by Glenn Bryant
Part of her great lie was exposed and defeated. She had never expected this. This moment. She had to sit down. Oh God, she thought.
Gerhard returned to the room, hoping to grab more whisky, but Catharina quickly shooed him out with a fierce face.
‘Jozef,’ she began, remaining seated and calm, yet sad.
Jozef sensed her anguish and ached. He wanted to hold her and tell her that he loved her, but he felt he could not in this moment. Whenever Catharina had cried when he was young, Jozef had instantly copied her and cried too. It had been an instinctive reaction. He had stopped doing it, but the pain only felt greater now that he was older. He wondered where the tears were and was afraid why they were not there anymore.
‘Jozef, myself and your father had a son. He was stillborn. The complications meant I could never try for a child again.’
Catharina beat back a tidal wave of emotion. She did not know from where she summoned the strength before realising it came from the most powerful feeling she would ever experience – the unconditional love for a child. She was protecting him.
‘Your real name is Jozef Drescher. You were born here in Munich on April 3, 1941 we believe, one month later. I was not happy for a long time after your stepbrother died. It helped me to think of you as my Jozef, so we gave you the same birthday. You already had the same name. We never thought of it again. Your father and I decided. It was like a miracle. You were such a happy child, even then at the end of the war.’
Jozef could see himself now – Jozef Drescher, born April 3, 1941 – for the first time. Who he was. He could almost remember. He cried finally.
‘Oh Jozef,’ said Catharina, who gave in herself and started to cry too.
She tried to caress and comfort her son with warm words over the line, like stroking the back of his little neck, sunburnt from happy summers in their garden.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Professor Zielinski sat in his office. It was late. He was enjoying some vodka in a coffee mug. It was deliciously decadent and helped soothe him through some tedious marking of uninspired essays.
The bottom drawer of the professor’s desk was slightly ajar – not at first glance, but the professor knew. After his encounter with Michael it had become something of a safety blanket for him.
A knock at the door and the professor’s pulse quickened. Who was it? It was nearly 11pm.
The professor grabbed his pistol out of his bottom drawer and tiptoed the short distance from his desk to the door, hiding behind it in case it sprang open and caught him out. His pistol was pointed, ready.
‘Who is it?’ the professor enquired as calmly as he could.
‘Stan, it’s Henryk,’ said a familiar voice.
‘Jesus Christ, Henryk,’ said the professor, opening the door and allowing his thumping heart to beat back down. ‘What are you doing here at this time?’
‘Is it ever too late to see an old friend?’ said Henryk warmly. ‘What’s with the gun?’
‘It’s nothing. Nothing!’ protested the professor. ‘Just an old man starting to lose his mind.’
Henryk could see his friend was frightened – and not much frightened him. Stan was different from most former camp inmates. He never allowed the Nazis to really reach him, not completely like the others. He retained a certain dignity. Hardly anyone did. Others foolishly tried and quickly paid with their lives, but Stan had not. He had survived and even though Henryk could have throttled him at times, he could only admire him.
‘Stan, I have something for you.’
‘Sit, sit,’ said Professor Zielinski. ‘Vodka?’
‘Is the pope Catholic?’ said Henryk, slapping his old friend happily.
The professor reached for another mug and poured a generous serving into it.
Henryk sat down and pulled out a book he had carefully been concealing inside his jacket. He opened it at a page he had marked. ‘Is this the man, this Michael who visited you?’ asked Henryk.
There he was – younger, prouder and grandly wearing a Nazi uniform. It was him, Michael. There was no mistaking those eyes. The hair was whiter and thinner now, but still in the same style, combed over to one side.
‘Michael Drescher,’ the professor read out. ‘Chief medical officer of Hadamar State Institution and Sanatorium. Well, well. As I live and breathe. Well done!’ exclaimed the professor, wrapping an arm around his friend’s shoulder, who was enjoying the vodka which had begun to draw a giddy smile across his lips. ‘What is this? How did you get it?’
‘It is what the Nazis called a death book. It holds all the records from Hadamar, one of six centres set up to house and kill the mentally and physically handicapped from 1940-42,’ he said. Henryk flicked through the pages and underlined a figure with the tip of his finger. ‘Here,’ he said.
Professor Zielinski leaned in for a closer look. There it was, plain and clinical. The Nazis got their numbers right at least. The professor shook his head and drank some vodka. It was hard to think of such numbers and translate them into people the Nazis had targeted and then eliminated with murderous efficiency.
Henryk read, ‘Hadamar: in operation from January 1941 to July 31, 1942. People processed: 10,072. Total: 10,072.’
‘Ten thousand,’ said the professor. ‘Ten thousand. Poor bastards. Thank you so much for this. Can I keep it for a few days? I will bring it back to you in person. You have my word. I will guard it with my life.’
‘I know you will,’ said Henryk. ‘Where can an old man get a good drink and a warm bed around here?’
‘I know just the place,’ said the professor, rising to his weary feet, knees cracking.
The men wrapped their arms around one another and walked out of the office.
* * *
‘It is what the Nazis called a death book, Jozef,’ said the professor the next day. ‘It is priceless. It must remain in safe hands. It was in the possession of a fellow survivor and now it is temporarily in my possession.’
‘Where is it from?’ asked Jozef.
The two of them were sitting in the professor’s office. It was a brilliant morning, not yet 9am and the formal start of the university day.
The professor had not been able to wait; he was too intoxicated by the knowledge. ‘It is from a place called Hadamar,’ said the professor. ‘One of six killing centres created by the Nazis in early 1940 and in open operation until the summer of 1942. Together, more than 70,000 mentally and physically handicapped Germans, Aryan Germans – these were not Poles or Slavs or Russians or Jews – were secretly murdered under direct orders from Hitler.’
‘Why?’ said Jozef.
‘Darwin,’ said the professor. ‘The survival of the fittest. The Nazis called it “life unworthy of life”. Hitler knew he could not carry out such work publicly. He knew he would have opposition at home from the Catholic Church and he knew the Allies would use the knowledge and very probably win the propaganda war with it. But the Nazis were not alone in adopting these ideas. In the USA from the start of the century up to 1939, more than 30,000 men and women deemed unfit to have children were sterilised by the government. Many were forced. Others did not know. Of course, Hitler took Darwin’s ideas a significant step further and he did not allow nature to take its course. He began a genocide against handicapped people in Germany.
‘From early 1934, only a year after Hitler became chancellor, Germany began sterilising between 300,000 and 400,000 physically and mentally handicapped German men and women. A Marriage Law was passed a year later in 1935 so couples had to prove that they would not pass hereditary diseases on to their children.’
A knock at the door. The secretary of the modern history department peeped her head around it. ‘Professor, there is an undergraduate to see you. A Frau Kluge,’ she said.
The girl who spoke too much.
‘Tell her I’m busy all morning. I can see her if she can come back early this afternoon,’ he answered curtly.
The secretary nodded and expertly closed the door b
ehind her without making a sound.
‘Jozef,’ said the professor, holding Jozef’s eyes with his own, ‘the man you know as Michael, the man you knew growing up, ran Hadamar for the first year of its existence, until spring 1941.’
The professor revealed Michael’s photograph on a separate sheet of paper tucked towards the back of the book. It was not officially part of it.
Jozef stared at it, Michael’s head and shoulders proudly looking back from the small, passport-style window in the top corner of the page. Jozef nodded slowly. He did not feel anything. He was too busy thinking, piecing together clues in his head.
Michael was a malevolent, intelligent man, who had dominated his father during his childhood. He now knew why. Gerhard was not capable of this, overseeing the murder of more than 10,000 people. It rang true that Michael would be so precise, so correct, so particular.
Jozef picked up a glass of water from the professor’s desk and drank from it for a moment.
The professor allowed Jozef to ingest the information. He thought he might have been upset. He was surprised he was not. Still, it was a lot to process. The professor did not say anything, but instead watched his understudy closely, discreetly. He wanted him to be okay. He wanted it to be okay.
Jozef then noticed Michael’s name. He had been too busy focused on those eyes, trying to magically elicit some clandestine truth from the tiny portal to the past. He felt Michael was trying to tell him something. His name. Jozef read it again: ‘Dr Michael Drescher.’
He lost control of himself. His limbs could not do anything, as if he had fast forwarded 70 years to the body of an ancient man, broken and fragile at the end of existence. Jozef’s grip loosened and the glass of water fell to the floor. It hit the carpet and bounced. Jozef watched. Water spilled out onto the green material.
The professor immediately bent down to pick it up.
‘Oh God,’ said Jozef, though he had hardly heard the words. ‘Oh God,’ he said again, louder now. ‘Professor, my name, my real name.’
‘What Jozef?’ asked the professor, concerned.
Jozef looked pale like weak light.
The professor struggled to discern the difference between the two. Only Jozef’s protruding nose and eyes clearly distinguished him in all the white. The professor put his hand up to shield his eyes momentarily. ‘What Jozef?’ he said again. ‘What?’
‘My name, my real name,’ he repeated. ‘My mother told me last night that my real name is Jozef Drescher. I was born April 3, 1941, one month after Jozef Diederich, who was stillborn.’
The professor’s eyes panicked, trying but failing to translate his friend’s revelation.
Jozef’s colour then returned.
‘Michael Drescher. Dr Michael Drescher.’
‘The coincidence is too much, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the professor, who instinctively thought it was. He had learnt not to believe in coincidences. ‘Let us not be hasty, but, yes, it is perfectly possible that Michael Drescher is your father.’
The professor tried to place a hand on his student’s sagging shoulder. It did not help.
It is too beautiful today to be unhappy, thought Jozef. He wanted to it to be grey and wet and miserable. He would have been happier then.
Another knock at the door. It was the department secretary again, opening the door widely now. She was becoming annoyed. It was 9.30am. People were beginning to queue.
‘Professor?’ she said abruptly.
‘I know, I know,’ agreed the professor, irritated. ‘Let’s go out Jozef.’
Jozef did not say anything. He was still too stunned.
‘We are going out Frau Kirsch. I will be back this afternoon. It is very important,’ he said. ‘I am afraid everyone will have to wait.’
Professor Zielinski whirled on his tweed jacket and helped Jozef to his feet, handing him his briefcase as he did so.
Jozef looked like he would have clean forgotten it otherwise and Jozef never forgot anything, thought the professor.
‘Come on,’ he comforted him, supporting him past a stream of students in the narrow corridor leading out of the department and out of the building, out into the world.
Clean air.
Jozef did not say anything. He kept his head bowed. Fellow undergraduates thought something strange was happening. Jozef did not know who he was, who he had become and who he would become. Who was he? Michael. Those eyes, staring back at him from history and the small portrait photograph in the top corner of the document. 10,072. 10,072. Was Michael a victim too? Was it not really him? Or him in another time, another place?
Professor Zielinski and Jozef walked out together into the dazzling white. It did not hit them happily. The professor felt he was hauling a vampire out into the world to prove sunlight would not burn him alive.
‘There is a café just down here,’ said the professor, still propping up a shell-shocked Jozef. ‘Hardly anybody uses it.’
Five minutes later the professor was pouring coffee more happily.
It was true, there was no one else here, thought Jozef, sipping water and slowly coming around.
‘We will discover if Michael is your real father,’ said the professor. ‘First, do you want to know what kind of man he really was? What he did?’
No reply. No indication from Jozef. He was thinking, but his mind had forgotten how.
‘Jozef, this is important, quite important,’ said the professor and Jozef began to nod his head in response.
The professor paraphrased from the death book he still had in his possession, ‘The Nazis appointed Michael to run Hadamar. Michael had prospered because many in the medical profession were opposed to Hitler’s policy of killing the mentally and physically handicapped. Michael was not. He was not a real doctor, it is believed, but no matter. He could be trusted, the Nazis thought. They seemed right to have thought so.’ The professor paused to sip coffee.
The sun slid briefly behind the clouds.
The change of light was a relief to Jozef.
‘Michael has written here. Families of patients received three letters to convince them of the lie. The first told them that their relative had been transferred for ‘war purposes’. A second told them that they had arrived at Hadamar and gave them visiting times and so forth. A third letter told them that they had died. Michael has added here as a footnote that it is wise patients are processed within 24 hours of arrival to avoid mistakes, like relatives trying to visit. That could ruin everything, he adds.
‘Michael has kept copies of letters he sent to Berlin, praising members of staff at the institute and suggesting that they could be useful to the Party when a final solution to the Jewish question had been reached. He further recommends the transfer of gas chambers from Hadamar for use in larger camps in the future.’
Jozef began to feel a chill. He looked up and hoped the sun would come back out.
‘Michael worked out how much money processing the first thousand patients at Hadamar had saved the Party,’ said the professor. ‘There is a picture,’ he added, handing Jozef a photograph. In it, people were happy, smiling and had glasses full of drink in their hands. They were posing.
The professor read blankly, ‘A picture of staff celebrating the 10,000th patient processed at Hadamar. Senior staff had wine. Junior team members each received a small bottle of beer, Michael writes. Staff then gathered in the basement to witness the burning of the body. They first decorated the corpse with flowers before loudly applauding when it was time for the cremation. Michael is not in the photograph. That is not the end. There is more.’
The professor ordered more coffee.
‘Do you want to know Jozef, really know, what type of man Michael was? The man, do not forget, who it is perfectly possible is your biological father.’
‘I want to know,’ said Jozef. ‘This is who I am.’
The professor shook his head. ‘Jozef,’ he said, taking his hand and wrapping his own around it like a blanket.
‘You are not your father, whoever he is and most certainly – most certainly – not like this man.
‘Is everything good with your coffee?’ a waitress asked suddenly. She glanced at Jozef and saw how handsome he was.
‘Everything is perfect, young lady,’ he said. ‘Danke.’
He began again, ‘At Hadamar, Michael oversaw experiments. He starved children and he measured the results. He gave them electric shock therapy for wetting the bed. In spring 1941, just over a year later, the Nazis reassigned Michael and asked him to give lectures to troops, handpicked to be part of killing squads on the Eastern Front, the Einsatzgruppen. There were initially four of them. Michael was attached to the first of them, Einsatzgruppen A. Each Einsatzgruppen consisted of between 500 and 800 men.
‘The normal rules of warfare did not govern them. They operated behind the frontline, away from regular German troops, and they killed Jews. Senior Nazis decided it would be bad for morale if other soldiers witnessed what they were doing. Hitler wanted Michael to observe the psychological impact on the men in Einsatzgruppen A, the psychological impact of killing Jews in large numbers every day.’
The last words made Jozef stop. It was impossible to grasp the enormity of what they had done.
‘The Nazis knew from Hadamar that Michael was both meticulous and an excellent record keeper. Michael recorded precisely how many Jews Einsatzgruppen A killed behind the frontline in two years of operation, before things started to go badly on the Eastern Front for the Nazis.’
‘337,’ said the professor.
Jozef took the figure in. 337 did not sound so bad in the context of the Second World War where millions had perished.
‘Per day,’ added the professor. ‘337 per day. For two years.’
Jozef had a mouth full of cola and nearly choked. He began coughing violently. The professor realised he was in some discomfort and sprang up from his seat across the small, round table they occupied. Neighbouring patrons glanced across at them. Professor Zielinski slapped Jozef’s back and Jozef began to regain his breath.