The Chosen Ones

by Steve Sem-Sandberg

  *

  An Accident People from the country know how to look after themselves, Hedwig Blei had declared to Anna Katschenka. Nurse Blei had only failed once in her life to look after somebody else. That person was her younger brother, Nicolas. He and his older brother were as different as day and night. Matthias, like his father, seemed born to farm. He was slow to react but his mind was orderly and determined. By contrast, Nicolas was impulsive, proud, quick to anger and sometimes over-confident. Perhaps Hedwig loved him because she had been used to protecting him from early on (God knows, he did need a protector) but it could also be that she saw one side of her own personality reflected in his quick, fiery temperament, a side of her that at the time she couldn’t or felt she shouldn’t show. Ever since July 1936, when local and voluntary civil defence militias had been forbidden by the state, there had been flare-ups of trouble at the border with Czechoslovakia. Nazis, mostly Sudeten Germans, crossed the border at night to agitate and distribute flyers. Plenty of people in the area sympathised with them, but their father, Anton Blei, had no time for the Brownshirts. As far as he was concerned, they were criminals, the lot of them. When he saw young people march behind the banners of National Socialism, he would turn away and spit into the roadside dirt. Now, these people were suddenly around at night, even taking shortcuts across his own yard. The border guards never seemed to do more to stop them than they absolutely had to and whatever the insurgents were up to, they did boldly. Nico said that they smuggled arms as well. In the end, he and Matthias joined a handful of other local men in a voluntary Grünbach civil defence force. The men took turns to keep guard at night. It was illegal, of course, and a punishable offence. But who would stop them? The terrain was rough, a hilly highland that was hard to defend. Nico said he had an idea where some of the arms caches were. One suspect area was an old granite quarry where several insurgents had been spotted recently. The quarry had been abandoned long ago and had become overgrown. It was hard to reach unless you used the open road where you always ran the risk of being seen, so instead they decided to try getting into it from the back, down a narrow ravine. Nico, who was the slimmest and most agile of them, was roped up and four men took the weight at the top of the ridge. More rope, pay it out, more, Nico kept shouting. His voice grew fainter and fainter the further down he got. Then the rope went slack. An alarming silence fell. After waiting for half an hour, Matthias leaned over the edge and shouted his brother’s name. The answer was a violent explosion. A cloud of stone dust and black smoke rose from the ravine. The explosion must have triggered a rockfall higher up on the mountain because they suddenly had to dive for cover from loose stones racing towards them and down into the smoke-filled ravine. Afterwards, no one could explain how it all started, or how the dynamite complete with blasting caps had ended up in the quarry. The newspapers reported the accident, if they did at all, in terms such as ‘inexplicable’. When the emergency team reached Nico, he was still alive but both his legs had been nearly torn off at the knees and had to be amputated. He had a few weeks at home after the operation but was not the same Nico. He sat in his wheelchair by the window, staring outside with a distant look on his face. He never answered the questions about what he had discovered in the quarry, just turned his eyes away. Soon, he went down with a high temperature and the doctor thought that the wounds had become septic. They took him to the hospital again, but he had lost consciousness by the time he arrived. He died that night. Because Nico had been the younger son, he had left few possessions for them to inherit but Hedwig ended up keeping his best black shoes, bought for his first communion at thirteen. She brought them with her when she went to Linz to train to become a children’s nurse, and again when she moved to Wien and took up a post at the newly opened clinic at Spiegelgrund. From time to time, she would pull the shoelaces out, polish Nico’s black shoes and lace them up again. But dead people do not grow back into their old shoes, regardless of size. The enigmatic accident and Nico’s sudden death made something inside Hedwig Blei freeze. She stands on the verge, watching the arrogant, insecure Hitlerjugend youths march past. In Linz, she sees the motorised Wehrmacht units roll across the bridge as joyful shouting fills the air and the local NSDAP cadres roar and sing so the streets echo with the noise until late at night. And she smiles, too, and the band of freckles glows on her blonde face. Those who don’t know her well can never guess how she feels. She always comes across as easy-going, chatty and friendly, very much her older brother’s sister. But behind the bright freckles, fury has hardened into a wall. Only those who have worked with her for a long time have tales to tell about the way her skin can suddenly pale to a chalky white, how the folds between her eyes deepen and her eyes cut like broken glass. Felix also notices when it happens. Then, the infantile spasms in his face vanish and he stands very still, as if listening for something.

  *

  Orthopaedic Shoes One morning, Hedwig takes Nico’s old shoes to the orthopaedic workshop. The orthopaedic surgeon, Doctor Grieck, is doubtful at first. He wants a formal referral, he says, then he blames lack of time and, anyway, the shoes would be far too large and unwieldy for a child. But Nurse Blei is stubborn. She has been palpating the distorted ankles and arches of Felix’s feet for weeks and is by now feeling quite sure about what is required. In the end, Doctor Grieck reluctantly agrees to try out a pair of loose insoles, and maybe also to strengthen the heel if necessary. Whatever else, she must bring the boy along. Doctor Grieck is a grumpy man with bushy grey eyebrows and grey hair in a spiky fringe around his bald head, which is crowned with a protruding, egg-shaped bulge. He sits on a low stool in front of Felix with the boy’s left foot in his lap while Felix stands in front of him. The boy’s eyes are glued to that smooth, shiny egg-shape. He looks as if he would like to touch it but doesn’t dare. Just for once, he is on his best behaviour, doesn’t grimace or resist the stranger’s large hands that are touching his legs and feet. Perhaps the setting has silenced him. The orthopaedic workshop, with its high ceiling and long row of windows overlooking the old hospital garden, is a little like a schoolroom. It is a sunny, breezy day. The crowns of the trees are swaying in the wind and casting long shadows like pale curtains that sweep across the room’s white walls and low workbenches. On the worktops lie finished or part-finished prosthetic arms and legs, and a whole hand with splayed rubber fingers. In the old days, Grieck and his team dealt with shoe lasts, strengthened soles and raised heels for people with club foot, when they had time in between making crutches and walking frames for elderly patients. But ever since the German clinical experts arrived with their lists of names and the hospital gradually emptied of the ill and the old, that kind of work is few and far between, Grieck says or rather mutters. Now, they mostly make prostheses for injured soldiers. Hedwig Blei stands nearby, watching intently as Nico’s old shoes are adjusted to fit Felix’s feet. She doesn’t say anything. In pavilion 17, the doors at the back of the building have been opened wide so that children who are able to walk unaided can be outside. The area around the terrace is fenced off and nurses from the wards in the pavilion take turns to keep an eye on the children. Felix takes his first steps in his new shoes inside this enclosure. Like so many children damaged by polio, he has grown used to dragging and sliding his feet on the ground in order to avoid having to put his body weight on one leg only and now, when he really must move using his own muscle power, he hesitates a great deal and takes small, jerky steps as if wading in ice-cold water, while his posture is enough to express his resentment: one shoulder is pushed up close to the side of his face, his arms are bent and his hands left to dangle uselessly in front of his chest. Hedwig Blei watches from the day room window and sees him move towards the far end of the enclosed area, as usual trying to get as far away from the other children as he possibly can. Paaah …! the boy Pelikan wheezes. He has joined her at the window. Pelikan never goes outside willingly and prefers to creep from room to room, turn up in the doorways and listen along the walls, so he can keep tabs
on what is going on, especially if it involves the other children; and next, goodness, look at that boy, what’s he up to? Nurse Storch says. By now, she too stands at the window, watching the yard. Storch points at Felix. He has stopped and stands stock-still, looking down on his shoes as if in some mysterious way they have stuck to the ground. Nurse Sikora steps down from the terrace and starts to walk towards Felix. She seems agitated but determined and when Felix turns towards her – probably in response to what she is shouting at him – everyone can see the stain, roughly shaped like the African continent, which has spread across the crotch of his baggy trousers. The usual grimace disfigures his face as he turns to Nurse Sikora and, naturally, Sikora slaps his ugly face hard and then drags him, shoes and all, back into the building. The slam of the terrace door echoes all the way upstairs. And what’s the point, anyway, Nurse Storch mutters, giving that boy new shoes …?

  *

  Fatherlands The next day, she is called to the matron’s office. Klara Bertha is at her desk and looks as if she has just bitten into something bitter and nasty. Sikora has clearly passed on the gossip. I hear that Nurse Hedwig has set out on her own initiative to supply the idiots with new footwear? she (Bertha) says. And Hedwig replies: they were my brother’s shoes. Bertha: perhaps he had better have them back now. Hedwig: my brother is dead, he died defending his country. At first, Sister Bertha seems quite upset but she soon recovers her old, safe expression of patient goodwill. She keeps looking at Nurse Blei as if expecting her to explain just which country she has in mind or what, generally speaking, she means by ‘country’. But Hedwig Blei doesn’t elaborate. Instead, she says: Where I come from, we’re not used to letting things go to waste. Bertha: and where does Nurse Blei come from, if you don’t mind me asking? The amusement is back in her voice but also a hint of relief. As if Matron feels reassured now that any discussion of the country’s defence has been dropped. She starts leafing through some papers, pretending to be preoccupied. You’re good with children, Nurse, she says. Your colleagues recognise it. You will now return to nurse in the gallery. An urge to dress the children as you fancy is not quite so likely to arise there.

  *

  The Miraculous Births There is an outer and an inner world. The outer one is filled with unceasing clamour while the stillness in the inner world is like that of an early winter morning when the snow has just stopped falling. Hedwig Blei remembers such a morning. She was four or maybe five years old. They had just finished breakfast when a chorus of voices from the yard started to call to them. Outside, their neighbours and even folk from as far away as Grünbach were crowded closely together. Their frost-reddened faces seemed suspended inside a drifting cloud of vapour created by their breaths. They were on their way to Ratschnig’s farm nearby, where a heifer was about to give birth to a monster calf. The words ‘monster calf’ stuck in her memory, as did the sight of all the bulkily dressed people stomping about in the thick layer of new snow, their shouting voices sliding across a silence that had been blown clean by the snow-laden wind. At Ratschnig’s (once they got there), it was like a Christmas fair. Everyone was yelling and laughing, the dogs were barking and howling and tugging at their leads. The crowd was especially dense near to the cowshed door. Nico, who was bony and quick on his feet, had managed to squeeze inside and could report afterwards how the men had hauled the calf out (he didn’t know if it was born alive or not) tied to a long rope, carried it out into the barnyard and set to beating and stabbing it with spades and bars while the farmer had kept shouting spare the head … spare the head … As the years went by, the monster birth was added to the many portents or local accidents that served as measuring rods sunk into the flow of time. This or that, people would say, happened the year the monster calf was born at Ratschnig’s. It somehow added weight to the event. The episode stayed in Hedwig’s mind, too. Not just because of the calf. After all, her childish eyes hadn’t been allowed to see it. But everything that surrounded its birth seemed etched into her memory with unreal precision: the silence after the snowfall, the winter sky clearing into a nearly turquoise blue, and all their neighbours standing in the yard as if they had gathered to look for someone missing, a runaway or a suspected drowning perhaps (one of them had brought a hurricane lamp, though it was already light). And she remembers their elated eagerness, as if the local folk had already fantasised about the heavy tools they would use to beat the calf to death. And there was the thought of the calf itself: how it must have felt as it was pulled out of its mother’s large, warm womb into a world of noise and shouts and iron bars that thumped and hit and, then, this terrible pain. There are no monster births, as her mother used to say: all living things born to God are miracles. This was how she had wanted to see the children in pavilion 15. But it was not to be. In the eyes of those who administered and managed the clinic, its patients were not actually children but specimens, living examples of neurological and physiological defects, or of various pathological processes, all conditions whose progress were worth observing. Nothing was real in any other sense, not even the convulsions and the pain that plagued some of the children continuously. If they were sedated, it was not to ease their suffering but to put a stop to their screaming. The doctors would arrive at regular intervals to study them, to select whose life should be taken immediately and whom it might be worth troubling to keep under observation for a little longer. Once the decision to eliminate had been made, they would return to take notes about the actual dying. In a group, always. For it would not do to look into the eyes of the newborn animal: the creature obviously has no idea about the infernal flaw that makes it unfit to live. It’s easier to kill if you are part of a group. When you act with others, you don’t personally kill a living thing but join a battle against a common threat. The staff in pavilions 15 and 17 showed absolute obedience to their superiors, not only because the strictly hierarchical order diffused responsibility so that no one individual took a life, but also because it reduced killing into an outcome of the order of things. It also followed that you must not allow yourself a second’s inactivity. Standing around, crestfallen and empty-handed, gave you time to think. As Hedwig Blei admitted afterwards, it wasn’t that there was such a tremendous amount of work to do on the ward. Truly, the daily routine was relatively light because most of the children were heavily sedated most of the time. But being constantly on the move prevented you from taking in how absurd the situation was: this was a clinic for severely ill children which did not specialise in making the patients better, or at least provide them with appropriate treatment, but, on the contrary, in avoiding any treatments that would make them harder to kill. The reason, it was argued, was that such children constituted a major threat against the Germanic peoples. Not that this was something you could discuss. The entire clinical unit operated under a duty of silence so total that it seemed like mental quarantine. But people had to talk about something, of course. Hence, the gossiping. No one escaped the wagging tongues, not superiors, not colleagues (when absent). The gossip offered one way, at least, of talking about what was going on. The clinic’s staff included several former Steinhof employees, some of whom had been there long before the reorganisation. Like Hilde Mayer, who often spoke about when the so-called medical experts had turned up at the main asylum (most of these experts were Germans and members of the SS). They had walked around from ward to ward, always led by Doctor Jekelius because he was the one who made the final decisions. Later, the psychiatric nurses had been ordered to take the selected patients to the waiting buses and, though some of the elderly ones knew no better than to think that they had caused too much trouble where they were and that’s why they had to be moved, the majority understood only too well, and wept and tried to hang on to whatever they could reach – beds, door posts, stair railings. By then, many of the nurses were in tears, too, although perhaps not always for the reasons one might have assumed. Naturally, some people were remembering their own old and ill, like I did, for instance, Mayer said, but the Lord be praise
d, my old folk were still mentally sound and, she added, I seem reasonably sane as well, at least as far as I can judge. Still, to be honest, most of the nurses were probably thinking of themselves and their jobs. What will happen to them, they worried away, now that the psychiatric patients are carted off and the hospital is to close? They might well be surplus to requirements. Jekelius gave a reassuring speech to the entire staff in which he said that there would surely be enough work for everyone. Their (here he meant his and his colleagues’) work had, to the best of his knowledge, only just begun. When he had finished, there were no more tearful faces to be seen. When Hedwig Blei thought about Jekelius, she was often reminded of something her father used to say: you recognise the cock pheasant by his feathers. To her, the doctor was an embodiment of affectation: his gentle voice, so strenuously soft that one had to stand on tiptoe to hear what he was saying; his deliberately graceful movements, used to emphasise every word he uttered. Jekelius was seen, almost always, in the company of others. In his case, this was not because of some inner need to blend in. Somehow, Jekelius always managed to be a little behind, or drifting away from the group, as if wanting to keep his distance from those who were closest to him. It meant that it was always the others who had to turn to address him, while he never had to come after them. A man who behaves like this wants to be seen at any cost. Vain and self-assured, certain of his absolute power. Hedwig saw him only very rarely, though. His absences were due to his in-service travels or other tasks and, besides, he had no medical reason to stay at Spiegelgrund. The day-to-day running of the clinic was the responsibility of Doctor Gross and Doctor Türk, who were in charge of one ward each. The staff in pavilion 15 was working on a duty rota that meant Nurse Hedwig was on nights at least twice a week. According to the regulations, one doctor should be on call every night but Hedwig Blei had only rarely seen either of them. The rule was also that the doctor must only be called when a patient’s condition worsened enough to require medical attention or when one of the children died and the doctor had to sign the death certificate. But it happened often enough that Gross, who, like Türk, had been provided with a house on site, took his time to ‘come down’, making the point that turning up twice was surely unnecessary. If he didn’t come, the dead child was left lying until the morning. What was wrong with that? Overall, Hedwig Blei said, the lack of drama was striking, perhaps in particular when it came to the killing and the dying. Even though nobody had cared to state it openly, Blei had realised almost at once that the children’s lives were taken deliberately. True, hints were dropped all the time. Don’t you think these children are sleeping a little too much? Nurse Frank had asked rather rashly when she was new to nursing in the gallery, and Hilde Mayer had replied: Just practising for their eternal sleep! Give Mayer half a chance and she’d let her tongue run away with her. But, perhaps there was no need to speak out. The attitude of the clinic’s leadership sent its own unmistakable message. They often couldn’t be bothered even to begin treating a patient or to complete a treatment once it had begun. Why, they weren’t even prepared to have the temperature on the ward kept at a comfortable level. Wartime scarcity was blamed, hence the need to save fuel. Nonetheless, the staff was ordered to keep the windows open at all times, even during raw, damp and cold days in winter, even though the children were in very poor condition and often febrile. Most of the severely ill patients stayed in the gallery for just a few weeks but, even so, many years later Hedwig Blei had clear memories of some of them. A baby boy, six or seven months old, called Heinz something (she no longer remembers his surname) had a tumour on his back, a fist-sized growth like a knobbly little rucksack. He could only lie on his side with his face pressed against the sheet. In this awkward position, he breathed like a wounded animal, his frail ribcage heaving up and down like the gill slits of a fish. A small girl in the bed next to him cried out all the time, as if something was slowly tearing itself to pieces inside her. No one tried to find out what caused the pain. She was prescribed huge doses of morphine and died within a week. Several of the children were tied to their beds to stop them from hurting themselves or eating their stools. Some of them had been strapped down for so long that their wrists had deep, infected gashes that seeped fluid and pus. A seven- or eight-year-old girl had initially been restrained but the ties had to be removed when blisters on her lips spread and turned into large, weeping sores. Hedwig Blei had asked Cläre Kleinschmittger for a little salicylic acid to apply to the girl’s lips. Two days later, Kleinschmittger mentioned that salicylic acid had been taken from the medicine cupboard to Katschenka, who demanded to know the circumstances. Kleinschmittger told her that Blei had used the drug. A long time had passed since their meeting in the sluice room when Blei had asked Katschenka if she was married. Now, their respective ranks had been clearly established. I will never forget her coming towards me with that slow, processional pace of hers, Blei said. Katschenka had already caught my eye but because her whole face was so immobile, down to the muscles and bones, she always seemed to be smiling. It took an age for her to reach me. When I told her what I had needed the medicine for, she said that in this ward we never use anything unnecessarily. Soap and water would have been sufficient, she told me; that was all, no reprimand, nothing, only the gaze she fixed on me, so cold, as if I had done something disgusting, almost perverse. Afterwards, they had to apply the straps again because the girl wouldn’t stop scratching. She must have been in utter torment but Doctor Türk just prescribed more morphine, and when Blei arrived the following morning, the girl was lying very still. Her swollen eyelids were closed and her hair stuck out in stiff, sweaty tufts around her head. No one had bothered even to disentangle her hair and comb it. Why should they, she was going to die soon anyway. When the doctors did their rounds, Katschenka always kept a step or so behind them. It was her job to summarise what the nurses had written in the day notes about each patient. Just two or three sentences, whispered into the ear of the medic on duty. Nothing more was required to indicate the child’s condition and many of her short confidences were dismissed by the doctors before she had finished whispering. There was no telling whether that was due to plain indifference or whether everything had already been decided and matters were taking their due course, so there was nothing more to say. But sometimes Hedwig Blei felt sure she had seen an expression of distaste flit across Doctor Gross’s face and der kommt dran, he would say. Blei says: I will always remember that phrase of his, that’s that, then. Katschenka didn’t bat an eyelid, just stood there, her grey face as impenetrable as always, waiting for Doctor Gross to move on to the next bed, but I’m certain that she understood the doctor’s intentions perfectly and knew to whom and at what dose a certain drug would be administered in the evening. She was the perfect ward sister. Like a clock counting down the minutes to death. Meanwhile, she watched and waited and saw to it that everyone else was doing her duty. Not even Hilde Mayer, who would tell jokes and make fun of everyone, ever dared to stand up to Katschenka. The children died, one after the other, and later on, when Doctor Illing had succeeded Jekelius, the death rate was two or three every night. Once a child had finally given up the ghost and the death certificates had been filled in and signed, the body was wrapped in a simple shroud and sent off to autopsy via the back door to avoid any troublesome confrontations. By then, the child’s parents would already have been informed but Katschenka insisted that no relatives must be admitted to the pavilion. If they wanted to see their child one last time, it had to happen somewhere else. Blei had, several times, witnessed incidents when upset relatives tried to force their way in. The porters had to be called and if they couldn’t handle the situation, someone phoned the police. But there was never a word of criticism from the staff, not even after alarming, violent incidents such as these. What mattered was the clockwork running of the institution. In one of the secretarial rooms, Marie Kölbl was typing out the standard letters to the families of the dead children. The letters had been dictated in good time. The door to
Kölbl’s room was always kept closed and if the clatter of the typewriter ever stopped, it was only because she got up to open or close the window. Afterwards, the typing started again, sounding stronger or fainter, but it never stopped for any length of time.