As a boy I learned to play the violin, an instrument that was thrust into my hands by my aunt when I was six. The instrument was much loved by my mother, whose own father had played to some acclaim. I enjoyed it and played well, and many said I had a natural ear for music. One evening when I was around the age of eleven, I performed a solo at an event at my school. My father clapped at the end of the piece, though his face, as always, was unreadable.
That night after I had climbed between the clean, starched sheets of my bed, I heard music coming from downstairs. Apart from the violin, Father did not allow other music to be played in the house, and he rarely accepted invitations to concerts. I crept down the curved stairway, my hand sliding silently over the smooth, polished wood banister to feel my way. The door to the front sitting room where my father worked was ajar, and a light shone from within.
I peered into the room and noticed that the soft music was coming from a phonograph, and Father was facing the window, holding a photograph of my mother. In the reflection of the window glass, he saw me and angrily told me to return to bed or receive a caning. In the seconds before I was sent away, I had enough time to see his face in the reflection and to see that it was a different kind of face than I had seen before: one that was reflective and sorrowful. I disappeared from his sight quickly because my father always carried out his threatened punishments.
To this day, I can’t touch a polished banister without thinking of my father’s face in the window glass.
The morning after my concert, he called me into his study and announced that I was not to play the violin anymore, and that I must work harder in science and mathematics and prepare for a career in medicine.
This is the only time I can remember feeling disappointed for a prolonged period. The violin had been my only physical connection with my mother—something she would have once held and caressed, and ours to share. I cried for several nights because I had so enjoyed the applause I received at the end of the recital, and for the first time wondered what my mother would have thought—if she would have been pleased by my performance. I believe my father had seen this sentimentality developing and decided that a sharp separation from the instrument was the cure.
It was my aunt who came to my aid, telling me that when I was grown, I could do whatever I wanted, including play the violin, but for the time being I was to accomplish what my father had planned for me—that he knew best how to raise me. As an adult, I wonder whether she had believed her own words—since I am still often under his strict direction—or whether she had convinced me in the interest of maintaining household harmony. There are few people who have the courage to object to Father’s decisions.
My father frequently traveled to other countries to talk about his research and to observe the work of others. When he personally attended to the medical needs of the families of Heinrich Himmler’s inner circle in 1933, his competence was noticed and he quickly moved up through the ranks of the party. His own field of research was set aside. He was asked to consult on other issues, such as inexpensive chemicals needed for Hitler’s euthanasia program. He began working in an exclusive sanatorium in Lychen, treating athletes and Hitler’s protection squad, the Schutzstaffel, or SS. He was trusted. He put the Nazi Party before family, before me. I was groomed from birth to be loyal.
But the idea of women’s intricate physiology continued to plague me into adulthood, hence I combined the study of general medicine at the University of Munich with the disciplines of gynecology and obstetrics also. War broke out three months before I was due to graduate, and my father summoned me to Berlin for urgent talks. He needed me packed and ready for transfer to Poland to be the personal physician to the SS. I would follow them around, repairing and sending them off for more brutality. We argued, as I wanted to return and finish the degree. It was the physiology of women that I had spent years attempting to understand. He knew that it was my intention to open a fertility clinic, and I could not have foreseen that voluntary abortions on Jewish girlfriends would be part of my work. (Meanwhile, abortions on Aryans were otherwise illegal.)
It had been a long time since I had stood up to him, and, as always, he won in the end. He dismissed my concerns. “It is just the paperwork.” With a slash of his pen on party letterhead, a request was made, and a week later I held my medical and gynecological degree. I certainly knew all the material, and had achieved high results throughout my education, but I still cannot help feeling a fraud sometimes, having not completed the final exams that many of my colleagues were presented with, simply because I am who I am. The son of Anton Gerhardt, a respected member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
“So, what is the promotion?” Lena asks.
“I will be working for my father, unfortunately. He wants to send me to a women’s camp just north of Berlin. It seems the number of patients per doctor is rising fast.”
“How long have you known?” She sounds suspicious. She is always one step ahead of me.
“He told me at our last dinner gathering. I wanted to think about it before I told you. I needed to summon up the courage knowing how you feel about Father.” I say this, half joking. Part of my delay was deciding whether to take the promotion or not. Though I hugely dislike my current placement, I have grown used to being secluded here with Lena, partly cut off from my father in Berlin. The gathering the other evening reminded me how much I detest the pomp and sycophants who follow him around.
“Do we have to be so close to Anton?”
My father tends to make people tense, especially Lena.
“You can’t have it all your own way,” I say playfully.
“If only that were true.”
“At least we will be back in Germany with the family, yes? To celebrate his first birthday and every other event.”
“How do you know it’s a him?”
“I keep dreaming of a boy. A little boy with brown hair, like yours.”
“Maybe it is your own childhood you’re remembering.”
“Thank you, Herr Freud.”
She ignores my teasing dig. “Who is replacing you?”
“They haven’t approached anyone yet. I suppose the medical centers will provide the services I do now, until a replacement is found.”
I have tried not to imagine what will become of them. Pregnant women will most likely be turned away at the general medical facilities. But my wife does not need to know this.
“Lena,” I say, “there is more to tell you. My father wants me to observe and participate in the research methods being conducted at Auschwitz. There are procedures being used there that he wants me to implement at the camp near Berlin, as well as at other camps. He believes that the work being done at Auschwitz is promising for women. I have to go to the camp soon, but it is not a place I can take you.”
“No!” Lena has stopped to face me. “You have told me before it is an awful place. I don’t want you to go there.”
I take her arms gently. “It is only for a short time. A few weeks.”
“And what of these women in the camps? What sort of procedures?”
“Sterilization methods that don’t involve surgery. That allow women to recover twice as quickly.”
“Do these women consent to it?”
It is a question I have asked myself. I know the conditions are even worse in the camps than in the ghetto. I have heard the guards joke about them, and my father refer to the women as “subjects.”
“I didn’t think so,” she says, reading my vacant expression. “What a ridiculous idea! Suddenly a Jewish woman is also an animal that can be subjected to tests for research purposes? Who but Himmler would have thought of that?”
“I will make sure they agree before such procedures are performed.”
Lena is independent and strong, yet fragile when it comes to the subject of women and babies—especially now, in her condition. Thankfully she has not had to witness the thinning limbs of the children within the ghetto.
“Di
d you know that her father had been a member of the Catholic Centre Party?” Father said several days after I had introduced him to Lena. We had already been seeing each other for months, but he did not know this.
“No,” I said.
“Don’t you think that it is strange she hasn’t mentioned it to you?”
“No, Father. There are other topics more interesting than politics.” I remembered Lena’s expression when I had boasted of my father. She had been unimpressed, rather amused.
“Why would you search her records?” I asked him.
“You know why. I hold an important position.”
My father had come to the Führer’s notice for his work in researching diseases, and more recently had been promoted to SS Gruppenführer. Even I have to admit he is successful on so many levels.
“I have to do checks on everyone,” he told me.
I mentioned this to Lena later that evening.
“What now?” she asked, challenging.
“What do you mean?”
“I suppose that it is over between us. I suppose you want to end it.”
“No!” I said, shocked. “Why would I want that when I am in love with you?” It was the first time I had declared my feelings for her.
She smiled, looked down, like she always did when she was thinking, and our relationship was sealed that day, thanks to my father.
“Trust you to declare your love as if it were there all along, as if I should have known it!” she said, though it was clear from the redness of her face that she was pleased.
The fact that her suitability had been questioned seemed to drive us closer together, and I soon learned, and kept secret, that her father had attempted to convince other members of the Centre Party to vote against changes to the Constitution of the German Reich—changes that were proposed by Hitler’s government in 1933—allowing Hitler to enact laws without parliamentary consent. Lena’s father’s attempts at opposition failed, and his party supported the changes. This support for a new parliamentary act would ultimately assist Hitler in obtaining unlimited political power.
For reasons of self-preservation, and the threat of reprisals, Lena’s parents eventually felt forced to align themselves publicly with Hitler and his party. My father had put my father-in-law’s earlier alignment to being disillusioned, and manipulated by church leaders. Though unbeknown to my father, Lena’s parents have privately kept their Catholic faith.
Of course, that was not the end to differences. I have had to counsel Lena on what she says in front of my father.
At a dinner party held shortly after our engagement, Lena overheard my father and colleagues discussing the removal from their jobs of certain scientists and professors who had been too outspoken about certain Nazi practices. Lena then commented—perhaps it was the wine that brought out some truth—that “dumbing down the masses” was important for the party’s success. To which there was an awkward pause.
“Until solutions can be implemented by the powers of the state, ignorance is sometimes a good thing,” Father replied coolly before changing the subject.
After the dinner party, I chastised her and she stormed out, secluding herself at the house of a friend and refusing to meet me at the door, until I found myself writing her long letters of apology, begging for her to come back to me.
“All right,” Lena said, finally agreeing to speak with me. “I will be a good Nazi wife if that means staying with you. Besides, I have learnt something about you. You are not so wooden after all. You have some passion hidden very deep down that your father has kept suppressed.” She put her hand on my chest. “Perhaps I can bring more of that out of you.”
We married not long after this. My father was unable to attend the wedding, having been called away at the last minute to travel to a secret location for political talks. The following year, war broke out, and after completing my first commission as a military physician, Lena gave up her teaching career to join me in Poland.
The sun breaks through the clouds, streaking color across a city that struggles to find reasons to meet the day. We pass the remains of a synagogue that has been gutted by fire.
It is a long way back to the apartment, but Lena says she doesn’t mind. She believes our walks might halt the phantom pains she’s been having. I explain to her that this is her body simulating the feelings of labor, giving her a glimpse of what is to come.
“Thank you, Doctor,” she says. “Or should I call you something else now? Now that my important doctor husband has suddenly grown two inches taller.”
“You may refer to me as SS Hauptsturmführer Gerhardt, no less,” I say, making myself sound falsely pompous. Though, there is no denying, the promotion has given me the pleasure in knowing that life will be good for us.
CHAPTER SIX
MATILDA
The train ride to wherever is tedious, and the carriage bounces and jolts across the dark places of Romania as we head toward Germany. I shift and sigh loudly to show that I’m bored, looking out into the blackness through the glass in the rattling doors, and then rolling my eyes back from the window and into the dimly lit train instead. The lights above us on the ceiling make the faces of the other passengers appear ghostly white and cast large shadows into the corners of the booths. People stare at me as if I am something they haven’t seen before. I stare back until they look away. I have been on a train before, to visit Tata’s brother in Poland, though I do not know the name of the town. That time the journey was exciting, because my whole family was there. Dragos kept jumping onto the seat as Theo and I watched and laughed. Now I am on a train headed to a hotel somewhere in the north, traveling with a soldier in a colored uniform and a strange woman with a square face.
We arrive at a station late at night where another soldier is waiting for us. He is wearing a darker uniform and a hat, and he doesn’t look at my face. It is as if I am invisible. The first officer will return on the train, and the new one will take the woman and me to a hotel. We climb into another car. It isn’t as nice as the first one that carried me away from my home. This one smells of oiled hair, and the cold wind sneaks in around my feet. The soldier leaves us at the door of the hotel and says he will be back in the morning.
I have never stayed in a hotel before. A boy walks around from behind the front counter and stretches out his hand toward my case. I hold tight to the handle, and the boy pulls back his hand and looks at the square-faced lady.
“She can carry her own,” says the woman and hands the boy her suitcase. We follow him upstairs to the first floor. Inside the room are two beds, a desk, a chair, and lamps on the walls. I am told there is a bath and a toilet at the end of the hall. The woman pays the boy after he sets down her luggage and gives him an order for food. She does this without looking at him. She is familiar with this place.
It has been many hours since I have eaten, and despite the fact that I am thinking of Mama’s stew, which suddenly makes me sad and hungry, I am eager to try the food the lady has ordered. When it comes, I have to eat it at the desk.
The woman does not eat hers straight away. She opens her case and takes out several items of clothing and places them on the bed that I’ll be sleeping in.
I wipe the last potato dumpling in the thick gravy. I have already eaten the slices of pork and now there is apple, wrapped in pastry and rolled in powdered sugar.
I don’t finish my milk, which does not taste as fresh as the milk at home. My stomach is full, and I feel guilty that I have this food and my brothers don’t. At home Dragos and Theo will not have eaten this much between them. But then they are at home in their beds, and I am here with a strange woman. They are the lucky ones.
“You must drink all the milk,” the woman says in Romanian, although she does not speak it well.
“You can talk in German,” I say. “Tata always spoke to us in both. Tata reads us stories in German.”
“You are a growing girl, and you must drink this milk as well to make your bones healthy,” she says
in German. “Children should drink plenty of milk.”
“How would you know?” I say, since I am doubtful she knows anything about us. I don’t like this woman who tells me what to do. She is not my mother. The woman speaks without looking at me.
“I have a daughter your age.”
This is a surprise to me.
“Where is she?”
“Back in Germany.”
“Then why are you here?”
“You ask too many questions for a young girl.”
“Theo says that I am the most curious person he knows.”
“Who is Theo?”
“My brother.”
She is shaking out a long nightgown, and this time she stops to look directly at me. It is the first time she has looked at me for this length of time. She pulls her lips together and returns to her task.
“I see. Then he is probably correct in what he says.”
“Why are you here and not with your daughter?”
She stops at her task again, puts one hand on one hip, and watches me with large brown cow eyes. They are the only pretty things about her.
“I think you have to learn to stop being so nosy. Now, you must change into your nightwear. I have laid it on your bed.”
I examine the piece of clothing. It is fine and white and gathered at the front. It is very pretty and not like the one I have in my suitcase, made of fabric that has yellowed in places, passed down from Catarina.
“I don’t need it. I have my own.”
“You are very willful. Unfortunately, such a temperament won’t do. I suggest you change your attitude before you arrive at the Center. You will not find your new supervisor tolerant of such behavior . . . but that is not my concern. You are not my problem after tomorrow.”
I suspect this woman does not care at all for her daughter—that she stays here all the time so she can be paid to watch the young girls they steal.
Later in bed, after I have changed into Catarina’s old nightgown (I have left the other one at the bottom of the bed), I watch the woman as she writes at the desk.
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