TWENTY-FIVE
Erich, Brandenburg, 1943
As each week passed the gray buses came more often to Görden, bringing many patients from distant villages, crowding the examining room and courtyard at times. Long days became the standard for Erich and the rest of the medical staff. At the beginning, his examinations of the patients were far more thorough than anyone else’s. He often dismissed patients from the walk down the hall to the gassing room, scribbling in their charts, “Capable of working.” None escaped their fate, though. As soon as he dismissed them, they were quickly returned to the line waiting before Franz, who took no longer than one minute, often less, to pass them on to their deaths. In time, Erich saw what was happening but continued his ways in examining his patients, as a good doctor would, until fatigue finally deadened his mind. He would leave then to go and sit, and sometimes read, next to Mother Mary, one of the statues that greeted the crazies from her place in the garden.
None of the doctors, including Erich, remained in the examining room for the two hours it took to ventilate the gassing room and remove the pile of dead bodies. They would return to the hospital wards to tend to their regular patients, should there be any. Erich, though, had few to treat in the East Ward, for which he was glad, and spent his time reading and talking with Maria. They had become close friends, as he said to her one late afternoon, and they both agreed that nothing more than friendship should be expected of the other. She reminded him that she was very much married and loved Martin, though no letter had come from him in months.
A letter did come to Maria one Friday morning, but it was not from Martin. In the simplest of words, she was informed by the Chancellery that her husband was missing in action. Erich was with Maria when the news came, holding her until there were no more tears left to shed, except those in her heart. They then went to the rose garden by the hospital and sat together where he held her hand, listening to rambling shattered stories of who Martin was and all that he meant to her. When the time came for Erich to return to the examining room, she promised to wait for him, and they would talk more of Martin. Kissing her lightly on the forehead, he squeezed Maria’s hand and left to face the remaining hours of the day in a room full of people whose future no longer really mattered, at least in a way they would know, because what there might have been would soon end for all of them.
When he returned to the garden hours later, the sun was resting low in the sky, lining puffs of clouds with soft, red streaks that gradually became lost in gray as evening moved closer. Erich stood in the garden for a brief moment to look at the moving scene, as he had many times as a child in Dresden. The changing colors had thrilled him then, quickening his desire to become the painter his mother hoped he would be and his father despised. “All life is brief, only a second before God,” she had told him, “but art is forever.” Perhaps someday, he sighed, when all was right again, he would trade the white coat for a handful of brushes and paint such a scene.
Maria had left the moment Erich disappeared from sight, returning to the East Ward to gather her things and go first to the apartment and then the church. She knew no one there, nor did she belong, but she loved its great doors that swung open wide like two giant hands welcoming all who entered. She had sat there alone for hours in the dark sanctuary, asking God’s grace a hundred times to shine on her Martin’s life, wherever he might be, and bring him home to her. But God’s grace was nowhere near Martin, as he lay between the old man and his comrade, rotting in the filth of the outhouse, never to be found.
Finding Maria not at her apartment, Erich went to where he knew she would be, in the great Evangelical Lutheran church, whose twin spires seemed to go beyond heaven to another world. Saying nothing, he sat down quietly next to her and waited until she was ready to leave.
Later, he sat again with Maria in her apartment, holding her at times while she cried, other times listening to words that made little sense. Never before had Erich felt someone else’s pain, and he doubted even now that what he was experiencing might be such an emotion. Yet he had no explanation for the moment. The closest time to now was when the grandfather he loved so much was killed in the Great War. But even then it was a selfish loss, quickly passing when others took his place. His separation from Julia was a matter of the heart, an explainable longing shared by all lovers, but there was never the searing pain he saw in Maria. It seemed to smother her from head to toe, allowing nothing to escape its crushing weight.
As the night aged, Maria fell asleep in Erich’s arms, the anguish of Martin’s loss still brushed across her face. He would stay the evening, sleeping fitfully next to her soft body, lest she awaken and cry out again for him to hold her. It was a new and strange experience for him. He had never finished the night with a woman by his side. Not even with Julia. Their times together were, for the most part, a precious gentle love wrapped in brief moments of ecstasy.
Maria was different, though. Away from the hospital and the starchiness of her nurse’s uniform, she exuded sex in a fragile way that Julia never could, nor would he have wanted her to. Even the smell of Maria’s sweat aroused the desire to take her brutally and uncaring as one animal might another. He had never experienced such a long night. Vile games came to him in his mind, the kind psychiatrists since Freud have tried to analyze and understand and sometimes called a sickness. They would stay with him until the dawn, as he tried to understand what lay beneath the terrible urge to use Maria, even though the empathy he felt for her loss and pain seemed terribly real to him. Had the night been an hour longer, he would have taken her, Erich knew, she was that vulnerable.
At first light, ignoring Erich’s presence next to her, Maria slipped out of bed and went to the bathroom to bathe. Erich had already left for the hospital when she returned, deciding to shave and wash in the doctors’ lounge near the East Ward. When he arrived, Franz was waiting by the nurse’s station to talk with him.
“I have been ordered to Auschwitz much sooner than expected,” he said, looking closely at Erich’s ragged and unshaven appearance.
Erich noticed Franz’s attention but said nothing.
“I must leave this afternoon,” Franz continued, “and I have asked that you take over my duties here.”
Surprised by Franz’s gesture, Erich was both elated and fearful by what else might now be expected of him. He knew Franz was not the kind to help anyone unless there was something for him to gain in doing so. That was the way the game was played throughout the Reich, especially the Health Ministry. Even those closest to the Chancellery knew their status always depended on someone else a bit higher and closer to the catbird seat than they were.
For a moment, Franz looked past Erich at the empty nurse’s station.
“Where is Nurse Drossen? We are expecting more patients than usual this afternoon, and she will be needed in the examining room.”
“Her husband was reported missing in action only yesterday. She is at home or the church.”
“Mourning in the church will do her no good. God hates whiners. Let her mourn among the crazies, where good will come to all of us by getting rid of them,” Franz said, staring coldly at Erich for a second, then walking away towards Dr. Heinze’s office.
Later, Erich returned to Maria’s apartment to find her staring blankly at a letter from Martin, which had arrived earlier in the morning. It seemed odd to him there were no tears in Maria’s eyes, only a frightened look of utter disbelief, the kind when nothing around you seems real. Handing the letter to him, Maria pointed to the date—it had been written months back but was only now reaching her.
“He is dead. My heart felt it last night. There is no need to pretend anymore,” Maria said calmly in a soft voice.
Erich sensed Maria was probably right. Only a lucky few who were missing in action ever returned to reclaim their life.
Erich reached out to touch Maria, but she quickly brushed his hand aside and moved away from him.
“What is it you want, Erich, besides me?”
Eric
h could find no answer for a second to Maria’s surprising words and turned to the kitchen stove as if he were inspecting it.
“Dr. Kremer knows of your loss, and in his kind way has ordered you to be on duty this afternoon in the examining room. There will be many patients to process.”
“It is right they should die, but not my Martin. He was only a simple soldier trying to do his duty. They are nothing and never will be,” Maria said with anger, leaving Erich standing by the stove while she went to dress.
When Maria returned, she was dressed in a newly cleaned and pressed uniform, with her face covered in powder as white as the uniform she was wearing, giving her a ghostlike appearance. Erich’s stunned look made her smile, which bothered him even more.
“Don’t you like it? The crazies will, I’m sure, looking at me, and maybe even laughing one more time before we kill them,” she said, tracing a wide smile across her mouth with bright red lipstick. Erich quickly took the tube of lipstick away from her, placing it in his pocket, and led her to the bedroom.
“Go back to bed and end this dream you are in. Dr. Kremer is leaving for Auschwitz and I will cover for you for a few days, since I will be in charge.”
Ignoring Erich’s presence, Maria began disrobing. As he turned to leave she grabbed his arm, pulling him towards her.
“Come to bed with me. Be my Martin for a little while,” she said, before bursting into loud sobs, the tears slowly making their way through the heavy powder on her face, carving small canyons before dripping from her chin. She looked even more hideous now, standing naked with a face twisted and smeared in a mixture of watery colored anguish.
Pushing her onto the bed and covering up her nakedness with a sheet, Erich looked down at the crumbled human mass before him and said in a commanding voice, “Stay away, Maria, until you can see the world as it is, not from that of a lost love.”
As he left then, Maria’s loud sobbing pierced the air as he shut the door behind him.
When afternoon came, Franz had left for Auschwitz and Erich moved tentatively to assume charge of the ongoing T4 Operation taking place in the old prison. He had never been particularly good at giving orders, and thought himself to be a poor excuse for authority, directing men to do something they might otherwise decline to do. Deciding beforehand to simply take his place alongside the other examining doctors and say nothing, he nodded to the SS staff to begin what had now come to be called “the slaughtering line,” a name given to the naked patients waiting much like steers lined up in a stockyard in preparation for their sudden and violent death.
Within minutes the room was filled with the same type of patients as those before, but Erich noticed a small group of five had been segregated from the others, standing quietly to themselves while they removed their clothing. When the greater number had been examined and marked and stamped by the nurses, the other doctors stepped back, leaving Erich to examine the remaining five patients who were hurriedly shoved into a line before him. Erich turned around to look at the doctors, now smoking and talking among themselves.
“Why are you stopping? There are other patients?”
“We do not want to touch them. They are crazy Jews. They are to be separated here and everywhere else,” the oldest and most distinguished of the doctors replied.
“Yes, they are for you to examine, Dr. Heinze has ordered,” another one said sarcastically.
Erich knew what was happening, he had heard the rumors. Doctors everywhere were being tested to see if they were loyal to the greater good of the Reich. Those that failed would be sent away, without notice to family or anyone else. That is what had happened to Dr. Schneider months back when the crippled babies were being euthanized. Now these doctors were watching to see what he would do, one especially, who was a Gestapo informant. Any hesitation on his part could be seen as a failure.
Erich summoned the trembling group to come forward. None in the group had ever shown themselves to others, as they were doing now, standing naked before so many staring eyes. All were from the same small crossroads village south of Brandenberg, working at menial labor because of their slowness of mind, yet earning their way in life. They were standing before Erich because like the rest of the patients they had been reported to the authorities as mentally ill and registered with the Health Ministry as such. All five had been brought in a separate, smaller bus from the other patients, with the windows painted over so no one could see out or in. Strangely, though, they had been sent to Görden for observation only, not as a part of the larger group. Erich talked briefly to each about their work but did nothing else. To touch them would separate him from the other doctors carefully watching him. He knew, though, the Jews were healthy of mind from their answers to his questions, and could perform meaningful work if carefully taught to do so. His examination complete, Erich ordered them marked and stamped and to be kept separate from the rest of the waiting patients, before their short trip to the gassing room. They would be the last to enter the room and the ones he would see die, gasping for air as others in the room pushed them away. Erich could not help but watch the irony of the terrible scene playing out before his eyes. With death but moments away for all trapped in the room together, separation from Jews was still necessary for some.
Back in the examining room, Erich gave a list of those gassed to the older doctor, directing him to write the necessary letters to the families explaining their loved one’s fictional death a week earlier than normal. No letters were necessary for the five Jews, he decided. It would be as if they had never come to Görden, or even existed.
Returning to the hospital, Erich went first to Dr. Heinze’s office and filled out the coded report for the Health Ministry of the number of deaths processed, and then added a special addendum to the report regarding the five Jews. There he carefully noted in detail the absence of any serious mental sickness on their part and that all were fit and able to perform meaningful work. It was the only way he knew to tell the Ministry the five Jews had died for nothing. When he finished with the day’s report, 125 more German citizens had been added to the growing number of those being sacrificed for the purification of the Aryan race. The eugenics movement, first begun so many years ago in America with the birthing rights of thousands of women spirited away on nothing more than the machinations of a new science and a perverted ideology, was now moving across Germany with the unbridled energy of a thousand steam engines. To some who cared, it was a joyous moment in history, the triumph of social evolution. For others, it was the beginning of the end of innocence as God intended it to be.
Maria was waiting at his apartment when Erich arrived. She looked rested, having slept the full day after he left her place, yet her eyes betrayed the terrible hurt she had suffered and was trying to reason away, relying on, the best she could, the old Christian adage that what comes to us in our lives is always God’s will. From that, she had been told since childhood, we should always dismiss the terrible things we suffer as nothing more than a test of one’s faith. She had believed easily in such nonsense all her life because nothing had come her way but the sunshine of each day. But even sunshine, she now knew, carried its own separate basket of tears.
For his part, Erich was glad to see Maria. She had become the only person outside of Julia to have found a corner of his soul. What he wanted now from her was absolution for what had occurred with the Jews during the afternoon. When he told her what took place in the examining room and the innocence of the five Jews, Maria said nothing. Instead, she walked around the apartment, looking in each room and closet as if searching for some phantom body, or hidden recording device, that in time might come back to haunt her with the words she would say now. In a few minutes she sat down next to Erich, who was resting on a small settee in the makeshift living room, but she offered no explanation for her strange behavior.
“What do you want me to say, Erich, that it was wrong for the Jews to die as they did?” she asked. “They were no more innocent than all the crazies we are kill
ing.”
“Perhaps, except they were not as sick. They died for who they were, which does seem different, doesn’t it?”
Maria looked wishfully at Erich, her eyes becoming watery with tears.
“Why are we talking about the Jews, Erich, when my Martin is dead. So forgive me, what is right and wrong makes little sense to me at the moment.”
“Why are you here then? Pity?”
“Yes, for my share of the pity I think. It’s the one emotion that requires the least of anyone to give, yet it does help one feel better.”
“Okay, I pity you,” Erich said with a nervous smile, becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the conversation.
But Maria was not amused and turned away from him for a moment. Though she felt herself a fair person, the plight of the Jews bothered her little, growing up in Mainz as she did. None lived in her poor neighborhood, nor went to her schools. They sometimes seemed as foreign to her as the occasional French businessman in the town, especially the old ones. But to many people in the neighborhood, including her mother, it was the greedy Jewish bankers that Hitler had railed against who kept them in poverty. Even at the church, few kind words were said for them. And every Easter she was reminded that it was they who had killed her Savior. After Easter week one year, when she was twelve, she was brought to tears and chased from the playground by her classmates taunting her for acting as a Jew in the town’s annual passion play. What was strange to her later when she recalled the episode was that she thought little about what it might be like to be a Jew, but more about how it would be if you were not against them.
Without thinking, Erich took Maria’s hand and brought it to his lips, kissing it gently, then said, in the softest of voices, “We are alive, Maria, and we have a choice to stay alive. For that we should be glad. It’s more than the crazies and Jews had.”
Shocked by his actions, Maria abruptly jerked her hand away, rose from the settee, and began straightening her clothes nervously.
“You are confusing your psychology lesson, Dr. Schmidt. Pity and sex are not the same thing, and never will be,” she said, opening the front door to leave.
“I meant nothing, only that I cared about your sorrow.”
“Perhaps, but not likely. A hunger for sex has a way of sneaking up on you, hiding behind a lot of fake emotions. Yours is pity,” Maria said, closing the door behind her.
Erich sat looking around the room at the shadowy emptiness staring back at him. Maria was right. Her hurt and weakness continued to arouse him long after she was gone, and he felt no shame for it. The fact he possessed any kind of feeling now, with all that had happened, thrilled him. It told him he was alive and still very much a man.
So he came to yet one more day in the examining room. Maria was there waiting for him, as were the three doctors who stood with him the day before when the Jews were gassed. There were no Jews to examine, only the usual four busloads of mental patients. Though she had begged off after the first day, upset by all the squirming naked flesh crowding around her, Maria wanted to return. She would heal more quickly from her own loss, knowing she was doing her duty, which would have pleased Martin.
As summer turned to autumn, the buses continued to come, sometimes in twos, with their load of patients. At times there were some Jews included, but never more than a few, for which Erich was glad. One afternoon, while waiting for the gassing room to be emptied of bodies, Erich became upset when two buses arrived carrying an unusually large number of semiconscious patients and ones who had been brutally beaten about the face. When the first patient stepped from the bus and saw Erich and the staff, he began crying and shouting “murderers” at them and tried to run away. Quickly subdued and sedated, he was carried straight to the examining room, stripped of his clothing, and tossed in a corner of the room where he lay crumpled on the floor like discarded dirty laundry. The same fate awaited the other semi-conscious patients, and when the gassing room was empty all were quickly carried in and stacked like a cord of wood near the front wall. When the other patients entered the room and saw the pile of naked bodies, they turned back and rushed to the door, which had already slammed shut behind them. Pounding on the door, they began to scream and wail unmercifully until the gas made its way into the room to still them.
Later, when one of the SS staff was questioned about the semiconscious and those beaten, he had no excuse other than to say, “Everyone in the asylums now seems to know what will happen to them when the gray buses come.” When others on the staff were questioned, their answers were the same. Listening, Erich believed that the secret T4 program, so carefully guarded by the Health Ministry, had become unsheathed by the steady rise in rumors coursing through the villages and asylums. Questions began to be asked of him for which he had no answers. At first, when the killings began, the walls were silent, yielding no hints that anything other than caring medicine was going on behind them. But the rising blackened gray smoke from the crematory had become a fixture in the skies, spreading the smell of burning flesh. No questions would come from the townspeople, though, only a silent wonder after a while at how all that was happening could have come about. “Where were the churches?” some would say among themselves. “They should know. Isn’t it their job to know those things that seem so evil?”
A few churches did begin to speak out, some with commanding tongues, against what they believed might be happening behind the walls of the old prison. But the mental patients continued to come at an ever-increasing pace, making it impossible for all to be examined by Erich and the staff, or carefully identified from the hospital records to confirm that they should even be there. The constant rows of human cattle waiting to be slaughtered, and the piercing stench of death that followed, was beginning to overwhelm even the sanest of the lot, except Maria. Steeling herself with constant visions of Martin lying dead somewhere in the unknown, she stood throughout each day, hollow eyed and blind to the crying faces that continually passed before her, leaving each evening unshaken by all that had happened that day. Erich grew obsessed with how those around him seemed to enjoy being a part of the killing center. He began to wonder if the time hadn’t finally arrived when the rational mind would eventually accept killing when death was all around. Like mass hysteria, could it become the aegis, the mental shield for all else that was happening? He finally concluded that living in the world is nothing more than a morality play where one may easily forget his lines.
As time passed, Maria continued working in the examining room, always stoic, her mind a million miles away from the beseeching eyes of the patients watching every move she made, or every word she might say. Twice during the mornings she would go and look for a second through the glass peephole in the door to see the writhing bodies gasping for air, then collapsing. It was always a strange and puzzling sight to her, she told Erich one evening. Why did they struggle so much to stay alive, when it was hopeless? They should submit and thank God for what they’d had. For herself, she could never get over the idea of death. One moment you were here and then there was nothing. No fanfare of trumpets and clapping hands and flashing lights, just nothing. Erich recognized the silent footsteps of Maria’s approaching madness with such chatter. Like a brittle dead twig, her mind was snapping. Still, each morning Maria was the first to report for work, renewed in spirit and determination to complete the day as best she could. Martin would have expected it of her, she would tell those who questioned her welfare.
With the winter months approaching, the number of mental patients going to their deaths seemed to be diminishing. By Erich’s calculation, over eight thousand bodies had been carried by the stokers on metal pallets for burning in the crematory. Thousands more, he knew, had been killed elsewhere in the asylums across Germany. It was hard for him not to think of what his future in psychiatry might have been had all these people lived. In a way, he felt cheated. With all the crazies dead, he would have no patients to treat.
One day no buses came. And when none came the next day, nor th
e days after, the sudden unexpected release from killing played on everyone’s mind, except Erich’s. Secretly, Franz had prevailed upon Dr. Eduard Wirth, the chief SS physician, to transfer Erich to Auschwitz. When the transfer orders came, Erich was reading aloud Nietzsche’s long aftersong, “From High Mountains,” to Maria in the rose garden. They had come there together often in the recent weeks to let their day become peaceful for the night. It was good for Maria to do so, he believed. To hear the rhythmical words sing their soothing beauty held a healing grace of its own for her broken heart. They had also become closer friends than each realized. More so, too, than either one would have wanted, they would later claim. But in these passing moments in time, each seemed to hold for the other what they had lost.
Erich said nothing as he read the orders silently to himself, but the shock printed across his face was there for Maria to read. He was to report to Auschwitz in five days. While the order of transfer was clear to him, it was the second order that was puzzling and bothered him. He was to report first to Munich and there attend a trial of several university students charged with treason to the Third Reich. They had been caught distributing leaflets condemning Hitler and fostering internal dissent against the Nazi regime. Together with another psychiatrist who would come from Berlin, he was to try and develop a psychological forensic profile of the charged university students that would help the Gestapo in identifying other disgruntled students on campuses across Germany. Erich knew little about the kind of profiling being requested of him, and knew that innocent students could easily be arrested should they display any of the characteristics found in the profile he would develop. He was paranoid enough to believe his task there was another Gestapo test of his loyalty. What he didn’t know, and never would, was that the special assignment to Munich was the doings of his father trying to reassure his own position with the Chancellery by involving his often-suspected son in such an important task.
When Erich handed the official orders to Maria, she grasped his hand for the first time ever and began to cry. She had lost Martin, and now it was Erich who would be leaving. And while the looming separation may have fooled her heart into believing more is there to be taken from the heart than it really ever had, she would be alone.
“Tomorrow is Saturday. We must do something special, then go to church on Sunday,” she said through a flood of tears tumbling down her cheeks.
“Yes, finding a small inn by the river to stay over through Sunday would be nice, if there are any left from all the bombing. I can go from there to Munich.”
Maria listened carefully to Erich’s words, and knew what he was asking, what was expected of her. Any other time she would quickly have dismissed with anger what was being suggested. He was not her Martin, nor would he ever be, or anyone else, but the strange and tender bond that had developed between them tied her to him. The need to be held through the night now was too great for both of them, she knew.
“Berlin would be special for both of us and we should be there together, but we must still go to church on Sunday. It would be right to do so before you leave,” Maria said, now smiling again.
***