Gustav Kleinmann (1891–1976)
“Every day the transports go past us here, all of them closed and sealed freight cars. But we’re well aware of what’s going on. They’re all Hungarian Jews, and all this is happening in the twentieth century.”[1]
Born in Saybusch, Upper Silesia, in 1891, Gustav Kleinmann came to Vienna as a 15-year-old, passed his apprenticeship certification examination as an upholsterer, and served as an Austrian soldier in World War I. He was wounded several times in combat and was decorated for his bravery. In 1917, he married Tini, and the couple had four children. From 1923 on, Gustav Kleinmann worked as a master upholsterer in Vienna’s 2nd District. Together with his son Fritz, Gustav was arrested, interrogated, and beaten by “friends” on November 10, 1938, but he was released again the next day because of his service in the war. Just under one year later, in September 1939, the two were deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. He was able to avoid being separated from his son. Gustav Kleinmann survived two years in Buchenwald, where his work details included several weeks of forced labor in a quarry. He describes the period of his imprisonment in a secret diary: “(I) work to forget where I am. The camp gets smaller each day, the mortality rate is high, and so it goes.”[2]
In 1942, the father and son were sent to the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp, where Gustav worked first as a carpenter and then as the camp upholsterer.
On January 18, 1945, Gustav and Fritz Kleinmann, along with thousands of other inmates of the Auschwitz camp complex, were forced to go on the death march. After Fritz escaped, Gustav trudged on alone, passing through the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, toward Celle, where he was liberated by the British on April 14, 1945. Ten days later, on April 25, he took matters into his own hands and headed for home with another Viennese, Josef Berger. On foot and part of the way on a bicycle, he made his way back to Austria, where he found his son Fritz once more. After a prolonged struggle, Gustav Kleinmann got an apartment in Vienna again and was able to open a workshop. Two of his children, Edith and Kurt, had managed to leave Austria in time. His wife, Tini Kleinmann, and their daughter Hertha had been deported to Minsk in June 1942 and were killed there. He married Olga Steyskal, his second wife, in 1948. In addition to the diary written at great personal risk, behind whose dry formulations, abbreviations, and matter-of-fact language the camp’s harrowing conditions are perceptible, Gustav Kleinmann wrote a poem in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1940: “Steinbruchkaleidoskop” (Quarry Kaleidoscope). Gustav Kleinmann died in Vienna on May 1, 1976.
(SP; transl. KL)