by Celia Rees
“Kurt took him. He was six years. He’d just had a birthday. It was a fine day, late summer, a breath of Autumn in the air, the lindens just beginning to turn yellow against the blue sky. I made sure Wolfie was dressed up warmly in his best tweed coat, hat, scarf, and mittens. He showed no emotion, but then, he never did. He did not like to be touched. Nevertheless, he let me kiss him. He reached up and wiped a tear from my face. “Why are your eyes leaking, Mummy?” That’s what he said. He got into the car next to Kurt. We all waved until they had disappeared down the drive. That’s the last time I saw him. He didn’t look back.”
She broke off, arms tightly crossed, as if holding herself together. Edith let the silence stretch until Elisabeth was able to continue.
“Kurt . . . Kurt promised me that he would receive the best of care. The director was a personal friend and a very fine doctor. He specialized in children of Wolfie’s sort. I went to Berlin, attended receptions, parties, hosted dinners for Kurt’s SS colleagues. The clinic was not far from Heidelberg. Kurt would visit when his work took him to the university there, so I had regular reports on Wolfie’s progress. He’s in good physical health, Kurt said, happy, being well looked after. It was coming up to Christmas; I asked if Wolfie could come to us in Berlin. Kurt said it was not advisable for Wolfie to travel so far. I asked if I could go to visit him with gifts: jigsaw puzzles, a paintbox, a new hat Irenka had knitted and a scarf and new mittens since he was always losing them. That was not advisable, either. Patients found such visits upsetting. It disrupted the routine, which was all-important for the children’s treatment. Kurt took the gifts himself on his next trip to Hiedelberg. When he returned to Berlin, he told me about the carol singing on Wolfie’s ward, the tree hung with Christmas treats and sweetmeats. Wolfie had had a fine old time, that’s what he said. But it was all lies. When my son was supposed to be enjoying himself eating gingerbread and stollen, he was almost certainly already dead.”
Even though she had sensed that this was coming, Edith was shocked beyond words. Eventually, she broke the awful stillness that had grown in the cold, shabby room.
“How did you know?” she asked at last. “What did you do?”
“In the New Year, I found a letter, dated before Christmas, saying that he had been moved to a new asylum in Hessen– Nassau. I thought that was odd. Kurt was away on Reich business, I couldn’t talk to him. Or anyone else. Kurt made it very clear that it would not do to broadcast that there was anything wrong with our son.” She sighed again. “I knew, I knew something was not right. I determined to go to the place, find Wolfgang. Take him home to Steinhof.”
Edith was about to speak but Elisabeth held up her hand. “The next part is hard to tell, hard for me to even think about, but it is necessary for you to know. I must tell it in my own way, or I won’t be able to say it at all.”
I set off immediately. I arrived in the evening and took a room in a hotel by the station. In the morning, when I asked about the asylum, the proprietor just pointed to a great red-brick edifice, crenelated and turreted, like a fortress set high on a hill above the Rhine, lowering over the pretty little town.
I set off up the hill toward it. There was a barrier across the entrance to the drive. A man came out of a small booth. He was armed, wearing some kind of uniform, more like a guard than an attendant.
“What do you want?”
“I’m here to see a patient.”
He pointed to a sign. Zutritt wegen Seuchengefahr strengstens verboten. Entry strictly prohibited because of danger of infection. I didn’t give a damn.
“I’ll take my chances—let me in.”
“Verboten!” he repeated, gripping his weapon more securely.
We might have gone on arguing, but a car drew up, a sport-kabriolett with the top down, despite the coldness of the day. The driver wore an SS uniform. He leaned out of his window.
“What’s the problem here?”
“My child is inside and I must see him. I don’t care about the infection.” He looked me up and down and then opened the passenger door.
“Raise the barrier!” he ordered, and we were in.
His name was Deiter Brauer. Quite young, thirty or so. He was a doctor there but today was his last day. He’d come back from Christmas leave to find that he had been reassigned to the army, something that did not make him happy. I think that this is why he invited me in that day. He said that they rarely received visitors, certainly not beautiful women dressed in sable. His manner was extremely flirtatious, so maybe that was another reason.
He drove up a long drive past a line of buses, their windows covered in canvas. We got out of the car at the front of the building. He invited me to admire the view over the town and down to the Rhine. On a clear day, you could see all the way to Mainz, he said. It was not a clear day. A group of men worked below us, clearing snow. Very poorly dressed for such weather, in rags really, wooden clogs on bare feet. They moved slowly, like men in a dream. Thin, undernourished, they looked as if a sudden, strong wind would blow them away. Some of the patients, he said. Inmates, ones who could make themselves useful. What about the rest? I asked. He shrugged and looked back down the drive toward the buses. Not so many of those left now.
He’d been drinking. I smelled schnapps on his breath. He said he knew my husband. He took out a silver hip flask, offered it to me. I refused. He raised it to his lips. Prost! Then he asked when Wolfgang had been sent here and from where. When I told him, he made no comment, just said that we would go to the Children’s Ward to look for my son.
The Children’s Ward was some way from the main building, up on a hill by itself. It looked more like a shed, or a chalet, a temporary place. There was a balcony with a few toys scattered about: a striped ball, blue and red, some building bricks, a painted engine, a wooden tricycle. The paint on them was faded, cracked, and flaked; they were frozen to the boards and looked as though they had been there all winter. What I remember most was the silence. Where children are, there is always noise, but here there was nothing, not even crying. And the smell. A cloying stench of disinfectant masking something sweetish and un-pleasant. As we went in, the smell grew stronger.
We entered a small foyer with rooms off it. It was nearly as cold in there as it was outside. Double doors opened onto a ward. He threw the doors wide. We were there only for a few seconds. Sometimes, that’s all you need, a fraction of that even, to see everything. The ward contained perhaps fifty beds, maybe more, placed close together, on either side of a wide aisle. I say beds, but they were more like cots, or coffins, high-sided wooden boxes. Each one contained a child. The children were emaciated, some naked, or with the barest of coverings. Some were bluish gray; others yellowish white, like the skeletal effigies you sometimes see in churches. The only sound was the squeak of the nurses’ shoes on the polished wooden floor. Here and there liquid eyes stared out of tiny, shriveled faces. That was the only indication that we were not in a morgue.
The nearest nurse turned at the opening of the doors, seriously alarmed at our presence. She came toward us, arms out wide to block our view. Others came, rushing from different corners of the ward, physically barring us from entering, ushering us back, into the entrance hall. The Sister sent the others back to their charges. She wanted to know what we were doing there, what I was doing there, what was Dr. Brauer thinking of, bringing a member of the public to the ward? Dr. Eckhart would know about this. Brauer replied that I had come in search of my son. The von Stavenow child. Her face became a mask of false sympathy and solicitude. “I’m sorry to have to tell you,” she said, “but your son passed away soon after his arrival here of pneumonia and cardiac insufficiency.” A singsong recitation, no thought behind it, just a rush of words, running into each other. Pneumonia. Yes. I could understand, but cardiac insufficiency? What did that mean? When he left me, my son was strong. Healthy. He’d never shown the least sign of a heart condition. Not the least sign! “It is something common to patients suffering from his particular aff
liction,” she replied, in the same singsong. “Incurable.” She said that with triumph on her pale, fleshy face then she watched me with a kind of pitying curiosity, her dark-brown eyes as shiny as buttons. It was as if all natural human feeling had been switched off in her.
When did this happen? I demanded. Why hadn’t I been informed immediately? Not long after he arrived. When would that have been? Before Christmas. Her tone was edging toward impatience. Your husband was informed. If I had no more questions, there was work to do. Brauer offered me his hip flask. This time I did not refuse.
How could it happen so quickly? “Once they get here,” Bauer replied, “they don’t last long. They starve them. Here we follow the B-Kost, the diet developed by Pfannmüller at Eglfing Haar. No protein, no fat. If that doesn’t carry them off, they will give them something: luminal, veronal, sulfonal, trional, morphine. Not enough to kill, just enough so they die of something else—pneumonia in winter. In summer, diarrhea.” But why? Why would they do that? Because they don’t want to lie on the death certificate. If a patient died as a result of drugs administered, it would constitute murder. What happens here is no longer under the Führer’s direct order. Murder is still a crime under German law. Where is he? Where’s my son? Where’s his grave? I had some idea to take him home. Bury him in the family chapel. Brauer laughed. He would have been buried in a paper coffin in an unmarked grave with other children who died that day. His brain removed, along with other organs, harvested is the word they used, preserved in formalin, shipped in special containers to Schneider at Heidelberg, or to Richter in Berlin, for dissection and study. Then he will have served the Reich in some way. I had to ask him to stop the car.
I vomited at the side of the road.
Edith had listened without interruption. “Why did he tell you all this?” she asked now. “Exposing you to these, these horrors? Do you think that he disapproved?”
Elisabeth took a cigarette. Edith had to help her light it.
“Oh.” She exhaled slowly. “There was more. He was quite reckless in his revelations. What was happening here was nothing compared to the east. Special camps designed to kill millions using the techniques they’d learned killing the cripples. His words, not mine. Jews, of course. All organized from Kurt’s office on Tiergartenstrasse. I had absolutely no idea what went on there. It was just ‘the office.’ Brauer had no qualms about the work. He wanted to be reassigned there, not sent to the Eastern Front. He was bitter about that. It was the winter of 1942/1943. Things were beginning to go against us. He probably saw his reassignment as a death sentence. He was jealous. Of Kurt. Telling me this was a way to get back at him. Kurt was progressing in his career while Brauer had been written off. He wanted me to go with him for a drink, dinner. I told him to take me to the station. He looked disappointed. My seduction would have been his crowning satisfaction. To think that was even remotely possible! These people!” She shook her head, loathing clear on her face. “It was as if they lived in a different world, completely devoid of any kind of normal human feeling, and Kurt was one of them. I remember thinking that on the train. He is one of them. I went straight to Steinhof. I haven’t seen Kurt since.”
She finished speaking, and there was silence between them. Edith had been absolutely caught up in the spell of the story. There was nothing she could say. Every word faded, discarded as wanting, inadequate. It was one thing to be briefed by Leo in London, but the repressed agony apparent in Elisabeth’s testimony, and it was a testimony, brought into graphic focus the monstrous, warped depravity of this obscene “Project.”
Elisabeth sank into the chair next to her, eyes closed. Edith could feel her exhaustion, see it in the slump of her shoulders, hear in her shallow breathing how much it had cost to hold herself together long enough to tell that story.
“It was hard, very hard for me to tell you all that, but I wanted you to know exactly what kind of man Kurt had become.” Her eyes opened and fixed on Edith. “You are the only one who can help me find him, and I want him found and I want him punished. Hanged, preferably. The child is Kaspar’s daughter. I was robbed of one child. Now I have her. I want to be free to marry her father. To live the normal life of which I was deprived.” She gave a fleeting, tired smile. “If such a thing is possible in these difficult times.”
24
Atlantic Hotel, Hamburg
2nd March 1946
Menu Américain
Potage de Jour
Jambon De Virginie
Petits pois au Beurre
Pommes Croquettes
Coup Maison
Fromage
Café
In the British Zone, but American Menu. My dining companion enjoyed the ham, similar to the first time I was here, but Baked this time. Recipe to follow.
“Es schneit.” Frau Schmidt said it with a certain amount of satisfaction.
Edith looked up. Outside, the pewter-gray sky had a yellowish, sickly tinge to it and the snow was already flying.
“I can see that.” She went back to peeling her egg. Frau Schmidt always hard-boiled them.
Frau Schmidt’s grape-colored eyes were shining and sly. She knew that Edith had been planning a trip to Hamburg, how much she’d been looking forward to it.
“How is the ankle?” She tried another tack.
“Much better.” Edith smeared margarine across her toast. “Thank you for asking.”
“Maybe you should not go. With ankle and now snow.”
“Thank you for your concern, Frau Schmidt, but I see no reason to change my plans.”
Edith bit into her toast. It had been a week since she’d seen her, but Elisabeth’s story was still fresh in her mind and still as shocking. She’d been back, taking supplies for her household, help of a practical kind. They didn’t talk further about Kurt and what he’d done, it would be too painful, but they both wanted to find him and they both wanted him punished. Their interests were aligned.
“I’m sorry?” Edith’s thoughts were interrupted by one of Frau Schmidt’s heavy sighs.
“I said I prepare packed lunch in case you are stuck in snow.”
“Thank you, Frau Schmidt.” Edith wiped her mouth and folded her napkin. “That would be very kind. Now I really must get ready.”
She was determined to get to Hamburg, first to meet Harry and second to get out of Lübeck. She’d been nowhere else since she got here. An afternoon at Travemünde hardly counted. It had been touch and go. First, her ankle. Now this cold sweeping down from the Arctic bringing everything to a standstill.
“It ain’t that bad.” Jack shook the flakes off his cap. “It’ll tack up, you see if it don’t.”
He wanted to get to Hamburg just as much as Edith. He was taking Kay to a little hotel at Blankenese, and a bit of weather was not going to stop him.
The heating in the Humber was temperamental. Jack drove in his greatcoat. Edith sat with a blanket over her knees. There were more in the back in case of emergencies and two Thermos flasks of whisky-laced tea.
“We’ll get there, don’t worry,” Jack said as he peered through the windshield, the wipers groaning as they tried to cope with the driving snow. “It’ll be fine once we reached the autobahn. I was wondering—did you find out anything about them photographs?”
“I did, as a matter of fact. I showed them to . . . someone I know. He’s Latvian. He was able to identify Jansons. He was in some kind of Auxiliary force helping the SS.”
“What was going on in the background? Did he say?”
“Yes.” She looked over to Jack. “A massacre somewhere in Latvia. Jews being shot then pushed into trenches. You were right. Those were sand dunes.”
“Bloody hell! I thought it was something—”
The car skidded on the ramp onto the autobahn; Jack just managed to right it before they plowed into a drift. “Blimey! The Humber is fucking useless in these kinds of conditions, ’scuse my French. Need chains on the wheels. I keep telling them.”
The autobahn was two-th
irds covered. There was no more talking. Jack had to use all his driving skill to prevent them joining the already snow-covered vehicles that had been abandoned all over the road.
The snow eased as they entered the city. A thick, white blanket covered everything, accentuating the silence, adding to the sense of desolation.
Jack dropped her off outside the Atlantic. Edith checked in and went to her room. She’d hardly taken off her coat before the telephone rang.
“Fraulein Graham? I have a message. Your friends are waiting in the bar.”
What friends? Friends plural. Edith changed quickly and went downstairs.
The bar of the Atlantic overlooked the Außenalster. A long, high-ceilinged room with white-jacketed waiters gliding about, bearing trays of drinks to mostly men, in uniform, and out of it, occupying deep, comfortable chairs.
Adeline was sitting with Tom McHale, drinking a martini. They both looked very glamorous. He was in blue mess uniform and she was wearing a low-cut evening dress. The scarlet silk flattered her pale skin and her lipstick matched. Her hair framed her face in soft waves and curls.
Tom rose as Edith approached their table. Edith was struck again by his apparent youth: the wide-set blue eyes, slightly sulky mouth, fresh complexion, and smooth cheeks, as if he didn’t need to shave. “Don’t let those baby-faced looks fool ya,” she remembered Adeline saying. “He’s a killer over and over. Plus he’s older than he looks.”
“Edith.”
“Tom.”
“Drink?”
“Yes, please. I’ll have a martini. Thanks.”
“Martinis for the ladies,” Tom said to the waiter who had glided in their direction. “I have to leave you. See you later, Edith.” He looked at his watch. “Leaving at eight, Adie.”