A Perfect Madness (30 page)

When the overhead lights came back on,
Erich looked around at the audience. Maria had been crying and was
busily sopping up her tears . She was not alone; others had been
moved to tears by the gentle death of the doctor’s wife.

“
A beautiful death,” one
said.

“
A righteous death,”
another said.

Still another: “A blessed
doctor.”

Franz Kremer said nothing because he
knew, like Erich, the film meant nothing where goodness was
concerned. Soon, “misfits” of every age would be brought to the
hospitals to die. Then he hoped the Jews would follow. Franz
glanced over at Erich, the man he hated worse than Jesus. To him
Jesus was a monumental fraud, no better than the next Jew, and had
made an unholy mess of everything in the world. In his school
studies, Franz prized reading of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who
wanted to execute Jesus a second time. Had the story been true, he
would tell anyone who would listen, the Jesus myth would have ended
there.

Erich hated Franz, too, but for a
different reason, which he felt was just. Franz could never accept
that he had loved and slept with a lovely Jewish woman who
possessed above all things a beautiful soul. Now with the world at
war and the Nazis in command, Franz would kill Julia outright
should the opportunity present itself. But Erich also believed,
perhaps as the psychiatrist he was, that Franz’s misguided hate of
Julia came more so because she chose to fall in love with someone
other than him. Earlier, before Julia looked to Erich’s love, she
had spurned Franz’s persistent, many times drunken, overtures. This
triad of hate would be there at the end, Erich knew.

Franz ignored the ebullient
conversations around him and walked over to where Erich was
sitting. The tension he brought was explosive.

“
What was your reaction to
the film, my weak friend?” he asked sarcastically.

“
You should stop playing
your childish games, Franz, being such a miserable ass. You and I
both know what the film is about, what it is telling us will
happen.”

Franz’s face turned red from anger at
Erich’s words, his hands knotted in huge, tight fists, as if he
would try to pound him senseless with them at any moment. Then, for
a reason Erich would never know, Franz suddenly relaxed, turning
quiet for a moment before speaking again.

“
I suppose you’re right.
We should end our silly quarrels from the past and get on with what
is expected of us,” he said calmly, surprising Erich.

“
Good, then we will
quarrel no more, though we will never be friends,” Erich said
loudly, turning his back on Franz and leaving the
auditorium.

Later in the afternoon, he returned to
the East Ward, peering into each empty room, wondering what the
next child might look like who would die there.
I
Accuse
had made him realize even more the reality of what
was to come, and he found himself strangely at peace with it. There
was no exit from all that was around him, he knew, and so he had
begun to feel that to cope with what was coming would be to comply,
to do that which was expected of him, his duty. He need not hide
his fears any longer behind the gentle face of compassion. He could
endure until the war’s ending and he would find Julia then and
begin again to live as a man.

The days became long for Erich and
Maria and everyone else as the trickle of misfits entering the
hospital steadily became a flood. It had been decided by Dr. Heinze
that the children should be kept mildly sedated for several weeks
to give the impression they were receiving the advanced treatment
promised. Erich, with Maria and the other nurses on duty in the
ward, welcomed the plan happily. In time, it fooled their minds
into believing what they were doing was what they should be about
as doctors and nurses, looking to their patients with compassion.
But the end was always the same. A quicker death for some from
morphine. Others a slower death from luminal.

Erich began to throw himself into the
medical scene, working fifteen hours a day trying to grasp the
whole picture, at least scientifically. Before sending the parents
home, he would examine the entire family for any obvious conditions
he believed might lead to their child’s malformations. Then,
methodically examining the child’s condition daily with Maria at
his side, he would map a treatment plan that would lead nowhere but
to death. In time, such long hours would come to nourish his
illusion of medical authenticity and help keep him sane.

When a particular child who had
unusual malformations died, he would send the body to a research
laboratory, rather than the crematory, where Dr. Bracht, a
neurosurgeon, anxiously awaited. He had come to Görden at Erich’s
father’s request, much to the chagrin of Dr. Heinze and Franz, and
was enthralled by the great number of children’s brains at his
disposal. Together, he and Erich would dissect the brains, looking
for physical signs or strange diseases that might somehow cause
such malformations of the body or the mind. Sometimes Erich would
think of Julia and Rabbi Loew’s sacred golem while looking at the
twisted pinkish gray tissues of a child’s brain, and believed
someday such a story might be true, that life would somehow spring
from a test tube.

He had grown fond of Maria, too, as
the months passed, not in any intimate way, but with a new respect
for her own sense of duty. He kept his distance socially but felt
good when she was with him in the ward. Her presence by his side
became a necessary factor in his own role as doctor. Early on he
turned to luminal pills as the favorite method for euthanizing the
children under his care, seldom opting for a quick death from
morphine. In most cases, the children would develop breathing
problems, eventually succumbing to bronchitis or pneumonia. At
times he would treat these ailments, carefully charting every
change in a child’s condition, no matter how small, as if he were
trying to heal them, not kill them. A child’s death seemed always
like a failure to him, should it come either earlier or later than
the expected time noted in the chart. Should a child linger too
long, suffering, he would quickly finish them off with a lethal
injection of morphine. When such a death did happen, he would
meticulously review his notes looking for possible errors in
luminal dosage prescribed, food and water intake, or any other
factors that might have contributed to an error in his prognosis
for time of death.

One afternoon while awaiting the
arrival of new patients, he decided to visit several of the “good”
wards, a name he had given them, that held patients who would see
and walk in the sunshine again. He would talk there to other
doctors about their cases to learn, always pretending as if he had
similar ones in his own “special” ward to attend to. To get to the
“good” wards, he had to pass through several wards like his own,
including a larger one under Franz’s supervision. On this
particular day, Franz was serving as a guide for several teachers
touring the hospital. When he saw Erich approaching, his voice rose
in volume and his mouth twisted in a sneer as he glared at him.
Then he suddenly pulled a terribly emaciated child from its crib
and held her by the leg like he would a small dead animal he had
just killed.

“
These children will die
as God intended them to do, naturally, not by any drugs,” he said
proudly.

Starving the misfits to death was a
method used by many of the doctors, Erich knew. It saved time and
money, and required less monitoring from the staff, though many of
the nurses seemed uncomfortable with its use, compared to outright
killing. But to Erich it was a terrible wrong, letting your patient
die such a slow death. Giving food and water to the thirsty and
hungry was the greatest of Christian virtues, and to deny them that
was far different from the compassionate deaths Erich sought and
now believed in.

But he said nothing as he listened to
the boasting of Franz for a minute, thinking to himself how very
different he was from such an evil man. For Franz, the children
being killed should die because they were already essentially dead,
separated from a life and world that had no room for them.
Compassion had no meaning to them, and never would. There was no
pretending in Franz—what he was about, the killings, was very much
who he was. Erich had actually killed more children than Franz, but
none died alone. Their deaths always came in the arms of Maria or
his own. That factor alone, he believed, provided the moral wall
separating him from Franz and other doctors like him.

When he was finished talking to the
teachers, Franz casually tossed the pitiful child back into its
crib as he might a dirty towel, all the while smirking at Erich,
daring him to say something. Ignoring his taunting looks, Erich
moved past Franz and the group of teachers, who had turned their
attention to him, thinking he might be someone of importance, and
walked down the hall to the good wards. Though Erich believed he
was practicing medicine in treating the children to be euthanized
in his ward, it was here that one’s calling to the ancient guild of
Asklepios was still felt in his soul. While there he would read the
medical records of patients suffering from undiagnosed illnesses,
pretending he had been brought in to their cases as a consultant,
deciding in silence the ailment and the treatment to be given. Then
he would return another time to the wards to see if he had been
right. When he was, which was more often than not, he would glow
with pride at his diagnostic prowess. Nothing came from any of this
pretending though. All the other doctors there, mostly older, knew
he was from the killing wards, and allowed his little game to play
out, knowing the supposed relief it brought to him. Only by chance
had they been assigned to the “good wards” and escaped his
fate.

When Erich returned to the East Ward
he found Maria sitting in one of the rooms holding a tiny year-old
baby boy in her arms, gently rocking him. The boy was blind and had
no arms below his elbows and had been left by the child’s mother at
the front door of the hospital. Maria looked up when he entered the
room.

“
A new patient for us to
kill,” she said without any hesitation.

Erich ignored Maria’s callous remark
and picked up the child for a cursory examination. “He is
blind.”

“
I know. What better way
is there to escape your fears than having no eyes to see them? You
would dream of nothing then,” Maria said, taking the child from
Erich.

Taken back by Maria’s sudden
melancholic attitude, Erich asked, “Are you okay? You seem
tired.”

Looking first at the sleeping baby’s
face, then at Erich, Maria began to cry softly.

“
We are doing the right
thing, aren’t we?”

“
Maybe. In our eyes we
are, but I’m not sure about God’s,” Erich responded, looking more
closely at Maria, wondering if she had reached a breaking point
from the constant smell of death around her. Some nurses had and
were placed on leave.

“
The churches have been
silent. That is a good thing, isn’t it?” she asked.

“
Perhaps, but like the
rest of us, they stay silent to survive.”

Maria rose from her chair, kissed the
sleeping boy on the forehead, then laid him gently in the bed,
covering him with a light blanket as Erich had done little Brigitte
on the very first day everything began. Turning back to Erich she
said, “I wonder, how is it with death, to die? There must be
something we feel. The change is so great.”

“
That’s a strange question
to ask, with all the dying going on around us.”

“
I thought maybe you knew,
that’s all, maybe from cases where one was said to be dead but
wasn’t, and then told of what it was like.”

“
Perhaps we change only a
little, maybe not at all. No one knows, but it would be nice if we
did. I think then we wouldn’t fight so hard for that last mouthful
of air,” Erich said, taking Maria’s hand and leading her back to
the nurse’s station.

“
Your hours have been too
long. I will speak to the supervisor about giving you some days
away from the hospital,” he said, still holding Maria’s
hand.

Maria abruptly stiffened, pulling her
hand from his.

“
No, say nothing, please.
They will think I’m weak, when I should be strong, with Martin and
all the boys fighting for us in the East. Martin would be ashamed
should he know.”

Then she began to cry
again.

“
I never knew there would
be so many. Surely there are no more crippled children left in
Germany.”

“
You may be right. Perhaps
things will get better for everyone in a few more months,” Erich
said, taking the file of the new patient from Maria’s desk and
reading the notes quickly.

“
Start him on luminal
tablets in five days; three weeks is too long to wait for this
child,” he continued, walking towards the young blind baby’s room,
leaving Maria alone.

***

TWENTY-ONE

Erich, Görden, 1942

I
t was an exciting
and stimulating time for Erich. His ward stayed mostly empty with
only twenty children admitted during a five-week period, all
imbecilic by diagnosis. Their time to be euthanized, however, had
been purposely extended over several days, providing him with the
opportunity to bring in Dr. Bracht to study each child’s external
disabilities more thoroughly before dissecting their brains. Prior
to this time, his view of these malformations had only been that of
observing a dead child lying on a gurney when brought to his
laboratory, which told him nothing about their movements. Both he
and Erich had theorized wrongly that all imbecilic brains of blind
and malformed children would produce observable lesions, or other
damaged areas in the tissues of the brain.