A Perfect Madness (23 page)

When Bouhler first mentioned the
committee’s decision-making authority over each patient’s case, it
was the bold presence of his father’s name on the committee that
both stunned and heartened Erich at first. There would be a back
door opened on every case, if his father would listen to him.
Bouhler had said that a unanimous decision would be required by the
committee in each case before a plus mark indicating “no available
therapy” could be placed on a child’s file. A simple dissent from
his father, nothing more, could be the grace he sought. What Erich
didn’t hear, though, were the brief disturbing words being
exchanged between Bouhler and his father, as he was
leaving.

“
Your son Erich concerns
me, Dr. Schmidt. We don’t want any trouble from him,” Bouhler
said.

“
I assure you, he will
follow orders and perform his duty. He was involved with the Knauer
child, you know,” Dr. Schmidt responded meekly.

“
I do know, Doctor, and he
and Dr. Schneider voiced an objection.”

“
As I said—”

“
It is only because of you
that he’s not fighting now on the Eastern front, or worse, given to
the Gestapo. Talk with him and report back to me at once, if he
will become a problem,” Bouhler said harshly.

“
I understand,” was all
Dr. Schmidt could say before Bouhler turned his back to him and
began talking privately with Dr. Heinze.

Later in the evening, Erich sat with
his father at a small sidewalk café close to the hospital. He had
selected the café because most of the patrons chose to dine outside
in the cool night air, hungrily smoking their cigarettes like they
were a part of each dinner course, leaving the inside area mostly
empty. Privacy was available at the very back tables, where lovers
could go and dine in secret. Their greeting at the meeting in Dr.
Heinze’s office had been cordial, but not warm. Even now, both sat
in silence waiting for the other to speak. It was as if they had
just been introduced to each other for the first time and were
struggling for words that might impress the other. After a glass of
wine, Dr. Schmidt stared hard at his son’s troubled
face.

“
Philipp Bouhler is
concerned about your political philosophy,” he uttered in a low
voice, unsure whether the Gestapo might be secreted unseen
somewhere in the empty café.

“
I would think so, Father.
It’s difficult to change what you are and have always been. You
should know that as a psychiatrist.”

“
It’s not whether you want
to change, Erich—you must, or you will be transferred to the
Eastern Front to fight the Russians.”

Erich grew silent for a moment,
looking at the strange darkness now covering his father’s face.
Once it had glistened with unbounded excitement when simply looking
through a microscope in his laboratory at life he had seen many
times before. Before this war is over, no one will be spared such a
terrible darkness, Erich believed.

“
What happened to you, to
us, Father?”

“
What do you
mean?”

“
We are not monsters,
we’re people, human beings. And the sick children are too. You
should know that.”

“
You are wrong, Erich.
Tell me, do you think God would waste a good soul on idiots like
the Knauer child? He’s not that dumb,” his father said loudly,
becoming red in the face and thumping the table with a
fist.

“
Perhaps He has hopes.
That’s all a soul has anyway,” Erich answered, surprised by his
father’s outburst.

“
You are speaking rot now.
I am talking medically, as a doctor. These children are nothing,
absolutely nothing. They are already dead. A garden slug would find
more delight in life then these creatures.”

“
Perhaps we have an
inflated concept of humanity—or is it a life unworthy of life,”
Erich said facetiously, mocking the credo being put forth by the
Health Ministry.

“
I would be very careful
how you use those words, if I were you. The Chancellery has ears
and knows of your close affair with the Jewish woman in Prague.
They are watching to see where your loyalty lies.”

This time Erich had no ready answer
for his father. But he felt his sharp rebuke. The same cold fear
that paralyzed him in the Black Forest when confronted by the
soldiers began creeping through his veins again as if he had
suddenly been given a transfusion of ice water.

“
You’ve changed, Father.
It’s as if we’re no longer of the same blood.”

“
No, it is you who should
return to your roots. I am a scientist first, and my passion for
cleansing the German race is here before me. A sick Germany can
become healthier by removing the misfits. We should embark on this
great voyage together as father and son.”

Moved by his father’s words, Erich
reached out to touch his arm but stopped short when he abruptly
arose from the table.

“
I must return to Berlin
now, to another meeting. And then to Dresden to spend a few days
with your mother,” he said.

Then he came around the table and
stood next to Erich, looking tenderly at his face.

“
You must do your duty,
you have no choice.”

With those words, he turned and left
the café, leaving Erich to wonder if he would ever see him again.
They were more distant than ever now, it seemed. Watching his
father disappear into the night was no different than what he had
always done, suddenly appearing in his life from the shadows for a
few minutes, then quickly disappearing like a phantom into the
night. Most people travel far to find out what they are, only to
find they had become what they pretended to be all along. But not
his father. He had never pretended. Fact and fiction were wedded in
him for as long as Erich could remember. His father was the
complete package now with no ambiguities, able to carry out that
which he had theorized for so long in eugenics. The passion he had
nursed since childhood for biology and Darwin’s survival of the
fittest had become the ruling voice of German medicine. His rapid
involvement in the National Socialist Party first began with a
mesmerizing speech by Rudolph Hess declaring National Socialism to
be nothing more than applied biology. Unknown to Erich, who was
studying medicine then in Prague, his father’s zeal as a missionary
for eugenics had brought him quickly into the inner circle of the
Health Ministry. There he became a powerful intellectual voice for
euthanasia as the final therapy for the misfits in society, joining
the rising chorus of Brandt and Bouhler and others. Still, in doing
so, he would insist that any such program must always remain in the
hands of the doctor, as it has through the ages.

How his father had come to this place
in his life would stay a mystery to Erich. His father fervently
embraced the Hippocratic Oath, yet felt, like most German
psychiatrists, that mental patients lacked ordinary human
qualities, were not persons, and should not be allowed to
propagate. Sterilization was the grand solution, he would argue, as
America was so busily doing, always stopping short when the idea of
eliminating them as a cure was placed on the table for discussion.
Why his father changed, Erich knew he would never know. Their
lively discussions and debates and games of the mind, always as
intellectuals, never father and son, no longer mattered to his
father. They did to Erich, however. The small warmth and intimacy
they brought to him was all he had ever enjoyed with his father,
all that had seemed real and normal to him as his son.

Leaving the café, Erich stopped and
gazed for a still moment at the night skies above him, as he often
did. There were no stars, only an empty blackness with no end
wherever he looked, much like the quickening turns in his life. It
seemed to him that he had been chasing the wind all his life,
hoping to catch it one day and ride on it far away to a bright new
world. But now, the fabric of his tomorrows that he had so
carefully woven was unraveling, and he didn’t know why. Nothing was
real anymore.

***

SEVENTEEN

Erich, 1941

A
fter another
sleepless night, the warm shimmering rays of the morning sun made
everything seem like another world to Erich. He could only wish it
were so, where he could hide forever with Julia by his side. There
were no more innocent Edens left, though, for those in love to
discover.

Entering the hospital again, nothing
was certain in his mind other than his physical presence there.
What he would do as a doctor when the time came to put a malformed
child to sleep forever was as distant from him as God seemed to be
now. How fragile moral conscience becomes when fear and duty come
through the door to one’s future at the same time. He had theorized
about such a happening with Julia and her father one cold, sunless
winter afternoon only a few months before Prague fell. It was as if
the subject had been hiding somewhere deep within the folds of his
conscience, which was struggling to understand what was happening.
For Julia and her father, fear was a permanent resident living
somewhere in their ancient genes because they were Jews. And like
the Jews of history, even though it was there, they lived and
played and sang and would die as God intended them to.

“
Fear, like everything
else, can be good or bad. To fear God is good. To fear dying is
bad. It’s as simple as that,” Professor Kaufmann had said, ending
the long afternoon discussion.

Later Erich expressed to Julia his
disappointment in such a trite statement by her father. He had
expected much more than a two-sentence explanation from such a
learned man. Something, maybe, from Kant’s treatises on duty, or
perhaps Hume’s defense on the priority of emotions in one’s life.
Anything would be better than what Dr. Kaufmann had passed on.
Julia quickly agreed, yet she knew what her father was saying.
Compromise is never an option where one is faced with doing either
a good or bad thing. For Erich, though, Darwin’s survival of the
fittest was all about fear, and had to be a part of everyone’s
struggle to live. It was as much a part of fitness as strength and
health. We do not survive in life without fear, he had argued to
Julia and her father. Hitler and those around him knew this to be
true, too, he pronounced almost arrogantly, pacing back and forth
in their tiny living room that day. To defeat the goodness of one’s
soul, there was no weapon on earth equal to fear. And it becomes
doubly powerful when a political ideology seeks its own validation
through scientific means like those to be implemented at Görden and
other hospitals throughout Germany. There, Erich knew, the best of
doctors would quickly succumb to the combined lure of science and
fear, leaving only a saintly few to resist, who would in time grow
silent, too. Still, he was still not sure which road he would take
when the moment finally came. A compromise by the soul that might
heal some distant day would be the ideal road to take, if there
were such a thing to be found. Though one’s soul would have to make
room for a joint owner other than God if that were to happen, Erich
mumbled to himself as he walked to the East Ward where he had been
assigned.

Nothing in the hospital had changed
from yesterday, which he had hoped it might, as he walked through
the halls before returning to the nurse’s station. The darkness in
the halls was still unnerving. Piles of trash and discarded
bandages lay in the corners of the halls waiting to be hauled away.
Only the faint muffled sounds of coughing and crying from children
could be heard coming from a few rooms as he walked by. Most of the
rooms were still empty, their beds unused, which puzzled Erich at
first. But then he remembered that the compulsory registration,
spoken of by Bouhler, of all mentally and physically disabled
children under three had been in effect only a few days. Soon the
children would come to Görden and the beds would be filled and he
would be busy being a good doctor.

Erich sat down behind the broad marble
counter that encircled the station and began to read through the
first of a small stack of patient records.

“
Good morning, Herr Dr.
Schmidt.”

Erich looked up quickly to find the
nurse he briefly spoke with yesterday peering intently at him from
the other side of the counter.

“
I am Nurse Drossen,” she
continued, smiling, “and I should be sitting there and you standing
here. May I help you with anything?”

“
Yes, what is your full
name?”

“
Maria
Drossen.”

“
May I address you as
Maria?” Erich asked bluntly, surprising her by his bold dismissal
of the professional decorum expected from German doctors. Though he
had no good reason for doing so, the situation he found himself in
seemed to call for it. His eyes had been quick to follow her
outline in the crisp white uniform she was wearing, which to him
seemed the only thing clean and sanitized in the hospital.
Strikingly attractive, but not in a pretty way, she appeared taller
than most German women, made so by her long blonde hair coiled
neatly in a large bun on top of her head.

“
No, now please, Herr
Doctor, you should begin making morning rounds, not sitting in my
station. I’ll be in trouble if the head nurse finds me standing
here and you sitting there,” Maria said, walking around to the side
opening in the counter by a metal gate, waiting for Erich to
move.