Let Me Go (7 page)

"I'm fine," she sniggers. "You promised you'd come back. And promises are made to be kept. Is it true that you're going to keep your promise?"

I nod, stunned and bewildered.

"I know you're honest," she says, trying to flatter me. "You're my daughter. And my daughter is an honest person."

I wonder how she knows that. She knows practically nothing about me.

She gives a contented, satisfied smile. She smooths her hair and looks at her nails: white, clear as cellophane, neatly trimmed. She continues to amaze me. What happened? Did she fall ill for a moment, or was she playing a trick on me?

And once again she hurls a series of questions at me: "Are you coming back tomorrow? Will you bring me an ice cream? And some more flowers?" She seems ecstatic at the prospect of seeing me again, and I feel a momentary sense of guilt.

"I don't know," I say, trying to evade the issue.

"You promised!" she snaps.

With a desperate gesture, she presses her temples with her fingertips. "You promised. You promised!"

That's when it happens. That's the turning point. Something in the depths of my insides revolts, whispers to me.

"I will come back tomorrow, and I'll bring you more flowers—as long as you tell me about Ravensbrück."

A blatant piece of blackmail. I catch my cousin's look of disapproval but ignore it.

"I want yellow roses," my mother announces in a domineering voice.

"And you'll have them if you tell me about Ravensbrück."

She eyes me carefully.

"Why do you want to know about Ravensbrück? There was nothing interesting in Ravensbrück." Her blue, blue eyes are transparent. Pale and transparent.

Really? Wouldn't you say that the experiments on muscle regeneration or bone transplants were interesting in their way?

From time to time they would take a piece of muscle from the lower part of the leg of some of the prisoners, to check whether and how the tissue was growing back under the plaster. With other victims, they would amputate a healthy arm, leg or shoulder-blade, and an SS doctor would wrap them up to drive in his car to Professor Gebhardt in Hohenlychen, who would have his doctors, Dr Stumpfegger and Dr Schulze, transplant them into patients from his clinic. The guinea-pigs from the Ravensbrück camp, meanwhile, were killed with lethal injections.
^2.

"I've learned that in many camps, including Ravensbrück, experiments were carried out on human guinea pigs," I say in a neutral voice to avoid irritating her. "I'm sure you must know something about that. It would be interesting to hear your views on the matter."

I realize that I'm not acting in quite a proper manner, but it's as though a demon somewhere inside me has taken my place.

"How did you know that?" she asks suspiciously. I haven't managed to render my voice entirely anodyne. I'm going to have to be more careful.

"It's in the history books," I reply carelessly. But she'll have none of it.

"Well, if these things are in the public domain, why do you want me to repeat them to you?"

"Because you're a witness," I reply promptly, with a hint of flattery, "and historical testimony is precious, whatever its source."

"Precious . . ." She savors the word as though it were a delicious morsel. "Do you really mean that?"

"Yes," I reply, smiling unctuously. But she is avoiding the subject once again.

"I was nothing more than an irrelevant pawn," she announces with false modesty, as though openly seeking more blandishments from me.

"Oh, no, I don't believe that for a moment," I say, contradicting her. "I'm sure they must have entrusted you with difficult tasks in Ravensbrück, tasks that only the best, the strongest, and the most efficient guards could have carried out. Am I wrong?"

For a fraction of a second I wonder what's going to happen.

She has pulled herself up in her chair in fact, and I can tell from her expression that my flattery has hit home.

"It was my job to assist the doctors," she replies quickly, though with a hint of reticence.

I don't give her time to change her mind. "And what did those doctors do?"

"They cured the prisoners," she replies vaguely.

"And what were your tasks?" My eyes have caught hers and won't let go.

"I had to . . . take their temperature." She's lying, probably guided by some distant instinct, but I keep at her.

"You just said your task was to assist the doctors!" I remind her impatiently. And immediately I rebuke myself: I've spoken too harshly; she'll get annoyed.

Now she's locked herself away in stubborn silence. She purses her lips and stares at me like a wounded child.

"Well?" I insist; then I try to sweeten my tone. "What other tasks did you perform as an assistant, apart from taking the patients' temperatures?"

"Nothing," she replies irritably.

Gently, now, whispers my demon, apply a little pressure.

"Fine," I say, pretending to give up. "You don't want to talk and I'm not coming back tomorrow. I'm not coming back to see a mother who has nothing to say to me."

"I want yellow roses," she mutters crossly.

"No yellow roses," I declare while a small voice deep within my conscience rebukes me: She's weak in the head; you're not equally matched; you're playing a cowardly trick.

But some dark force drives me implacably onward.

"I want you to come back," she says, giving in. "And I want yellow roses."

She begins to sob, then immediately stops again. She wipes her eyes with the hem of her military fabric.

"Then talk," I insist. "What else did you have to do as an assistant?"

She swallows, then replies in a strange gurgling voice. "I had to tie the prisoners to the tables."

"What for?"

The prisoners were infected in the lower part of their legs, while being left in the dark about the real purpose of the interventions to which they were being subjected. Often, as the scars of the few survivors demonstrate, and as witnesses confirm, the flesh was cut to the bone. In many cases, apart from bacterial cultures, fragments of wood or shards of glass were added to the wounds. The legs of the guinea pigs soon began to suppurate. The victims, who were not given any kind of treatment so that the progress of the condition could be observed, died in terrible pain. . . . For each series of experiments, repeated at least six times, between six and ten young women were used—usually chosen from among the most attractive.

Professor Gebhardt only came irregularly to Ravensbrück, to inspect the results and examine the wounds of the "patients" who, tied to the tables in rows, had to spend hours waiting for the arrival of the "Herr Professor."

Professor Gebhardt referred to the results in May of 1943, in a paper entitled
Special experiments on the
effects of sulfalinamides,
on the occasion of the third convention of specialist medical advisers to the Academy of Military Medicine in Berlin, which included, among others, the heads of the Medical Services of the Wehrmacht, and the Luftwaffe, the department of public health and so on, along with directors of university clinics and institutes of medical study and research, Hitler's personal doctor Karl Brandt and a large number of eminent and honored professors of the German Reich.

In his paper Professor Gebhardt made no effort to conceal the fact that the experiments had been carried out upon prisoners, and even went so far as explicitly to assume full responsibility for them.

None of those participating raised any objections.
3

She hesitates for a second, lowers her head, and stares at her hands.

Then she raises her eyes and declares with a kind of obtuse arrogance, "No, I felt no compassion," and she seems to stumble over the words, "for 'those people,' because the operations were being carried out for the good of humanity."

"Meaning?"

"Are you going to tell me that science doesn't always work for the good of humanity?" she asks emphatically.

"Those doctors were nothing but charlatans," I reply with quiet contempt, "they were pseudo-medical sadists and pseudo-researchers."

She gives a start, as though she's just been slapped unfairly for something she hadn't done. Now her eyes are staring at me with glassy stupefying clarity.

"How foolish you are," she explodes, "and how mistaken. Our doctors were outstanding professionals, and the results of their experiments were published in all the most authoritative medical journals, both in Germany and abroad!"

She gets her breath back; her cheeks have turned strawberry-red with rage.

"Our researchers were invited to the most prestigious medical conventions in the whole world!" she adds heatedly. "You know nothing. Nothing!"

And she underlines her statement with a peremptory and impatient wave of her hand.

"And I had no right to feel compassion; my sole duty was to obey. Loyalty and obedience, nothing else. Loyalty is an important virtue, believe me!" Now she is waving a pale and severe finger under my nose.

A pause. She turns to look out the window toward the tops of the old plane trees swaying in the misty air.

Then she murmurs,
"Ich habe doch eine Harteausbildung
erhalten,
" as though talking to herself.

I underwent dehumanization training. Might that be an almost unconscious attempt at self-justification?

Yes, Mother, I know, I've read your file. They trained you in order to desensitize you to the atrocities that you would witness at the extermination camps; and only the hardest, the thickest-skinned were destined for those.

That's why you were chosen for Birkenau, the most selective camp of all.

Another silence. I'm feeling hot, and I'm getting more tired by the minute, but the demon within me is driving me onward.

"So you didn't feel any pity for anyone? Never, not for any of the prisoners in Ravensbrück? Not even for the very old or the very sick?"

Eva gives me a little nudge with her elbow. What on earth are you doing, it seems to mean. I pay no attention; something inside me is starting to boil with rage.

Ask. Ask again. It may be your last chance.

"It's no fun talking to my daughter!" My mother explodes, sticking her fingers in her ears. "I'm not listening to you anymore."

Eva takes the opportunity to whisper to me, "Why are you torturing her? Can't you see there's no point?"

I don't reply. My mother is darting resentful glances at me. Outside, the weather is getting worse. A viscous wind lashes sheets of rain against the windowpanes.

Could it be, I wonder, that this woman has never really experienced an emotion apart from those inculcated in her? Love as well as hate, pity as well as cruelty?

"Once," I hear her say suddenly.

I gesture to her to take her fingers out of her ears.

"Once what?" I ask, curious.

"Once I felt sorry . . . a bit."

"What had happened?"

"One day a prisoner was assigned to my block. She had been a comrade, but then she had moved across to the Resistance, and the Gestapo sent her to the camp. The minute she saw me she spat in my face."

Instinctively I ask, with some irony, "Did you have her executed?"

She doesn't need to consider her response. "I put her in the selection for the brothel."

"What brothel?"

She seems to rummage around in her memory for a moment, then picks up her thread again.

"Yes, it was in 1943. We'd had instructions to set up brothels in the larger camps, and the first one was to be organized in Buchenwald. One morning we guards were ordered to choose suitable prisoners for the transfer, and I chose her."

Her face hardens, and a subtle satisfied smile settles on her lips.

"Shortly afterward I learned that she had died of a venereal disease," she adds, and twists her fingers in an unusual manner, while I have the impression that a kind of veil is falling across her eyes. It lasts only a moment.

"At first . . . I felt a kind of sorrow," she admits, as though confessing to a deplorable weakness, "but I soon overcame it. I couldn't allow myself that kind of emotion, I mean pity and regret for people who deserved to be in a camp. It never happened again. I was in the Waffen-SS. I couldn't permit myself the sentimentality of ordinary people."

She had transferred sovereignty over her feelings to the Führer, and she continued to defend the fact.

HOW MANY WOMEN, on the other hand, in a Berlin ablaze and thick with the stench of corpses, had the child Helga heard raging against their Führer? They had fought tooth and nail, the women of Berlin, to defend their children, often having given birth to them in air-raid shelters or beneath the arches of the underground. In order to feed their own children, they had not hesitated to take up arms and confront the guards of the few food warehouses that had remained open, the ones that supplied the Wehrmacht or Hitler's entourage. As they fled from Eastern Prussia with the Red Army at their heels, they had dragged five, six, or seven children behind them, tying them one to another with a clothesline so as not to risk losing them. After the war, widowed and with no future in sight, they had gritted their teeth and had liaisons with the men of the victorious powers, preferring the shame of being called whores over the unbearable thought of seeing their own children dying of hunger. I wonder how many of those women still loved the Führer during the battle of Berlin.