Fritz and Kurt

Brothers Fritz and Kurt Kleinmann were fifteen and eight respectively when Nazi Germany invaded Austria. In a very short time, the life they had known in Vienna, the ‘before Hitler came’ in Kurt’s words, was destroyed. With so many of their Jewish neighbours, Fritz and his father were taken prisoner and transported to Nazi prison camps, first Buchenwald, then Auschwitz. The family managed to send two of their children abroad – Edith went to England, and Kurt to America, making the long, dangerous journey on his own aged just ten. The greater part of the book however describes what happened to Fritz and his papa, who managed to stay together, Fritz choosing to go with his father to Auschwitz even when he could have stayed in the relatively safer Buchenwald.

An adaptation of his bestseller The Boy Who Followed His Father Into Auschwitz, Dronfield tells their story for children effectively and with sensitivity, conveying the horror and cruelty of their treatment in the camps but showing young readers how Fritz and Papa cared for each other and how fellow inmates defied the Nazis to support fellow prisoners and even to form a resistance. He is good too at showing the banality of evil and exposes the ‘stark stupidity of Nazi ideas’ as he describes an episode in which Papa is recategorized as a political prisoner, in order to continue the skilled work he was doing as a kapo on an Auschwitz building site. Jews weren’t allowed to be kapos, but making them ‘Aryan’ solved the problem.

Both Fritz and his papa survived, through luck, determination, but mostly we feel through being together, and were reunited with Edna and Kurt after the war, though by then Kurt had almost forgotten how to speak German. Their mother and sister Tini and Herta Kleinmann were killed.

Throughout the book, Dronfield highlights their resilience, and that of others they met in the camps, providing a sense of hope. Black and white illustrations by David Ziggy Greene quietly support the text. There are lots of first person accounts of the Holocaust but this is an important addition, with lessons to apply to the world today. At a time when some claim England is ‘full’ we should remember that the same argument was used in the 1930s. It demonstrates too how easy it is to turn people into ‘the other’ and that real courage is standing against oppression.

Jeremy Dronfield knew Kurt well and draws on written accounts by Fritz and their papa, who extraordinarily managed to keep a hidden diary of their experiences.