The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

A True Story of Family and Survival

Jeremy Dronfield

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780063019300
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

"Brilliantly written, vivid, a powerful and often uncomfortable true story that deserves to be read and remembered. It beautifully captures the strength of the bond between a father and son."--Heather Morris, author of #1 New York Times bestseller The Tattooist of Auschwitz

The #1 Sunday Times bestseller—a remarkable story of the heroic and unbreakable bond between a father and son that is as inspirational as T he Tattooist of Auschwitz and as mesmerizing as The Choice. Where there is family, there is hope

In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholster from Vienna, and his sixteen-year-old son Fritz are arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Germany. Imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp, they miraculously survive the Nazis' murderous brutality.

Then Gustav learns he is being sent to Auschwitz—and certain death.

For Fritz, letting his father go is unthinkable. Desperate to remain together, Fritz makes an incredible choice: he insists he must go too. To the Nazis, one death camp is the same as another, and so the boy is allowed to follow.

Throughout the six years of horror they witness and immeasurable suffering they endure as victims of the camps, one constant keeps them alive: their love and hope for the future.

Based on the secret diary that Gustav kept as well as meticulous archival research and interviews with members of the Kleinmann family, including Fritz's younger brother Kurt, sent to the United States at age eleven to escape the war, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz is Gustav and Fritz's story—an extraordinary account of courage, loyalty, survival, and love that is unforgettable.

Part I

Vienna

Seven Years Earlier . . .

1. “When Jewish Blood Drips from the Knife . . .”

Gustav Kleinmann’s lean fingers pushed the fabric under the foot of the sewing machine; the needle chattered, machine-gunning the thread into the material in a long, immaculate curve. Next to his worktable stood the armchair it was intended for, a skeleton of beechwood with taut webbing sinews and innards of horsehair. When the panel was stitched, Gustav fitted it over the arm; his little hammer drove in the nails—plain tacks for the interior, studs with round brass heads for the outer edge, tightly spaced like a row of soldiers’ helmets; in they went with a tap-tapatap.

It was good to work. There wasn’t always enough to go around, and life could be precarious for a middle-aged man with a wife and four children. Gustav was a gifted craftsman but not an astute businessman, although he always muddled through. Born in a tiny village by a lake in the historic kingdom of Galicia,^* a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he’d come to Vienna at age fifteen to train as an upholsterer, and then settled here. Called to military service in the spring of the year he turned twenty-one, he’d served in the Great War, been wounded twice and decorated for bravery, and at the war’s end he’d returned to Vienna to resume his humble trade, working his way up to master craftsman. He had married his girl, Tini, during the war, and together they had raised four fine, happy children. And there was Gustav’s life: modest, hardworking; and if not entirely content, he was at least inclined to be cheerful.

The droning of airplanes interrupted Gustav’s thoughts; it grew and receded as if they were circling over the city. Curious, he laid down his tools and stepped out into the street.

Im Werd was a busy thoroughfare, noisy with the clop and clatter of horse-drawn carts and the grumbling of trucks, the air thick with the smells of humanity, fumes, and horse dung. For a confusing moment it appeared to Gustav to be snowing—in March!—but it was a blizzard of paper fluttering from the sky, settling on the cobbles and the market stalls of the Karmelitermarkt. He picked one up.

PEOPLE OF AUSTRIA!

For the first time in the history of our Fatherland, the leadership of the state requires an open commitment to our Homeland . . .¹

Propaganda for this Sunday’s vote. The whole country was talking about it, and the whole world was watching. For every man, woman, and child in Austria it was a big deal, but for Gustav, as a Jew, it was of the utmost importance—a national vote to settle whether Austria should remain independent from German tyranny.

For five years, Nazi Germany had been looking hungrily across the border at its Austrian neighbor. Adolf Hitler, an Austrian by birth, was obsessed with the idea of bringing his homeland into the German Reich. Although Austria had its own homegrown Nazis eager for unification, most Austrians were opposed to it. Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg was under pressure to give members of the Nazi Party positions in his government, Hitler threatening dire consequences if he didn’t comply—Schuschnigg would be forced out of office and replaced with a Nazi puppet; unification would follow, and Austria would be swallowed by Germany. The country’s 183,000 Jews regarded this prospect with dread.²

The world watched keenly for the outcome. In a desperate last throw of the dice, Schuschnigg had announced a plebiscite—a referendum—in which the people of Austria would decide for themselves whether they wanted to keep their independence. It was a courageous move; Schuschnigg’s predecessor had been assassinated during a failed Nazi coup, and right now Hitler was ready to do just about anything to prevent the vote going ahead. The date had been set for Sunday, March 13, 1938.

Nationalist slogans (“Yes for Independence!”) were pasted and painted on every wall and pavement. And today, with two days to go until the vote, planes were showering Vienna with Schuschnigg’s propaganda. Gustav looked again at the leaflet.

. . . For a free and Germanic, independent and social, Christian and united Austria! For peace and work and equal rights for all who profess allegiance to the people and the Fatherland.

. . . The world shall see our will to live; therefore, people of Austria, stand up as one man and vote YES!³

These stirring words held mixed meanings for the Jews. They had their own ideas of Germanism—Gustav, immensely proud of his service to his country in the Great War, considered himself an Austrian first and a Jew second.⁴ Yet he was excluded from Schuschnigg’s Germanic Christian ideal. He also had reservations about Schuschnigg’s Austrofascist government. Gustav had once been an organizer for the Social Democratic Party of Austria. With the rise of the Austrofascists in 1934, the party had been violently suppressed and outlawed (along with the Nazi Party).

But for the Jews of Austria at this moment, anything was preferable to the kind of open persecution going on in Germany. The Jewish newspaper Die Stimme had a banner in today’s edition: “We support Austria! Everyone to the ballot boxes!”⁵ The Orthodox paper Jüdische Presse made the same call: “No special request is needed for the Jews of Austria to come out and vote in full strength. They know what this means. Everyone must fulfil his duty!”⁶

Through secret channels, Hitler had threatened Schuschnigg that if he didn’t call off the plebiscite, Germany would take action to prevent it. At this very moment, while Gustav stood in the street reading the leaflet, German troops were already massing at the border.

With a glance in the mirror, Tini Kleinmann patted down her coat, gathered her shopping bag and purse, left the apartment, and woke the echoes in the stairwell with her neat little heels click-clacking briskly down the flights. She found Gustav standing in the street outside his workshop, which was on the ground floor of the apartment building. He had a leaflet in his hand; the road was littered with them—in the trees, on the rooftops, everywhere. She glanced at it and shivered; Tini had a feeling of foreboding about it all which Gustav the optimist didn’t quite share. He always thought things would work out for the best; it was both his weakness and his strength.

Tini walked briskly across the cobbles to the market. A lot of the stallholders were peasant farmers who came each morning to sell their produce alongside the Viennese traders. Many of the latter were Jews; indeed, more than half the city’s businesses were Jewish owned, especially in this area. Local Nazis capitalized on this fact to stir up anti-Semitism among the workers suffering in the economic depression—as if the Jews were not suffering from it too.

Gustav and Tini weren’t particularly religious, going to synagogue perhaps a couple of times a year for anniversaries and memorials, and like most Viennese Jews, their children bore Germanic rather than Hebraic names, yet they followed the Yiddish customs like everyone else. From Herr Zeisel the butcher Tini bought veal, thinly sliced for Wiener schnitzel; she had leftover chicken for the Shabbat^* evening soup, and from the farm stalls she bought fresh potatoes and salad; then bread, flour, eggs, butter . . . Tini progressed through the bustling Karmelitermarkt, her bag growing heavier. Where the marketplace met Leopoldsgasse, the main street, she noticed the unemployed cleaning women touting for work; they stood outside the Klabouch boarding house and the coffee shop. The lucky ones would be picked up by well-off ladies from the surrounding streets. Those who brought their own pails of soapy water got the full wage of one schilling.^* Tini and Gustav sometimes struggled to pay their bills, but at least she hadn’t been reduced to that.

The proindependence slogans were everywhere, painted on the pavements in big, bold letters like road markings: the rallying cry for the plebiscite—“We say yes!”—and everywhere the Austrian “crutch cross.”^* From open windows came the sound of radios turned up high, playing cheerful patriotic music. As Tini watched, there was a burst of cheering and a roar of engines as a convoy of trucks came down the street, filled with uniformed teenagers of the Austrian Youth waving banners in the red-and-white national colors and flinging out more leaflets.⁷ Bystanders greeted them with fluttering handkerchiefs, doffed hats, and cries of “Austria! Austria!”

It looked as if independence was winning . . . so long as you took no notice of the sullen faces among the crowds. The Nazi sympathizers. They were exceptionally quiet today—and exceptionally few in number, which was strange.

Suddenly the cheerful music was interrupted and the radios crackled with an urgent announcement—all unmarried army reservists were to report immediately for duty. The purpose, said the announcer, was to ensure order for Sunday’s plebiscite, but his tone was ominous. Why would they need extra troops for that?

Tini turned away and walked back through the crowded market, heading for home. No matter what occurred in the world, no matter how near danger might be, life went on, and what could one do but live it?

Across the city the leaflets lay on the waters of the Danube Canal, in the parks and streets. Late that afternoon, when Fritz Kleinmann left the Trade School on Hütteldorfer Strasse on the western edge of Vienna, they were lying in the road and hanging in the trees. Roaring down the street came column after column of trucks filled with soldiers, heading for the German border one hundred and seventy miles away. Fritz and the other boys watched excitedly, as boys will, as rows of helmeted heads sped past, weapons ready.

At fourteen years old, Fritz already resembled his father—the same handsome cheekbones, the same nose, the same mouth with full lips curving like a gull’s wings. But whereas Gustav’s countenance was gentle, Fritz’s large, dark eyes were penetrating, like his mother’s. He’d left high school, and for the past six months had been training to enter his father’s trade as an upholsterer.

As Fritz and his friends made their way homeward through the city center, a new mood was taking hold of the streets. At three o’clock that afternoon the government’s campaigning for the plebiscite had been suspended due to the developing crisis. There was no official news, only rumors: of fighting on the Austrian-German border; of Nazi uprisings in the provincial towns; and, most worrying of all, a rumor that the Viennese police would side with local Nazis if it came to a confrontation. Bands of enthusiastic men had begun roaming the streets—some yelling “Heil Hitler!” and others replying defiantly “Heil Schuschnigg!” The Nazis were louder, growing bolder, and most of them were youths, empty of life experience and pumped full of ideology.⁸

This sort of thing had been going on sporadically for days, and there had been occasional violent incidents against Jews;⁹ but this was different—when Fritz reached Stephansplatz, right in the very heart of the city, where Vienna’s Nazis had their secret headquarters, the space in front of the cathedral was teeming with yelling, baying people; here it was all “Heil Hitler” and no counterchant.¹⁰ Policemen stood nearby, watching, talking among themselves, but doing nothing. Also watching from the sidelines, not yet revealing themselves, were the secret members of the Austrian Sturmabteilung—the SA, the Nazi Party’s storm troopers. They had discipline, and they had their orders; their time hadn’t yet arrived.

Avoiding the knots of demonstrators, Fritz crossed the Danube Canal into Leopoldstadt and was soon back in the apartment building, his boots clattering up the stairs to number 16—home, warmth, and family.

Little Kurt stood on a stool in the kitchen, watching as his mother pre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue
• Part I: Vienna
• Part II: Buchenwald
• Part III: Auschwitz
• Part IV: Survival
• Epilogue: Jewish Blood
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography and Sources
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
• Also by Jeremy Dronfield
• Copyright
• About the Publisher