The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz is a reminder of both the best and worst of humanity, the strength of family bonds and the resilience of the human spirit

Gustav Kleinmann, a Viennese Jewish upholsterer, is arrested by the Nazis in 1939 and, along with his teenage son Fritz, is taken to Buchenwald in Germany. There begins their unimaginable story of violence, hunger and forced labour, building the concentration camp, their own prison. When Gustav was put on a transport to Auschwitz, which at the time was tantamount to a death sentence, Fritz refused to leave him. Throughout the horrors they witnessed and the suffering they endured, one certainty kept them alive: the love between a father and son.

Based on Gustav's secretly kept diary and supported by meticulous archival research, the book tells their story for the first time—a story of courage and survival unprecedented in the history of the Holocaust.