For every person killed in the Holocaust, there is a story. This is another non-fiction account of a father and son who did not die, but were interned in all the major concentration camps, and survived.
There are similarities with other survival stories: small miracles of food and friendship, being in the right line or section in a camp, benign kapos, which helped Gustav Kleinmann and his son Friz survive the horrors of war.
They were caught ( Vienna, Austria) and shipped to Buchenwald early on in the war, and had to help build it. Thanks to this Fritz gained construction skills which kept him alive in the following years. There were many intellectuals and political prisoners here and thanks to them Fritz gained an education in his own country's history and politics.
Gustav was shipped to Auschwitz and Fritz volunteered to go with him, knowing that together they might have a chance of surviving. En route they were separated and Fritz spent some time in Mauthausen, where prisoners were killed though hard labour.
Over the whole of the six year ordeal, Gustav kept a diary of sorts in a small notebook he managed to keep with him. Fritz didn't know of it, and after the war was able to piece together more of their story through his father's notes.
Through the notebook, interviews with Fritz and other eye-witness accounts, Dronfiled has pieced together this remarkable story. The bonds between father and son kept them alive, when all was hopeless and lost.
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