A Perfect Madness (25 page)

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EIGHTEEN

Erich, Görden Hospital, 1941

T
he night was good to
Erich this time, no more other worlds to hide from, no more
monsters to fight and slay. Dreams as they should be came to him,
dancing magically throughout the night in his sleeping thoughts.
Even though his father had sternly warned him about duty and honor
and the consequences of failure, he still was his father’s son, and
Erich knew his father would help him. With the start of his morning
shift at the hospital still two hours away, an early morning walk
in the cool air along the Havel River was the right place to
prepare the words he would soon speak to his father. He would tell
him then that performing one’s duty only out of fear has no honor,
no goodness attached to it, unless it is the right thing to do at
the moment. And surely now, all that was being expected of him was
wrong.

Erich arrived at the hospital fifteen
minutes early and went straight to the East Ward, where he saw
Maria laughing with two nurses leaving from the night shift. As he
approached them, the two nurses quickly walked away, leaving Maria
alone standing by her desk.

“
Good morning, Herr
Doctor. You look fresh and well.”

“
Thank you, I am. What
time will the committee be here? Do we have time to see the
children again before they arrive?” Erich asked in an excited
tone.

Hesitating, Maria picked up the
children’s files, handing them to him.

Erich hurriedly opened the first file,
which was little Brigitte’s. A form that he had never seen before
lay on top of the admitting sheet. But he read no further. On the
left side of the form, the names of his father and Dr. Catel and
Dr. Heinze were printed.

“
My father was with the
committee?” he asked, not believing his eyes.

“
Yes. Dr. Brandt was
detained in Berlin. They met here very early and left. That’s all I
know. Dr. Heinze will be here soon to walk the morning rounds with
you.”

“
My father was with them?”
Erich asked a second time, not listening to Maria’s
words.

The winds of hope that had filled his
sails this morning became as still and listless as an ocean calm,
where he would flounder helplessly. On the right side under the
heading “Treatment” were three columns with a space available
parallel to each of the three names. A bold plus mark had been
penciled in the left column by each name, which included his
father’s. Erich’s heart sank and he asked Maria to get him a drink
of water. The plus mark meant only one thing: the killing of the
child. It had no other meaning. There was no other way to say it.
All he had hoped for was one minus sign noted in the middle column,
which would have allowed the child to live. His father could have
done this, but didn’t.

Maria returned with a glass of water,
placed it on the desk, and sat down next to Erich. The blood had
drained from his face, leaving him as white as the paper he had
been reading.

“
You look sick. Let me get
you a cold towel,” Maria said, starting to stand up.

“
No don’t, this will pass.
It’s not easy to accept being betrayed by your father. He knew how
I felt about this whole goddamned mess. Yet, his plus mark is
bigger and bolder than the other two.”

“
Perhaps he meant to tell
you, time has so little meaning now for all of us in this
war.”

“
No, the bastard sat
across from me at dinner several days back and said nothing, not a
word about the committee. Duty with honor was the topic he had
chosen for discussion—my duty and his honor,” Erich said
hatefully.

Erich started to open the second file
but stopped and put it back with the others in the stack. There was
no reason to read it, he knew. The plus marks of death would be
there, too. These four children were in worse shape than little
Brigitte—blind or deaf, or both, and badly deformed. Two
one-year-olds with dangling microcephalic heads no bigger than an
apple. Another sightless and deaf with two stubs for legs. The
fourth child, deaf and an imbecile—there was no other way for Erich
to describe him. All were innocent victims of some misguided step
in evolution’s wiring at some unexpected moment in their mother’s
womb. But Erich knew there would be others to come, thousands
perhaps, whose only deformities were hidden in the terrors of their
twisted insane minds. They were the frightening ones, scorned by a
society that delighted in keeping the threshold low between that
which was normal and abnormal. There was no room for the delightful
eccentricities of silly people.

Maria saw Dr. Heinze approaching from
the far end of the main hall before Erich did and moved to the
front of the station to greet him. Erich remained seated at the
desk, acknowledging Dr. Heinze’s presence only after he stood
before him and spoke.

“
Good morning, Nurse
Drossen. Good morning, Herr Dr. Schmidt.”

Erich nodded but did not
smile.

“
I have reviewed the files
again, Dr. Heinze. Perhaps we should see the children now,” he said
curtly, handing the files to Maria and walking towards the infant
Brigitte’s room without waiting for Dr. Heinze.

In her room, and the others that
followed, Erich carefully described in descriptive detail, to the
amazement of Dr. Heinze and Maria, each and every affliction
suffered by the five children and where there might be a good
possibility of therapy. No one looked closely at the children,
though, nor touched them. The diagnostic pictures he painted were
too vivid to doubt. When they were through, Erich looked at his
watch. The medical rounds with Dr. Heinze had taken only fifteen
minutes; killing them would take longer—an absurdity in itself that
Erich would not soon forget.

Back at the nurse’s station, Dr.
Heinze told Erich to come to his office in twenty minutes to a
staff meeting of all attending doctors. There the treatment of
these children and those that were to come would be finalized.
Erich again said nothing, only nodding that he would. He had yet to
speak Dr. Heinze’s name, or show him the courtesy his position
demanded. Ignoring all protocol, he had walked ahead of him in the
hall and to the rooms, not behind him, or even next to him—as if it
were his only means of protesting the absurdity of what they were
acting out—a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by Dr. Heinze and Maria.
But Erich knew that the few grains of sand left in the hourglass
would soon fall to the bottom, freezing him forever in all that was
around him as if it were a new unseen dimension in time.

Maria stood silent, watching Erich,
waiting for him to acknowledge her presence, even though she was
standing close to him. A healthy hue was in his face again, and his
hands were calm and his walk deliberate as he moved to her desk and
sat down.

“
I will need a notepad to
take with me to the meeting. They will talk about the final therapy
procedure, I am sure,” Erich said anxiously, motioning to Maria,
who quickly opened a side drawer under the counter, retrieving a
blue notepad for him.

“
I will be here when you
return, should you need to talk about what is to happen,” Maria
said softly, as Erich started down the hall towards Dr. Heinze’s
office.

Six doctors, besides Erich, took their
seats in front of Dr. Heinze’s desk waiting for his appearance,
which usually came exactly ten minutes after everyone had
assembled. It was a disarming trick he had learned from waiting on
Philipp Bouhler in the Health Ministry. Important people are never
punctual, nor should they be. It is our right, he believed. Then
for the next two hours, continually mixing patriotic fervor with
substance, Dr. Heinze spelled out to the small group the medical
protocol to be followed, how they would welcome the children sent
to them, and how they would kill them. Everything he was saying
displayed a sophistication of thought by the Chancellery and Health
Ministry in planning the program to be undertaken at Görden. It
would not be a one-time event, Erich realized, but a mass
undertaking that had been carefully crafted by leaders in the
Ministry, which included his father.

Strangely though, of all that Dr.
Heinze had said, it was the lie that the doctors would be compelled
to tell the parents about their child’s death that bothered Erich
the most. After the death of a child, the attending doctor was to
write the parents a kind and gentle letter, telling them of their
child’s death from unexpected complications, nothing more. There
would be nothing entered in the medical records of the child other
than time of death and a fictitious cause. To Erich, everyone knew
there was nothing more sacred in a physician-patient relationship
than the truth, and the lying and the killing they were ordering
were not the same. The killing could be explained with reason, as a
cold necessity like Hitler had said, but not a lie. And no mother
should be lied to when it came to the death of her child, or
anything else for that matter. Lying is a man’s way of trying to
hide from God, his mother had told him, and He won’t let you do
that more than once or twice before shipping you off to hell, which
frightened him terribly. Lying to yourself didn’t count with God,
though she thought it should, because you were only fooling and
hurting yourself. So, he never lied again to his mother, or
himself, or to anyone else. He would pretend though, which wasn’t
lying, because he always knew it wasn’t real, much like pretending
his father really did love him.

Clearly disturbed by what he was
hearing, Erich grew restless, stirring in his chair, crossing and
uncrossing his legs trying to get comfortable, and somehow shut his
ears to the nonsense sputtering endlessly from Dr. Heinze’s mouth.
Finally, swept up by the drama of the moment, Dr. Heinze rose and
walked slowly from behind his desk, pausing for a moment in front
of each doctor until he came to Erich, where he stood in silence,
staring hard at him.

“
We doctors are warriors
for the Fatherland, too. Everyone here should think carefully on
these words, lest we forget them,” he said calmly but with a hidden
agenda of terror clearly behind his voice.

Then he left the room, which had
suddenly become cold with an eerie uneasiness that everyone felt.
No one spoke, nor stood to leave for several minutes, each afraid
of what the others might think and say behind his back.

Erich did not return to the East Ward,
but walked straight to the medical library and sat down at the
second of the two tables there. To him, the ancient Greek
playwrights couldn’t have written a greater drama. Only the chorus
of chanting voices was missing. All of their virtues and struggles
were carefully rolled up in a bundle of nonsensical emotions and
placed before him on the table. Duty and fear and courage and all
the others, even suicide, were all there laid out to be seen and
wrestled with. It was not an “Either/Or” moment of truth, as long
argued by Kierkegaard, whom he fancied greatly. Instead, it was a
decision to survive, to stay alive one more day, and then the day
after, until God finally decided to change the barrel organ tune
that everyone was dancing to.

Strangely, Erich tried to imagine what
Julia would say if she were here with him this very moment. The
courage she would bring to the table, though, would be unfair,
because he had no equal to it. His father’s thoughts meant nothing
either, because they had long been anchored in drifting sand, blown
about by the winds of change each passing day. But his mother’s
decision at this moment, he knew, would be from her heart, what
roads she believed in traveling, though they might be the wrong
ones. Courage had no merit to her because it was a male thing; only
duty counted. Whether it was right or wrong didn’t matter. Goodness
came to you in performing one’s duty, nothing more. The duty to
tell the truth, or tend to your neighbor, or fight for your country
were all one and the same, Christian virtues to the core, so it
seemed to her. However, neither she nor Julia were doctors.
Whatever they believed in, the ancient sanctity of the
physician/patient relationship was missing for them. This holy
treasure, carefully wrapped through the centuries with the fabric
of Hippocrates’s robe, transcended all other duties. And it was
this treasure the Health Ministry set about changing, making the
physician/patient relationship beholden to the state.

Erich walked back to the stack of
journals near the door and lifted from the bottom shelf the journal
he had taken and returned unread,
The New
German
Physician
. Nothing original was offered in the words before him
until he reached the core of the arguments being made for what a
German physician should be, particularly in wartime. With so many
of Germany’s best and bravest facing death on the battlefields, the
argument went, it was imperative on the physician “to come to terms
with counter-selection in their own people.” He had never heard the
term “counter-selection” used in medicine, or anywhere else for
that matter. It was presented coldly for the first time, as a moral
choice that the new physician must consider.

What came next in the treatise
surprised Erich even more by its careful reasoning. Infant
mortality is a process of natural selection, with the majority of
the cases affecting the constitutionally inferior. But now advances
in medicine dramatically interfere with this selection. Therefore,
the task of the new German physician becomes that of restoring the
balance of nature to its original form through the process of
counter-selection. Not to do so would be ethically unacceptable.
This was it, what the physician should be about, and it bothered
Erich because it made good sense and was quite seductive. Unless
the incurable die, true healing of the sick and protecting the
nation’s health would be impossible.