A Fight in Silence

by Melanie Metzenthin

  Manfred and Rolf couldn’t do the full range of jobs, but they could at least sweep up the workshop, run errands and look after the guard dogs. They were both always cheerful and made huge efforts to do everything well. At first Richard’s mother had been uneasy and was worried it could be dangerous taking in asylum residents, but once she got to know them and learned more about the background to Richard’s desire to help, she even managed to persuade Margit to let them have Jürgen’s old room.

  ‘I can’t understand why their own parents are not doing all this for them,’ commented Margit later. ‘How can they take the risk of these terrible things happening to their sons? They might be feeble-minded, but they’re likeable enough and know how to work if you give them the right things to do.’

  ‘I agree with you, Margit, but that’s why I asked Papa to take them on. Their mother died when they were born and their father put them in residential care very early on, but they’re only allowed to stay there until they’re twenty-one. That’s how they came to the asylum, but I saw straight away that they wouldn’t be safe there for long.’

  ‘They’ll be safe with us,’ promised Margit. ‘I’ve spoken to Holger. We could take on another one like these two, if it helps to save a life.’

  ‘Really? I do know someone.’

  And that’s how Johannes Mönicke, the schizophrenic who had been buried alive during the previous war and had consistently favourable reports from Richard, also got a position at the Hellmer joinery workshop and so vanished from the files at Langenhorn.

  Come the end of April, every member of the population received a gas mask. They came in all sizes, even for infants. Emilia and Georg were intrigued and tried them on, complaining about the strong smell of rubber.

  ‘There now, that’s why car tyres are rationed. They need the rubber for the gas masks,’ said Richard drily.

  ‘Do you really think the British will launch gas grenades at us?’ asked Paula, for once disconcerted.

  ‘Yes, and cluster bombs, firebombs, no expense spared. That’s if our flak guns don’t shoot them down first,’ commented Richard. ‘Haven’t you seen the towers for the anti-aircraft guns being put up all over the place?’

  ‘I have, actually,’ said Paula. ‘And this morning someone came here from the local authority wanting to check our cellar for its suitability as an air-raid shelter. They’re going to put in a couple of extra beams over the next few days and want us to clear out our stuff to make space for bunk beds.’

  ‘Have we got much stuff down there?’

  ‘The old pram, both the cradles and the changing chest, and then the tinned food.’

  ‘I’ll phone my father and ask him to have his staff clear the cellar there. Could be they’ll know someone with a use for the cradles and the changing chest.’

  Paula sighed. ‘I hope we’re never in the position of having to use this cellar, and definitely not with these gas masks.’

  A fortnight later, deafening sirens woke Richard in the middle of the night. He looked at the clock: just past midnight. Paula was already awake, sitting bolt upright in bed.

  ‘Air-raid warning! Paula, get the children ready!’

  Paula was out of bed and dressed in a trice. Richard was ready quickly too and hurried to the children’s bedroom, where he simply got Emilia and Georg into their dressing gowns and gathered up their clothes.

  ‘Papa, are they going to throw bombs at us now?’ asked Emilia.

  ‘They’ll try, but the flak guns will shoot them down first. You’ve nothing to worry about.’

  ‘And why are we going down to the cellar?’

  ‘Just in case someone drops a bomb before the flak man can shoot it down. It’s just to make sure. Anyway, you’ve been wanting to try out those beds for ages.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Emilia. Then she signed to her brother, ‘You’re lucky you can’t hear the noise of the sirens. It really hurts my ears.’

  Paula came in with a suitcase. ‘Let’s put the children’s clothes in here. There’s still space.’ As she held out the open case, Richard saw that all their photo albums were already safely packed, together with birth certificates, professional certificates and reports.

  ‘We can replace clothes and furniture any time,’ said Paula, ‘but I don’t want to be running around trying to replace papers like these!’

  ‘Well done!’ said Richard proudly. ‘Maybe we should just leave everything in there from now on, ready for the off.’

  They made haste down to the cellar and on the staircase bumped into their neighbours, some in nightclothes, others fully dressed, also on their way to the shelter.

  ‘Oh dear Lord, are they going to blow this house to pieces?’ wailed old Frau Walter.

  ‘Don’t worry, Frau Walter,’ piped up Emilia. ‘Our flak man will shoot the bombers down first, isn’t that right, Papa?’

  ‘Yes, our anti-aircraft rockets will get there first,’ confirmed Richard. ‘This is just a precautionary measure.’

  Emilia and Georg had always wanted to have the top bunks, but once they were actually in the darkness of the cellar, lit only by a few paraffin lamps, Emilia asked her father if she could stay close to him in the bottom bunk and Georg asked to be with his mother.

  ‘Of course, poppet,’ said Richard to his daughter, smiling a little to himself that she was wanting to take refuge with him while Georg had opted for his mother. Sigmund Freud would have definitely put all this down to an Oedipus complex.

  In the distance they heard the sinister low-level hum of aircraft, interrupted by the flak rockets, and now and again individual strikes. At the moment it all sounded a long way off.

  ‘Right, it’s not directly overhead,’ confirmed Richard, while Emilia snuggled closer into him. ‘Go to sleep, little one. I’ll keep a look-out and make sure that nothing happens.’

  ‘I’m not at all tired,’ she said.

  ‘We could look at some old photos!’ suggested Paula brightly, taking one of the albums out of the suitcase. So she and Georg sat on Richard and Emilia’s bunk and the lamp seemed brighter.

  ‘Shall we look at the photos of Italy?’ As she spoke, she put everything into sign language for Georg.

  Georg nodded and Emilia said, ‘Ooh, yes! I’d like to see the ones of the Colosseum and hear those stories about the Christians getting thrown to the lions.’

  ‘So you want scary stories, do you?’ asked Richard with a smile.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘All right, then. But we must tell the stories really quietly so as not to disturb other people.’ To any observer, they presented an unusual scene, a family of four conversing through signs and gestures, the only sounds a laugh or a whimper. Richard was relieved to see how concentrating on the stories helped Emilia to forget about the disturbing background noise of bombs and flak fire, while Georg had, for the first time in his life, a distinct advantage in not hearing anything.

  The all-clear sounded around three in the morning and all residents went back to their flats.

  ‘That wasn’t so bad,’ announced Emilia as they went back upstairs. ‘Our flak man was really careful.’

  ‘You’re right there,’ said Richard. ‘He was.’

  Next morning, however, he heard that overnight the British had dropped over four hundred incendiaries and eighty high explosives on Altona, St Pauli, the port and on Harburg. Houses and barns had gone up in flames, thirty-four people had died and seventy-two were injured. This was 18 May 1940 and Richard realised this war could not be compared with the earlier one. He feared it would be far worse.

  And yet, by contrast with the previous war, the German army remained on the advance. Paris fell in June 1940 and everyone celebrated. Adolf Hitler was now seen as the greatest military leader of all time and there was talk of a blitzkrieg. The disgrace of Versailles had been wiped out.

  Karl sent a postcard from Paris and a photo which showed him up the Eiffel Tower with his comrades, all of them in uniform. His smile came across as genuine, an
d Richard felt relieved that his nephew seemed to have conquered those feelings of guilt. He hoped Karl would soon be home, but nobody, and nothing, for that matter, was any safer in Hamburg. There were new concerns about enemy attacks against civilians.

  And so it was that early in July a British fighter aircraft came out of the clouds without warning and dropped four high explosives directly on Steilshooper Strasse, where children were at play. Eleven children, four women and two men were killed. The newspapers condemned this as a cowardly act of aggression and Fritz told Richard how he’d tended to two of the victims on his operating table. A seven-year-old had slipped away as he treated her and he’d managed to save a boy of eleven, although both his legs had been blown off in the attack.

  ‘What kind of people are these, bombing children?’ Fritz raged after the event. ‘Yes, OK, we’re at war, but why can’t they just bomb the port, the wharf and places like that, not just come in from nowhere and hit kids out playing with their friends? It’s barbaric; it’s abnormal.’

  ‘I know,’ said Richard. ‘It’s worse for the children in any case. Not just that they can’t sleep undisturbed at night, but there are even daytime raids now. Paula worries every time Georg goes to and from school on the tram.’ He let out a huge sigh. ‘How are Henriette and Harri with the nights in the air-raid shelter?’

  ‘Relatively good, to be honest. Rudi’s more scared than anyone, really. He creeps into a corner with his tail between his legs and whimpers fit to break our hearts! Henriette and Harri stroke him and calm him, and that helps them both forget to be frightened. And of course I always tell them our flak rockets will shoot down all the bombers before they get anywhere near our house.’

  Richard gave him a look of sympathy. ‘You know, if Hitler was clever, he’d negotiate a peace treaty now that he’s taken Paris, then he could go down in history as some great military leader and we’d get a decent night’s sleep at last.’

  ‘Unfortunately, great military leaders are so full of themselves that they go on and on until they fall off their mighty pedestals! Just look at Julius Caesar and Napoleon,’ said Fritz.

  ‘Yes,’ said Richard quietly. ‘I fear this is only the beginning.’

  Chapter 35

  February 1941

  Humans are creatures of habit, as Richard liked to say, and by now it had become routine to seek safety in the air-raid shelter at least twice a week. Losses were still being contained and at least no one had had to use their gas mask yet. People adapted. On every staircase, and in pretty much every flat, there was now a bucket of sand or a pail of water to put out the incendiaries. If the air-raid warning had lasted more than three hours overnight, then the children had leave to go to school two hours later than normal.

  Repair squads proved dependable. Even a hit on a power station would be put right in under two hours.

  The war had changed Hamburg. No white pleasure boats steamed across the Alster now, as a timber structure had been put in place across the water to mislead enemy aircraft and remove any point of orientation.

  Fritz frequently brought horrific tales from the operating theatre, where he would be in the middle of surgery when the sirens went and have no option but to carry on with the operation throughout the raid. The majority of patients in Hamburg’s hospitals could not in any case be taken down to the air-raid shelters, due to lack of facilities. Their only hope was that the anti-aircraft rockets would do their work while they lay helpless in their beds.

  The asylum at Langenhorn, however, remained relatively safe as it was too far out to be of any interest to enemy bombers, so life there went on in its usual way, until one morning in February 1941 when Richard got a call from Fritz.

  ‘I’ve got bad news,’ said his friend. ‘I’ll start with the less dangerous part. The black-market trader I’ve been getting all your petrol coupons from has been rumbled.’

  ‘Shit,’ muttered Richard. ‘I hope he hasn’t got a customer list that’ll drop us both in it.’

  ‘Don’t worry, there’s nothing to implicate us. But that’s not the only thing. I can’t even go on giving you my own coupons because I’ve got to sell the car. My call-up papers came this morning.’

  ‘What?’ Richard couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  ‘My call-up papers.’ Fritz practically had to spell it out for him.

  ‘But you’re the senior consultant and Professor Wehmeyer’s deputy! They can’t just conscript you like that!’

  ‘Yes, they can. And it’s to serve as director of a medical battalion for the German Africa Corps in Tripoli. My research into operating on bullet wounds to the skull and on multiple abdominal traumata, the work I published with Professor Wehmeyer, is what’s led to this disaster. The top brass must have thought, Oh well, the Prof’s too old for the Front, we’ll leave him in Hamburg, so my hard-won skills are sending me off to serve the fatherland alongside its other battling sons.’ His laugh was bitter. ‘And there was I, idiotically believing that if I did the best work possible that I’d be indispensable to the home front and not get conscripted.’

  ‘When are you reporting for duty?’

  ‘On 1 March. As if all I’d been waiting for was to sacrifice myself for the Führer, the people and the fatherland.’

  ‘Fritz, I am truly sorry.’

  ‘Maybe you made the better decision, going for psychiatry, but surgery’s my whole life now.’

  ‘Shall we have a beer together this evening? While you’re still here in town?’

  ‘You bet, then I can bellyache to you in person about it all.’ Fritz chuckled quietly in spite of the sombre mood.

  Moments after Richard had put the phone down there was a knock on the door. It was Krüger’s secretary, Frau Handeloh.

  ‘Dr Hellmer, Dr Krüger wishes to speak to you immediately. Your telephone line has been engaged, so he asked me to come and fetch you.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘A supervisory commission from Berlin is here and there are a few queries about your statements.’

  ‘What kind of supervisory commission?’ asked Richard, getting to his feet and preparing to follow Frau Handeloh.

  ‘From Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin, the place we send all the statements to.’

  Tiergartenstrasse! The place where life-and-death decisions were made on the basis of those patient registration forms. Richard’s face burned. Was this a routine visit, or had they noticed that for the last nine months every single patient at Langenhorn had demonstrated the same productivity as a healthy person? If they’d looked at the forms carefully, they’d have seen straight away that everything had been embellished. Would it be a case of insubordination or incompetence? And what would happen to him now?

  He followed Frau Handeloh down the corridor, his mind rapidly working through ways in which he could outmanoeuvre them if what he suspected was true, but nothing seemed appropriate. He couldn’t play the staunch but stupid Nazi as he had before, because Krüger was going to be there too. And Krüger had had it in for him for a long time now. Whichever way you looked at it, if they examined his statements alongside the original files, he’d had it.

  Dr Krüger’s impatience was evident as soon as Richard entered his office. With him were two men in civilian clothes, files open in front of them on the desk.

  ‘Ah, here at last!’ he snapped. ‘These gentlemen are from Berlin and have questions to ask.’

  ‘Good morning,’ said Richard. ‘How can I be of assistance to you gentlemen?’

  ‘Good morning.’ Although they both returned his greeting, they didn’t do the usual ‘Heil Hitler’. Was that a good sign? Richard wasn’t sure.

  ‘I’m Dr Nissen,’ said one, acting as spokesman for the pair of them, ‘and this is my colleague, Dr Clausner. The Ministry for the Interior has asked us to come here and look into your patients’ files.’

  ‘You’ve come all the way from Berlin to look into our patients’ files? What have we done to deserve this honour?’ asked Richard.
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  Krüger threw him a scathing look.

  ‘It has come to our attention that the efficacy of treatment here is well above the average. For nine months now every one of your patients has received a productivity assessment comparable to the average healthy worker. This has sparked our curiosity.’

  ‘I see.’ Richard’s throat tightened. He tried to conceal his disquiet.

  ‘Our colleague Dr Krüger has told us that you are responsible for the registration and classification of all inmates.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Richard folded his hands behind his back so that nobody could see them shaking.

  ‘It is remarkable that most of your classifications do not seem to match with the files themselves,’ Dr Nissen went on. ‘We have sampled eleven at random. And in nine of these the productivity assessment is falsely positive. What do you have to say?’

  Richard tried to clear his throat. ‘I’ve filled out so many registration forms that it’s perfectly possible that one or two errors have crept in.’

  ‘One or two errors?’ Dr Nissen studied him with raised eyebrows. ‘In this sampling your error rate is more than eighty per cent. That would suggest an error in your methodology, don’t you think?’

  Richard remained silent.

  ‘You have nothing to say?’

  Richard’s mind was feverishly working on how to get around this. The truth would send him straight to prison.

  ‘I was expected to determine precise percentages regarding patients’ capacity for productivity in comparison with that of a healthy man. In the end, I’m a doctor, not a farmer. If you look at agriculture, you’ll understand that work of economic value is in fact being done, work that contributes to nourishing the patients here and indeed those in other institutions, particularly those with children’s wards.’

  ‘And this is why you certificated every single mentally ill patient here with one hundred per cent capacity, in spite of the fact that this applies to only twenty per cent of the patients at the very most?’