Trusting Calvin (10 page)

“Take your brother home,” Dr. Meisner told Sig. “Take care of him. Bring him back in December, and we'll see.”

Home, Max knew from Sig, was three furnished rooms in Amberg that his brothers and friend Isaac had rented from a widow, Etta Eichenmueller, forced by finances to take in boarders. He imagined the small stuffy rooms where the three men would have to compress themselves to accommodate another person, a blind one. He would be nothing but a burden.

Max sat silent and still as Sig filled the journey with a steady stream of talk. Sig had come up with a way to earn enough money to keep them fed with a roof over their heads, he said. During the war, the routes and means by which Germans conducted commerce had faltered and then died. The ability to buy commodities had stagnated, so Sig and friends had set up a complex but very effective chain of bargain, barter, and trade.

There were interesting coffee shops in Amberg, Sig continued, where they could sip exotic coffee richer than anything Max could imagine, sweetened with as much sugar as they wanted. There were lively cabarets where the music was gay and the women very friendly. It was time, Sig figured, for the brother who had passed all of his adult years in camps or hospitals to venture into manhood.

Once they had arrived in Amberg, Max joined the others on their outings to taverns that reeked of cigarette smoke and stale beer, pressed forward by their energy. But he felt numb, distant. They didn't help, these outings.

During the days, while his brothers and Isaac worked, Max was installed in a straight-backed chair next to a window with nothing to do but listen to the birds and the noises from the street, people with real lives busily going about their business. He came to hate those sounds and those people. They should have been a tantalizing invitation to exploration, but they were nothing but a reminder of how incapable he was.

Mrs. Eichenmueller could see the desolation overtaking him, so in the afternoons, when her work was done, she sat and talked with him, read to him, told him of promising signs of change washing across Germany. Pitifully inadequate counterbalance, he thought, to the appalling truths seeping out about the horrors that had transpired during his years of captivity. And the full story wasn't even known yet, he figured.

In nearly two dozen countries, Jews had been rounded up and sent to one of the 20,000 labor camps or death camps Nazi Germany had established to imprison or kill Jews and other undesirables. About 90 percent of the Jews of Poland and Greece had been murdered; 75 percent in Yugoslavia; and at least a quarter to half in most of the rest of the countries that the Germans had occupied. This genocide—six million Jews, half of them Poles—in future decades came to be called the Holocaust. For now it was known as the
Shoah,
Hebrew for “calamity.”

It was impossible to fathom so much evil, and when he tried to push this knowledge into some recess where it would haunt him less, he was unsuccessful. His mind filled with an ugly mass of swirling images.

His brothers and friends spent hours, night after night, discussing the military tribunals that would commence soon in Nuremberg, just forty miles from Flossenbürg, to prosecute the most prominent leaders of these systematic killings. But how could any trial possibly make up for the six million Jews and as many non-Jews—prisoners of war, Gypsies, the disabled, sympathizers, and others—who had been slaughtered?

To pull Max away from these thoughts, Mrs. Eichenmueller arranged for him to begin violin lessons with a blind music teacher named Mr. Pletschachesr, a man as kindly as he was talented. Max displayed no aptitude for strings, however, so Mr. Pletschachesr switched him to the accordion, which required less musical soul. Still nothing. The music teacher suggested that the hearing loss from having typhus might be contributing to Max's lack of musical ability, but both Max and his teacher knew that he simply had no talent for music. One more thing he couldn't do.

As the weeks passed Max's depression deepened. He could sometimes muster a slab of loathing toward his self-pity, but not very often, and not for very long. Most days, most hours of every day, he floundered in misery.

At night, wrenching nightmares about his time in the ghetto and the camps tormented him. His cousin Chayale, lifeless, blood pooled between her legs, the smeary broomstick used to rape and kill her flung aside. Scrawny men on their knees, naked, by the ditch, lips moving in prayer as each awaited the crack of the rifle placed against the base of their skull. The writhing man taking his final gurgling gasps while that massive German shepherd roared and ripped at his throat.

Max would awake drenched in sweat, heart racing, the fear as harsh as it had been when he'd first witnessed those horrors.

Sig learned that autumn of a brilliant eye doctor in Wiesbaden, 165 miles away. The brothers caught rides from truck drivers, hoping for a different outcome. The assessment remained the same.

In December, Max and Sig returned to the Munich eye clinic as directed, to see if the eye drops were accomplishing anything deep inside the remaining eye. Dr. Wesseli—who had headed the clinic before the Nazis had come to power and installed their own man—had replaced Dr. Meisner. A grandfatherly sort, he took his time examining Max, who, although not new to the facility, was new to him.

“The medicine did not work,” Dr. Wesseli finally said. “I see no sign of improvement.” He paused a moment before continuing. “I believe you should know this, too, so you can begin to live your life: In my opinion, no eye doctor anywhere will be able to do anything, unless—and I believe this is unlikely—someone in the future develops a completely new technique or therapy.”

It was possible, the doctor knew, for a young man without a limb to live something close to a normal life; he had seen this often when farm and industrial accidents and wars stole arms and legs. Many men had also adjusted with relative ease to deafness. But complete blindness robbed a person of his sense of independence. Now that the final shred of hope had been snatched away, this man might decide to take his life, the doctor thought, not knowing that Max had already initiated the effort once before.

As Max began to rise, he felt a firm hand on his arm.

“You are going to be blind for the rest of your life,” Dr. Wesseli said evenly. “What will you do about it? I see three options. Option one: Feel sorry for yourself, and be a burden to your brothers and to society for the rest of your life. Option two: The Nazis didn't kill you; now you can do it yourself. That will prove you are a coward. Option three: Try to restore your life.”

He urged Max to enroll in a nearby rehabilitation school for blind adults. He would make a call to the superintendent to inquire whether Max could start with the next class.

“You will learn how to live independently. You will learn Braille and typewriting. You will learn a skill that will enable you to become self-supporting.”

Trust a German to chart his life? Unlikely. Still, Max requested a few minutes to discuss the matter with Sig, who listened with interest.

“We have nothing to lose,” Sig concluded.

Perhaps, Max told the doctor a few minutes later, he would be willing to try this idea of his. “And if it doesn't work, I can always return to option one or two.”

On January 2, 1946, at the age of twenty-three, eight months after his liberation, Max began attending the Rehabilitation School for Blind Adults in Tegernsee, south of Munich, a residential school with an iron-fisted approach to transforming blind men into productive citizens. Seventy men arrived that snow-swept winter day, all former Nazis but Max. Dr. Wesseli had warned that would likely be the case.

“Don't let anything that anyone says or does bother you. Pay attention to your studies, learn as well and as fast as you can, and get out of there as quickly as possible.”

Max's two roommates, Gerd Scholz and Sep Huber, had served as soldiers. Both had been conscripted to fight, however; they hadn't instantly raised their arms in support of Hitler and his policies and marched off to do his bidding. That mattered to Max. The three became good friends and had little to do with their other classmates.

The students learned, during the two to three years they would spend there, how to use knives and forks to eat food they couldn't see; how to shave themselves with a razor—tricky business, but a man couldn't walk about with nubs of stubble missed by imprecise swipes; how to take care of their clothes; how to walk from one place to another. They learned Braille. They learned how to avoid obstacles and keep themselves safe.

They were not coached on how to deal with the emotional aspects of having lost their sight. Raising the issue would have merely emphasized the disability, school officials thought, and they were devoted to banishing that sort of thinking, replacing it with a level of competence so high that graduates would entertain no feelings of weakness.

Classroom instruction took place from eight a.m. to four p.m., Monday through Friday, and from eight a.m. to noon on Saturday. Each night the men had hours of homework. The only breaks were two weeks of vacation every August and about ten days around Christmas. The grueling schedule was probably a deliberate strategy, Max thought, so as to allow no time for self-pity.

Vocational training offered instruction in professions that blind people could master and for which there was high demand: switchboard operators, court and medical transcriptionists, and physical therapists. Max chose physical therapy. He would not be a doctor, as his mother had hoped, but he would still be helping people. He found the study of anatomy and physiology mentally stimulating, and the practice sessions on veterans at a nearby hospital proved he was good at this work.

Every Saturday afternoon and Sunday young women from town volunteered to take a student or two to a movie or concert, for a walk, or to a cafe for coffee, and to read pages of their textbooks to them once they began studying for their vocations. School officials encouraged these interactions but warned the men against developing attachments, as becoming involved might interfere with their studies. There was undoubtedly another worry: that these men, still vulnerable because of their disability and most of them quite young, could be preyed upon by women motivated by the postwar shortage of males.

Helene, a few years older than Max, staked a regular claim on his weekends, taking him to cafes and reading his assignments to him. She worked at a jewelry store and had a son who didn't live with her. Max assumed that the child may have resulted from the kind of affairs of survival often conducted during war years, but he never asked, and she never offered.

It seemed casual enough for a time, but one Saturday when, after a concert, they stopped at a tavern for a beer, the air shifted sharply.

“It's too late to go back to the school now,” Helene said. “Why don't you stay in my room tonight?”

Helene was well skilled in the ways of love, an enthusiastic teacher who helped Max imagine through his hands everything he couldn't see with his eyes. The affair didn't last long, however. Worried that he might neglect his studies if he divided his focus, Max put an end to it.

A few months later, in the summer of 1947, after he had been at the school for eighteen months, Max developed an eye infection and was admitted into the eye clinic in Munich for several days. There he met Hanka, a young patient in for a minor procedure. A kittenish girl with a sunny disposition, she, too, was a Holocaust survivor. It was the first time that Max had had the chance to develop a relationship with someone who might understand what made him feel so different, so unwilling to form attachments or reach out. He never expressed that to her, not wishing to taint their time together, but the fact that they shared an underpinning of similar trauma had significance, he thought, even if they didn't speak of it. They spent their time together out of view of the nuns who ran the facility, laughing about silly things and grabbing kisses like a couple of boarding school adolescents.

When his eye infection resolved and he returned to school, Hanka visited Max several times. Despite his vow to avoid entanglements, he found himself emotionally caught up with the young woman. She was lively and cheerful except for those occasional moments when a blanket of melancholy, heavy and impenetrable, would settle unexpectedly over her, and she had given every indication that she was ready to tackle life anew. For his part, Max had learned to be self-sufficient, was growing confident in his abilities, and he was making excellent progress toward being able to pursue a profession. Maybe a life with her was possible. Perhaps the next time she visited he would broach the idea of becoming serious.