A Perfect Madness (38 page)

Returning to the hospital, Erich went
first to Dr. Heinze’s office and filled out the coded report for
the Health Ministry of the number of deaths processed, and then
added a special addendum to the report regarding the five Jews.
There he carefully noted in detail the absence of any serious
mental sickness on their part and that all were fit and able to
perform meaningful work. It was the only way he knew to tell the
Ministry the five Jews had died for nothing. When he finished with
the day’s report, 125 more German citizens had been added to the
growing number of those being sacrificed for the purification of
the Aryan race. The eugenics movement, first begun so many years
ago in America with the birthing rights of thousands of women
spirited away on nothing more than the machinations of a new
science and a perverted ideology, was now moving across Germany
with the unbridled energy of a thousand steam engines. To some who
cared, it was a joyous moment in history, the triumph of social
evolution. For others, it was the beginning of the end of innocence
as God intended it to be.

Maria was waiting at his apartment
when Erich arrived. She looked rested, having slept the full day
after he left her place, yet her eyes betrayed the terrible hurt
she had suffered and was trying to reason away, relying on, the
best she could, the old Christian adage that what comes to us in
our lives is always God’s will. From that, she had been told since
childhood, we should always dismiss the terrible things we suffer
as nothing more than a test of one’s faith. She had believed easily
in such nonsense all her life because nothing had come her way but
the sunshine of each day. But even sunshine, she now knew, carried
its own separate basket of tears.

For his part, Erich was glad to see
Maria. She had become the only person outside of Julia to have
found a corner of his soul. What he wanted now from her was
absolution for what had occurred with the Jews during the
afternoon. When he told her what took place in the examining room
and the innocence of the five Jews, Maria said nothing. Instead,
she walked around the apartment, looking in each room and closet as
if searching for some phantom body, or hidden recording device,
that in time might come back to haunt her with the words she would
say now. In a few minutes she sat down next to Erich, who was
resting on a small settee in the makeshift living room, but she
offered no explanation for her strange behavior.

“
What do you want me to
say, Erich, that it was wrong for the Jews to die as they did?” she
asked. “They were no more innocent than all the crazies we are
killing.”

“
Perhaps, except they were
not as sick. They died for who they were, which does seem
different, doesn’t it?”

Maria looked wishfully at Erich, her
eyes becoming watery with tears.

“
Why are we talking about
the Jews, Erich, when my Martin is dead. So forgive me, what is
right and wrong makes little sense to me at the moment.”

“
Why are you here then?
Pity?”

“
Yes, for my share of the
pity I think. It’s the one emotion that requires the least of
anyone to give, yet it does help one feel better.”

“
Okay, I pity you,” Erich
said with a nervous smile, becoming increasingly uncomfortable with
the conversation.

But Maria was not amused and turned
away from him for a moment. Though she felt herself a fair person,
the plight of the Jews bothered her little, growing up in Mainz as
she did. None lived in her poor neighborhood, nor went to her
schools. They sometimes seemed as foreign to her as the occasional
French businessman in the town, especially the old ones. But to
many people in the neighborhood, including her mother, it was the
greedy Jewish bankers that Hitler had railed against who kept them
in poverty. Even at the church, few kind words were said for them.
And every Easter she was reminded that it was they who had killed
her Savior. After Easter week one year, when she was twelve, she
was brought to tears and chased from the playground by her
classmates taunting her for acting as a Jew in the town’s annual
passion play. What was strange to her later when she recalled the
episode was that she thought little about what it might be like to
be a Jew, but more about how it would be if you were not against
them.

Without thinking, Erich took Maria’s
hand and brought it to his lips, kissing it gently, then said, in
the softest of voices, “We are alive, Maria, and we have a choice
to stay alive. For that we should be glad. It’s more than the
crazies and Jews had.”

Shocked by his actions, Maria abruptly
jerked her hand away, rose from the settee, and began straightening
her clothes nervously.

“
You are confusing your
psychology lesson, Dr. Schmidt. Pity and sex are not the same
thing, and never will be,” she said, opening the front door to
leave.

“
I meant nothing, only
that I cared about your sorrow.”

“
Perhaps, but not likely.
A hunger for sex has a way of sneaking up on you, hiding behind a
lot of fake emotions. Yours is pity,” Maria said, closing the door
behind her.

Erich sat looking around the room at
the shadowy emptiness staring back at him. Maria was right. Her
hurt and weakness continued to arouse him long after she was gone,
and he felt no shame for it. The fact he possessed any kind of
feeling now, with all that had happened, thrilled him. It told him
he was alive and still very much a man.

So he came to yet one more day in the
examining room. Maria was there waiting for him, as were the three
doctors who stood with him the day before when the Jews were
gassed. There were no Jews to examine, only the usual four busloads
of mental patients. Though she had begged off after the first day,
upset by all the squirming naked flesh crowding around her, Maria
wanted to return. She would heal more quickly from her own loss,
knowing she was doing her duty, which would have pleased
Martin.

As summer turned to autumn, the buses
continued to come, sometimes in twos, with their load of patients.
At times there were some Jews included, but never more than a few,
for which Erich was glad. One afternoon, while waiting for the
gassing room to be emptied of bodies, Erich became upset when two
buses arrived carrying an unusually large number of semiconscious
patients and ones who had been brutally beaten about the face. When
the first patient stepped from the bus and saw Erich and the staff,
he began crying and shouting “murderers” at them and tried to run
away. Quickly subdued and sedated, he was carried straight to the
examining room, stripped of his clothing, and tossed in a corner of
the room where he lay crumpled on the floor like discarded dirty
laundry. The same fate awaited the other semi-conscious patients,
and when the gassing room was empty all were quickly carried in and
stacked like a cord of wood near the front wall. When the other
patients entered the room and saw the pile of naked bodies, they
turned back and rushed to the door, which had already slammed shut
behind them. Pounding on the door, they began to scream and wail
unmercifully until the gas made its way into the room to still
them.

Later, when one of the SS staff was
questioned about the semiconscious and those beaten, he had no
excuse other than to say, “Everyone in the asylums now seems to
know what will happen to them when the gray buses come.” When
others on the staff were questioned, their answers were the same.
Listening, Erich believed that the secret T4 program, so carefully
guarded by the Health Ministry, had become unsheathed by the steady
rise in rumors coursing through the villages and asylums. Questions
began to be asked of him for which he had no answers. At first,
when the killings began, the walls were silent, yielding no hints
that anything other than caring medicine was going on behind them.
But the rising blackened gray smoke from the crematory had become a
fixture in the skies, spreading the smell of burning flesh. No
questions would come from the townspeople, though, only a silent
wonder after a while at how all that was happening could have come
about. “Where were the churches?” some would say among themselves.
“They should know. Isn’t it their job to know those things that
seem so evil?”

A few churches did begin to speak out,
some with commanding tongues, against what they believed might be
happening behind the walls of the old prison. But the mental
patients continued to come at an ever-increasing pace, making it
impossible for all to be examined by Erich and the staff, or
carefully identified from the hospital records to confirm that they
should even be there. The constant rows of human cattle waiting to
be slaughtered, and the piercing stench of death that followed, was
beginning to overwhelm even the sanest of the lot, except Maria.
Steeling herself with constant visions of Martin lying dead
somewhere in the unknown, she stood throughout each day, hollow
eyed and blind to the crying faces that continually passed before
her, leaving each evening unshaken by all that had happened that
day. Erich grew obsessed with how those around him seemed to enjoy
being a part of the killing center. He began to wonder if the time
hadn’t finally arrived when the rational mind would eventually
accept killing when death was all around. Like mass hysteria, could
it become the aegis, the mental shield for all else that was
happening? He finally concluded that living in the world is nothing
more than a morality play where one may easily forget his
lines.

As time passed, Maria continued
working in the examining room, always stoic, her mind a million
miles away from the beseeching eyes of the patients watching every
move she made, or every word she might say. Twice during the
mornings she would go and look for a second through the glass
peephole in the door to see the writhing bodies gasping for air,
then collapsing. It was always a strange and puzzling sight to her,
she told Erich one evening. Why did they struggle so much to stay
alive, when it was hopeless? They should submit and thank God for
what they’d had. For herself, she could never get over the idea of
death. One moment you were here and then there was nothing. No
fanfare of trumpets and clapping hands and flashing lights, just
nothing. Erich recognized the silent footsteps of Maria’s
approaching madness with such chatter. Like a brittle dead twig,
her mind was snapping. Still, each morning Maria was the first to
report for work, renewed in spirit and determination to complete
the day as best she could. Martin would have expected it of her,
she would tell those who questioned her welfare.

With the winter months approaching,
the number of mental patients going to their deaths seemed to be
diminishing. By Erich’s calculation, over eight thousand bodies had
been carried by the stokers on metal pallets for burning in the
crematory. Thousands more, he knew, had been killed elsewhere in
the asylums across Germany. It was hard for him not to think of
what his future in psychiatry might have been had all these people
lived. In a way, he felt cheated. With all the crazies dead, he
would have no patients to treat.

One day no buses came. And when none
came the next day, nor the days after, the sudden unexpected
release from killing played on everyone’s mind, except Erich’s.
Secretly, Franz had prevailed upon Dr. Eduard Wirth, the chief SS
physician, to transfer Erich to Auschwitz. When the transfer orders
came, Erich was reading aloud Nietzsche’s long aftersong, “From
High Mountains,” to Maria in the rose garden. They had come there
together often in the recent weeks to let their day become peaceful
for the night. It was good for Maria to do so, he believed. To hear
the rhythmical words sing their soothing beauty held a healing
grace of its own for her broken heart. They had also become closer
friends than each realized. More so, too, than either one would
have wanted, they would later claim. But in these passing moments
in time, each seemed to hold for the other what they had
lost.

Erich said nothing as he read the
orders silently to himself, but the shock printed across his face
was there for Maria to read. He was to report to Auschwitz in five
days. While the order of transfer was clear to him, it was the
second order that was puzzling and bothered him. He was to report
first to Munich and there attend a trial of several university
students charged with treason to the Third Reich. They had been
caught distributing leaflets condemning Hitler and fostering
internal dissent against the Nazi regime. Together with another
psychiatrist who would come from Berlin, he was to try and develop
a psychological forensic profile of the charged university students
that would help the Gestapo in identifying other disgruntled
students on campuses across Germany. Erich knew little about the
kind of profiling being requested of him, and knew that innocent
students could easily be arrested should they display any of the
characteristics found in the profile he would develop. He was
paranoid enough to believe his task there was another Gestapo test
of his loyalty. What he didn’t know, and never would, was that the
special assignment to Munich was the doings of his father trying to
reassure his own position with the Chancellery by involving his
often-suspected son in such an important task.

When Erich handed the official orders
to Maria, she grasped his hand for the first time ever and began to
cry. She had lost Martin, and now it was Erich who would be
leaving. And while the looming separation may have fooled her heart
into believing more is there to be taken from the heart than it
really ever had, she would be alone.