TWENTY
Erich, Brandenburg, 1942
In the weeks after euthanizing little Brigitte and the other four children, Erich stayed largely to himself, ignoring all social invitations from colleagues and anyone else associated with the hospital, except Maria. Together they had taken the long fatal step away from everything they knew was good and right, making each one’s guilt the other’s as well. Standing silently in Brigitte’s room that terrible day, still holding the dead child in his arms, he had turned to Maria and simply said, “All these years, we’ve been educated to help the sick, to heal them—not to kill them. And look at this child. This is what you and I have done.” And then both parted, saying nothing further, nor daring to look at the other.
When late hours of the night came to him that first day, his soul had no answer for what had taken the place of medicine—the killing of the five “misfits”—and was strangely quiet, as if it were no longer a part of him. Written words of lies twisted his mind, as he penned letters to the parents of the murdered children, attributing their deaths to unexpected complications. It would be so much easier to say they were killed out of compassion, an enduring Christian virtue in medicine, which everyone understood. At least then it would be seen as a good death. Yet, all virtues have their own bad moments if taken too far. How many crippled children could one kill in the name of compassion and still remain virtuous? he wondered.
For a while, his mind traced back to a long discussion he shared with Julia and her father late one evening on this very subject. What if telling the truth causes a greater harm than lying? had been the question raised by Dr. Kaufmann. He had quickly answered, with Julia agreeing, that lying would become the virtue then, not truth. But Dr. Kaufmann pressed the question further.
“Then killing someone who is innocent for a greater good, perhaps to save the lives of ten people, would become the virtue.” Erich had no answer, nor did Julia.
“It is the principle that is the real virtue, not the act. Should the principle die, there would be no more innocence,” Dr. Kaufmann said, closing the discussion.
Near one in the morning and still unable to sleep, Erich changed back to his street clothes and left his apartment for Maria’s, which was located several blocks closer to the hospital than his. There she shared a small three-room flat situated over an empty kosher meat shop, whose Jewish owner had simply disappeared one evening with all his family. Arriving at the apartment, Erich banged on the door four times before Maria responded.
“Dr. Schmidt, what are you doing here?” she asked, opening the door slightly, greatly puzzled by Erich’s sudden appearance at her door, something which had never happened before.
“I thought we should talk about this day. Do you mind?”
“Tomorrow would be better, it’s so late.”
“No, tomorrow won’t do, not really,” Erich said, pushing his way past Maria into the apartment.
Maria hesitated, then closed the door, and that of her bedroom. Erich studied Maria’s face for a moment and was bothered that she displayed no anguish over what had happened earlier, the terror they had brought to the children’s rooms. Instead, her emotions seemed as hard as the floor beneath his feet. Yet, he knew, neither one of them would emerge spiritually unscathed from what they had done, and would do so again in the days ahead.
“Would you like a cup of coffee, or a beer perhaps,” Maria asked.
“Coffee might help, thank you. Is your roommate sleeping?” Erich questioned, looking towards the bedroom.
“She is home with her sick mother, why do you ask?”
“What happened today is only the beginning, I’m afraid. We’ve been ordered to keep it secret from the public. That is what the ministry wants.”
“Why should we pretend it’s a secret? Everyone will figure out something bad is happening to the children if no one ever sees them again.”
Maria poured two cups of black coffee. She was both glad and angry that he had come to her door. He was a miserable man, that much she believed, hurting terribly as she was but for different reasons. Deeply religious to the edge of obsession, she loved all children, whether whole or not. And misfits among God’s little creatures were to be loved as much, if not more so, than those that were normal. Compassion from love was Christlike, she had been taught, and gave great meaning to her calling as a nurse. Killing those you love out of compassion, as she did the children, bothered her deeply because the duty to do so had been commanded by the state, not God. Had it been God, she would own no guilt, because God is good.
Erich’s supposed compassion, she had discerned, came from fear not love, and she despised him for it.
Maria took several sips of coffee waiting for Erich’s answer to her question, but none came. Instead he said, “I want you to be my friend, Maria. It’s difficult not having someone you can talk to, someone you can trust. I have no other friends here at Görden.”
Erich’s words muddled her mind. They were not what she had expected to hear from him. All she knew about him was that he was a deeply disturbed young man with important ties to the Chancellery through his powerful father, nothing more. Whether she could trust him with her own problems and stories was a question she had no answer for at this time.
“I will listen and talk with you, if that is what you want, but we will never be friends. It’s very simple—I don’t like you and never will,” she said dismissively.
Maria’s quick rejection to his offer of friendship stunned Erich, pushing him to silence for several minutes. He hadn’t expected such cold words from her. He now felt she would betray him, too, spreading false rumors and reporting all words he would utter to her to Dr. Heinze and the Health Ministry.
“I am sorry, it was a terrible mistake to come here,” he said, taking his empty cup to the kitchen sink, then walking to the door.
Maria followed him to the door, and for no reason she could later think of, gently rested her hand on his arm.
“There are things happening that we must accept and do, if we are to survive these terrible times. Ending any child’s life bothers me deeply, as it does you, I suppose, but I know it removes suffering from the child. That fact alone is enough for me to do my duty,” she said softly.
Erich stepped into the hall and looked down the unlit stairway to the street. Maria’s words could have been his. Compassion and science had led him to perform his duty, too, so he believed, in bringing death to the five children, certainly not the twisted desires of the state to purify the Aryan race. Still, the cold fear of what they might have done to him had he not obeyed remained like warm vomit from a sick stomach, choking his thoughts and mind.
Starting down the steps, he stopped and looked back at Maria, who was still standing in the doorway to her apartment watching him.
“We may be on a slippery slope before this thing ends,” he said.
“I know, but we’ll be alright,” was all Maria could think to say, before closing the door.
Erich reported in two hours late the next morning. The night’s late visit to Maria’s apartment had been a mistake, leaving him more unsettled than ever. His ward was empty of patients for now, for which he was thankful. He knew, though, that the beds would soon be filled as the state-mandated registration and reporting of handicapped children grew in number. They would come by the hundreds to be killed, unknowingly, to achieve a greater good no one really understood or accepted. Stopping by Dr. Heinze’s office, Erich completed the death certificates of the five children, indicating the cause of death for each child as “multiple emboli to the lungs, etiology unknown.” It was as good a lie as any of the others he would soon use. Before he could leave, Dr. Heinze entered the office with Erich’s old nemesis, Franz Kremer, now very much a doctor, too.
“You know Herr Dr. Kremer, I believe,” Dr. Heinz said smiling at Erich.
“Yes, we were classmates in Prague for a short time.”
“Good, then no introduction is necessary. You must be old friends,” Dr. Heinze said, still sm
iling oddly, Erich thought.
Neither one spoke though, nor acknowledged the other’s presence. Looking at both of them eyeing each other like two circling boxers waiting for the fight to begin, it would be difficult to tell which one hated the other the most.
“Herr Dr. Kremer has been assigned here by the Health Ministry for a few months to assist us in establishing the children’s new therapy program. I’ve already told him of your early success with the children,” Dr. Heinze said in a proud tone, no longer smiling at Erich as he had been.
Slightly dazed by Franz’s sudden appearance at Görden, Erich said nothing in response to the weird praise from Dr. Heinze, accolades for euthanizing children. From the moment he walked into the office with Dr. Heinze, Franz had fixed the slant of his eyes on Erich’s in an unyielding war of nerves and stares to see who would blink first. Dr. Heinze watched the dynamics for several seconds, then turned to Erich, smiling oddly again as he had before.
“You will take my place and accompany Dr. Kremer to view a screening of the new film, I Accuse, in the auditorium. Afterwards you are to write a report on its value, if any, to the Health Ministry.”
Neither one speaking, the two archenemies left the office together and started walking down the hall to the right where the hospital’s small auditorium was located. Anyone nearby watching the two men could not help but feel some of the intense hatred flowing back and forth between them like electrical charges, its high voltage no longer insulated by the niceties of their profession. They were locked together in a world separate from all around them, where time itself no longer seemed to matter.
When they had walked but a few steps, Franz asked, baiting Erich, “How is your Jewish whore?”
“Julia was not a whore, she was my friend then. You had no Jewish friends, I suppose,” Erich said, turning the question back on Franz, who merely shrugged his shoulders at the suggestion.
“Never there, or anywhere else. I am pure. You should know that.”
“Perhaps.”
Both men stopped at the auditorium door, childishly waiting for the other to open it. Neither one would until Maria and two other nurses approached. Erich stepped forward and held the door open until the three had entered, then moved quickly inside ahead of Franz.
“You should be more careful with what you say and do, Erich. You don’t know who I am, and what I am about,” he said as he walked past Erich and took a seat close to Maria and the two nurses. Erich sat alone.
No one had seen the movie, though rumors about the contents could be heard throughout the hospital and in the cafés and beer gardens of the city. What begins as a simple happy story of a wholesome German family quickly becomes heart wrenching when the beautiful young wife is taken ill with multiple sclerosis. In the movie’s most tender moment, the husband, a physician, responding to his wife’s pleas to do so, gives her a lethal injection. As she closes her eyes in death, a moment of ethereal joy spreads across the husband’s face, watching her terrible suffering end. But Erich saw much more than a sad story of unconditional love being played out on the screen. And he wondered if Franz and all the other doctors watching had read the same message hidden in the tenderness of the moments before them. Because the wife had given her husband permission to kill her, ending all suffering was the most moral thing one could do. Yet, still hiding ominously behind the scene was the admonition that this same compassionate act must be available for those who are incompetent and cannot ask for such a wonderful death, like the mentally ill. Erich knew in a second that a subliminal dagger was being thrust at the heart of these sick people—because the state would take over the moral responsibility to act, allowing no one else, family or friend, to do so.
In the days to come, the hospital halls would echo limitless discussions of the morality of doctors and nurses assisting an incurably diseased patient to die in peace. It was the definition of disease, though, that bothered Erich the most, because many of the mentally ill were already thought of as diseased. The public and doctors throughout Germany could not help but be moved by the deep feelings of sympathy and love expressed in the film. Many were already there, taken in by the highly saleable idea of Christian compassion spewing forth from the Health Ministry like an awakened Mount Vesuvius. Evil wears many different clothes, and the real reason, cleansing of the race, was deftly attired in the royal colors of Christian compassion.
When the overhead lights came back on, Erich looked around at the audience. Maria had been crying and was busily sopping up her tears . She was not alone; others had been moved to tears by the gentle death of the doctor’s wife.
“A beautiful death,” one said.
“A righteous death,” another said.
Still another: “A blessed doctor.”
Franz Kremer said nothing because he knew, like Erich, the film meant nothing where goodness was concerned. Soon, “misfits” of every age would be brought to the hospitals to die. Then he hoped the Jews would follow. Franz glanced over at Erich, the man he hated worse than Jesus. To him Jesus was a monumental fraud, no better than the next Jew, and had made an unholy mess of everything in the world. In his school studies, Franz prized reading of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who wanted to execute Jesus a second time. Had the story been true, he would tell anyone who would listen, the Jesus myth would have ended there.
Erich hated Franz, too, but for a different reason, which he felt was just. Franz could never accept that he had loved and slept with a lovely Jewish woman who possessed above all things a beautiful soul. Now with the world at war and the Nazis in command, Franz would kill Julia outright should the opportunity present itself. But Erich also believed, perhaps as the psychiatrist he was, that Franz’s misguided hate of Julia came more so because she chose to fall in love with someone other than him. Earlier, before Julia looked to Erich’s love, she had spurned Franz’s persistent, many times drunken, overtures. This triad of hate would be there at the end, Erich knew.
Franz ignored the ebullient conversations around him and walked over to where Erich was sitting. The tension he brought was explosive.
“What was your reaction to the film, my weak friend?” he asked sarcastically.
“You should stop playing your childish games, Franz, being such a miserable ass. You and I both know what the film is about, what it is telling us will happen.”
Franz’s face turned red from anger at Erich’s words, his hands knotted in huge, tight fists, as if he would try to pound him senseless with them at any moment. Then, for a reason Erich would never know, Franz suddenly relaxed, turning quiet for a moment before speaking again.
“I suppose you’re right. We should end our silly quarrels from the past and get on with what is expected of us,” he said calmly, surprising Erich.
“Good, then we will quarrel no more, though we will never be friends,” Erich said loudly, turning his back on Franz and leaving the auditorium.
Later in the afternoon, he returned to the East Ward, peering into each empty room, wondering what the next child might look like who would die there. I Accuse had made him realize even more the reality of what was to come, and he found himself strangely at peace with it. There was no exit from all that was around him, he knew, and so he had begun to feel that to cope with what was coming would be to comply, to do that which was expected of him, his duty. He need not hide his fears any longer behind the gentle face of compassion. He could endure until the war’s ending and he would find Julia then and begin again to live as a man.
The days became long for Erich and Maria and everyone else as the trickle of misfits entering the hospital steadily became a flood. It had been decided by Dr. Heinze that the children should be kept mildly sedated for several weeks to give the impression they were receiving the advanced treatment promised. Erich, with Maria and the other nurses on duty in the ward, welcomed the plan happily. In time, it fooled their minds into believing what they were doing was what they should be about as doctors and nurses, looking to their patients with co
mpassion. But the end was always the same. A quicker death for some from morphine. Others a slower death from luminal.
Erich began to throw himself into the medical scene, working fifteen hours a day trying to grasp the whole picture, at least scientifically. Before sending the parents home, he would examine the entire family for any obvious conditions he believed might lead to their child’s malformations. Then, methodically examining the child’s condition daily with Maria at his side, he would map a treatment plan that would lead nowhere but to death. In time, such long hours would come to nourish his illusion of medical authenticity and help keep him sane.
When a particular child who had unusual malformations died, he would send the body to a research laboratory, rather than the crematory, where Dr. Bracht, a neurosurgeon, anxiously awaited. He had come to Görden at Erich’s father’s request, much to the chagrin of Dr. Heinze and Franz, and was enthralled by the great number of children’s brains at his disposal. Together, he and Erich would dissect the brains, looking for physical signs or strange diseases that might somehow cause such malformations of the body or the mind. Sometimes Erich would think of Julia and Rabbi Loew’s sacred golem while looking at the twisted pinkish gray tissues of a child’s brain, and believed someday such a story might be true, that life would somehow spring from a test tube.
He had grown fond of Maria, too, as the months passed, not in any intimate way, but with a new respect for her own sense of duty. He kept his distance socially but felt good when she was with him in the ward. Her presence by his side became a necessary factor in his own role as doctor. Early on he turned to luminal pills as the favorite method for euthanizing the children under his care, seldom opting for a quick death from morphine. In most cases, the children would develop breathing problems, eventually succumbing to bronchitis or pneumonia. At times he would treat these ailments, carefully charting every change in a child’s condition, no matter how small, as if he were trying to heal them, not kill them. A child’s death seemed always like a failure to him, should it come either earlier or later than the expected time noted in the chart. Should a child linger too long, suffering, he would quickly finish them off with a lethal injection of morphine. When such a death did happen, he would meticulously review his notes looking for possible errors in luminal dosage prescribed, food and water intake, or any other factors that might have contributed to an error in his prognosis for time of death.
One afternoon while awaiting the arrival of new patients, he decided to visit several of the “good” wards, a name he had given them, that held patients who would see and walk in the sunshine again. He would talk there to other doctors about their cases to learn, always pretending as if he had similar ones in his own “special” ward to attend to. To get to the “good” wards, he had to pass through several wards like his own, including a larger one under Franz’s supervision. On this particular day, Franz was serving as a guide for several teachers touring the hospital. When he saw Erich approaching, his voice rose in volume and his mouth twisted in a sneer as he glared at him. Then he suddenly pulled a terribly emaciated child from its crib and held her by the leg like he would a small dead animal he had just killed.
“These children will die as God intended them to do, naturally, not by any drugs,” he said proudly.
Starving the misfits to death was a method used by many of the doctors, Erich knew. It saved time and money, and required less monitoring from the staff, though many of the nurses seemed uncomfortable with its use, compared to outright killing. But to Erich it was a terrible wrong, letting your patient die such a slow death. Giving food and water to the thirsty and hungry was the greatest of Christian virtues, and to deny them that was far different from the compassionate deaths Erich sought and now believed in.
But he said nothing as he listened to the boasting of Franz for a minute, thinking to himself how very different he was from such an evil man. For Franz, the children being killed should die because they were already essentially dead, separated from a life and world that had no room for them. Compassion had no meaning to them, and never would. There was no pretending in Franz—what he was about, the killings, was very much who he was. Erich had actually killed more children than Franz, but none died alone. Their deaths always came in the arms of Maria or his own. That factor alone, he believed, provided the moral wall separating him from Franz and other doctors like him.
When he was finished talking to the teachers, Franz casually tossed the pitiful child back into its crib as he might a dirty towel, all the while smirking at Erich, daring him to say something. Ignoring his taunting looks, Erich moved past Franz and the group of teachers, who had turned their attention to him, thinking he might be someone of importance, and walked down the hall to the good wards. Though Erich believed he was practicing medicine in treating the children to be euthanized in his ward, it was here that one’s calling to the ancient guild of Asklepios was still felt in his soul. While there he would read the medical records of patients suffering from undiagnosed illnesses, pretending he had been brought in to their cases as a consultant, deciding in silence the ailment and the treatment to be given. Then he would return another time to the wards to see if he had been right. When he was, which was more often than not, he would glow with pride at his diagnostic prowess. Nothing came from any of this pretending though. All the other doctors there, mostly older, knew he was from the killing wards, and allowed his little game to play out, knowing the supposed relief it brought to him. Only by chance had they been assigned to the “good wards” and escaped his fate.
When Erich returned to the East Ward he found Maria sitting in one of the rooms holding a tiny year-old baby boy in her arms, gently rocking him. The boy was blind and had no arms below his elbows and had been left by the child’s mother at the front door of the hospital. Maria looked up when he entered the room.
“A new patient for us to kill,” she said without any hesitation.
Erich ignored Maria’s callous remark and picked up the child for a cursory examination. “He is blind.”
“I know. What better way is there to escape your fears than having no eyes to see them? You would dream of nothing then,” Maria said, taking the child from Erich.
Taken back by Maria’s sudden melancholic attitude, Erich asked, “Are you okay? You seem tired.”
Looking first at the sleeping baby’s face, then at Erich, Maria began to cry softly.
“We are doing the right thing, aren’t we?”
“Maybe. In our eyes we are, but I’m not sure about God’s,” Erich responded, looking more closely at Maria, wondering if she had reached a breaking point from the constant smell of death around her. Some nurses had and were placed on leave.
“The churches have been silent. That is a good thing, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Perhaps, but like the rest of us, they stay silent to survive.”
Maria rose from her chair, kissed the sleeping boy on the forehead, then laid him gently in the bed, covering him with a light blanket as Erich had done little Brigitte on the very first day everything began. Turning back to Erich she said, “I wonder, how is it with death, to die? There must be something we feel. The change is so great.”
“That’s a strange question to ask, with all the dying going on around us.”
“I thought maybe you knew, that’s all, maybe from cases where one was said to be dead but wasn’t, and then told of what it was like.”
“Perhaps we change only a little, maybe not at all. No one knows, but it would be nice if we did. I think then we wouldn’t fight so hard for that last mouthful of air,” Erich said, taking Maria’s hand and leading her back to the nurse’s station.
“Your hours have been too long. I will speak to the supervisor about giving you some days away from the hospital,” he said, still holding Maria’s hand.
Maria abruptly stiffened, pulling her hand from his.
“No, say nothing, please. They will think I’m weak, when I should be strong, with Martin an
d all the boys fighting for us in the East. Martin would be ashamed should he know.”
Then she began to cry again.
“I never knew there would be so many. Surely there are no more crippled children left in Germany.”
“You may be right. Perhaps things will get better for everyone in a few more months,” Erich said, taking the file of the new patient from Maria’s desk and reading the notes quickly.
“Start him on luminal tablets in five days; three weeks is too long to wait for this child,” he continued, walking towards the young blind baby’s room, leaving Maria alone.
***