None But The Brave: A Novel of the Surgeons of World War II

by Anthony A. Goodman

  No, they would never come for me. My family has been here for more than three hundred years. Not for me, surely. I’m a Doktor. I’m not political. No, they will not come for me.

  If only he had known. Much of his family, his sister and his younger brother, had left for America years earlier. They implored Berg to join them, but Berg refused.

  “You are being irrational,” he told his sister. “Yes, things are bad, but they will get better. This madman will fall, as have all the madmen who tried to rule the world. Besides, what would I do there? I would have to retrain before I could practice surgery again. I would have to start all over like a new graduate. I’m too old for that.”

  His sister and his brother had pleaded, literally begged him to join them. But he wouldn’t hear of it.

  Eventually, of course, the Nazis did come for him, too. It was in the night, as always. Beating down the door while everyone was still fuzzy-headed from sleep, they dragged away his wife, screaming and sobbing, and jammed rifle butts into the ribs of the protesting children, his two little boys, Max and Aaron. Six and eight years old. Berg had married late, and his boys were mere babies.

  Out into the streets in his nightshirt, he was dragged through the mud. No explanation. No charges. No dignity. He was thrown into an open truck filled with other men, all of them shouting and arguing with the Nazis.

  “There has to be some mistake.”

  “They could not have meant to arrest me.”

  Then it struck him with such force that he nearly staggered with the weight of the realization. They were all pleading the same cause of innocence, hoping to be the one who was spared, willing to let the others go to their fates. None of them were joining together. None of them were helping each other. No one argued to save his neighbor. The guards weren’t listening to anyone anyway. They stared at the prisoners as if they were nothing. Even the occasional rifle butt to a chest or a head was delivered with a carelessness and detachment that paralyzed Berg with fear. From now on, he too was nobody. He had no past, and he would have no future.

  They were delivered to the railroad yards; not the Bahnhoff where the passenger trains were, but to the commercial yards where they shipped freight and cattle. Yes, cattle. This was the second of his revelations. They were to be slaughtered like cattle, and again they would not resist or band together but rather submit like dumb beasts of the fields.

  The Germans unloaded the trucks and jammed the prisoners into the cars. By the time the doors were closed and bolted, nobody could sit or lie down. At one point, Berg could lift both feet from the ground and not fall.

  And so the journey began. So long ago.

  No one would tell him what happened to his wife, to his little ones. Only the silence and the violence. And the cattle cars. And the camp.

  Berg moved back into the little room and closed the door. The wind found its way through the ill-fitting jamb, keeping the room nearly the same temperature as the outside air. The moisture penetrated the scant clothing of the inmates, piercing the skin until constant shivering was a normal way of life. Berg walked to the side door and entered the ward. Fifteen double-decker wood-frame cots crowded the small room. It was nearly impossible to walk down the center aisle. The cots were so close together that the patients had to squirm sideways to get out of bed. Three of the cots were shared by more than one patient. But, here in this pitiful little hospital ward, there were few who were capable of walking anyway. These beds were reserved for the very sickest of the prisoners. These were the dying, not the curable. Berg had long since been reduced to a caretaker of the terminally ill. Virtually none of his patients left the ward alive. This was no longer a hospital but a way station on the road to death.

  Over the years, somehow, the fear had diminished a bit. Berg didn’t know whether this was because life as he was living it might not be better than death. What, after all, could be worse than this? When the Nazis took away everything from a person, they created someone who had nothing to lose, someone for whom any extreme was acceptable.

  Yet Berg didn’t give up. That was what puzzled him so. Why did he struggle to do his job every day? The odds were hopelessly against him. There were no real successes. Yet he went on every day, seven days a week, for four years with almost no rest. What was it, he wondered, that drove him and the thousands around him to struggle to survive until the next awful day?

  In the early days, he had actually been able to operate on a few patients. For a short while, there had been a bit of ether and a few vials of morphine smuggled in by the doctors and nurses who had been arrested and sent to the camp. These were given directly to him to use on his most pitiable patients. There were some needles and sutures. But it had been at least two years since he had the luxury of even the most rudimentary medications. Now, he washed wounds with a tattered cloth and warm water. There was hardly ever soap. Oh, there was soap in the camp. Yes, they had small bits of soap in the “showers.” The soap made it look as if the showers were real. Only after they were locked in the room, and the hydrogen cyanide gas, Zyklon B, had begun to pour through the shower heads instead of water, did the poor souls realize they had been tricked; only when they began to scramble for the barred exits and trample one another in their desperate and useless flight from the vapors of the Zyklon B, might they have realized that the soap was not for them; only when it was too late.

  When the gassing was over, the guards would find a pyramid of bodies in the middle of the room where, in their terror, the prisoners had scrambled and clawed their way struggling in a desperate last attempt to get to the top, nearer the light coming from the glass in the ceiling. Anything to get away from the gas. Anything to survive a few more seconds.

  So, every morning and afternoon Berg played doctor the only way he could. He made rounds. Rounds were all he had to give now, and all that gave structure to his own days. With no medicine, no surgery, he gave only his time and his attention. Kindness was his whole store of medical supplies.

  Berg walked down the narrow aisle, stopping at the foot of a cot. He squeezed between two beds and managed to sit on the edge of the nearest. In this bed, an old woman (he had no idea of her actual age because they all looked at least ten or twenty years older than their real age) lay awake, the ragged blanket pulled up to her chin. She was shivering, even as the beads of sweat coalesced on her forehead. Her hair was matted and damp. Berg took her hand in his and turned it palm up. There, he saw the little red spots covering most of her hand. He didn’t need to look at her other hand, nor the soles of her feet. It was all too clear what her problem was. He had made the diagnosis of typhus the moment she was carried into the clinic. What surprised him was that she had lived so long.

  He put his hand to her forehead. At least one hundred and four. The last fever thermometer had broken a year ago, when a patient’s fever-driven chattering teeth had bitten through it. But, he could still tell. For him, there were only three categories of temperature: no fever at all, a mild fever, or a high fever. The actual numbers were of no significance. Still, after so many years as a scientist, a doctor, he found himself needing to put a number on it.

  Yes, at least one hundred and four.

  He took a ragged piece of cotton and wiped the sweat from the woman’s forehead. As he did, she opened her eyes and gave him a smile. This would be the highlight of his day today: a patient conscious long enough to know he was there—and a smile even.

  “How are you, my dear?” Don’t use her name.

  “Better, Doktor. A little better.”

  “Could you eat something?”

  “No. No…. I’m not very hungry. Perhaps later.”

  We are such wonderful liars now, he thought. I pretend there is food, and she pretends she has no appetite.

  “Very well. Maybe later. Rest now.” He rose from the bed and patted her hand. She nodded even as her eyes were closing, and then fell instantly back to sleep. Berg wondered if she would open her eyes again in the afternoon. And what would it matter?r />
  Yet, I do matter, he thought. It matters to these souls that there is a hospital and a doctor. When it comes time to die, this is still a little better than dying in the crowded noisy barracks where everyone’s suffering fills the air; where a cot of one’s own is a luxury beyond reach. No, it is better to have a few days of quiet in the hospital in a bed of one’s own, to hear a kind word from the Doktor, to close one’s eyes to life in a place of silence, and to have someone who could recite the Shema Yisroel and the Kaddish for them.

  Berg finished seeing all his patients just before dark. He would not return to the barracks in the evening. In fact, it was rare for him to go back there at all. The small luxury of a private space was worth the discomfort of having to sleep in a wooden chair. For him, anything was better than having to go back to the barracks and sleep in rows on a shelf like so many dead fish in the market. It was a small benefit of the job. He knew that he led a privileged life; that his position as a surgeon had put him at the upper levels of society before the war. At least, that was true until the Nazis had risen to power and singled out the Jews, the teachers, the businessmen, and all of the professionals in society who by nature were an anathema to Nazism; those whom Hitler proclaimed to be the cause of all of Germany’s problems. Now, he felt ashamed of his passion for privacy, for his need even to wash his hands when water and soap were in such terribly short supply.

  At night, he would often dream of his days in the operating room, where nothing was spared for the welfare of his patients. He would dream in sensuous detail of his days in surgery with a full team of nurses and assistants. Early on in his imprisonment, the dreams had been of food and warmth and sex. Sex was the first to disappear. He had to admit to himself that he missed those dreams of making love to his wonderful Rachel. Occasionally it wasn’t necessarily Rachel, but who would know? It was just a dream, after all.

  Then with the gradual starvation, an obsession with food dominated his sleep, and what felt like hours would pass at fine restaurants at tables laid with expensive china and silver. There were platters filled with roast chicken and warm breads. Butter melted on his plate, and waiters refilled his wine glass over and over again until he had to tell them to stop.

  Later, the dreams that comforted him most were the ones of sitting in front of his fire, a fine knitted rug over his knees, and a wonderful book in his hands. He was smoking his favorite old meerschaum pipe (the one he never took out of the house for fear of breaking it), filled with his own mixture rich with Virginia Burley from America and Latakia from Turkey and Perique from a small parish in Louisiana, while Rachel put the children to sleep.

  Now, for some curious reason, he dreamt only of the operating room and never of anything else. He thought this must come from his powerlessness, his inability to do anything—anything—for his patients. Now his greatest fantasy was to be back where he could do some good, and only his dreams made that so. Only in his dreams.

  Chapter Eleven

  6 June 1944, 1340 Hours

  Near Fauville, France

  Schneider’s mind continued to wander as the hot June sun beat down on his helmet. He could not let go of the fact that he had been responsible for Claude’s death. Had he not called to the boy, had he not included Claude in their group, Claude would be alive right now. He knew it to be true.

  Damn! What an asshole I am! How could I let a little boy join a combat team? I should have asked directions, commandeered the cart for Sorenson, and sent Claude to somewhere safe.

  But what was safe? The Germans were everywhere. And they were nowhere in sight. Still, the boy had survived all these years with the Germans in his back yard. He had been safer with them apparently than he was with his American liberators. Schneider knew he could reason this out all day long for the rest of his life, and he still would never be sure. Only this was certain: Claude was dead.

  Sorenson was sleeping in the cart. His brain had finally given in to the rocking motion, and to the morphine, and to the emotional exhaustion from the events of the past night and day. Marsh was alongside the cart, keeping an eye on Sorenson, trying to stay awake himself as he walked. The fragment of their weary platoon made its way carefully toward Fauville. They still had no idea at this point whether allied infantry had taken the village, or whether the Germans were still in control. They didn’t even know where they were in relation to the village. There had been no definite landmark on which to take a compass fix since they had crash-landed. Fauville was out there somewhere. They knew that only from the directions Claude had given them.

  But now Claude was dead. And no farmhouse was in sight. So, although they were probably on the right road, going in the right direction, the platoon was still technically lost. The next few miles would tell the story.

  Schneider’s mind kept trying to put this whole thing into some frame of reference, some clear focus. The war against Germany had been going on for years now, but everyone assumed it would come to an end with the Allied invasion. Schneider had been cooling his heels in England for so long that nothing of the war seemed real. The Blitz was real enough. The nightly raids over London were something nobody who was there was ever going to forget. Schneider had been stationed far away from London. But every night he could hear the voice of Edward R. Murrow coming through the radio static as Murrow roamed about in the Blitz.

  “London is burning. London is burning,” Murrow told them as explosions roared in the background, intermittently drowning out the reporter’s voice. Yet even that had in some ways become routine. It was hard to explain, but short of hiding under a bed for the duration, or in an air raid shelter like some mole in a tunnel, the English simply went about their lives as if each day were just another normal day. They lived with the shortages, the danger, and the deprivation with the most stoic attitude. Their proverbial stiff upper lip was no myth. Schneider found himself hoping that Americans could bear adversity so well should it ever come to that. After all, except for the fleeting “Day of Infamy” at Pearl Harbor, Americans had not witnessed armed conflict on their soil since the Civil War eighty years before.

  All these memories, some of which were only a few days old, reminded Schneider that he still had a family at home who knew almost nothing of his new life. Susan, Emily, and Anna, knew absolutely nothing of what was happening to him, good or bad. His letters took so long to get home that, by the time he got an answer in the mail, he had forgotten what he had written. He never mentioned the fear and the anticipation of the invasion. There was no need to worry them.

  His mother and father were living in their own personal hell. They suffered with him, and they suffered for the family his mother had left behind in Germany so long ago. His father’s family was, mercifully, all in New York. It was worse for his mother, for she still had her “baby” brother somewhere in Germany. He was a surgeon like Schneider, except older. Schneider visited him once, taking a train to Munich and spending some wonderful time with his uncle. Schneider’s German began to improve soon after he arrived, and his desire to follow his uncle’s path into surgery was strengthened by the visit. His uncle became a role model for him even from so far away. He was a man of great integrity and devotion to his patients. Schneider felt he could do a lot worse than grow up to be like his uncle.

  Munich was a wonderful city back then, even with the strife created by the rise of Hitler and his thugs. Schneider went hiking with his relatives in the Bavarian Alps, taking picnics of local wines, breads, cheeses, and salamis. His uncle was a great hiker and often left Schneider in the dust, laughing and teasing him about his misspent youth. Schneider could barely keep the older man in sight on the steep green slopes of the mountains.

  They wrote often after Schneider came home, sharing hospital stories as the uncle followed his nephew’s career through medical school and residency. But, he never visited Germany again, as the political climate rapidly worsened and Schneider was too busy and too poor as a surgical resident to return to Germany. His mother begged her brother to come
to America. Jews were beaten in the streets, their businesses wrecked by the Hitler Youth, their wives and daughters abused in public. Nonetheless, Uncle said that they must not worry.

  “As all the other plagues in the world’s history have passed,” Uncle wrote, “so, too, will Hitler.”

  Then, abruptly, the letters stopped. Some time just after the start of the war, they heard nothing more. They flooded Germany with letters and telegrams, often through intermediaries such as friends or neighbors. They tried diplomatic channels as best they could, but it was all to no avail. Communication between America and Germany became nonexistent, and in the silence, his favorite uncle disappeared from Schneider’s life.

  Now, along this road in France, on the first day of the invasion, Schneider felt like an emissary sent by his family to find his beloved uncle. It was as if his role in the war was to heal the wounded and to find his mother’s baby brother. He didn’t know which was the more important, let alone the more dangerous or more difficult. Walking along the dusty road in France, with the bodies of Talbot and Claude in the cart and dozens of corpses in their wake, it was hard to imagine that he could ever find his uncle, much less survive the long fight to Berlin and eventually Munich. How many more lives, he wondered, would be wasted before this terrible war was won? He never doubted that the Allies would defeat Hitler and his Thousand Year Reich. But, at what cost?

  Sorenson woke with a start as the cart’s wheels struck a rut. The pain resonated through his whole body. He looked as if he were going to vomit. He wiped the sweat off his face with a khaki handkerchief. Then he looked with dismay at the bodies lying next to him. He remembered that he was hitchhiking in a hearse.

  Schneider looked at Sorenson and moved closer to the side of the cart.

  “How are you doing?”