Book Review

Jeremy Dronfield. The Boy who Followed his Father into Auschwitz: A True Story.  Michael Joseph/Penguin Books, 2019. xvi + 416 pp.

Reviewed by Norman Simms

This book by Jeremy Dronfield probably should be categorized as a non-fictional novel: non-fiction because it is based on meticulous research into family interviews and documents and the public historical record, and a novel because of its vivid description of people, places, things, feelings, thoughts and events, details generated by a sympathetic imagination—those close, sensuous and intimate aspects of life that are usually left out of academic historiography. Many important memoirs, autobiographies and letters that constitute Holocaust Literature are either written after the fact by professional writers looking back on their own experiences or ordinary men and women struggling to find the words to express their own lives under extraordinary circumstances, or attempt to present, with minimal editing, accounts recorded during the time they spent in concentration camps or in hiding from their persecutors.

Dronfield’s gift to the genre depends on his sensitive eye and ear, his attention to the spoken and written voice, his capacity to generalize from single instances and specific details to well-realized scenes, and at the same time to filter out all the by-now conventionalized and clichéd depiction of the Shoah and its victims. At a time when survivors and the first generation of their children are disappearing, the reality of the Shoah falls to those whose skills and sensitivities, whose imagination and understanding of the substance of the event make them authoritative bearers of the tradition. It is their task to keep the humanity and Jewish spirit alive through novels, short stories, films, drama and other artistic modes, and the task of intelligent and knowledgeable critics to be ever vigilant for fraud, exploitation and sentimentality.

But does this proviso hold in Dronfield’s family narrative?. For all its reliance on personal testimonies, written documents and scholarly research, somehow the horror of the Holocaust does not come through. That—the disorientating fear, the endless pain and humiliation, the smells and tastes of ever-present death—remains on the margins, something seen at a distance and thought about rather than felt. The main characters scheme and negotiate with other prisoners, many non-Jews, German civilians working in the camps and associated factories, even occasionally with soldiers of the Wehrmacht and the SS. With difficulty to be sure, they maintain some kind of communication with old friends and assimilated relatives in Vienna and elsewhere in the Reich. They survive not by sheer luck or divine miracle, but by will-power, manipulation of the system, and something else never explained.Others die around them, are shot, pushed into the gas chambers, starve, kill themselves—but not the father and son. They become ill, are injured, sometimes tortured, exhaust themselves to the very limits of what the body can endure, but they stay alive, and always have faith in the other, that they will survive. Not a religious faith (Is it even a Jewish story?) or an ideological (It rejects the Communists and the Fascists.) belief in the self-correcting nature of history: but something like sheer grit.

On the other hand, there is between the narrative voice and all the other more historical voices, documents and information the author-editor-composer, that is, Jeremy Dronfield. For him, the creating of this book is both a family duty—to preserve the memory of his parents and grandparents and all the other members of the family murdered in the Holocaust—and a historical project, to keep to the facts and guard the integrity of his sources. While there are innumerable other studies, memoirs, collections of documents and oral archives to ensure that as many of the individual persons killed and families shattered, the burden is now ensure that the Holocaust deniers and trivializers do not swamp these stories, reduce the Shoah to one of an ever-increasing list of genocides and mass murders, dilute it in a messy soup of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism that fill up social media and school textbooks, and cast doubt on the veracity of the carriers of the truth.

That said, about 75 pages of The Boy who Followed his Father into Auschwitz is made up of scholarly apparatus: Bibliography and Sources, Notes and Index. In addition, from time to time in the narrative there are footnotes to explain unfamiliar names or to give current names of places. There is also a two-page Preface by Jeremy Dronfield, and a two-page Foreward by Kurt Kleinmann, and a two-page Prologue by the author himself. These are authentic historical voices testifying to the accuracy and importance of the narrative recounted in the book, a story which is “true” but all wished hadn’t been. The narrative itself provides a background to the Kleinmann family prior to the Holocaust and afterwards, and a few pages about what happened to those members of the family who managed to escape to England and the United States. The narrative is divided into four main parts, designated by roman numerals and a brief title: Part I, Vienna; Part II, Buchenwald; Part III, Auschwitz; and Part IV, Survival. Each  part contains varying numbers of chapters, from two to ten; and each chapter has smaller units set apart by Hebrew words designating the main characters treated, אבא (aba), father; אםא  (ima)  mother, בן (ben) son, משפחה (mishpucha), family, and so forth. There is also an Epilogue called Jewish Blood, and it contains three subsections: “Vienna, June 1954”,  משפחה    (mishpucha)  and a Star of David.