A Perfect Madness

by Frank H. Marsh

TWENTY-SIX

  Erich, Munich and Auschwitz, 1943

  Erich knew nothing of the three university students charged with treason. Nor did he know anything about their seditious underground publication, The White Rose, which had boldly denounced the Nazi regime, calling for all Germans to rise up against the tyranny of their own government. Even as a psychiatrist, he was equally ignorant of how to go about developing the kind of forensic profile the Gestapo was looking for from the students, simply by observing them and listening to their words at the trial. There was no nonsense to these young people, no theatrics.

  Outwardly, Erich saw nothing that would separate them from other university students except perhaps an aura of calmness in facing down the shrieking denunciations of the Nazi prosecutor and trial judge. They clearly were marching to a different gospel than everyone else, and had chosen the worst of times to proclaim it. Erich saw clearly their purpose but quickly closed his mind to it. Truth means nothing unless it is heard, and they did just that, daring to write their testament for all to read. They had refused to separate the singularity of duty and conscience, as all those fervently following Hitler had done. This fact was never more evident to Erich than when the young woman, Sophie Scholl, rose in the courtroom. Looking straight at the tyrannical judge before her, she said, “Somebody, after all, had to make a start.”

  Eight simple words. Everything she and the other students believed in was there for everyone to hear. One cannot do his duty when conscience is not a part of it. For Erich, though, it seemed that simply doing one’s duty had its own intrinsic worth and didn’t need a touch of conscience to make it right. Not to believe so would seem to shame the honor of all the thousands of German soldiers who were blown to pieces in a terribly wrong war, not for Hitler, but for duty and Germany alone. While he was unsure how to produce the kind of treasonous forensic profile the Gestapo desired, what he could offer them was a profile in courage, if only he had enough integrity himself to do so.

  It was a given to Erich that the students were either mentally unstable or incredibly courageous, being saturated from head to toe in a boldness with which he was unfamiliar. When the trial was over and they were found guilty and sentenced to death, Erich knew he had witnessed the rawest sort of bravery, the kind that one can only read about in great books.

  He had no stomach to witness the students’ execution. It would be difficult enough to erase the events and machinations of the trial; images of their beheadings would be impossible to suppress.

  On the long trip from Munich to Auschwitz where he was to report, one unanswered question still lingered in his mind: how could they choose truth over living at such a young age? If they had been old and wrinkled, it would make more sense. But the mere utterance of words that had no hope could not be worth more than staying alive when you are young. They were dead now, and others would be, too, and nothing would come from what they had said and done except the silent grief of their parents. Still, they were different, Erich knew, but he didn’t know why. They had moved beyond the ordinary to a dimension in life few people would ever know. They were unafraid.

  All his life he had believed he could become something more than the nothing he now felt himself to be. Art and painting had captured his early childhood dreams, but they had long since vanished, lost on another road in the wilderness of his fantasies. To be a great artist or poet, one must imagine the world as it is only with the eyes of the soul, and his were now blind. Dimmed by his experience at Görden, they could no longer see things as they truly were; they could only see that which was necessary to exist. There was not a single moment in his life now, he knew, when he could say no to doing what was expected of him.

  It was the miles of lights and fires that he passed entering Auschwitz the night of his arrival that finally closed the eyes of his soul to everything but his own desire to exist. Everything seemed like a dark fairy tale to him, somewhere deep in his beloved Black Forest, only fairy tales don’t smell like this one did. The smell clung to the folds in his nostrils like thick green snot frozen in the cold winter air. He knew the stench from burning bodies at Görden, but it never made him afraid to breathe as he was now. Five crematoriums were spewing their thick black smoke across the sky, but his attention was drawn to a long wide pit with colorful dancing flames licking naked burning bodies that had been doused in gasoline. Erich turned away, refusing to look anymore at all the horror before him.

  When he stepped into the chief SS physician’s office, Franz Kremer was there to greet him.

  “Ah, my old timid friend, we are together again at last, and in the best of places.”

  Erich said nothing, only nodded. His hate for the man had not lessened. With his flair and posturing, Franz was a commanding figure, ranking higher in the chain of authority before anyone of his young age. Tall and Aryan looking, he had become unbearably handsome in his uniform to everyone around, even to Erich.

  “Come, there will be no more trains this night and we can have drinks together at the doctors’ quarters to celebrate your arrival. Tomorrow you will see Auschwitz,” Franz said, signaling to his driver to have the touring car ready for them, a vehicle marked with a Red Cross symbol.

  The “club,” as Franz referred to it, was unusually quiet for an evening when little was expected of its doctors. Some had gone home to be with their families for the weekend, tending to neglected chores around the house and yard or celebrating birthdays with their children. Others preferred escaping reality alone in the solitude of their own quarters, where they could become drunk and pass out in peace. But all would be ready again for their long hours of duty on the selection ramp when the trains arrived, bringing the prisoners.

  Looking around the rather large room filled with an assortment of wooden tables, Erich counted only four men, two sitting together, the others separate. None looked up, or cared to see who he might be, this new doctor standing with Franz. As important as Franz was, it was of little matter to them because their minds had long left this world, drowning in a flood of alcohol. Franz and Erich sat away from the four men, to talk and drink and eat snacks into the late hours of the night. Erich learned much of what would be expected of him when tomorrow came, and of the many hours and days ahead as increasing numbers of Jews arrived in the camp. How he performed his duties, whether in an unkindly or noble manner, was of his choice so long as the immediate selection policies were followed. Erich knew Franz preferred the cruelest of ways, and looked with great favor on others who did.

  So the next day, he took his place alongside Franz, and for two weeks after, conducting medical selections. The bedlam in the terrifying scene played out before his eyes was beyond anything he might have imagined it could be. Where Görden had maybe thirty patients arriving at a time, here thousands of frightened prisoners scurried to leave and empty the long line of boxcars standing idle next to the ramp. SS guards with dogs shouted “Out, out! Line up, line up!” as they climbed down from the cars and formed two rows. Those that failed to move along quickly enough were shoved forward violently, or beaten about the head and shoulders by the guards. Many had little sense that a selection process of any kind was taking place. As quickly as they had climbed from the boxcars, the long rows of anxious faces moved past Franz’s eyes, stopping only for a second while he looked them over for signs of physical weakness or strength. Occasionally he would ask a question of age, as if to verify his medical thinking. He then pointed his thumb either to the right or the left, much like God was expected to do on the final judgment day, for those who believed and those who didn’t. Left was immediate death by gas. Right meant, perhaps, only a delayed death, one that came in the early mornings when you could no longer stand for another day of hard labor.

  Observing Franz, Erich believed a good bit of medical judgment was being employed in selecting those who would live, and that was important to him. Age and physical fitness had always been an essential component of a physical examination performed by a doctor. What bothered him some, thoug
h he would say nothing, was Franz’s immediate thumb to the left for pregnant women who came before him. They all seemed young and healthy, and in time would be good workers, but they were Jews and no more Jews were to be born, at least on Franz’s watch.

  That first night, when the trainload of prisoners lined up for selection, Erich saw they were all Jews and his mind turned for a quick moment to the five Jews that had come before him at Görden. How is it this is happening? he had asked himself then. But the question had no meaning for him this night, looking at the endless line of Jews before him. They were already dead, all of them. And what he could or could not do was of little consequence and meant nothing. The revulsion he felt then was no longer with him, and had become shaded by acceptance of what was expected of him now.

  Erich had been on the ramp the first night for ten hours, being relieved for an hour of rest two times by other doctors. When there were no more trains to come and no more prisoners to see, the scene became still and quiet, swathed in a hidden silence of the horrible things that had happened there. Leaving the ramp with Franz, it was he who suggested the evening end with drinks in the officers’ club.

  There were several doctors socializing in the lounge when they arrived, two of whom, like Erich, were new doctors assigned to the camp. Unlike him, though, they had not been at the small killing centers where the mentally ill were being euthanized whether they were Jews or not.

  “How can the things we are doing here be allowed? They surely will write about this for a hundred years,” one doctor said, somewhat intoxicated.

  “Yes, this is a filthy business for us,” his companion said.

  Erich watched Franz’s reaction. Like everyone else in the room, he offered no response but continued drinking and talking. Many in the room had spoken the same words when they first came, but now they no longer talked of the terrible happenings around them. In time, except for the Nazi ideologues like Franz, the new doctors would come to believe as they did, that in the beginning it seemed impossible, and yet it would become almost routine. In time, as the days passed, Erich found this to be true. Everything happening was as one in Auschwitz. No one could escape the pervading morality in the camp that seemed to separate him and the other doctors and everything else in Auschwitz from the rest of the world. This awakening became even truer two nights later.

  Working with Franz again, Erich noticed him suddenly stiffen and straighten in body, as he would do when someone of importance approached him. To his right a strange-looking man, handsome in carriage, with a brown riding crop in his right hand, walked by the waiting line of prisoners for a short distance then back again, stopping next to a mother and her young daughter. When the man pointed to an SS guard to separate them, the woman fought with the guard, biting and scratching his face. At this moment, the man with the riding crop drew his pistol and shot both the woman and child in the face. Waving the crop back and forth, he ordered all the prisoners to the gas chambers, even though some had been selected for the work force, shouting “Away with this shit” as he left.

  Franz smiled, but not Erich. The scene had unnerved him.

  “That was the great scientist, Herr Dr. Mengele. I’m sure he wanted the young girl for one of his research projects,” Franz said.

  “I know nothing of him. What kind of research is he doing?”

  “All kinds, but no one really knows. He comes many times to look over the prisoners when they arrive, especially the young children and mothers. I do know he has the run of the camp in taking any prisoners for research.”

  “Why not take the dead?” Erich asked, utterly amazed at what he was hearing.

  “No, they are always alive when they go to him. That’s all any of us know.”

  “It was good then that he killed them.”

  Erich said nothing more, but waited with Franz for the last of the prisoners to be taken from the ramp and transported to the gas chambers. Then he went to the officers’ club with him, got slobbering drunk, and passed out sitting in a chair, where he remained until morning came and a new day of selecting began again.

  Nothing changed at Auschwitz as the seasons passed, except thousands more Jews came to die. There were not enough ovens for them and large new trenches had to be dug to burn the corpses in, some still alive when the burning began. Working through all that was happening, Erich had come to the conclusion that whether you believe something or not depends on the situation. There is no separate truth. It is in those moments that the unthinkable becomes credible for those that are a part of it. And so it was just that for Erich on a cold winter Saturday, the Sabbath day of all the Jews standing and shivering on the ramp before him.

  When they came, as he knew they might someday, he was not ready. But he had known he never would be. He had hoped they would be transported to another camp when their time came, but the increasing number of Jews arriving from Czechoslovakia told him otherwise. He had thought many times of such a moment when they might appear before him, how he would act, whether he should speak to them, or whether he would recognize them? But it was they who would not let the moment pass quickly, making it easy for him.

  Standing before Erich, Dr. Kaufmann with his gentle wife Anka waited for him to speak their names before walking to the waiting trucks, which would take them to the ovens. When they arrived, Dr. Kaufmann had refused to say he was a doctor, which might have kept him alive, choosing instead to stay by Anka’s side until the end came for both of them. If they were to go to God now, they would be together when they met Him, he whispered to her moments before they climbed down from the boxcar to the ramp. They had come with all their family to this place to die, except for Julia and Hiram, whose lives he had never stopped thanking God for. No word had come from them in nearly five years, but in his heart he knew they were safe.

  Through the time since Julia and Hiram left Prague in 1939, he had watched the houses and streets and synagogues empty and the voice of the Jew grow silent.

  “After this year, the blood of our ancient fathers will be gone from Prague,” he told the rabbi one Saturday, only weeks before they were to report to the authorities.

  But the rabbi smiled and shook his head and said, “It may go away and hide for awhile, but it will come back as it has through the ages.”

  Both embraced then and he left, knowing that what the rabbi said was true. The Jew had been pushed out of Prague too many times to count over the centuries, but his soul never left. Julia and Hiram and many of the other children who had escaped would surely come home when all that drove them away had left.

  Franz had joined Erich this night on the ramp, having been away on other assignments for some time, and recognized Dr. Kaufmann only moments before Erich did. He no longer looked at Dr. Kaufmann but to Erich, staring at him cruelly, relishing the strange drama playing out before him. What were the odds? Two dear friends, traveling different distant roads, meeting again as they did in such an isolated moment in history where one would select the other to die.

  “It was like a Greek tragedy,” he would say later to Erich, taunting him. “How did it feel sending your lover’s father to his death?”

  But Erich would say nothing, and would never speak of the night to anyone.

  When he realized Julia’s father and mother were standing before him waiting for selection, he could do nothing but stare blankly at their faces. Neither one spoke to him, both looking beyond the ramp at the trucks ahead filling up with prisoners. But, in a moment that seemed to complete the Faustian bargain Erich had long ago made with Mephistopheles to remain in the world a little longer, Dr. Kaufmann turned to him. No words were spoken. Only the unmistakable question, “Why?” was there to be read in his eyes, and then they were gone.

  Watching the scene unfold, Franz clapped loudly, as if hoping Dr. Kaufmann and his wife would return to the ramp for a repeat performance. The delight he felt for Erich’s agony would carry him high for days, and he would teasingly tell him so many times, just to prolong it. What he said, thou
gh, was of little consequence to Erich now, because what little piece of honor that somehow might have been left in him after all the terrible things he had done, rode with Dr. Kaufmann and his wife to the gas ovens.

  When the night’s selection was over, a clouded darkness swept across the empty ramp as it always did, lending an eeriness to the silent death cries that could be heard if one listened closely, from the thousands who had been there only moments before. He was alone now, and the haunting scenes in his dreams had become real. It was not that Dr. Kaufmann and Mrs. Kaufmann were any different from those who had gone before to the ovens. In the reality of things, they were Jews like the others who died. But in his mind he had separated them from all the other Jews in the world because he loved Julia. And this fact changed the equation. He had come to love and respect them more so than anyone else he had ever known. Dr. Kaufmann’s imposing intellect had captivated him from the day they first met, constantly fueling the intense bonding that grew between them through the years. All Erich knew now was that he could never speak of this moment to Julia should they meet again, nor how her parents went to their deaths.

  Walking back onto the ramp, he traced his fingers along the sides of several empty boxcars still smelling of the humanity they brought to the death camp. From time to time he would stop and look in one, as if expecting to find a terrified child hiding back deep in a dark corner, pretending he couldn’t be seen. Looking at the almost endless chain of boxcars that delivered daily thousands to the camp and to the ovens, Erich knew he had been given a gift of time that others hadn’t. He knew that the lives of those who came to be killed in Auschwitz embodied more truth than his compromised life did, and now all he had become was a man who had moved beyond forgiveness.

  In the weeks ahead, until the end of Auschwitz, Erich spoke very little to anyone, nor drank and socialized in the officers’ club, keeping to himself much as possible. When duty permitted, he sat alone in his quarters reading and rereading Goethe’s Faust and Dostoevsky’s The Double. Like Faust, he had gone further than anyone thought he could, and pledged himself also to Mephistopheles in exchange for a few more precious days breathing in the world around him. Now his soul, he knew, would soon be carried away by the prince of demons to some distant world where the rest of the captured souls moaned in eternal agony.

  For a while, he believed himself and all the doctors around him mad. No one could do what they had done unless they were. But in time, he concluded no one was really mad or crazy, not even Josef Mengele. He had learned long ago that a man didn’t have to be mad to kill a tiny baby like he had little Brigitte and the other crippled children, if one found a reason for doing so, a reason to make it seem right. In time then, the unbelievable becomes believable, like what the Nazi regime was trying to accomplish here in Auschwitz. For whatever reason is used, he decided, it births another self, another personality within us that could in time adapt to killing without feeling oneself a murderer. Watching and listening to the other doctors, some spoke proudly of duty and loyalty as their reason, others of science and eugenics, but none from hatred of the Jews like Franz. Those that hated the Jews, and there were many in the camp that did, needed no reason for slaughtering them—their hatred had long ago erased any thoughts of guilt from their minds. Setting all reasons aside, Erich wondered if there wasn’t a psychology of genocide, where just maybe killing was the normal thing to do and could be seen as right. After all, humans are animals, too, only dressed in the tattered clothing of a few hundred years of trying to be civilized. Surviving is what life is all about among animals, and killing other animals to stay alive is certainly a part of that. How else do you explain the thousands of wars the world has suffered?

  So who was he now? Erich wondered, because he didn’t know the work of fiction he had become. Perhaps he would never know; so many days of change had come his way. All he could do was to try to stay alive and go home when the war was over and start again.

  ***