The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz (Jeremy Dronfield)

I picked this one up at Costco having never heard of it, and it's up there with some of the best books I've ever read. It also ended up being one of the more accessible accounts I've come across relating the suffering experienced during the Nazi regime.

The book mainly follows Gustav Kleinmann and his son, Fritz, as they travel through Hell and back to their home in Vienna. The entire family is split up over the course of six years, whether having perished, emigrated, or gone to separate camps. Jeremy Dronfield's writing was inspired by Gustav Kleinmann's diary, something of which he bravely and dangerously kept a secret from the SS, cryptically recording his mental status since his first day in Buchenwald, in 1939. Research and interviews would later help Dronfield fill in the blanks of the Kleinmann family's story, and ensure the book remained a non-fiction piece, as there are also parts of the book where history is nearly erased, solely because there were no survivors to explain what exactly occurred in those moments.

When I say that this book is accessible, I really mean it. It's written like a novel, but has a huge textbook element to it. As you continue to track the Kleinmann family's experience, you'll gather historical context backed up and corroborated by documents, census records, and evidence from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Footnotes are organized by chapter at the back of the book, and I found this very helpful.

You will get a very, very vivid image of what the Kleinmann family went through, while details on the era's social structure, laws, and camp placements are given a space of their own. They are very well situated in the story; I would say respectfully. Dronfield does a great job staying true to chronology while switching from person to person, explaining what was happening and how each member of the family was affected in timely relation to their father, son, mother, daughter, brother, sister.

With regards to the content...

I have a Degree in history and made Holocaust studies my focus. I can truly say that I was shocked with some of the details accounted for in this book. I consider myself to be quite familiar with the brutal dictatorship of the NSDAP and the torturous tactics of the SS, really because I've spent well over a decade studying it both formally and informally. But, there were points in this book where I actually had to stop and think about what I had just read. Let that be a warning of sorts, that while this story is incredible in how father and son make it through the Holocaust alive, it is equally, if not more horrifying.

I consider it to be a very good thing that I was taken aback at points, because it means that even if you start to think you're "desensitized" to the subject, you can very easily be reeled back into overwhelming humility. It really makes you think about what's happening. You have no choice but to grasp every single word on the page, and visualize the horror that each of these people faced.

And that's always been what's made me so drawn to these stories, because that's what each of the victims were. Each one of them was a person. Not a serial number reducing them to a mere "1/6,000,000+", but a person; an individual. Each of them had their own very unique, very true, very personal story of persecution, torture, and for the vast majority, death by murder. Most of those stories were never told, and will never be known.

I would highly recommend The Boy Who Followed his Father into Auschwitz to anyone who would like to remind themselves of the atrocities that occurred just over 80 years ago. None of it is worth forgetting.

9.5/10