The Chosen Ones (4 page)

A Christmas Celebration (and its consequences)
  In December 1940, the Ziegler family celebrated their first Christmas together.
Helmut joined them once the reluctant Haidingers had been persuaded to ‘hand him back for the duration’. They’d had family Christmases before in the Simmeringer flat, with a tree and all the trimmings, but it always ended with everyone, uncles and aunties included, waiting around at the table where the place laid for the head of the household stood empty. With any luck, he would turn up near midnight, drunk, alone, or with mates he had fancied bringing along. If he was on his own, he’d be furious because there was nothing but
sweet rubbish
on the table and would take it out on Leonie, hit and kick her, shouting that she was a useless slut not worth wiping the floor with. This time, though, they would have a proper Christmas. With one week to go until Christmas Eve, Adrian and his father walked to Rochusmarkt and picked a real fir tree to take home. At school, one of the teachers, who clearly wasn’t a totally convinced Nazi, allowed them to write essays on the theme
My Best Christmas
and even let them build their own nativity cribs. Adrian’s sister Laura became so excited at the thought of all the fun they’d have over the festive days that she spent an entire afternoon dashing in and out of the shops on Mariahilfer Strasse. She made one of her friends from school distract the shop assistants while she picked all the lovely, shiny things she could find room for under her sweater, like many-coloured glass balls and glittering strands of tinsel. They were sitting on the steps leading up to the Westbahnhof platforms, tarted up like little princesses with tinsel threaded through their hair, when the police caught up with them. It wasn’t the first time that Laura had been caught shoplifting. Most of it was small-scale, like pencils and erasers and other things she needed for school, or chocolate and fruit from the stalls in the market. But times had changed. Before, staff from the departments of social services and health had at least tried to be sympathetic and helpful, but now everyone was relentlessly
strict. Vagrancy and larceny were crimes, and correct punishments had to be meted out. Laura’s behaviour was especially vexing, as she obviously ‘tempted others to follow her’. When the social workers came for a home visit two days into the new year, they took note of the fact that Adrian, Helmut and Laura not only shared the same bed but also played ‘Mummy-Daddy-Children’ underneath a rigged-up tablecloth and, furthermore, that Adrian and Helmut were both naked, all of which was interpreted as
an indication of incestuous relationships
in the family.
The children are dirty and malnourished, and their manners have been allowed to degenerate. They are rebellious and foul-mouthed.
The report included a long passage about Adrian Ziegler, who is described as
an insolent and degenerate boy who, when adults are talking, incessantly interrupts with obscene expressions and invectives.
I can’t remember any of us being insolent, Adrian commented when he saw the report much later. On the other hand, I do remember how they interrogated us one at a time, he said, and tried to make us say things about our parents that were not true. For instance, they wanted me to tell them about my mother, how she was slovenly and had failed to look after the family, and then I burst into tears. I knew that my mother had worked, unselfishly and unaided, for more than twelve years, doing her best to keep her children clean and in decent clothes, seven of us in the end, and have food put in front of us every day. They could never make me say that she had failed to look after us. The family was split up again. They decided that Mrs Leonie Ziegler (née Dobrosch) had enough on her hands with her two youngest. The authorities looked for a new foster family for the eldest, Laura, who was almost fifteen and needed to prepare for her
Pflichtjahr
, when she had to go away and learn how to do practical tasks in the house and on the land. A place in a children’s home on Bastiengasse in Währing was found for Helmut.
Adrian was sent to Spiegelgrund, which had just been designated a specialist clinic for children with severe psychiatric or neurological conditions, but which also served as a reform school for boys and girls with disciplinary problems. Spiegelgrund was the place of last resort, the end of the road for those thought effectively irredeemable. He didn’t know all that at time, of course. When he was registered on that January day in 1941, the form recorded all measurable facts about him in neat typescript:

Doctor Gross had made just a few entries under ‘Other characteristics’:
R. shoulder blade protruding slightly; feet smell badly; L. shin, an approx. 30cm long scratch.
The form has three photographs attached, two from sideways on and one from in front. The photos show an eleven-year-old boy who looks perfectly healthy. His shoulders are raised a little and his half-open mouth and scared eyes complete the picture of a child who surely could harm no one.

My name is Anna Katschenka. I have worked as a nurse for twenty-two years. My service at Spiegelgrund began in 1941. Doctor Jekelius was the institution’s acting medical director at the time. I believe Doctor Türk had taken up her post there by then. Later, Doctor Illing took over the directorship. If I remember correctly, this change took place in July 1942. Between 1923 and 1934, I was a member of the Social Democratic Party and, subsequently, of the Austrian Patriotic Front. Since the post-war regime changes, I have not taken any further interest in politics. I have never belonged to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) or any of its organisations. In June 1929, I married the medical student Siegfried Hauslich. Our marriage was dissolved on grounds of incompatible differences of personality and interpersonal antipathy. My ex-husband was a Jew. I met Doctor Jekelius for the first time after my dismissal from service in Lainz, when I was referred to him for treatment of my recurring depressed moods. His treatment was successful and I came to trust the doctor wholeheartedly, which is why I applied for a nursing post in his clinic. A few days after starting work on the wards, Doctor Jekelius called me into his clinical office. He reminded me of my professional oath and promise of confidentiality, and emphasised that I must not, under any circumstances, disclose any details of individual cases treated in the hospital, nor was I to ask unnecessary questions. He put it to me that I had by then seen with my own eyes the miserable state of the children when they arrived at the clinic and observed that some of them were incurable. He then went on to explain 
to me how the clinic managed the children afflicted by such conditions. I remained very attached to Doctor Jekelius after his recruitment to the Wehrmacht in January 1942. I wrote to him when he was on active service and visited him several times. There was no romantic relationship between us at any time. Doctor Jekelius was a National Socialist and I never was. Personally, I have never cared for politics.

Doctor Jekelius
    He inspired confidence from the start. At first, she thought it was just a matter of the way he observed her and addressed her, but later she realised that his entire being contributed to the impression he gave. The way he moved was so remarkably graceful and relaxed. Like an animal, on his guard but never self-conscious. Several years later, when he was hounded and became the target of a hate campaign, and even some of his especially loyal colleagues began to distance themselves from him, whether out of cowardliness or an acute sense of fear, he was accused of being a fraud. Still, she felt certain that someone who inhabited his body with such confidence and was so trustful of all its senses couldn’t possibly defraud anyone. It is easy to lie in thought or speech, but the body doesn’t lie. Later, when the preliminary investigations started up, she felt not the slightest need to try to cover anything up, and spoke quite openly about how she came to look for a post in his clinic. Back in 1939, she had spent a long, anxious year on the nursing staff at the home for the elderly in Lainz. Doctor Herz, the Minister of State in charge of the home, committed suicide immediately after the Nazi takeover. Professor Müller, head of the medical department where she worked, was forced to leave. The staff kept changing, one wave after another. Anna Katschenka, who had never before doubted her own competence, began to feel inadequate, and her sense of insecurity made her subject to recurring fits of depression and an unending series of headaches and stomach upsets. She worried that
her new superiors were in some indefinable way displeased with her and thought her poor at her job. To her, loyalty and trustworthiness were central ideals. It mattered very much to her that the authorities should regard her as
worthy
. Her medical problems, she would confess to Jekelius, were rooted in the fact that she lived in fear. Of course, she feared that she would be sacked for political reasons. More than that, she dreaded what the consequences would be of no longer belonging, of not being seen to exist in her own right, of not being needed. It was relevant that both her father and her brother had been forced out of posts at various points in time after the Patriotic Front came to power in 1934, and that the survival of her family now depended on her alone. When her physical symptoms became unbearable, she turned to her superiors, and Doctor Dipold, a consultant who had taken over from Professor Müller as medical director, had recommended her to get in touch with Doctor Jekelius. Jekelius himself had changed his place of work and taken on the post of senior consultant at the Steinhof alcohol and drug rehabilitation clinic. However, he had kept his former practice going and still saw patients for a few hours in the afternoon at his Martinstrasse surgery in Währing. The patients had to ring the bell at the garden gate and cross a paved terrace edged on both sides by great trees whose crowns had come to join, forming a shadowing arch. Almost like a pergola. Because it was a warm summer’s day, the surgery window was open and they had their first long talk against the background noise of sparrows flying in and out of the leafy canopies outside. She had been quite worried about that first encounter. Maybe he would be contemptuous, even displeased when he realised that his patient was a registered nurse. He might have taken note of this but she couldn’t tell. Instead, he enquired meticulously about her previous jobs and muttered approvingly if a familiar name of a professor or
consultant turned up. He smiled when she finished her account, and went on to say that she must surely regard him as the oddest of all the doctors she had met. This claim put her on the back foot. Why so? she asked. Because of my accent, he said. It’s from Siebenbürgen, my whole family is from there. (True, his precise High German had a slight Saxony intonation, but she had taken no special notice and, insofar as she thought anything about the way he spoke, it was how well his melodic voice went with his smoothly co-ordinated body). She suspected his remark to be more of a diversionary tactic, a way to make her relax a little. Then, he told her a story.

In Hermannstadt, where he grew up, he had cared a lot for one of his aunts who throughout his youth suffered from recurring depressions. For that reason, his parents had forbidden him to go and see her. He usually played by a small stream near their house. They called it Stinkystream because it carried so much smelly rubbish. When he was playing on its bank, he hoped all the time to find something that might cure his aunt. One day, he came across a small, white packet and brought it to her at once. The moment I took the wrapper off, my aunt burst out laughing, Jekelius said and looked straight at her. Can Nurse Anna guess what was in the packet? he asked.

She shook her head.

Lausex.

What’s Lausex?

A delousing insecticide. Given the right dosage, the contents of that packet could have killed some seven thousand people. There, I see that you’re laughing, Mrs Katschenka! And so did my aunt. She laughed so hard she could not stay upright, neither sitting nor standing. The next day, our family doctor called to tell my parents that my aunt felt much better, thanks to their son’s timely intervention. He told me,
you must study medicine, Erwin!
Do you know
what I replied? I said,
then I think I’d rather become the emperor of Germany!

They laughed. And then sat together in silence. From outside came a noise as if someone quietly, discreetly, was scrunching up crisp sheets of paper. It was the sparrows dashing in and out of that dense mass of leaves. She had forgotten about them for a while.

Why do you tell me this? she finally asked.

Perhaps, he replied, because what you need is just someone to snap their fingers in front of your face –
like this!
– and, suddenly, the world looks different. Put it this way: to cure disease, truly to heal, doesn’t exclusively mean doing something to, or even
for
, the patient. The person who is ill is part of a
context
, and that is what must be changed: the very way we understand illness. I would be happy to discuss this further at your next appointment.

The Vocation
   Anna Katschenka had known that she wanted to be a nurse ever since she was ten. That was her age when her sister died from an inherited thickening of the heart muscle. Everyone had known about her heart trouble and that it might be fatal at any moment. Anna’s sister had found it hard to keep up with the other children, and soon became breathless and had to sit down to rest. She was perfectly fine when they played what their mother called ‘quiet games’, and could even be a little protective of Anna. The day before she died, Anna’s sister had been swinging her legs to and fro as she perched on the edge of her bed and they had pretended that her legs were little wild creatures that Anna had to catch, but once the wiggling feet had been caught and shoed and the laces were tied, Anna’s sister stood up but was breathing oddly and sweating, and her face was flushed. The following day, her bed was empty, the bedspread stretched flat and tightly tucked in. They had removed all the pictures, and the books from the shelves, and even the ‘secret box’ where Anna’s sister had kept her pretty things, her rings and necklaces, together with saved-up letters and a diary. It seemed they felt nothing of hers could remain, now that she was dead.

She had told Doctor Jekelius of a memory of the funeral. Anna and her mother, who had been deeply affected by her daughter’s death, were leaving the church together, walking arm in arm. Above them the mighty church bells had swung and hammered and banged incessantly with their massive brass clappers. She used to say that the bells had called her into service, but at heart she knew that nothing so uplifting had taken place. It had been a dreadful moment. For perhaps a second, all went black as the overwhelming, choking din of the bells took her over. It was as if the Lord had hurled back down to Earth each one of the dead child’s frail heartbeats, transformed into a crushing weight of iron that boomed and trembled, boomed and trembled, until the sky seemed like a gigantic heart about to break. Her mother had clapped her hands over her ears and moved closer to the wall as if looking for shelter. But the wall, too, broke, and the pavement cracked and sagged under their feet. Anna’s hand, from now on to be a
helping hand
, could not reach her. No hands could help. From that day, Anna Katschenka’s mother never went outside. She said that she dreaded the looks in people’s eyes. Perhaps more than their eyes, she dreaded those whispering voices that, even as she sat beneath the stone arches of the church, had begun to creep into her mind, every one of them murmuring that she had failed to save her daughter’s life. From then on, her child’s heart failure took shape and became a dominant presence during all her waking hours, just as being blind or paralysed can dominate someone’s life. It meant that every objection, every attempt to inject some uncertainty into the absolute truth of what the mother said about her dead child only served to make the illness stronger still, because it brought back memories of shame and guilt. Anna, from now on, was the one charged with preventing the chaos and disintegration in the outside world from getting through to her mother, and seeing to it that her
mother heard only what was cheerful or encouraging, and nothing that maimed or tore apart. Day after day, Anna did her bit to create a provisional world order that was sound and harmonious, even though her mother had long since stopped believing in anything of the sort. One of her sayings used to be:
the healthy don’t shun the light
. This was one of her mother’s many incantatory phrases that Anna now made her own. To prove just how healthy and tough they all were, her father would sometimes spend an evening displaying his photos from the time when he was a sportsman. He had been a long- and medium-distance runner, and could be picked out in the group pictures from championships in strange cities as a tall, gangly young man standing among his teammates, all with their arms loosely draped across each other’s shoulders. The young sportsmen belonged to the Wiener Arbeiter Turn- und Sportverein and the banner above their heads read
WAT Ottakring
. As an older man, Anna’s father had been asked to take on the honorary post as the society’s treasurer. He used to sit at the kitchen table most evenings after supper and run his index finger down the columns of paid and unpaid membership fees, or else he went to the sports ground and settled down alone on the empty coach’s bench with a stopwatch in one hand and a notebook in the other, checking his son’s lap times on the track below as Otto trained for the hundred-metre hurdles in the club championships. Into the light, then out of it.