Book Review: I’ve read a number of accounts of those few who survived the Nazi organised Holocaust and Jeremy Dronfield’s Fritz and Kurt published in 2003 is the best one. It’s not a first-hand account but it tells the true story of brothers Fritz and Kurt Kleinmann and their father Gustav and how the trio were persecuted by the Nazis and even by ordinary people in Austria and Germany during World War 2 because they were Jewish.
Written for children following the publication of Dronfield’s The Boy Who Followed his Father Into Auschwitz the author felt the same story needed to be written for young people so they can understand what Fritz and Kurt went through. Billed as an incredible story as apart from the horrors they witnessed as children they also survived to tell the world what happened. And what happened was unbelievable when we look back at the era from 1933 to 1945 due to the complete lack of humanity of those who followed the Nazi doctrine. Fritz and Gustav were arrested and sent to work in various concentration and labour camps from 1939 to 1945 and despite seeing death on a daily basis and starved (and in Fritz’s case tortured) they somehow clung onto life. Fritz cheated death several times including an attempt by the SS Guards to blow him and his fellow prisoners up in a tunnel.
Kurt was sent by his mother by train and steamer to America where he grew up within a family who had paid for his passage in the process, where he lost his German language becoming an all-American boy. The worst aspect of the story was the murder of their mother and sister who were deported to a camp in Poland where they were killed within days along with everyone else in the camp. Jeremy explained in an interview he omitted it as there were no witnesses to the murders and felt it best to allow young readers to fill in the gaps in their minds. Their life in Vienna before the war is given a detailed account – and clearly life was good until the poison of Hitler’s politics took hold – not just in Germany but amongst their friends and neighbours some of who betrayed them.
A page turner, simply but concisely written with a frankness that disarms the reader and illustrated by David Ziffy Greene this is one of the best ever examples of how to tell a horrific and eventually redemptive true story. Reading it you might think how could this have happened? A chance sequence of events in history perhaps – but like today with immigrants fleeing their own countries there is a tendency in all societies to see other people as outsiders – less human – and it becomes easy to pick on them – always egged on by people who seek political power or influence – I mention no names, but Farage and Yaxley-Lennon come to mind.
I’ll leave the last words to the author: “Above all else, the important lesson from the Holocaust, and from all the genocides and persecutions committed by the Nazis, is to resist the impulse to see people as having diminishing value the further away they are from you, ethnically or culturally. If some people – travellers, refugees, migrants, Jews, Muslims, people of different ethnicities – seem strange or even scary to you, that is your problem, not caused by any inherent quality those people have.
“In 1933-1945, most countries didn’t want to take Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. If you went back in time and read the newspapers, listened to the politicians, and talked with the ordinary people in that period, you’d hear exactly the same fears, suspicions and rumours about those refugees that you hear about migrants and asylum seekers in the present day. The result of that failure of human empathy was one of the greatest tragedies in history. The Holocaust could have been diminished or never happened at all if people hadn’t feared the unfamiliar outsider.”
Harry Mottram
There’s an interview on YouTube with Kurt and Jeremy at https://tinyurl.com/28k3m3w5