by Elly Welt
The flies had been irradiated forty-six and one-half hours. Enough. When Professor Kreutzer and the Security Officer were gone, I took my three capsules from the target area and stopped by Rare Earths to tell the Chemist that the Radiation Laboratory would be O.K. now, and then I went into my lab to etherize the flies and put each male in a flask with three virgins. You could figure that as soon as the virgins matured, after two hours or so, and there were male flies in the vicinity, the virgins had to be considered fertilized.
Monika was there waiting to help me. She and Marlene must have talked, for when the hundred flasks were all back in the incubators, she took my hand and led me to the darkroom. Both of them—first Marlene and then Monika—lay so silent and unmoving that I felt that although one had the ability to perform coition, one could still feel inadequate.
We were looking for the effects of radiation on unripe sperm, so those first three virgins had to be discarded into the mass grave, and the second three, and the third three. Each male went through nine or so females before he was put with those whose offspring we could check.
Our second-floor wing smelled also of the rich compost we mixed with the soil to grow the feed for the rabbits, rats, and ladybugs and to grow the tobacco. Some of it was grown in the small greenhouse on the second floor, and the remainder in one of the large greenhouses in the park.
Our wing smelled of the tobacco we grew and aged, and of the particular sauce each scientist developed to cure his own tobacco: it was air dried, hung leaf by leaf on fishing line, and then soaked in all kinds of exotic solutions including the Chief’s recipe of prune juice and extract of dried figs. There was endless discussion on how long to soak, how long to dry, what sauce to use. Then it was cut, then smoked. The report filed showed extensive research on a tobacco virus called “Tabac Mosaic Virus.”
And it smelled of the smoke. Everyone smoked. It was an absolute miracle there was no explosion with the building so full of alcohol and ether vapors.
I smoked a lot after coming to the Institute, and I was puffing away on a cigarette while sorting flies one day early in August when Sonja Press came to get me. She was as warm and friendly as ever. “Your mother is here,” she said, touching my arm. She always smelled like roses.
I unscrewed the cigarette holder from my microscope and put it in a drawer.
“She’s upstairs in the Chief’s office.”
There was always the problem when I stayed overnight at the Institute that my parents would not know if I was all right, and I would not know if they were. Telephone calls to check on family after air raids were against the law. So we developed a system: I would ring the house, and if everything was fine, they would pick up the phone after the fifth ring and then hang up again. It wasn’t too satisfactory because often the phones were out of order, and I would end up riding through the night from Hagen, on the northeastern border of Berlin, to our southwestern suburb, Gartenfeld, only to find the house intact, my parents all right. Sometimes I would stay a few hours to help put out fires at neighboring homes and turn right around, stumble through the dark to the S-Bahn stations, and ride for two hours back to Hagen. The night before, the phones had been out of order, and I was unable to go home to check on my parents because I had to be Air Raid Warden at the Institute. We took turns being Warden.
Mother sat beside the Chief in his private office. So near to his bulk, his bursting virility, there seemed little life left in her. Mother, a small woman and plain, wore a black wool suit. I bowed and took the frail hand she extended.
“Herr Professor informs me that your work is promising, Josef. I hope, also, you are being a good and honorable young man.”
The Chief said, “I understand, Frau Doktor, he is quite good.” He smiled at me.
I could not yet smile at him.
Still her hand held mine. Unusual. “Has something happened, Mutti? Uncle Otto? Aunt Greta?”
She pulled her hand away. “No. We are all fine—your father, too.” A reprimand. “It concerns you.” She withdrew a letter from her black purse and gave it to me. One could see from the envelope that it was from the Office of Labor.
I did not want to be taken from the Institute.
She sat erect in her chair. The Chief jumped to his feet and began to pace.
I opened the letter and read it silently. “They want me to report to the Labor Office, Section IV-B-4, within seven days, in order to be incorporated into the work force.”
I did not want to be taken before my time. From 1941 on, when they were bringing in forced laborers from the conquered countries, there were rumors that the Jews were not being put into labor camps or resettlement camps but were actually being murdered. The first time I was aware that extermination was going on was in 1939. We were called into an assembly at school to hear a recent alumnus talk. He had been a soccer champion and student president of the whole school, and, of course, we all looked up to him as some sort of god. Several months earlier, he had enlisted in the Waffen S.S. and was just now returning from combat on the Polish Front. He had been asked to give a pep talk to the students so that they would go willingly into the S.S. and into the army. But instead, he stood before us and said that he could not live with what he had seen and with what he had done. He told us that in Poland they had rounded up Jews into groups and had driven their tanks and trucks into them, smashing them to death. Of course, the school officials were furious about what he was saying, and, finally, they stopped him. Later that day, he committed suicide by throwing himself off the school roof. We were called, again, into assembly and told that he had killed himself because everything he had said had been lies, and he was ashamed of the lies.
And Mitzka, every time he came to a staff dinner, corroborated all the horrible rumors about the death camps. We knew cyanide was being used—a horrible, suffocating death.
Mother said to the Chief, “Is it because he will be seventeen next week?”
The Chief stopped pacing and looked at me. “Happy birthday,” he said. He took the letter from me and studied it, then said to Mother, “If you’ll please excuse us, Frau Doktor, we will be back shortly. Come along, Josef.”
On the way out he asked Sonja to bring my mother tea with real sugar and to have two rabbits slaughtered and packed in a basket with cornmeal and vodka for her. We ran down the steps from his penthouse and up the central stairs to Herr Wagenführer in Personnel on fifth.
“Is it that he will be seventeen soon?” the Chief asked.
Herr Wagenführer shook his head. “No. Look at this number up in the corner: fifty thousand. They have printed only fifty thousand of these form letters, so most probably it is an action against a certain group.” He handed back the letter. “I’m sorry, Josef, there is nothing I can do for you, but sometimes Professor Kreutzer has ideas on these matters.”
In the Physics Laboratory on second, Professor Kreutzer changed his glasses only once, and quickly, before reading the letter. Afterward, he changed slowly back to the original pair, cleaning, slowly, the gold-rims, taking off the rimless, donning again the gold, putting the rimless away in a pocket, looking at me over the gold-rims and then through the glass before he spoke. “It’s some special action, in your case probably an action against mixed-bloods. If you will notice this number printed on the form, there are only fifty thousand issued, which is not many considering that they have gleaned the mailing list from files of some hundred million people or more.”
“What can be done?” the Chief asked him
“Delay.”
The Chief nodded and said, “Frau Doktor Bernhardt is in my office.”
“Alex,” said Professor Kreutzer, “Find out from our Gestapo in the House about this operation IV-B-4. I think it is not Labor Office at all but something else.”
The Chief left to find the Security Officer. Professor Kreutzer packed a few things into a briefcase—some papers and journals—checked to be sure his spectacles were all in place, and he and I walked down the hall and up the stairca
se to the Chief’s office. He bowed to my mother and said, “I am optimistic we can delay any action against your son until, we hope, there will be no further need to delay.”
The Chief came, followed by Sonja Press, who carried the basket of rabbits and all for my mother. I could see the Gestapo in the House, in his black uniform, waiting in the outer office.
“No!” said Professor Kreutzer. “It would be too dangerous for Frau Doktor to carry such a basket of food on the train. We’ll send it over later.”
The Chief pounded his palm with his fist. “Of course, how thoughtless of me.”
My mother was unable to speak. Sonja Press took her hand and held it. I, across the room from her, could not move. The Chief and Professor Kreutzer stepped to the outer office to confer with the Security Officer, returning in very few minutes.
“Frau Doktor,” said the Chief, “although it comes through the Labor Office, this action is secretly under the auspices of a special department of the S.S. An appointment has been made, and Professor Kreutzer and Josef will have to pay a little call there today.”
Mother stood and looked at me. I wanted to cross the room and embrace her, but I did not.
“He will be back today,” said the Chief gently.
“Good-bye, Mutti,” I said from my distance.
Professor Kreutzer and I walked the three kilometers to the train station without talking. Once on the train, he motioned for me to sit opposite him in the empty compartment; then he extracted two scientific journals from his briefcase and handed one to me. At the second stop, a family crowded into the small compartment with us. The father, an army sergeant, sat next to Professor Kreutzer. The mother, next to me, began to unpack sausage and bread from a basket. The four children, noisily munching, moved constantly—back and forth, forth and back.
The sergeant tapped Professor Kreutzer’s arm and offered him some food.
“Look,” he said, “real butter. I have just come on leave from Denmark, and we have real butter and good sausage.”
Professor Kreutzer looked at the sergeant over the black-rims. “Denmark, eh? So you eat good food from Denmark?”
“Superior. I am in a hurry to return there.”
Professor Kreutzer nodded and said, “Thank you very much, sergeant, but I have already eaten.”
I was too worried and preoccupied to read, but Professor Kreutzer returned to his journal and was so engrossed he seemed not to notice the continuing commotion, even when the train lurched and the children fell against him with their buttered bread and sausage.
But what? I looked again at him. A spastic movement, subtle. He rubbed his back against the bench; his left shoulder twitched. Discreetly he scratched his head, his chest, his underarm; there seemed a slight convulsion of his trunk.
The mother began to look at him, too, and, I think at the same moment, she and I saw the little fleas hopping about the lap of Professor Kreutzer—hop, hop—onto the leg of her husband. At her exclamation, the sergeant, too, noticed. He jumped to his feet, brushing his chest, his legs.
“What kind of pigs are these people?” he shouted.
And he moved across and sat beside his wife, who was packing the sausage and bread back into the basket. All four children crowded near the parents on my bench, which was intended for four people. They muttered and complained. “Pigs. Fleas.”
Professor Kreutzer, solitary, scratched his chest and said, “Eh? What? Fleas, madame? There are no fleas in Germany.”
At the next stop the family fled from the train. I began to itch. Professor Kreutzer motioned for me to sit beside him. I hesitated, but I did it.
“Your reluctance to sit here appalls me,” he said.
I shrugged.
He opened his hand. A gelatin capsule, the kind we used for irradiating flies. “Open it.”
Of course. Drosophila melanogaster vestigial. A mutation. Withered wings. They were unable to fly but perfectly capable of hopping about like fleas and of breeding with each other to make more such useful creatures. Thereafter, I bred my own private stock and always carried a capsule of them with me on the S-Bahn.
The Central Labor Office was midtown in a massive red-brick structure built at the turn of the century without regard for taste. The windows, all boarded and bricked because of the bombing, compounded its ugliness. Professor Kreutzer unhesitatingly bypassed the main entrance and walked briskly in a side door marked D, I following him. To the man behind the information counter, he said, “I have an appointment with Herr Direktor Bruno.” The man waved us on. Up three flights of stairs and to the right we came to a door marked 1127, Labor Department Section IV-B-4. He knocked.
“Enter,” sang a woman’s voice.
The anteroom was plainly furnished. A good-looking woman sat behind the reception desk. There were three doors leading, I assumed, to other offices.
“I have an appointment with Herr Direktor Bruno. I am Professor Kreutzer.”
“One moment please, Herr Professor.” She picked up her telephone and pushed a button. “Professor Kreutzer is here . . . Yes, Herr Direktor.” She hung up the receiver and said to us, “Won’t you have a seat, please? It will be a few minutes.”
We sat on the wooden chairs. I was anxious but not afraid. If there were to be a free election for the position of God and the two candidates were the Chief and Professor Kreutzer, I would vote for Professor Kreutzer. Both were brilliant, brave, and competent, and the Chief was also warmly human and overwhelmingly charismatic. Professor Kreutzer, by comparison, was cold and impersonal. But he was infallible—and I would, ten times over, rather be ruled by a well-directed infallibility than by a well-directed charisma.
After twenty minutes or so, the receptionist’s phone rang. “Yes, please? . . . Immediately, Herr Direktor.” She looked toward us. “Please, you may go in now. The middle door. You needn’t knock.”
Behind the middle door was a short passage leading to another door, which was upholstered against sound. Professor Kreutzer opened the second door and walked in, I behind him.
The office was elegant, with oriental rugs and heavy wine draperies. There were four framed pictures on the walls: Adolf Hitler; Himmler, who was Interior Minister as well as Leader of the S.S.; and Ley, Minister of Labor. The fourth was a family group with an officer in the black uniform of the S.S., surrounded by his overfed wife and chubby children.
Bruno, in well-tailored civilian dress, sat behind an ornately carved desk and did not look up as we entered. He pretended to be engrossed in the papers before him.
Professor Kreutzer, of course, was not one to be ignored.
“Heil Hitler and greetings, Sturmbannführer Bruno.” It was barked in staccato and followed by a click of the heels and a Nazi salute.
Sturmbannführer Bruno’s head jerked up. Astonished, he was momentarily impotent and could not get his hand up in a proper salute. “Heil Hitler,” he muttered. “How did you get my name?”
Translated, that meant how did Professor Kreutzer find out he was an officer of the S.S. and that IV-B-4 was not Labor Department at all but a clandestine operation of Herr Himmler’s. To this day, I am not sure why they bothered with such charades, and why they didn’t openly concede that this department was S.S. and that IV-B-4 was a code for Jew in the Labor Force.
Professor Kreutzer answered his question. “Did you not receive a special citation in the Schwarze Korps?”
“Yes, I did. But that was some time ago.” A half smile.
“I do not forget these things,” said Professor Kreutzer and handed him my summons. The man was off-balance and would not be allowed to regain his equilibrium.
Bruno glanced at the summons, and Professor Kreutzer began his spectacle-changing routine. He removed a glass case from one pocket and searched for the cleaning cloth in another, then removed the black-rims from the case and held them to the light from the window and began to clean them in a superior way, attacking a recalcitrant spot in the upper right lens. At this point, Bruno looked up at hi
m. Professor Kreutzer removed the gold-rims, put them in the case and into his pocket, and donned the black-rims, then stared over them at the seated official, looking cold and controlled. He looked very important, not at all kind, very superior—and all reverence is due superiority, so deeply is it engrained in our German souls.
Bruno rubbed the side of his face with his open palm, then stood, “What can I do for you?”
But Professor Kreutzer did not answer him and began to change to the rimless, all in all the most elaborate and perfectly timed exchange I had yet seen. Bruno just stood there, gaping at the stunning performance.
I stood behind Professor Kreutzer. I was as tall as he, but I weighed one hundred and twelve pounds and had absolutely no presence.
“As you well know, Sturmbannführer Bruno, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Neurophysiological Research in Hagen is involved in work of high priority and of utmost importance for the war effort of the Third Reich.”
Bruno nodded. “Yes, I am aware of this, Herr Professor.”
“Yes. Are you aware that I am the Chief Atomic Physicist, and that this boy has been trained to perform certain tasks? He has been trained by me to perform them well.”
Bruno looked at me.
“Even so, he does not understand what it is that he does, and what the work is all about. He is a machine. I am not free to go into the details of what this work involves, and I ask that this matter be handled with top security—TOP SECURITY! If you wish, you may check into the research projects for the Luftwaffe. The numbers for this project are eight . . . six . . . seven . . . zero . . . three . . . two . . . one.” Professor Kreutzer paused after each number to give Bruno time.