Shop - (Preloved Wrapped) THE BOY WHO FOLLOWED HIS FATHER INTO AUSCHWITZ : A True Story

View All Photos
The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival by Jeremy Dronfield
The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival by Jeremy Dronfield
The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival by Jeremy Dronfield
hdr
hdr
hdr
The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival by Jeremy Dronfield
hdr
hdr
hdr
hdr
hdr
hdr
hdr
hdr
hdr
hdr
The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: A True Story of Family and Survival by Jeremy Dronfield

(Preloved Wrapped) THE BOY WHO FOLLOWED HIS FATHER INTO AUSCHWITZ : A True Story

Jeremy Deonfield
WELL USED, PAPERBACK
Jeremy Deonfield
WELL USED, PAPERBACK

RM16.00

The Inspiring True Story of A Father And Son’s Fight To Stay Together And TO Survive The Holocaust

ISBN 9780241374948
Book Condition WELL USED
Format PAPERBACK
Publisher Penguin
Publication Date 24/01/2019
Pages 432
Weight 1.03 kg
Dimension 23.5 × 15.6 × 3.5 cm
Availability: Out of stock

Additional information

Out of stock

SHARE:
  • Detail Description

Description

 
★★The Number One Sunday Times Bestseller★★

★★“Brilliantly written, vivid, a powerful and often uncomfortable true story that deserves to be read and remembered. It beautifully captures the strength of the bond between a father and son.”
–Heather Morris, author of #1 New York Times bestseller The Tattooist of Auschwitz ★★

★★The #1 Sunday Times bestseller—a remarkable story of the heroic and unbreakable bond between a father and son that is as inspirational as The Tattooist of Auschwitz and as mesmerizing as The Choice.★★
 
Where there is family, there is hope
 
Another true story – about two family members and their separate ordeals in Auschwitz, brings us no closer to understanding the why. Indeed, if anything, it re-emphasises the sheer unfathomableness of the Nazis’ industrial-scale killing. What the book does help us grasp, though, and in a truly life-affirming way, is the unbreakable bond between the father and son who endured that living hell.

The author, Jeremy Dronfield—who is an historian as well as a novelist—devotes his book to two men: a father and a son who were born Austrian Jews and who were apparently more Austrian than Jewish.
 
In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholster from Vienna, and his sixteen-year-old son Fritz are arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Germany. Imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp, they miraculously survive the Nazis’ murderous brutality.
 
The book begins in Vienna in 1938 on the eve of the Anschluss that forcibly yoked Austria with Nazi Germany. Family man Gustav is an upholsterer; fourteen-year-old Fritz, one of his four children, is training to follow in his footsteps. Jewish persecution intensifies, and yet Gustav remains sanguine, considering the Kleinmanns to be more Austrian than Jewish. But after the murder-and-vandalism spree of Kristallnacht, he and Fritz are among the first to be rounded up and taken away in a dawn raid.
 
The pair are reunited in ­Germany on a long, arduous run along the so-called Blood Road to Buchenwald. Once inside the camp, they are informed by its commanding officer that no one will get out alive. And so the nightmare commences: backbreaking Sisyphean toil in quarries, meagre food rations, poor sanitation, bone-chilling cold, daily beatings and injuries, and the regular sight of arbitrary, senseless killings. “I work to forget where I find myself,” Gustav writes.
 
Still standing three years later, Fritz discovers that his father is to be transferred to Auschwitz – a place which, according to some disturbing whispers, contains gas chambers capable of killing hundreds at a time. Instead of staying put, Fritz risks suicide and asks to be sent with his parent.
 
It is an astonishing request, but by this stage the reader has come to expect anything out of the ordinary, from the most heinous crimes to the most fortuitous twists of fate. After surviving the Auschwitz selection process and instant death at Birkenau, Gustav and Fritz are sent to work on the construction site for the sub-camp Monowitz.
 
The hardship and cruelty is on a different level to that of before. Prisoners who made it this far had a life expectancy of three to four months. However, father and son defy more odds by keeping their heads down and battling on. When at last the German war effort stalls and Soviet troops advance on Auschwitz, Gustav and Fritz allow themselves a flicker of hope at the prospect of freedom.
 
But any happiness is quickly snuffed out. After running for cover from Allied bombs, they are force-marched across frozen wastes to a “death train” bound for more camps. En route to Mauthausen in their native Austria, a too-weak Gustav tells his son to take his chances and fend for himself. Franz kisses his father goodbye, and when the coast is clear, launches himself into the night from the moving train.
 
Then Gustav learns he is being sent to Auschwitz—and certain death. For Fritz, letting his father go is unthinkable. Desperate to remain together, Fritz makes an incredible choice: he insists he must go too. To the Nazis, one death camp is the same as another, and so the boy is allowed to follow.
 
Throughout the six years of horror they witness and immeasurable suffering they endure as victims of the camps, one constant keeps them alive: their love and hope for the future.
 
Based on the secret diary that Gustav kept as well as meticulous archival research and interviews with members of the Kleinmann family, including Fritz’s younger brother Kurt, sent to the United States at age eleven to escape the war, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz is Gustav and Fritz’s story—an extraordinary account of courage, loyalty, survival, and love that is unforgettable.
 
As biographer and historian Jeremy Dronfield explains in his preface, this Holocaust story is a rare one. Very few Jews experienced the Nazi concentration camps in all three stages: from the first mass arrests in the late 1930s, through the roiling maelstrom of the Final Solution, and then to liberation in 1945. Fewer still made that journey as father and son, or lived to tell their tale.
 
Needless to say, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz is a tough read. Just when we think things can’t get any worse, along comes a more obscene punishment, or a grislier medical experiment, or a more sadistic SS guard hell-bent on upping the amount of “adjustments”. Dronfield says that one separation was “pain beyond pain”; Gustav notes in his diary that “shock is piled upon shock”. Both descriptions sum up the book.
 
There are welcome chinks of light. During “borrowed hours” inmates swap stories and play chamber music. In one Oliver Twist-esque instance, Fritz asks the camp doctor for more food – and, amazingly, is granted it.
 
But these moments are short-lived. Acts of resistance are answered with appalling reprisals. Singing drowns out shootings. Relief from following Gustav’s other son’s flight to safety is offset by despair at his wife and daughter’s tragic end.
 
Despite the catalogue of horrors, it is hard to put the book down. It has the same frenetic pace and emotional punch as another Third Reich-themed book, Thomas Harding’s Hanns and Rudolf (2013), about a Nazi-hunter’s quest to track down the Kommandant of Auschwitz. In each case we remain rapt, eager for that cathartic release of good finally triumphing over evil.
 
Gustav and Fritz were survivors but also, crucially, witnesses. Thanks to their individual testimonies we have this harrowing yet vitally important book.

[ --- Read more --- ]
You've just added this product to the cart: