A Perfect Madness (39 page)

“
Tomorrow is Saturday. We
must do something special, then go to church on Sunday,” she said
through a flood of tears tumbling down her cheeks.

“
Yes, finding a small inn
by the river to stay over through Sunday would be nice, if there
are any left from all the bombing. I can go from there to
Munich.”

Maria listened carefully to Erich’s
words, and knew what he was asking, what was expected of her. Any
other time she would quickly have dismissed with anger what was
being suggested. He was not her Martin, nor would he ever be, or
anyone else, but the strange and tender bond that had developed
between them tied her to him. The need to be held through the night
now was too great for both of them, she knew.

“
Berlin would be special
for both of us and we should be there together, but we must still
go to church on Sunday. It would be right to do so before you
leave,” Maria said, now smiling again.

***

TWENTY-SIX

Erich, Munich and Auschwitz, 1943

E
rich knew nothing of
the three university students charged with treason. Nor did he know
anything about their seditious underground publication,
The
White Rose
, which had boldly denounced the Nazi regime, calling
for all Germans to rise up against the tyranny of their own
government. Even as a psychiatrist, he was equally ignorant of how
to go about developing the kind of forensic profile the Gestapo was
looking for from the students, simply by observing them and
listening to their words at the trial. There was no nonsense to
these young people, no theatrics.

Outwardly, Erich saw nothing that
would separate them from other university students except perhaps
an aura of calmness in facing down the shrieking denunciations of
the Nazi prosecutor and trial judge. They clearly were marching to
a different gospel than everyone else, and had chosen the worst of
times to proclaim it. Erich saw clearly their purpose but quickly
closed his mind to it. Truth means nothing unless it is heard, and
they did just that, daring to write their testament for all to
read. They had refused to separate the singularity of duty and
conscience, as all those fervently following Hitler had done. This
fact was never more evident to Erich than when the young woman,
Sophie Scholl, rose in the courtroom. Looking straight at the
tyrannical judge before her, she said, “Somebody, after all, had to
make a start.”

Eight simple words. Everything she and
the other students believed in was there for everyone to hear. One
cannot do his duty when conscience is not a part of it. For Erich,
though, it seemed that simply doing one’s duty had its own
intrinsic worth and didn’t need a touch of conscience to make it
right. Not to believe so would seem to shame the honor of all the
thousands of German soldiers who were blown to pieces in a terribly
wrong war, not for Hitler, but for duty and Germany alone. While he
was unsure how to produce the kind of treasonous forensic profile
the Gestapo desired, what he could offer them was a profile in
courage, if only he had enough integrity himself to do
so.

It was a given to Erich that the
students were either mentally unstable or incredibly courageous,
being saturated from head to toe in a boldness with which he was
unfamiliar. When the trial was over and they were found guilty and
sentenced to death, Erich knew he had witnessed the rawest sort of
bravery, the kind that one can only read about in great
books.

He had no stomach to witness the
students’ execution. It would be difficult enough to erase the
events and machinations of the trial; images of their beheadings
would be impossible to suppress.

On the long trip from Munich to
Auschwitz where he was to report, one unanswered question still
lingered in his mind: how could they choose truth over living at
such a young age? If they had been old and wrinkled, it would make
more sense. But the mere utterance of words that had no hope could
not be worth more than staying alive when you are young. They were
dead now, and others would be, too, and nothing would come from
what they had said and done except the silent grief of their
parents. Still, they were different, Erich knew, but he didn’t know
why. They had moved beyond the ordinary to a dimension in life few
people would ever know. They were unafraid.

All his life he had believed he could
become something more than the nothing he now felt himself to be.
Art and painting had captured his early childhood dreams, but they
had long since vanished, lost on another road in the wilderness of
his fantasies. To be a great artist or poet, one must imagine the
world as it is only with the eyes of the soul, and his were now
blind. Dimmed by his experience at Görden, they could no longer see
things as they truly were; they could only see that which was
necessary to exist. There was not a single moment in his life now,
he knew, when he could say no to doing what was expected of
him.

It was the miles of lights and fires
that he passed entering Auschwitz the night of his arrival that
finally closed the eyes of his soul to everything but his own
desire to exist. Everything seemed like a dark fairy tale to him,
somewhere deep in his beloved Black Forest, only fairy tales don’t
smell like this one did. The smell clung to the folds in his
nostrils like thick green snot frozen in the cold winter air. He
knew the stench from burning bodies at Görden, but it never made
him afraid to breathe as he was now. Five crematoriums were spewing
their thick black smoke across the sky, but his attention was drawn
to a long wide pit with colorful dancing flames licking naked
burning bodies that had been doused in gasoline. Erich turned away,
refusing to look anymore at all the horror before him.

When he stepped into the chief SS
physician’s office, Franz Kremer was there to greet him.

“
Ah, my old timid friend,
we are together again at last, and in the best of
places.”

Erich said nothing, only nodded. His
hate for the man had not lessened. With his flair and posturing,
Franz was a commanding figure, ranking higher in the chain of
authority before anyone of his young age. Tall and Aryan looking,
he had become unbearably handsome in his uniform to everyone
around, even to Erich.

“
Come, there will be no
more trains this night and we can have drinks together at the
doctors’ quarters to celebrate your arrival. Tomorrow you will see
Auschwitz,” Franz said, signaling to his driver to have the touring
car ready for them, a vehicle marked with a Red Cross
symbol.

The “club,” as Franz referred to it,
was unusually quiet for an evening when little was expected of its
doctors. Some had gone home to be with their families for the
weekend, tending to neglected chores around the house and yard or
celebrating birthdays with their children. Others preferred
escaping reality alone in the solitude of their own quarters, where
they could become drunk and pass out in peace. But all would be
ready again for their long hours of duty on the selection ramp when
the trains arrived, bringing the prisoners.

Looking around the rather large room
filled with an assortment of wooden tables, Erich counted only four
men, two sitting together, the others separate. None looked up, or
cared to see who he might be, this new doctor standing with Franz.
As important as Franz was, it was of little matter to them because
their minds had long left this world, drowning in a flood of
alcohol. Franz and Erich sat away from the four men, to talk and
drink and eat snacks into the late hours of the night. Erich
learned much of what would be expected of him when tomorrow came,
and of the many hours and days ahead as increasing numbers of Jews
arrived in the camp. How he performed his duties, whether in an
unkindly or noble manner, was of his choice so long as the
immediate selection policies were followed. Erich knew Franz
preferred the cruelest of ways, and looked with great favor on
others who did.

So the next day, he took his place
alongside Franz, and for two weeks after, conducting medical
selections. The bedlam in the terrifying scene played out before
his eyes was beyond anything he might have imagined it could be.
Where Görden had maybe thirty patients arriving at a time, here
thousands of frightened prisoners scurried to leave and empty the
long line of boxcars standing idle next to the ramp. SS guards with
dogs shouted “Out, out! Line up, line up!” as they climbed down
from the cars and formed two rows. Those that failed to move along
quickly enough were shoved forward violently, or beaten about the
head and shoulders by the guards. Many had little sense that a
selection process of any kind was taking place. As quickly as they
had climbed from the boxcars, the long rows of anxious faces moved
past Franz’s eyes, stopping only for a second while he looked them
over for signs of physical weakness or strength. Occasionally he
would ask a question of age, as if to verify his medical thinking.
He then pointed his thumb either to the right or the left, much
like God was expected to do on the final judgment day, for those
who believed and those who didn’t. Left was immediate death by gas.
Right meant, perhaps, only a delayed death, one that came in the
early mornings when you could no longer stand for another day of
hard labor.

Observing Franz, Erich believed a good
bit of medical judgment was being employed in selecting those who
would live, and that was important to him. Age and physical fitness
had always been an essential component of a physical examination
performed by a doctor. What bothered him some, though he would say
nothing, was Franz’s immediate thumb to the left for pregnant women
who came before him. They all seemed young and healthy, and in time
would be good workers, but they were Jews and no more Jews were to
be born, at least on Franz’s watch.

That first night, when the trainload
of prisoners lined up for selection, Erich saw they were all Jews
and his mind turned for a quick moment to the five Jews that had
come before him at Görden. How is it this is happening? he had
asked himself then. But the question had no meaning for him this
night, looking at the endless line of Jews before him. They were
already dead, all of them. And what he could or could not do was of
little consequence and meant nothing. The revulsion he felt then
was no longer with him, and had become shaded by acceptance of what
was expected of him now.

Erich had been on the ramp the first
night for ten hours, being relieved for an hour of rest two times
by other doctors. When there were no more trains to come and no
more prisoners to see, the scene became still and quiet, swathed in
a hidden silence of the horrible things that had happened there.
Leaving the ramp with Franz, it was he who suggested the evening
end with drinks in the officers’ club.

There were several doctors socializing
in the lounge when they arrived, two of whom, like Erich, were new
doctors assigned to the camp. Unlike him, though, they had not been
at the small killing centers where the mentally ill were being
euthanized whether they were Jews or not.

“
How can the things we are
doing here be allowed? They surely will write about this for a
hundred years,” one doctor said, somewhat intoxicated.

“
Yes, this is a filthy
business for us,” his companion said.

Erich watched Franz’s reaction. Like
everyone else in the room, he offered no response but continued
drinking and talking. Many in the room had spoken the same words
when they first came, but now they no longer talked of the terrible
happenings around them. In time, except for the Nazi ideologues
like Franz, the new doctors would come to believe as they did, that
in the beginning it seemed impossible, and yet it would become
almost routine. In time, as the days passed, Erich found this to be
true. Everything happening was as one in Auschwitz. No one could
escape the pervading morality in the camp that seemed to separate
him and the other doctors and everything else in Auschwitz from the
rest of the world. This awakening became even truer two nights
later.

Working with Franz again, Erich
noticed him suddenly stiffen and straighten in body, as he would do
when someone of importance approached him. To his right a
strange-looking man, handsome in carriage, with a brown riding crop
in his right hand, walked by the waiting line of prisoners for a
short distance then back again, stopping next to a mother and her
young daughter. When the man pointed to an SS guard to separate
them, the woman fought with the guard, biting and scratching his
face. At this moment, the man with the riding crop drew his pistol
and shot both the woman and child in the face. Waving the crop back
and forth, he ordered all the prisoners to the gas chambers, even
though some had been selected for the work force, shouting “Away
with this shit” as he left.

Franz smiled, but not Erich. The scene
had unnerved him.

“
That was the great
scientist, Herr Dr. Mengele. I’m sure he wanted the young girl for
one of his research projects,” Franz said.

“
I know nothing of him.
What kind of research is he doing?”

“
All kinds, but no one
really knows. He comes many times to look over the prisoners when
they arrive, especially the young children and mothers. I do know
he has the run of the camp in taking any prisoners for
research.”