by David Watts
I don’t go to convalescent homes, I said, remembering the specific limits of my malpractice insurance.
My secretary knows me well enough to know that my first answer is not always my last. She said nothing.
Okay, I’ll talk to her, I said.
We found a place for him, his niece told me. But they won’t take him unless a primary-care doctor agrees to see him once in the first seventy-two hours and weekly after that. He’s gotta go somewhere. Nobody wants to find him in his bed all bruised up, dried out, and confused.
If I hesitated, I might have been thinking how many times I’d run over the allotted time sitting around listening to his stories, knowing it would be hard to get in and out of there. I might have argued with myself by remembering how my mentor, when he knew he was dying, took me in his arms and said, You’re “Big John” now. Take care of my patients for me, will you? I thought of neither. There wasn’t time. Somehow I had already promised to go there.
He got better. Remembered more and more.
He moved to a rest home. Very nice. They packed in all his books, even the collection of hardcover American Heritages that took up three shelves. But for some weakness, he was his old self.
Food is terrible here, he said.
It’s a Jewish place, I said. What are you talking about?
I got news for you. Bad Jewish cooking is the worst cooking in the world.
I laughed.
Jesus Christ, he said. All this talk about my thinking. You know, the problem with my head is not that I’ve lost my mind, but I’m seventy-eight years old in two weeks.
I didn’t contradict him.
His family had told me that he ate mostly cookies and cheese puffs, that in spite of his ability to charm, he had his moments of blur. I knew that here, under supervision, his medications would be better controlled, he would not be taking four pills instead of one, would not be taking trips to the pharmacy to “supplement” his pain pills with Motrin, Tylenol, and anything else he could get his hands on. It reminded me of the situation with my aunt who swore on a stack of Bibles that the only way they would take her out of her house was feet first. I could respect that. Until I watched her fall—just reach up for a tree branch and fade to the grassy yard, stiff as a bowling pin—as if the earth’s center of gravity shifted suddenly and she was the only one affected by it.
I don’t know, I said. You look pretty good here.
There was a silence. I resisted the urge to break it. It would have to be his call.
Well, he said. It’s time I told you about Ohrdruf.
I settled in for a long spell.
His voice changed here. It became more broken, and he spoke in deliberate tones as if for emphasis, as if assuming the dramatic role the story demanded of him.
I was with the Eighty-ninth Division. We crossed the Rhine. We were first assigned to the cigarette camps. Camp Lucky Strike, set up for the boys to come back home, mostly wounded, ending their tour of duty. They would send them to these camps that were all along the coast, near the Belgian border. We were supposed to land in England when we boarded the boat in Camp Miles Standish, but halfway across they rerouted us to northern France. So there we were. And then Patton’s army—he was the farthest into Germany, so when we got stuck in the Bulge, they turned him around to clean up the place and just at that time we were assigned to that division.
From Lucky Strike we crossed the Moselle River, then the Saarland, and joined Patton’s army.
I was still with the battalion medical section. We got to the Rhine River, Lorelei, one regiment downriver, one above, one in reserve. We were on the top of that hill. The Germans across the river. Eventually we got over there and the division started pushing inland.
At the same time that we were getting across, the Remagen Bridge was open, so the Germans had to pull back. We were the demarcation between the British and American forces. We followed a course going down and ran into these towns with all of these workers in barracks sleeping on slabs, four or five slabs high. These were Eastern Europeans. We set them free. The medical corps told us not to feed them, you could kill them. We’ll come along behind and take care of them, they said. So we freed them and just kept going. General Patton was headed for the Czech border like a house afire.
And there were all these towns. By that time I was the company aid man of B Company. Second Platoon. Marching along, walking ten to fifteen miles a day. The sergeant and lieutenant would go to a meeting to find out the assignments. They announced we would have to get on the road at six a.m. It was April 10, 1945. Two days before Roosevelt died.
I remember we went down a hill, then walked through a wooded area southeast and we came out to a little town that was called Ohrdruf. There is a railroad track running through the town. We get on the track, and as we go through the town we notice that there, where the station house is, a man and a woman are standing. Just standing there. The lieutenant went up to them and asked their names, how many people lived there, and so on. The man started speaking in German. The lieutenant asked if anyone could speak German, so I raised my hand. I had had a little German in college and could understand bits here and there. But I told him that I spoke mostly Yiddish. And the lieutenant said that would be a good language to speak to this prick. He used the word prick. I remember that.
So I went up to him speaking English, but then I started trying to speak German, and I realized I was speaking more Yiddish than German. The guy looked at me in horror.
The lieutenant was one of the greatest guys ever. He was a lumberman who used to work the lots up in Washington. He was the one man who all the boys would follow, because they knew he would expose himself more than the others. As a medical man, walking in the back, you could always tell when the guys in the back would be ready to take off, because they would fart so strong you could smell it. It was bad like you’d never guess. I always tried to get up to the front with the guys who would fire the arms. Willie, the lieutenant would say, the guys at the back are a little nervous. I’m depending on you to quiet them down.
The Germans could always tell where the end of the platoon was because we medics had to wear that red cross. They could see that cross and would know where to direct their fire.
So I was planted back there. We climb the hill. We go down the hill. All the other platoons had their routes. The Germans had been broken by then, so we didn’t expect anything a platoon couldn’t handle.
So standing there are this man and this woman. Is there anybody who speaks German? So I’m assigned. We go through this for about ten minutes. Meanwhile, the platoon is on the station platform behind us. We can’t make out anything of what the German guy is saying. Then finally the wife opens her mouth and says, I speak and understand English.
The lieutenant gives her a dirty look. Why didn’t you say something before?
Well, I never want to speak before my husband does.
And the lieutenant says, How sweet of you.
So he asks her what’s down the road. We were supposed to meet the rest of our battalion at a little town, I forget the name, but we asked her because we knew it was down there somewhere.
It’s about twenty-nine miles, she said, but it’s not this way. It’s farther south, close to the border.
Meanwhile, I’m looking at this guy and he’s really shaking. Big time. And when she says “farther south” his facial expressions change. He sorta straightens up and has this relieved look on his face. The extreme tension went out of his body. I noticed because I was standing right next to him.
So I took the lieutenant aside and went out to the railroad track and I said, When you asked the woman what’s down the road and she told you that, I noticed this guy suddenly relaxed. By now they realized that we weren’t going to kill them. They must have been the mayor and his wife. The lieutenant asked me if I thought she was lying.
From the way he’s acting, I’m sure of it, I said.
So we decided to ignore her directions and take the road
to the town where the company was going to get together. Then all of a sudden this guy starts speaking rapidly in German, his wife translating. We were never Nazis, he said, we were in the underground fighting the Nazis and we were trying to save people . . . and he goes on and on like this for five minutes.
The American standing behind him tells the lieutenant that if this keeps going the man is going to die of a heart attack.
The lieutenant said to the wife, You and this man, you are a bunch of liars. Everywhere we have gone, nobody was a member of the Nazi Party, nobody persecuted anybody, and everybody was fighting in the resistance.
The woman says, Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Well, who was running the goddamned country, then? You’re all liars. If I was a German, you’d all be killed by now. Fortunately, we Americans don’t usually go around killing people. But if I find out you’re lying, I’ll come back up this road and kill you my goddamned self.
He calls up all forty-five guys, and the platoon is off.
Now, all of us in the platoon . . . we were aware of this odor . . . something wrong, something like a skunk smell, something deathly wrong.
We have four scouts out. Two in front, two to the side. We march in column form for about fifteen or twenty minutes and we’re walking in a path along the side of the track. The lieutenant leading one column, the sergeant the other. Me bringing up the rear as always.
We pass this town around the bend, then the track straightens out. The two guys come back from ahead and say that they notice a big fence with a wire top running along about two hundred yards, and in the center there is an open gate.
Do you notice any troops? The lieutenant asks.
No troops, but a stack of cordwood about eight feet high with a crazy guy on top jumping up and down. So the lieutenant says we will prepare for a fight. The BAR—that’s a Browning automatic rifle — the BAR guys were in front. Firefighting lines extending out on both sides, half with the sergeant, other half with the lieutenant. Twenty-four each side approaching straight on with rifles out, ready to fall to the ground if the fighting breaks out, or go through the fence and spread out on the other side.
We march on, and the stink is practically unbearable by now. Every five minutes we stop and all fall to the ground and get a rest. Then we get up and finally come up to where we can see the fence. There is the entrance to the fence, about seven or eight feet high. The regular fence extends out to the left and the right. The entrance is covered.
From the fence to this cordwood platform is about twenty or thirty feet away, a twenty-square-foot platform with wood on it. With this Polish guy on the top. I had heard Polish all my life and knew he must be a prisoner. So I told the lieutenant that this may just be a Polish survivor.
We walk in, two men at a time, and continue doing that until all of us are in, one turning to the right and the other to the left, bending down with guns out in order to cover in case Germans were there.
Nobody knew about death camps because none of the armies had gotten that far yet. They didn’t even know about—what’s that big one that begins with B?
Buchenwald.
Yeah, that’s it. Or Auschwitz, either.
Finally we get the platoon in, and the sergeant and lieutenant approach. The Polish prisoner is beside himself and we’re yelling at him, Come down, come down. He goes around to the back and disappears and then about a dozen of us start walking to this platform that looks like wood and that odor is getting worse. Indescribable. You know, I asked Doctor Eisner about it years later. I said that the other army guys can remember that odor, but you know, I cannot remember it. It’s lost. Gone. You know, Willie, he said, consider yourself lucky.
So we walked up. Here’s this thing about eight feet high. I’m in the middle. I’m about five-five, five-six, and suddenly, from about fifteen feet away, I realize it’s not wood. These are nude dead bodies—men, women, and children—and they were all stacked up. And apparently they must have had ladders, and they must have measured them and then put them down according to their size. You could measure it side to side and the whole thing wouldn’t be off by an inch.
So I walk up, all five feet five of me, my hand over my nose, and I come up, and my face comes up to, practically kissing distance, to what looked like a three-year-old girl, her face looking out, her body looking out—what was left of it—a three-year-old who had been battered and beaten. That, David, was my first view of the Nazi death camp and what they did to the Jewish people.
He stopped talking. He looked like he was having a hard time breathing. But then he went on.
The barracks extended to the fence on the other side and there were bodies all around, as if something had stopped them in the middle of their work.
We were there for about an hour. We were all picking up bodies and trying to bring them to a place along the ground.
The lieutenant reminded us we were supposed to meet our platoon in one hour. We decided to follow the track and see what we could find.
We got into two columns and went out the gate and I remember I was crying, crying loudly, and I became aware that all the other guys were crying, too. We had about four Jewish guys in the platoon, one of them was in shock. The sergeant walked with him, holding him up.
I didn’t pick up anything. We took the Polish prisoner with us. He was babbling all the way. One of the guys was about to give him some food, but the sergeant said to put the food away until we got to some doctors.
Our corporal turned out to be a weak-kneed bastard. He was on the ground in delusions. The sergeant took him in hand.
At twelve o’clock we stopped to eat. Nobody could eat. We didn’t think we’d ever eat again.
And you know, I’ve lost that sense of smell, David. I didn’t realize it until later. When I got back the guys were talking about the odor. We rode in the cattle cars, you know. The ones that they used for the prisoners. And we could smell the odor. But it was already fading from me. We never said much. Nobody talked about it until they started publishing reports in the battalion newsletter. Of course, the day after we were there, Bradley, Eisenhower, and Patton showed up at the camp and it was all published back in the States. It wasn’t until later we knew the Russian bastards had opened Auschwitz and never told anyone.
And I’ve been having the nightmares again. TV, radio, you know. But nobody remembers Ohrdruf. And I can’t remember the name of that big camp it was part of. I know it begins with a B. You see, I’ve blocked it out. That name. That smell. And you know, odors like that, or anywhere close to it, I can’t smell them. I can’t smell them at all. It’s like they don’t exist.
As quick as it started, the story had finished, not wanting acknowledgment or comment—each of us understanding nothing could be added and nothing was needed. Codger and I drifted off to other subjects. Damaged by the past, he’d found revisiting it somehow necessary. Horrible as it was, there was a strange tranquillity after the telling of it. And . . .
. . . we returned comfortably to the mundane, the clerical necessities that are the stuff of long-term relationships: the Vioxx he must take for his joints, the appointment with Dr. Sack, how I don’t have Prilosec samples anymore now that it’s gone off patent, but I do have Nexium, how he plans to leave this jail cell and go home as soon as he can— we leave alone what we cannot change and tend to what we can—the iron tablets that hurt when he takes them on an empty stomach, the flu shot before winter . . .
. . . and things are different now. Transformed mysteriously by what we just went through together. As a doctor I don’t have time to spend an hour or two listening to stories. Just sitting in one place that long makes me antsy, feeling like I ought to be doing something else.
Something made me do it this time, made me put aside the telephone, the call schedule, the urge to get home to my family, made me set aside all this long enough to endure the telling. But it was good. I don’t know why, but knowing that story changed everything, though it’s hard to say how. I could say that no
w I can see more of the layers behind this complex personality of his, and there was something like bonding, though I hate the word, a connection, perhaps, something secure enough so that when we clash we can still manage to stick together.
Yeah. So he’s still hard to tolerate sometimes. Only now it’s a game we don’t take seriously—all these little rituals we do numbly each day and are so accustomed to now have an undersurface to them, something we feel in our bones but will never talk about again.
I drifted to the door. He did what he always does when I am on my way out, scurried around like a hen scrambling for its chicks, scratching up another topic or two just to keep me there a little longer.
I put a finger in the air . . . but he beat me to it.
David, he said, pausing for dramatic effect. It’s been a little slice of heaven.
ABOUT MONEY
I am doing this one for free. My stethoscope glides over the surface of the abdomen like a stone skipping over a flexible sheen of water, listening first, not to disturb the delicate organs huddled and hiding below.
Having now heard their murmurings, rising this time like voices of protest, I feel for masses, organs grown large with struggle against some aberrant force that wishes to disturb the fragile balance of life.
He is eighty-two, the father of one of our hospital staff nurses and the patient of a friend of mine, a cardiologist who called this morning asking me to see him—diabetic, hypertensive, suffering a mild failure of the machine of the heart, contracting, perhaps, against too many hard times, and now suffering from a diarrhea nobody understands. My task is to discover what that’s all about.
Then a little mix-up — something attributable, probably, to language and the propensity of the telephone to misdirect—one hour after I’m off the phone he shows up.
We’ve got a problem, my receptionist says.
Yes, I say. He wasn’t supposed to come today.
Not that, she says. He’s HMO.
HMO. HMO. Poor bastard. Sick with restrictions. With his current medical problem he even looks abused. Frail, unshaven. He has the appearance of someone who has lost weight he could ill afford to lose. Before I hear his voice, I know it will tremble.