by Tessa de Loo
In another ward there was a patient with an inoperable splinter close to his heart. He could not move or be moved. He simply had to wait for the bombing raids in his hospital bed, in complete tranquillity – excitement was a greater threat to his life than a bomb. The sisters took it in turns to watch over him together with his doctor. So Anna regularly sat there by his bed next to the window like a living target and chatted gently about innocent subjects. Opposite her on the other side of the bed the overworked doctor sat wearing an anti-aircraft helmet. Her idle chatter did not often misfire on him either. She saw his eyelids, his head, slowly droop. Before he dozed off he was still sufficiently conscious to remove the helmet from his head and put it in his lap. If a bomb fell close by them he sat up and put the helmet on in a reflex, and then it began all over again. Not unaware of this slapstick effect, Anna suppressed her laughter with difficulty, in the interests of the splinter.
While looking for one of the nuns, she lost her way in the hospital’s building complex. She opened a random door that seemed to be the way in to a large room, and froze on the threshold. She could barely control the impulse to run away again immediately, through the labyrinth of corridors outside. It was a ward without beds – soldiers missing all their limbs were lying on the floor. The wounds had healed. Their bodies had been wrapped in leather so that they could roll over the floor like babies. The skimming autumn sunlight slid over what was left of them. All they could do was talk and roll. Anna shut the door abruptly. This was forbidden territory. She had seen something that did not exist – the other side of military grandeur, of sabre rattling and insignias, of heroic words. Which soldier going off to war was warned that this too, as well as the hero’s death, could be his hinterland?
In the evenings she walked home through darkened streets, a journey full of surprises. The damage done during the day was continually altering the familiar look of the city. With difficulty she pushed her front door open – two window panes had come out again, an icy autumnal wind had blown the Feldpost letters she had been rereading the previous evening around the apartment. She felt her way to the chest of drawers to light a candle, she reached into a hole and almost lost her balance. The chest of drawers was lying down below on the street. A day later a woman collapsed before her eyes at the entrance to the staircase. Anna recognized the pale face. After Martin’s death the woman had given her condolences on the staircase. ‘I think it is so hard for you,’ she had whispered with a bowed head, ‘you probably think that the worst thing of all has happened to you, but there is something worse.’ She had run up to the top apartment in tears, leaving Anna behind with her cryptic prediction in riddles. Anna brought her round with a wet cloth. ‘I’ll murder them!’ cried the woman, getting up. ‘Gently, gently …’ soothed Anna. ‘I’ll know how to find them when the war is over, I shall drink their blood, I swear it,’ the woman raved. The outburst brought some colour to her cheeks. Anna held her by the shoulders: ‘What’s the matter then …?’ Immediately slumping into a position of resignation, the woman confided to Anna in a dull voice her husband’s unexpected arrest some months ago. He had been picked up while leaving his daughter’s watch for repair with an old acquaintance who had a watch shop. The daughter was a nurse and what is more she wore the brown uniform with sincere conviction. Unaware that the watchmaker was suspected of communist activities, her husband had been wrongly taken to be one of them. Since then he had been in prison under sentence of death, chained up, unable to move. Water was dripped on to his head every minute, day and night. The thought of it was driving her mad. ‘But they have really made a terrible mistake!’ Anna cried indignantly. That an innocent had been convicted, that they had acted so unfairly, she could not understand, with her sense of justice and her orderly efficient approach, but on top of it all she immediately felt the urge to take action because it was so unacceptable that they could let the poor devil die an endlessly slow martyr’s death in a cunning way that could only have been conceived by a madman. She put an arm round the woman. ‘Leave it to me …’ she said grimly.
In the old parliament building of the former Habsburg monarchy, which had become the administrative headquarters of the Ostmark under the Third Reich, the Gauleiter resided. Anna was in one of her tempers. She marched there, up the stairs, into the historic buildings that were evidence of superabundant riches, through a long columned corridor with every ten metres motionless SS soldiers like stuffed corpses with rifles. Although no one ever came into this sanctuary uninvited they were too dumbfounded by the appearance of a hurtling Red Cross sister to intervene. Anna was not troubled by anxiety or modesty. The ring of her footsteps on the marble floor sounded like a confirmation of her righteousness. At a crossing in the corridors she became confused for a moment. Eventually a sentry barred her way. ‘Where do you wish to go?’ ‘To the Gauleiter.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I want to see the Gauleiter!’ Two others came over; they looked at each other quizzically. What was a hysterical hospital sister doing here? ‘My husband has just been killed serving with the Waffen-SS,’ haughtily she held the letter of condolence from the Obersturmführer under their noses. They had no reply to that. They escorted her to the required place as though she were a diplomat.
In her fantasy the Gauleiter had acquired monstrous proportions. In reality he sat in a gaudy room that must once have been the emperor’s study, behind an immense desk: a kind-hearted old man with a long beard – a sort of Santa Claus. Surprised, he gave her an encouraging nod. After taking a deep breath she cast the scandalous error at his feet. ‘I know those people, they are Nazis, their daughter is a brown sister! The Führer would not stand for such a thing! He does not know that an error has been made here, someone must inform him!’ The Gauleiter nodded like a weary grandfather who can refuse his granddaughter nothing, ‘Do me a favour,’ he said slowly. ‘Go home and see that the wife writes a letter requesting mercy. And bring the letter to me personally.’
The fruit of Anna’s efforts was the return home, fourteen days later, of a man who could only whisper about the forms of entertainment they had thought up for him in advance of his execution. He had lost the knack of eating, each movement was painful and exhausting. He slid into his bed with the last of his strength and stayed there, too weak to live or die. His wife had to go to work during the day. That was why she was not there at the end of March when a bomb fell on the block and blasted a hole ten metres wide. When Anna came home all she could see instead of her flat was the flats behind it. There was a heap of rubble up to the supposed first floor – beneath it they had found the one sentenced to death, a neighbour explained. ‘God, you are a sadist …’ cried Anna. The wind whispered in her ear: Do you still believe in justice, idiot? She clenched her teeth. She could not complain to the Gauleiter about this … she had to look for a higher authority … in more rarefied Gauen …
That same wind also carried the smell of dried mud – the Russians were advancing. During a staff meeting the sisters heard that the hospital would have to be evacuated in two hours. A hospital ship was ready on the Danube; all the wounded had to be transported there. Anna crept out unseen to say goodbye to her father-in-law. She pressed the packet of Feldpost letters into his hand hastily; since the apartment had been bombed she had kept them in the air raid shelter in the military hospital, stuffed into two suitcases with her other paraphernalia. ‘Please burn these,’ she said hurriedly, ‘otherwise they might yet be published in Izvestia.’
When she got back there was a line of buses at the entrance to the hospital. She had just finished helping the patients from her wards in and was going to sit at the front, flanked by her suitcases, when she was pulled out again by her apron. ‘Wait a moment, sister, you can’t do that!’ Before she knew what was happening, the medicaments and medical history notes of all the wounded, numbering one hundred and sixty, were handed over to her, Anna, Red Cross sister à l’improviste, by the nuns who were staying behind. She was pushed with these into a bus containing seriously wounded men she did not
know; it set off immediately. Hopefully her suitcases were travelling behind her in the other bus. The bus moved off at a cracking pace as though it wanted to shed the imminent deaths of its passengers – unfortunately it was forced to stop half-way there at a tunnel that was too low. Another bus was ordered. Meanwhile Anna unloaded the wounded with the driver and laid them on stretchers on the verge. It was getting dark – the Russians were coming – they stood there and waited and looked at the tunnel as though that was their last connection with the world of the living. Another bus, of more suitable dimensions, appeared in the darkness. The patients, chilled to the bone, were shoved inside it and it proceeded to the banks of the Danube.
One hundred and sixty wounded were laid in the damp grass. Hastily rustled-up orderlies carried them into the ship one by one over a narrow gangplank. Anna was buttonholed by a husband and wife couple drenched in the rain. ‘The boy being carried in now is our son. He has a pistol on him. We are frightened he is going to do something to himself. He can’t bear it that we are losing the war.’ She promised them she would keep an eye on him and went to look for her suitcases. In the distance she heard her name being called in unison: ‘Sister Anna from 3C, here we are!’ In her ears it sounded like a missa solemnis whose passages were being carried in the wind in fragments – she ran towards the sound, criss-cross between the wounded, and found her own wounded, who had refused to go into the ship without her. They were sitting in a large circle with their prostheses on the grass and guarding her suitcases. Their sister, her patients – during the previous months a mutual craving for possessiveness had come into existence; they were a big family who would only board the ship together.
After doing their task the orderlies vanished, leaving Anna behind in an overloaded ship. To assist her in the care of the wounded, who lay round about in no particular system, she had five hastily recruited middle-class women, without training or nursing experience. They wore aprons and caps and were regarded as being endowed with a natural talent for the business of caring purely on account of being female. It became clear all too soon that their talents resided at another level, and that they had a completely different idea of their duties. Whenever she needed them to hand out the urine bottles, medicines, meals, Anna found them after a long search back in the arms of soldiers. They had been grass widows throughout the whole war; now they were making up for their loss under the charitable pretext that they were providing a divine medicine for the poor devils who had been wounded in the battle for the fatherland – perhaps even fatally: an extra frisson.
From sheer necessity Anna split herself into one hundred and sixty parts; the one changed bandages, the next assisted the emptying of the bowels, a third mopped the fever – all at the accelerated pace of a silent film. At night those fragments could not all get back together again, they continued as usual with their own activities. After two days she was stumbling about with eyes red from tiredness. No one noticed it except Herr Töpfer, a high-ranking SS officer from her own ward who had lost a leg on the Hungarian front. ‘You will fall over,’ he observed, pushing her into a chair, ‘sit down.’ Leaning on his crutch he looked around like a general; he raised his voice to address his officers: ‘I say the following to you. Sister Anna cannot cope any more. She must have sleep. We need a couple of walking volunteers who can take over the duties from her. She has a list and she can tell you where the people are – it’s a question of organization.’ His audience nodded in agreement. ‘Secondly,’ continued Töpfer, ‘there is a spare bed in my cabin. I am offering it to Sister Anna. If any one of you has any reservations I will gladly hear them now. Woe betide anyone who I only get to hear from tomorrow morning. I’ll shoot him dead. Do you understand?’
He took her to the cabin and tucked her in tenderly. Anna slept instantly. When she woke the caring Töpfer was lying next to her; he had retreated to a corner and held on to the edge of the bed even as he slept, so that he would not roll onto her. He had given his own bed to a dying man who was hawking incomprehensible swear words.
The following evening they moored at Linz. The seminary stood like an impenetrable fortress in the rain, a colossal dark building, which was to be set up as an emergency hospital. When Herr Töpfer, who had limped up to it, supported by Anna, used the weapon of his voice, the door opened a crack. A fat sleepy man appeared in the doorway in silk pyjamas over which he had slipped a uniform tunic and looked at them with bad grace. Oh yes, the ship with the wounded … he scratched his head … but they would have to be deloused first, of course. ‘Verdammtes Schwein!’ cried Töpfer, beside himself at such ignorance and incompetence, ‘Watch out that you don’t have lice, we don’t have them, we come from a tidy hospital. If you don’t find us beds immediately …!’ The man opened the double doors trembling.
Everything had been prepared inside: there were wooden platforms with sacks of straw in the former classrooms, large cavernous rooms. At least the wounded would be getting beds again. The ship departed immediately after unloading; the surrogate sisters went back with it, satisfied from overwork, leaving Anna alone as mother superior of the wounded. Everyone tried to sleep, including her, seated at a large table in the centre of the room with her head on her folded arms. Töpfer woke in the middle of the night. ‘What are you doing here? You can leave us alone peacefully, everyone is sleeping! Go to bed!’ ‘But where is that bed …?’ Anna yawned. What? His blankets moved, he grasped his crutches and limped out of the room indignantly. Silk pyjamas was bawled out of bed: ‘If you don’t immediately …’ ‘Yes, yes, yes …’ he cried nervously. He found a bed for her somewhere; it was still warm from whoever had to make room for her, but Anna did not ask herself any more questions of conscience.
They had both chosen trout – easily digested – with boiled potatoes. Lotte thought of Schubert’s song ‘Die Forelle’ that she had once studied, and of the tragic ending: ‘… The little fish wriggled on it …’ She associated the image of a powerless fish that only had a body and a head, floundering on the line, with the fourfold amputees in the Viennese hospital. ‘It had never occurred to me,’ she said, ‘that anyone could lose all his limbs … Gruesome …’
Anna put her fork down. ‘They were young men. I certainly asked myself what became of them. I’ve never read a word about them in a paper, a periodical, a book. Yet they were still alive! Where have they gone?’
They ate on in silence, each at the mercy of her own speculations.
‘Your husband’s letters from Poland, Russia, Normandy …’ Lotte remarked, ‘were they actually burnt?’
Anna sprang up. ‘I could still kick myself … they would have been a lovely memento now, a document. Unfortunately my father-in-law bravely did what I asked him. Burned everything. It was the effect of the propaganda: when the Russians come they will take everything they fancy. Then if they find my letters, largely written in Russia, I reasoned, they would find them very interesting and print them in their communist newspaper. That’s how we thought then.’
Lotte laughed ironically. ‘As if they would have been interested in them! One soldier’s life meant nothing to the Russians … At any rate, a human life represented nothing under Stalin …’
‘Nevertheless we were still being brainwashed! Up to the end of the war. “The Führer would not stand for such a thing …” I said to the Gauleiter. Imagine it! In all sincerity. Although I had never marched behind him and just like everyone else I knew that he could not win the war, I was still so naïve I could not imagine that the innocent were being sentenced to death and martyred under his authority. End of 1944! God how naïve I was …’
From pure anger she forgot to eat any more; her trout was threatening to get cold.
This was the second atheist-Jewish Christmas they celebrated together. Everyone had lost weight; the stew from the soup kitchen had become so thin you could drink it. Lotte’s father, who secretly supplied electricity to the doctor, the liquor merchant and befriended farmers, had come home with a perversely large piece of p
ork and a bottle of gin. His wife disappeared to the cooker with it and basted the meat simmering gently in the casserole. Lotte fetched the dinner service from the cupboard. Mrs Meyer came downstairs, alarmed by the distinctive smell of fricandeau with ground cloves. ‘Er … we’re not allowed to eat that,’ she said, looking peevishly into the pot. ‘What would you rather be,’ enquired the cook sensibly, ‘a dead orthodox Jewess or a sinner alive and kicking?’ Mrs Meyer capitulated, no match for such healthy opportunism.
The table was laid, the candles were lit, everyone drew up a chair. Lotte and Ernst were still in the kitchen peeling a second batch of potatoes boiled in their skins, when they heard the distant rumble of an aircraft that was approaching fast. They stiffened with the potato knives in their hands. A bang, as strong as a lightning strike, took the ground from under their feet and made the windows rattle in their frames. A bizarre change of air pressure beat them to the ground amid the scattering potatoes. ‘We’re going to die,’ squealed Mrs Meyer’s voice. The whole gathering fled from the dining-room with the fragile bay window into the walled-in kitchen. They crouched there – Mrs Meyer, in the idle hope that youth was immortal, hung round Eefje’s neck, who bravely remained upright. Then it became absurdly quiet and they straightened up suspiciously one by one. In the dining-room they found Sara Frinkel who had meanwhile gone on with the dislocated Christmas meal on her own. She was eating with gusto. ‘I didn’t want my potatoes to get cold,’ she uttered with her mouth full. All the windows had cracked; the glass hung like fine lace curtains. Sara pointed to the meadows with a piece of meat on her fork: ‘I saw an enormous flash.’ ‘It sounded like a crashing aircraft …’ said Bram. ‘If the pilot has ejected … we can expect a large-scale operation here …’ suggested Ernst Goudriaan, with increasing panic in his eyes. He was still holding the potato knife in his hand as though he thought he could defend himself with it. He looked round in terror. ‘The Jews … the Jews … must go upstairs …!’ ‘What “Jews”,’ cried Sammy Goldschmidt, offended, ‘that’s how it all started, they swept us all into one heap.’ ‘You’re right, you’re right …’ Ernst raised his hands guiltily, ‘but what ought I to say …?’ ‘“Person in hiding”,’ said Sara carefully. ‘After all, you yourself are person in hiding too.’