The Stone Crusher by Jeremy Dronfield

Author:Jeremy Dronfield
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2018-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

14

Resistance and Collaboration:

The Death of Fritz Kleinmann

THE GREAT MACHINE IN which the concentration camps were the main components was a formidable but shockingly ramshackle work of engineering. Constructing it had been a process of extemporization—a component added here, a redesign there, parts bolted on. It ran at a juddering pace, misfiring, stuttering, consuming its human grist, pouring out bones and ashes, and ejecting an exhaust of nauseating smoke. The crusher was vast and growing all the time. The individual human, in drab blue and gray stripes, wasn’t only physically impressed into the machine but morally and psychologically too. Beyond the Blockführers and kapos, the 380-volt barbed wire and watchtowers, the SS commandants and guard dogs, beyond the roads and rail tracks, the commandeered village and construction sites, the camps, the camp system, the hierarchy of the SS, beyond all this was a nation, a government, and a society teeming with human beings whose base, animal emotions—fear, spite, lust for gain or some imagined former greatness—empowered the system that kept the stripe-uniformed beings shut, helpless, inside the wire.

Their incarceration was intended to be the simple solution to the society’s complex problems. The removal of its human toxins—criminals, left-wing activists, Jews, homosexuals—was supposed to bring back the nation’s great days. But the cure was not a cure but a poison, slowly but surely bringing their nation to the ground. The inefficient labor of starved slaves, the cost of the system that enslaved them, the weakening of science and industry by the removal of geniuses because they were tainted by race, hamstrung the nation’s economy. Becoming a pariah among nations had cost trade. Trying to solve these further problems by wars of conquest, more enslavement, more murder of the people falsely believed to be the root cause of the nation’s woes, the crusher rattled on, day and night, grinding and destroying and slowly wearing itself out.

Fritz Kleinmann found the helplessness and hopelessness of being trapped in the machine intolerable. His father was safe for now, which lifted a great weight from his heart. But the injustices and insane cruelty of the system could make a sane man crazy, and a pious one curse God. They lived out their enslavement, and in most cases died their ignominious deaths, within fences and walls their fellow prisoners had built. Fritz himself, with meticulous skill, had raised the walls, helped create this prison out of open fields. Across the road, in the Buna Werke, other men like him made walls and roads and structures of steel, within which other slaves, male and female, would labor for the benefit of the Reich and IG Farben’s bottom line. The very bricks and stones that Fritz laid had been molded and cut by yet other prisoners in stripes in the brick works and stone quarries run by the SS.1

From his earliest days in Buchenwald Fritz had learned that the key to survival was solidarity and cooperation. Deprivation and hunger bred hostility between prisoners, fracturing them along the lines of race,

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