The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  “You want I should cut you back?”

  “It’s all in fun.”

  “You won’t be thinking it’s fun when they kick your ass.”

  “No one gives a shit,” von Kempt said.

  Hehl told Major Petersdorf unofficially, and the major filed an official report with the Commandant, accusing von Kempt of behavior unbecoming an officer and failure to follow orders.

  “Why do they call him ‘Wage’?” Strauss asked.

  Wage means “dare” in German.

  “I don’t know,” Petersdorf said.

  Thirty Four

  Five years earlier, when Joachim Hehl was a 21-year-old medical student at the University of Vienna School of Medicine, he heard this speech from the Dean.

  “Knowledge, which in the past was pursued mainly for the sake of pure, theoretical science, will now find application in matters of daily life, particularly in those pertaining to sports, occupation, marriage counseling, family origin, proof of marital status and paternity. We physicians are called upon here and now to join in the decision-making process.”

  Applause. Rousing applause! Hehl looked across the crowd. The day was perfect—dry, clear, cool. Summer’s wane had parted the August haze for the clarity of a September afternoon.

  “That exam was awful—where the fuck does he get off asking about the hyeloid meniscus?”

  “Shh.”

  Fritzie Heiderich, Hehl’s closest friend, was a tall German boy from a farming town a few kilometers from Stuttgart.

  “You’ll get the highest score,” Hehl told him. “Stop complaining.” They stood in the grass.

  “Even if many errors were committed in the past, the new state hands us the tools with which to correct those mistakes in the years before us, to pursue in our own interest that which is desirable for each one of us. For the first time ever, we have the possibility of bringing the ancient Greek injunctions to their fullest realization.”

  “Ancient Greek injunctions?” Fritzie whispered. “What the fuck’s he talking about?”

  “How should I know?” Hehl said. “I only just got here.”

  “Slept late, eh?” Fritzie rubbed his stubble. “Nah. Such a clean boy.” He grabbed Hehl’s cheek and mussed his hair. Hehl waved him off.

  “The purpose of caring for the individual is to sustain the people as a whole,” the speaker said. The microphone whined and he stopped and tapped it. It screeched. A collective cringe seized the audience. The speaker tapped again. Another man approached the podium.

  “Can you all hear me?” the speaker asked.

  “They should fix that fucking thing,” Fritzie said. “What’s the great state good for if nothing works?”

  “I think—I think we've chased it out,” the speaker said. “Let's see.” He tapped the microphone. “Good. Yes. With this goal before us, our social awareness and the legal guidelines will enable us physicians to treat the body politic, both in the positive sense of supporting the able-bodied but also in eradicating worthlessness and decay.”

  “Eh?” Fritzie said.

  “Jesus,” Hehl said.

  “You assume the medical care—with all your professional skill—of the body of the people which has been entrusted to you, not only in the positive sense of furthering the propagation of the fit, but also in the negative sense of eliminating the unfit and defective.”

  “Am I hearing right?” Fritzie giggled nervously.

  “Shh,” Hehl said. “I want to hear if you’re on the list.”

  “What list?” Fritzie asked

  “Of the unfit and defective,” Hehl said.

  The methods by which racial hygiene proceeds are well known to you.

  “Who do you consider defective?” Hehl yelled to the speaker.

  At least one hundred turned.

  “Ouch,” Fritzie said.

  The control of marriage, propagation of the genetically fit...

  “Who’s defective?” Hehl yelled again. “What are you saying?”

  Two men stood and walked down the small stairs on the side of the stage. Fritzie grabbed Hehl.

  “Time to go.”

  “I want to know who he’s talking about,” Hehl said.

  “You have a big mouth. You should shut the fuck up sometimes.” Fritzie saw the two men round the audience. “They’re fat assholes—they’ll never catch us if we leave—now!” He grabbed Hehl. He was taller and they moved together. “You’re a stupid fuck sometimes—I just hope no one recognized us.”

  The speaker’s remarks echoed with them, reverberating on the tall brick walls of the admin office and the anatomy lab.

  ...whose genetic, biologic constitution promises healthy descendants: discouragement of breeding by individuals who do not belong together properly, whose races clash: finally, the exclusion of the genetically inferior from future generations by sterilization and other means.

  They lost the two men through an alley that opened to a pathway that led down and around a lake.

  “He’s the new dean.” Fritzie was breathless and had his hands on his knees.

  “He’s fucking crazy,” Hehl said.

  “Crazy—but distinguished,” Fritzie said. “He wrote the Topography.”

  Hehl looked at his friend. “Pernkopf?”

  “Yes. You used it night before last if you studied, as I know you did,” Fritzie said.

  The old buildings distorted Pernkopf’s echo. Hehl stood erect and gathered his breath. He stretched.

  “I’m going,” Fritzie said. “I’ll see you in class—maybe.”

  “They didn’t see us—we were in the shadows.”

  “They recognized your voice.” Fritzie jogged away.

  “I keep quiet in class—you’re the big mouth.”

  “Not any more,” Fritzie called back. “I now bestow that title on you.”

  EDUARD PERNKOPF. DEAN OF MEDICAL EDUCATION. Describer of a rare congenital deformity of the heart “in which the aorta arises from the right ventricle and the pulmonary artery arises from both ventricles.” Hehl read the announcement and the short biography.

  Eduard Pernkopf

  Son of a practicing physician and youngest of three children. Great interest in music since a child, but his father died when he was fifteen and to help support his family, Eduard entered medicine. Enrolled in the Vienna Medical School at age 19. Long active in Die Akademische Burschenschaft Allemania, an old student fraternity for Germans. Graduated in 1912 at age 24. Assistant in the Anatomical Institute of Vienna. Taught anatomy for fourteen years throughout Austria. Served as a physician for one year during World War I. Became professor of anatomy at the University of Vienna and succeeded the venerable Ferdinand Hochstetter as director of the anatomical institute.

  Big deal.

  An underground student newspaper supplanted the official line: “Pernkopf joined the National Socialist German Worker’s Party—now the Nazi Party—in 1933 and the Sturmabteilung, SA, or Brown Shirts in 1934.”

  “He’s dean because of Hitler,” Hehl told Fritzie.

  JOACHIM HEHL FIRST HEARD ABOUT the University of Vienna when he was a teenager in gymnasium. The University was a glorious, far-away place that infused him with a sense of scholarly peace and the calm that comes with knowing at a young age upon what road your future lies. With an unequaled international reputation and a faculty that included four Nobel laureates—Robert Barany, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, Karl Landsteiner, and Otto Loewi—the Viennese School of Medicine celebrated achievement and encouraged freedom of thought and expression—an excellent place for a young, forward-thinking mind. The Austrian university rejected native son Hitler’s ill disposition toward intellectual Europe and the Jews who made up much of its center.

  Hehl was raised—like many of his peers—in a German family that despised discrimination and embraced their Jewish neighbors. “Without the Jews,” his father had told him, “the engine of the world would stop.” Jews powered the engine of Austrian medicine—largely because it was the only
professional field historically open to them. Jews had done the dirty and dangerous work of caring for the ill during the great plagues of the Middle Ages and now, in 1938, 3,200 of 4,900 Viennese physicians were of Jewish descent. In Germany, a lesser twenty percent of physicians were Jews.

  Attitudes toward Jews in the European heartland corroded the engine of their industry. Strident political forces elevated Nazi sympathizers to the top ranks of the social and academic hierarchy. Anti-Semitic propaganda bombarded the common person. Jews began to lose gains that were centuries coming. The University of Vienna was not spared. Many students harbored a quiet cynicism that questioned this course. Sometimes their cynicism crested in open bitterness. But mostly, they kept their impassioned discourses about the “new world order” among themselves.

  In three weeks, Hehl lost most of his favorite professors. Each day brought another dismissal notice that named Jews, and the three men everyone knew were not right sexually, but didn’t speak of it because one of these men had won the Nobel. Pernkopf reduced his administrative load with remarkable speed. When he started his new job, the University of Vienna—still Europe’s premier medical school—had 197 faculty. Three weeks later, the school had forty-four.

  FRITZIE RECEIVED INTERESTING NEWS on a Monday in his mailbox, attached to his grade on the anatomy examination.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Hehl said. “You look sick—you only get ninety nine instead of one hundred?”

  “He wants me to help on his next topography,” Fritzie said.

  “Who—what’s that?”

  “Pernkopf congratulates me for being the top student in the class. He says his next topography will be world-renowned.”

  The first edition of the Topographische Anatomie des Menschen—Atlas of Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy— didn’t receive wide distribution despite its astounding anatomical maps. Pernkopf blamed the Jews for this slight and grew bitter. Jews, after all, controlled most publishing both inside Germany before the Reich, and outside Germany, especially in America, where all the medical schools used inferior atlases, what Pernkopf called “a disgrace to the grace of the human form.”

  American schools had money, and represented the biggest market for Pernkopf’s genius. When America shut him out, he vowed to develop an atlas that would have no historic equal and couldn’t be ignored.

  “My new edition will be the most important portrait of the human body since Vesalius,” Pernkopf told the excited members of his much-reduced anatomy department.

  Pernkopf came to his new position at Vienna in 1938 with monographs, photos, and many completed illustrations. He began work on the atlas in 1933 when he signed a contract with Vienna’s Urban & Schwarzenberg (a Jew). He hired only the most talented Viennese artists, who rendered his exquisite and finely-dissected corpses in unsurpassed detail. Most of the artists were active Nazi party members—Erich Lepier even signed his paintings with a swastika.

  “Fucking bastard,” Fritzie told Hehl one night over a beer. “Fucking amazing bastard.”

  “He’s a Wagner,” Hehl said.

  “Definitely,” Fritzie said. Wagners were in all the universities now. Geniuses without morals. Students invented the term. These days, you were either a Wagner or a nobody.

  “Why did he have to be so fucking brilliant?” Fritzie said. “He’s such a despicable bastard.”

  Pernkopf timed his revolutionary atlas to coincide with newly-developed four-color printing, a technique that perfectly reproduced all eight hundred watercolor paintings he commissioned. Like Wagner’s music, Pernkopf’s pictures mesmerized the senses. During their first meeting, he showed dozens of page proofs to Fritzie, the best student in anatomy and probably the best anatomist at Vienna since Pernkopf himself. Fritzie couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. Each new page overwhelmed him.

  “Everything about Pernkopf amazed me,” Fritzie wrote in his journal. “His eye, his colors, his details, and especially, his access to the material of our study.” The bodies arrived naked, without identity. “We dissected several dozen, and I was well-paid,” Fritzie wrote. “Money was never an issue.”

  Fritzie might have forgotten his repulsion for Pernkopf had not a live specimen arrived at the lab one evening stacked among the dead.

  “We need help.” Breathless men stood at the door at the end of the anatomy building.

  “Shit—now?” Pernkopf looked up from the open throat of a cadaver on a long table. He looked over at Fritzie, who set his scalpel aside, wiped his hands, and followed the two men.

  The hallway was long and cavernous and Fritzie heard something—a voice, a cry. The hallway ended in two open delivery doors. The voice was loudest there. The men were working at the rear of a van and Fritzie saw movement in a stack of burlap-wrapped corpses. They stepped into the van and slid aside the dead and pulled out a fighting, wiggling heap screaming through a gag.

  “He wanted a live one,” the shorter man said.

  Fritzie stared and something sharp jolted his gut and his mouth dried. “Pernkopf?” he said.

  “Who else? Look—grab her feet. There—grab them and let’s get her up.”

  Fritzie stood.

  “Come on.”

  “No.” Fritzie said.

  “You want to see a real beating heart?”

  “Only way to do it,” the other man said.

  “You’re completely fucked,” Fritzie said. “I’m not helping with this.”

  The woman jerked and tried to throw herself out of their grip and screamed words either too muffled or foreign for Fritzie to understand. She was wrapped completely, head, face, arms, legs, and waist gripped burlap-tight.

  “No way Pernkopf ordered this,” Fritzie said. “He must have been talking about a dog.”

  “She’s a retard—what’s the difference?”

  Fritzie was young, his blood pressure strong, his legs muscular and his head clear. But he felt faint and woozy now.

  “Shut the fuck up.” The man slammed his fist on the woman’s head.

  “Don’t do that shit—he wants her unhurt.”

  She wheezed and croaked through foamy saliva that wet the burlap around her mouth and chin.

  “Here.” Pernkopf pushed the men aside and bent over and grappled the girl’s arm and thrust a needle in. She jerked and spit and the wrapping around her mouth seeped blood. When they unwrapped her later, they saw she had bitten her tongue nearly off. The shot calmed her.

  “Think you can handle her now?”

  Fritzie slammed Pernkopf into the wall. He tried to punch but he felt both arms seized from behind. The men pulled Fritzie back and Pernkopf wiped his bloody lip.

  “Go back to work,” he said.

  Fritzie left school for three days. On the first day, he lay in his room and stared at the ceiling and watched the shadows of the sun rise and move and settle into darkness.

  On the second day, he grabbed his best friend Joachim Hehl in the Bierhaus and hugged him and kissed his face. Hehl hugged him back awkwardly.

  “I had such high hopes,” Fritzie said. He could taste the salt from his tears.

  On the third day, Hehl found a note. “I don’t want that son-of-a-bitch dissecting me,” Fritzie wrote.

  Pernkopf became the Rektor Magnificus, president of the University. But Fritz Heiderich left other notes that stained Pernkopf’s reputation. A half-century later—after never-ending controversy about Pernkopf’s legacy—the Office of the Rector at the University of Vienna provided all libraries with an insert titled Information for Users of Pernkopf’s Atlas.

  “Currently, it cannot be excluded that certain preparations used for the illustrations in this atlas were obtained from (political) victims of the National Socialist regime. Furthermore, it is unclear whether cadavers were at that time supplied to the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Vienna not only from the Vienna district court but also from concentration camps. Pending the results of the investigation, it is therefore within the individual user’s ethica
l responsibility to decide whether and in which way he wishes to use this book.”

  The investigation—by a commission at the University—concluded with an October 1, 1998 final report, which said that Pernkopf’s Institute of Anatomy received “at least 1,377 bodies of executed persons, including eight victims of Jewish origin. On the basis of a general decree of February 18th, 1939, the bodies of persons executed were assigned to the Department of Anatomy of the nearest university for the purposes of research and teaching...no proof could be found that bodies had been brought to the Vienna Department of Anatomy from the Mauthausen camp complex.

  “The presumption and suspicions that some of the illustrations might be of prisoners of war or Jewish victims are based predominantly on impressions which strike the critical observer. In these cases, however, the investigation was able neither to prove nor to disprove the suspicions. Because of the systematic practice of making specimens anonymous, it seems likely that a final clarification of such suspicions will not now be possible.”

  Three of the school’s Nobel laureates—including Karl Landsteiner, who discovered O, A, and the other blood types—died outside their homelands. For permission to emigrate, Otto Loewi turned his prize money over to the Reich. A stroke claimed Pernkopf—a free man after the war—while he was at the University working on the first book of the fourth volume of his atlas. No one heard from Fritzie Heiderich again.

  Thirty Five

  Another letter about Jakub Chelzak arrived on Major Petersdorf’s desk a few weeks after the first.

  1943/10/23

  Forward Command

  Warsaw District

  Office of SS-Brigadeführer Franz Kutschera

  Division of Inquiry and Logistics

  Kommandant Franz Strauss

  Melinka Resettlement Facility

  Melinka, Poland

  A man previously forwarded to your charge going by the name “Jakub Chelzak” has been discovered by our offices to have been a guest of Jews in our district. We have enclosed a brief dossier about Chelzak you may wish to review.