Tag Archives: Holocaust

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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Britain, Middle East, Russia, Syria, United Nations, United States

Can the West still stand by following new evidence from Syria?

SYRIA

The evidence stemming from the organised mass murder by the Assad regime in Syria have led to international war crime experts using phrases that are loaded with historical weight and meaning. One such term now being used is ‘concentration camp’. Such terms should never be used lightly.

Photographic evidence smuggled out by a Syrian military policeman, who has since defected to opposition forces, adds to the chronicled death of some 11,000 people, many of whom appeared to have been tortured before they died.

The former chief prosecutor of the special court for Sierra Leone, Sir Desmond de Silva, has described many of these photographs as being reminiscent of Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz and Belsen. Such comparisons should not be made without a great deal of sober reflection.

That war crimes experts now feel able to use these terms to describe the slaughter in Syria should give the world pause for thought. Such an assessment and use of rhetoric suggests everyone with a stake in the Syrian conflict – particularly those countries in the Middle East adding proxy support to the Assad regime – need to take a step back and reassess their positions on a conflict that has been going on for almost three years.

Wholesale slaughter in Syria should not come as a surprise. In July last year, the United Nations had already spoken of a death toll exceeding 100,000. However, if 11,000 bodies showing signs of torture turn up in just one area, it suggests that the figure declared by the UN may be a massive underestimation.

Following detailed examination we now have a greater understanding of the nature of many of these deaths. Not all have been casualties of fighting, or those caught up in the collateral damage caused by the indiscriminate shelling of civilian neighbourhoods. Experts are now learning that many were the result of systematic imprisonment and murder on an almost industrial scale.

Assad tested the West’s resolve last year with the use of chemical weapons against a rebel neighbourhood in Aleppo. Possible military repercussions against the Syrian government stalled when MPs in the House of Commons refused to endorse the use of limited force by the British military. Partly as a result, the United States backed away too from its plans in striking at the Syrian regime. The way was then left open for Vladimir Putin of Russia to find a way in brokering a deal that would involve the dismantling of the regime’s inventory and stockpiles of chemical weapons, with Assad remaining in power. But in light of this new evidence, is this diplomatic stalemate still a tenable option?

These revelations were timed to coincide with last week’s peace talks on Syria that were held in Geneva. Some interested parties have said that a ‘peace settlement’ might simply entrench the Assad regime and allow its barbarism to continue unchecked.  Following military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the West is rightly cautious about further military adventures in the Middle East that might involve ‘boots on the ground’. But with a new light now adding a new dimension to the horrors of the Syrian conflict, can the West really stand idly by? Being quiescent witnesses to a new holocaust requires action the West has so far been unprepared for.

 

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