🎧 The Boy Who Followed His Father Into Auschwitz
20th Century
•
44m
This is the most remarkable father and son story I have ever come across. We are still marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz here at History Hit and this time I am talking to historian Jeremy Dronfield about an astonishing true story of horror, love and impossible survival. In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was arrested by the Nazis. Along with his sixteen-year-old son Fritz, he was sent to Buchenwald in Germany, where a new concentration camp was being built. They helped build Buchenwald, young Fritz learning construction skills which would help preserve him from extermination in the coming years. But it was his bond with his father that would ultimately keep them both alive. When the fifty-year-old Gustav was transferred to Auschwitz--a certain death sentence--Fritz was determined to go with him. His wiser friends tried to dissuade him--"If you want to keep living, you have to forget your father," one said. Instead Fritz pleaded for a place on the Auschwitz transport. "He is a true comrade," Gustav wrote in his secret diary, "always at my side. The boy is my greatest joy. We are inseparable." Gustav kept his diary hidden throughout his six years in the death camps--even Fritz knew nothing of it. We talked about this very rare diary, Fritz's own accounts, and other eyewitness testimony, and built a picture of this extraordinary father and son team.
Up Next in 20th Century
-
🎧 The Books that Made Britain
For 50 years Christopher Tugendhat has been collecting modern first editions of books, including many that he believes reflect and illuminate the British experience during the first sixty years of the 20th century. In this podcast, he explores political and social change from 1900 to 1964 through...
-
🎧 The Bombing War
75 years ago this Spring, the aerial assault on Germany was reaching a crescendo as city after city was devastated by British and American bomber fleets. History Hit TV have just launched a major documentary to mark this anniversary featuring veterans and historians like Max Hastings and Victoria...
-
🎧 The Bombing of Nagasaki
The second atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki is less well known than the one a few days earlier on Hiroshima, but was it more influential in forcing the Japanese to surrender? To find out who exactly ordered it and why I talked to Harvard's Frederik Logevall. He discusses the debates that rag...