Winston Churchill was to blame.

His hostility was increased further by a disastrous mix-up when Churchill paid a brief visit to Washington after the United States joined the war in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Wilkie wanted to meet Churchill to establish his credentials as an international statesman, ahead of the 1944 presidential elections.

Churchill, in turn, was eager to meet Wilkie, then the favourite for the Presidency. He tried to phone Wilkie to arrange a clandestine meeting.

Unfortunately, though, the switchboard operator put him through to the wrong extension number. Barr records:

“I am glad to speak to you,” gushed Churchill.

“Whom do you think you are speaking to?” came the reply.

“To Wendell Wilkie, am I not?”

“No,” came the answer. “You are speaking to the President . . . Franklin Roosevelt.”

The President then banned Churchill from meeting Wilkie, who was mortally offended when the event was cancelled.

This was just one of a series of mishaps and misunderstandings which set the tone for Britain’s post-war relationship with the U.S.

At bottom, both countries were determined to gain access to oil, already known to exist in abundance on the Arabian Peninsula.

In an underhand move, the U.S. tried to hire Wilfred Thesiger, the famous British explorer, to guide them in finding oil reserves. Thesiger stayed loyal to the British: he was in fact hard at work on their behalf, at one stage carrying out oil exploration under fake cover for an organisation called the Anti-Locust unit.

 

THIS is a splendidly written book. It demonstrates the early perspicuity of a young Tory researcher called Enoch Powell who sought out Anthony Eden (then a highly regarded former foreign secretary) shortly after the war to give him advice.

“I want to tell you that in the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans,” the young Powell told the elder statesman.

Eden looked at him as if he was mad. But Powell had the last laugh. Eden was later to reflect: “I had no idea what he meant. I do now.”

– Lords Of The Desert by James Barr is published by Simon & Schuster for £20, 416pp

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