by Therese Down
The children, freezing cold, alone, afraid, had huddled together for comfort. Through the glass, Karl had watched a girl sobbing, open mouthed. She stood uncomprehendingly watching the adults at the window. How thin she was, Karl had thought, and how her little chest heaved with the effort of crying. Her eyes had widened in shock as the CO gas reached her. Almost simultaneously, the other children had started to gag. Karl had walked away in as controlled a fashion as he could and sought fresh air, fighting all the while the compulsion to vomit. By the time he had found an outside door and a wall against which to lean, the children were dead.
Dr Schroeder was right. He had calculated beforehand that it would take no more than two minutes of constant high pressure CO piping to poison the air sufficiently to cause the children’s deaths in a three by five metre room. Dr Schroeder had been unable, though, to attend the application of his theoretical work, and had left the observation and recording to two medical doctors, Heinze and Gutt, who would be taking responsibility for the Office for the Euthanizing of Children.
“Hey, that’s my cap.” Karl’s sister frowned as her brother suddenly leaned forward and swiped the SS cap from his nephew’s head. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Long day. Excuse me.” Karl left the living room and climbed the stairs to his bedroom; the bedroom where he had prayed each night as a child, before getting into bed, that God would keep his parents and his sister safe from harm. His father was a general practitioner who had cared for the health and well-being of local people since he qualified as a doctor thirty-five years previously. He had been so happy when Karl began his medical studies. How would he feel if he knew his son was occupied daily with ways to kill people efficiently?
On the wall opposite Karl’s bed was a picture of the Sacred Heart: Christ with outstretched arms, an expression of infinite compassion on his face. Karl fell to his knees and could not stifle an agonized cry. Frau Muller rose at once from her armchair to go to her son. Her husband stopped her, placing a gentle hand upon her arm.
“He spent most of the day with Greta, remember. It cannot be easy. Leave him.”
About a month previously, Karl’s wife Greta had become more depressed than she had ever been. She was unable to get out of bed, to dress or even eat unaided. She did not want to eat. She wanted to die. And then she had tried to commit suicide by stabbing her wrists with scissors. The attempt was genuine enough but the scissors too blunt. She wounded herself horribly and made a terrible mess of her parents’ bathroom.
Desperate and exhausted, Greta’s parents had acceded to pressure from their doctor to admit Greta to a local psychiatric institution. Karl had been unable to get home, for Himmler wanted him to design and oversee the construction of a crematorium at Sachsenhausen. The job needed to be done by Christmas, Himmler had said. In fact, it was completed by mid-December. Plenty of time, then, to convert an old bathroom at Brandenburg hospital into a gas chamber too. Efficiency. Key to the war effort. It was, of course, possible, even likely, that Himmler would have granted him leave for a day or two, had he been aware that Karl’s severely depressive wife had been committed to an insane asylum. But Karl didn’t want to tell him. He was only too aware of how dangerous it had become to be mentally ill in Germany. It was perfectly reasonable to gas children with polio or genetic disorders, but it was certainly not acceptable to be depressed about it – or anything else, for that matter.
As soon as he was able to get home to Leipzig, on the 23rd December, he had gone directly to the asylum. He had found Greta sitting comfortably enough in a chair on a women’s ward. Her wrists were still lightly bandaged beneath her cardigan sleeves. She looked clean, her hair pinned back and her face shiny, but her eyes were so dull. She did not recognize him for a full six minutes, during which time he reverently kissed her hands, stroked her hair and did not try to prevent himself from crying. He repeated her name several times and told her he loved her. Greta had continued to regard him blankly, until suddenly she had spoken.
“Karl?” Her voice was indistinct, as though she had named him in sleep. “Is it you, Karl?”
Overjoyed, he had smiled, nodded his head vigorously, wiped away tears. She had smiled back; a thin, watery smile for which she barely seemed to have the energy.
“Greta, Greta, it is Christmas! I have come home for Christmas, Greta.”
Then her smile died, as if she had forgotten him again.
“Do you want to come home?”
She turned her head away. “Sleep,” she said. “I just want to sleep.” And Greta had closed her eyes. Karl simply sat before her, holding her hand.
The ward was a large, pale green room with a white, high ceiling. The asylum had been built hundreds of years before and constructed on a revolutionary colony model, comprised of several purpose built chalet-type buildings. On the site were also a church, a library and several treatment rooms, a small bakery and a railway station. As far as Karl could tell, Greta had been placed on a ward with female patients whose conditions were non-violent and dysphoric.
Two women, drably dressed and wearing slippers, stood at separate bay windows and contemplated the snow. One rocked gently backwards and forwards; the other stood stock still, arms folded, as though waiting for someone. Three more patients dozed in armchairs, one occasionally opening her eyes to brush imaginary things from her lap and address someone she saw only in dreams of life. Another, the seventh woman on the ward, was little more than a girl. Seventeen? Eighteen? Karl guessed. Certainly she was not older than twenty. She stood in the middle of the ward, one arm gripping her midriff, chewing the fingernails of the other hand. When Karl smiled at her she frowned and began to mutter something. Her dark eyes narrowed and her expression became hostile. She looked foreign, like a gypsy – Romanian perhaps. Karl looked away. God knew she had every reason to fear him; to fear what his uniform signalled to one such as she. Perhaps she had already suffered at SS hands. Perhaps that was why she was in an asylum.
“I want to take my wife home.” Karl had been strident in the expression of his wishes to the young nurse in charge.
“I fully understand, Officer Muller, but Greta is very unwell.” The nurse looked genuinely sympathetic. “She is… well, she is still on suicide watch and we are trialling some new medication. She really needs to be in the care of her doctor.”
“What new medication?” Karl was suspicious of all medical administrative decisions since his assignment to T4. No doctor practising in Hitler’s Reich could be trusted. Karl knew all about the processes by which medics were now required to classify people. If a doctor stamped a patient file with a green “minus” sign, the patient was fit to live. A blue “plus” sign was a death sentence. And Karl designed the gas chambers and crematoria that disposed of the countless thousands of “unworthies” who were bussed and brought by rail like freighted cattle, from psychiatric institutions and general hospitals all over Germany, to be gassed at Hartheim, Sonnenstein and Brandenburg.
“I can’t discuss her treatment with you, Officer Muller. I am very sorry.”
Karl was more incredulous by the second. “Are you saying Greta must stay… in here… for Christmas?”
“I really am very sorry, Officer Muller, sir. There is nothing I can do. If you had come a few hours earlier, perhaps…”
“What?”
“Well, Dr Kaufman left for the holiday this morning. He has finished for Christmas…”
“And there is no doctor on duty over Christmas?”
The nurse looked distraught. Karl realized he had become increasingly irate. He remembered again how intimidating his SS uniform was. He had no desire to bully this woman who was little more than a girl. He just wanted to hold his wife.
“But I shall be able to see her every day over Christmas, yes?”
“Of course.” The nurse was visibly relieved. She was close to tears.
“And can I take her out?”
She did not answer, looked towards the bay windows, as though longing to escape.
&nb
sp; “It doesn’t matter. I shall speak to your superior.”
The nurse looked back quickly, her eyes pleading.
“No… no. You misunderstand.” He sounded normal now, even soothing. “I will discuss my wife’s treatment with a senior staff member or a doctor when I can.”
Just before he left the ward, Karl looked again at Greta. She was fast asleep in her chair, head leaning to the left, resting on an upholstered wing. The gypsy girl had crept forward and was staring at him, arms folded, humming something softly. When he met her intense, dark eyes, she nervously lifted a hand, pushed one curtain of thick hair behind an ear, did not break her gaze. He registered her beauty, undisguised by even the drab hospital dress and shapeless cardigan, thick brown tights and worn slippers. His eyes softened. She lowered her eyes from his only to spit on the floor, then lifted them to his again.
The nurse exclaimed loudly, “Nikola!”
“You are the devil! You are the devil!” The gypsy girl’s eyes were wide with terror – or hatred, it was hard to tell – and she advanced slowly, then changed her mind and started to walk backwards, pointing all the time at Karl and never taking her eyes off him.
“Nikola!” cried the nurse again. “You stop that! I am so sorry, Officer Muller. Nikola!”
Karl seemed to consider for a moment, then put on his cap, made a dismissive gesture and left the ward.
On Christmas Day morning, around eight o’clock, having left his car on a main road that had been cleared for traffic, Karl trudged through thick snow towards the little house in Riebeck Strasse, Leipzig city, where Greta had grown up and where her parents still lived. Even as he knocked vigorously on the front door, he was aware of the earliness of the hour, the significance of the day. But he was desperate, and he knew they would agree that nothing could be of greater importance than Greta’s welfare.
In the midst of Karl’s third volley of sharp raps at her door, Clara Erlach appeared and poked her head around it timidly, clutching the front of her woollen dressing gown, a long grey plait snaking lazily over one shoulder and hanging to her waist.
“Karl! Karl, come in! Hans, it is Karl!” she shouted up the stairs to her husband. Clara was clearly delighted to see her son-in-law and ushered him indoors, took his face in her hands and kissed him hard on both cheeks. “Happy Christmas, Karl. How wonderful to see you! Have you seen Greta?”
“Yes, Clara, I have seen Greta. It is why I am here.”
“What has happened? Is Greta all right? We only saw her yesterday morning. Has something happened?”
“No… yes. I’ll explain. Where is Hans? Is he coming?”
“Hans? Hans, where are you? Karl is here.” Clara was impatient now for her husband to come, and fearful for her daughter. While they waited, she put a match to prepared kindling and newspaper in the kitchen stove. “He was never good in the mornings,” she confided to Karl as she shut the door on the sleepy flames. She bustled about, automatically reaching for plates from a shelf in a large dresser, locating bread and cheese, placing both on the table. “And now his angina is worse, since Greta… you know.”
Finally, Hans appeared, tousled and dressed, still fighting with one of his braces. “Karl, dear boy. It is good to see you. But it is also so early!”
“I’m sorry, Hans. But I wanted to get to you as quickly as possible.”
Clara sat down, put her hands between her knees and stared at Karl, an anxious frown on her face. Hans pulled out a chair from beneath the table; sat down also.
“I saw Greta yesterday,” began Karl. “You know, it was a bit of a shock.” Karl looked directly into Clara’s eyes, imploring her to understand there was no accusation in his words. She nodded. Her eyes filled with tears. “I am so sorry I have not been here. I wish with all my heart I…”
All night he had slept only fitfully, waking violently from terrible dreams. Clara saw his exhaustion and distress, and leaning forward took Karl’s hands in hers. “No, no, Karl, please… We know you can’t get away. We have to read your letters to Greta sometimes… she can’t open the envelopes… She always smiles when we read them. We know how things are, Karl. You are a good husband.”
Karl, his hands still in Clara’s, lowered his head and cried quietly.
“Wait, dear Karl – wait a minute.” Clara let go of his hands and went in search of a handkerchief. She kept several large cotton ones pressed and folded in a linen drawer at the bottom of a kitchen cupboard.
Hans sat dejectedly, head also lowered, hands between his thighs and clasped as though in prayer – or embarrassment. When Karl had wiped his eyes and blown his nose, Clara spoke again.
“We know how much you love Greta, Karl. We love her too. She is our little girl. But after that awful day when we found her… in the bathroom… Oh Karl, I thought my baby was dead!” It was Clara’s turn to cry. But she recovered, took several deep breaths. “After that, the doctor said Greta needed proper treatment, in a hospital. He said that we could not possibly provide the care she needed at home. What if she had succeeded? What if my child had taken her own life while we were here – in the garden or making dinner – and she… How could we live with ourselves?”
Karl nodded. “I know, Clara. I know.”
“The doctor said Greta’s drugs were not working. That they would have to try her on other, stronger, drugs, and that needed close medical observation.” Clara’s voice was pleading, as if she were convincing herself that she had done the right thing in letting them take her daughter to an asylum. Karl knew what it was to appease one’s own conscience, but these people, he was quite certain, had nothing with which to reproach themselves.
“We had no choice.” Hans spoke for the first time. His words were a verdict. No one spoke for some time.
Eventually, Karl was able to begin vocalizing the horror that had brought him to their door at eight o’clock on Christmas morning.
“Please listen carefully.” He looked first at Hans, then at Clara. “It is very important that you don’t ask me too many questions and that you trust me, OK?”
Clara nodded, but Hans was immediately on his guard. All this emotion so early – on Christmas Day. His angina was already playing up. He was very tired. He was worried about Clara. If he became ill, with Greta still so unwell and locked up in that place, what would become of her? Karl was a good man, but he was also an SS officer. Hans had little time for the SS. They frightened him. Two of his good friends, Jews – men he had grown up with and with whom he used to go bowling every week – had been suddenly taken away. Gestapo officers just knocked on their doors in the middle of the night and made them and their families get dressed and put coats on. They had taken them somewhere. That was weeks ago.
“What is this about, Karl? It is Christmas Day, my boy.”
“You have to bring her home.”
“What?” Hans was suddenly angry. Had this young man listened to anything they had said?
“Please! What do you know about this Dr Kaufman, at the asylum?” Karl’s voice was resuming its authoritative tone, though he spoke quietly.
“Well…” Clara spoke again. “He seems charming enough. He treats Greta well, we think. Why, Karl?”
“There are only seven women patients on Greta’s ward. Was that the case when you… when she first went in?”
Hans looked confused, then frowned in irritation.
“Please, try and remember.”
“What is this about? What is the matter?” Hans demanded.
“Please, Hans,” Karl implored, “just answer the question. Please.”
Hans shrugged, spoke again. “There were more like… sixteen. Perhaps a few more. Why?”
“And that was a month ago, more or less, right?”
“You are frightening us, Karl,” interjected Clara. “What are you saying? People get better… people… die. Sometimes they get moved, to other wards, other hospitals. It is Christmas. People go home.”
“Moved? Do you know this or are you just guessing?” Ka
rl was trying hard to hide his great anxiety, but he was aware of how alarmist he sounded, and his heart began to pound as he realized how close he was to showing these people a landscape of debauchery, where the greatest profanity the heart of man could invent had been legitimized; where the grotesque and obscene had been issued with passports to the waking hours of children.
“I heard some nurses talking one time, arranging for some ladies to go to another place, another hospital.” Clara’s tone was that of someone trying hard to listen again to a long past conversation. Her eyes focused on a point to her left as she conjured the moment when the matron had instructed a young nurse with a clipboard to write down names as she called them out. She had interspersed the roll call with barely audible statements and directions accentuated by gestures, at which the younger member of staff had nodded and made notes. The names of three ladies, Clara recalled, were confirmed out loud by the nurse. The matron had nodded. Then another three. More nodding. Clara had been unable to make out anything distinctly, but she had heard, clearly enough, the word “relocation”, and something about a train. She thought she had understood Dresden as a destination, but it was more of an impression than a memory. She looked again into Karl’s eyes. “No, I don’t know where they went for sure. I think Dresden, but I couldn’t say definitely.”
“Dresden?” Karl was feeling nauseous. “Can you think why they would move six such women to Dresden?”
Clara shook her head. “Better facilities? Treatment? What? I don’t know!”
“Enough! That’s enough.” Hans was tired and his angina was threatening. SS officer or not, Karl Muller had no right to come into his home on Christmas Day morning and frighten his wife like this. “Say what it is you are trying to say, Karl, for pity’s sake. What has all this got to do with Greta?”
“We must get her out of there. Whatever it takes. I will see the doctor straight after Christmas. If you cannot look after Greta here, then she must go to my parents’ home.”