The Chosen Ones (49 page)

Dead, after just three and a half weeks in a hospital
, Mrs D says, turning to face the dumbstruck public,
and at home, with us, she lived for fifteen and a half years!

There are other witnesses to follow Mrs D that day, including the nursing assistant Anny Wödl. Anny Wödl was not at Steinhof but was an employee of the Allgemeines Krankenhaus. She had looked after her little boy Alfred at home for six years and was a single parent throughout. Alfred, according to Wödl, ‘understood everything you said to him but couldn’t speak’. His legs were apparently also not entirely functional because his walking was very poor:

But then 1938 arrived, the republic was dissolved and the Nazis took over. Terrible rumours were doing the rounds among people who worked in healthcare, stories about how the new authorities dealt with the old and the mentally ill. One of Wödl’s closest colleagues at the AKH had a son who was mentally retarded and had been at Steinhof since several years back. Now, she visited him as often as she could because she was so worried that something would be done to him. The day came when she arrived at Steinhof only to be told that her son was no longer a patient there. He had been transferred, as part of war-related measures, as they said –
kriegsbedingte Massnahme.
By then, all official decisions and all newly introduced systems of social order were explained in terms of the war effort and its demands. The boy’s mother was told that he was now in a spa resort on the German Baltic coast. A couple of weeks later, she received a letter telling her that her son had ‘died suddenly’. Around this time, thousands of other women in Wien also received letters speaking of ‘sudden death’ having struck down their children, parents or close relatives. Those who approached the hospital board at Steinhof and demanded to be told more about these deaths, and in particular what caused them, were referred to the city’s main office for public health, the Hauptgesundheitsamt, on Schottenring, but once there, the enquirers were referred on again, this time to various committees within the Ministry for Internal Affairs in Berlin. By
then, all important decisions were made in Berlin. One group of distraught women decided to club together and send a representative to Berlin, charged with making enquiries and demanding answers. The women chose Anny Wödl to represent them (even though Wödl herself had not yet shared their experiences; her son Alfred was still in the Gugging home and well cared for). ‘People from Wien plead for their relatives’ –
Wiener bitten für Angehörige
– is the entry in the visitor’s book at the ministry on Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin on 23 July 1940, the day Nurse Assistant Anny Wödl arrived in the capital of the Reich. She was received by Doctor Herbert Linden, Secretary of State with responsibility for Section IV, which dealt with healthcare and public health –
Gesundheitswesen und Volkspflege
. This section (abbreviated T4) had final say in decisions about which individuals in the Reich should be weeded out for reasons, as related to racial purity or social medicine, that turned them into so many millstones around the neck of the healthcare system, already under severe strain from the war effort. What must be prioritised, after all, was to make the system ready to serve the essentially healthy and fit for work, whose contributions of course include producing future generations of children in sound mental and physical health and, thus, enhancing the racial stock. Doctor Linden explained all this in precise detail to Anny Wödl and his calm, matter-of-fact kindness included an element of firmness. He also commented on the need for the transport of patients to take place at night since it prevented unnecessary and potentially damaging rumours from spreading among the general public. Furthermore, it must be obvious to all that Wien and Ostmark could not be exempt from a healthcare policy that by definition applied to the entire Reich. There was a war on, after all. Germany must be prepared to strengthen its preparedness on all fronts. That means the internal front as well, he said. How are
we to keep up our preparedness to go into battle if, for reasons of sentiment or similar feelings, we end up soiling our race, undermining our morals and weakening our will and our strength of character? And that was that. Wödl had to accept that this message was all she would ever get to bring back from Berlin. She set out for Wien and, in January 1941, half a year later, she learnt in various underhand ways that her son Alfred had been forced to undergo a new medical examination which showed that the boy suffered from what the doctor described as ‘athetotis’. The symptoms are spasmodic, involuntary movements that are often slow and oddly writhing; in addition to the motor effects, co-ordination was also disturbed. The doctor suggested that the condition might have followed an attack of encephalitis, the same inflammation of the membranes around the brain that had also caused Alfred to develop ‘a medium degree of debility’ and meant that he became almost permanently bedridden. On 6 February, Anny Wödl received a card, sent to the AKH ward where she was working at the time. The card stated:

On 15 February, Doctor Heinrich Gross examined Alfred and also took a photograph of him. In the photo, the miracle-boy Alfred Wödl stares with serious, eerily enquiring eyes at the doctor and his camera. Perhaps the child had not quite grasped what an enlightening observation Gross felt that he had just made. The doctor added a triumphant note to Alfred’s record:
The child is half Jewish! (15.02.41).
Clearly, the pieces had clicked into place: Alfred was born out of
wedlock, the Wödl woman had never disclosed who the father was and the boy’s condition had never been ascribed to a credible medical cause. Meanwhile, Anny Wödl succeeded in getting in touch with the Spiegelgrund clinic’s medical director, Doctor Erwin Jekelius. Many years later, she tells the court that she had completely given up on hoping to save her child and says this about the meeting with Jekelius:

Anny Wödl sits looking down and crying quietly. The courtroom is still and silent. The chairman of the bench calls the witness Anna Katschenka. The chief witness for the prosecution. Now, the atmosphere among the public changes to outrage. Someone screams
murderess!
when Katschenka is escorted into the court. She walks at her usual slow pace but to the public it looks as if she tries to resist the two court attendants who hold on to her arms. To those who know her, she seems wearier than before. She will now be asked to testify about the actions of the defendants, who are seated together, Hübsch and Illing on either side of Türk. They all stare at her with inexpressive faces. Faces set in stone. It is impossible to tell whether they feel ill at ease or are supremely indifferent. The prosecutor starts speaking at once about the so-called mercy killing of children. He reads aloud from a text which sets out the events following a child’s admission: the physical examination followed by a report to the
committee in Berlin, and the subsequent response by Spiegelgrund staff to the ministry’s decision about the child, including any recommended ‘treatment’.

Have I described all this correctly, Mrs Katschenka?

Anna Katschenka doesn’t know what to say. She looks at the stone faces opposite her, then down at her hands – worn, rough-skinned but clean hands, used to doing what they intend, effectively, be it to tuck in a corner of a sheet or compress a vein before inserting the syringe needle; they are supportive, helpful and sometimes punitive hands and not the kind that are mere tools. You cannot ignore what they have been up to. Sometimes, she has thought that her hands are her: all she is. And sometimes, at night, she has put them on her face and thought that they should stay there, stay for so long that they fuse to her skin. She doesn’t know if this would be a gesture towards expressing shame or grief or abandonment or all of these things at the same time. But she knows that she will sit with her face resting on those hands until the sentence is announced and the stone faces will observe her with their high-minded or indifferent eyes and everyone will think that she is to be punished as it is only what she deserves, given the acts these hands have carried out.

Much celebration in the courtroom. Anna Katschenka does try to stand up but on hearing the words of the most senior judge present, she sinks back onto her seat and almost falls forward, burying her face in her hands. When the attendants put their hands under her arms to support her, her weeping makes her shoulders shake so much it is almost impossible to raise her. For a brief moment, the woman, her face streaming with tears, looks up at the three stone faced doctors on the defendants’ seats: superiors whom she for this last time could not bring herself to betray. When she is led away, the audience is in uproar. This is more than anyone dared to hope for: a murderess who is arrested right in front of witnesses and victims. The three stone faces stay where they are. Illing turns his head slightly away, as if he found the entire performance repulsive.