The Chosen Ones (51 page)

The Archive of the Dead
    In March 1997, a previously locked cellar under the old autopsy rooms at Steinhof was opened up and,
inside it, the body parts of almost eight hundred children, all one-time ‘patients’ at the Spiegelgrund clinic, were discovered. The items removed from their corpses were stored in thirty-centimetre-tall glass jars, carefully labelled, numbered and lined up on the dusty shelving. No personal details are given on the labels. The specimens were sorted by age and gender (e.g.
4 J
– it stood for: boy [
Junge
], aged 4) or body weight (e.g.
10 kg
) but the labels usually also state the main diagnoses, written with blue ink that has faded over the years –
Results: Normal; Diagnosis: Idiocy
. All belong to what Doctor Gross has referred to in innumerable scientific articles as his personal set of anatomical specimens:
a remarkable range of good-quality anatomical specimens
…
probably the greatest and most wide-ranging collection of its kind available anywhere in this country.
Behind the grimy glass, whole brains or dissected bits of the central nervous system float in viscous formaldehyde solution; a child’s jaw with a preserved growth clinging to it like swollen seaweed; an entire face floating as if in a dream, with its eyes closed while its slightly parted lips curl in an expression of perennial wonder. Between the rows of tightly packed glass jars, the jars on the next rack of shelving can be glimpsed. An ever-unfolding perspective, as one line of shelves opens out into a view of another in a space that seems without end. The search for the identity of individuals will surely also go on forever, with the numbered jars being checked against case-note entries to find the diagnosis of the brain damage so that each anonymous specimen is seen to have been part of someone once alive.
Whole body paralysis. Hermine A.
Hermine is admitted to Spiegelgrund on 8 February 1943 and Doctor Illing’s diagnosis is
profound idiocy
(
tief-stehende Idiotie
). On the same day, the state committee in Berlin is notified of her case. The girl’s general health is ‘deteriorating markedly’ (a case note records ‘fever, 39 degrees’) but despite this, a full
pneumoencephalographic investigation is carried out five days later. Doctor Illing has already scheduled the autopsy of Hermine’s body but wants a set of the images of the live brain tissue. After the skull X-rays, Hermine dies without regaining consciousness.
Fifteen-year-old Ingeborg S
. Ingeborg S suffers from paraplegia but also occasional muscle spasms and cramps. The case notes show that her fits are treated with Luminal. The girl has to be ‘tied’ so as not to ‘tear herself free’ during the night. Doctor Illing notifies the Berlin committee of Ingeborg’s case – his stated reason is that the Luminal has failed to bring about any ‘progress’ – and then she, too, is subjected to a pneumoencephalography, even though she fell ill with measles the week before and, as the day nurse notes, ‘runs a high temperature’. Two days later, Ingeborg succumbs to ‘bilateral pneumonia’. As in all other cases, it is Doctor Uiberrak who carries out the post-mortem examinations, usually with either Gross or Illing present as curious observers – as Doctor Uiberrak made a special point of stating in the pre-trial interviews. The brain is lifted out and placed in the correct strength of formaldehyde solution. A selection of glands are also removed and preserved. The girl has been transformed into a nameless object to be taken out and examined, again and again. The dead don’t die just once. They keep dying.

The Last Interview with Doctor Gross
    In April 1997, a court case is once again brought against Heinrich Gross. This time, the charges are based on new evidence that includes a document recovered from an old Stasi archive in Berlin. In it, Doctor Illing asks the committee to approve a retrospective grant to the clinic in order to finance the work done by Doctor Gross during the summer of 1944, in view of his record of ‘support for the great task of the Reich committee’. Gross had previously claimed that, during the summer of 1944, he
was resting and, in any case, he had not set foot in the clinic since he was called up to join the Wehrmacht in 1943. This time round, the prosecutor can prove that Doctor Gross was fully engaged in the work of the clinic throughout the summer, and that he, during that time, examined, notified the authorities and subsequently ‘treated’ twelve children or more, of whom the youngest was ten days old when examined, and the oldest fourteen. Hannes Pichler was one of these children. He was seen by Gross on 19 July 1944. Hannes was three months old and had been born with a severe malformation of the face. Evaluations of the child’s psychological or neurological status were ‘impossible in the circumstances’, according to Doctor Gross’s notes. Following routines that were by then established since years back, the boy is taken to the infant ward in pavilion 15, pneumoencephalograms are produced, and Berlin is notified of the case. Presumably in view of the child’s malformed face, the committee recommends ‘treatment’ and the baby dies on 26 August that year. But even though both the record of the examination and the report to Berlin carry his signature, Doctor Gross continues to deny everything.

And so, Doctor Gross, through the medium of his team of lawyers, continues to contradict and deny everything, despite the prosecution’s presentation of solid evidence for his participation in twelve murders. In parallel with these denials, the defence also attempts to persuade the court that Doctor Gross is incapable of following the proceedings. The court is shown medical certificates stating that the defendant is suffering from a whole array of illnesses: diabetes; chronic infection of the bladder; angina; impaired mobility; and partial deafness. 21 March 2000 turns out to be the last day of the trial. Doctor Gross is eighty-four years old, his back is bent and he moves with small steps, dragging his feet across the floor. He wears a cap pulled down over his eyes and leans on his stick while gripping the arm of his lawyer’s son, who slowly escorts him to the defendants’ seats. He sinks rather than sits down, then slumps so that all you see under the brim of his cap are his large, broad-rimmed glasses and a part of his bulbous nose. As the hearing gets underway, Doctor Gross sags so much that he almost falls off his chair, a disaster prevented only when a court attendant reaches out to support him at the last moment. By now, the judge is worried enough to incline
towards the defendant:
Mr Gross, do you understand what I’m saying?
he asks. The reply is indistinct but something like:
not so well. A bit
. At this juncture, the lead advocate in the Gross team opens his document case and produces a trump card: a recently done CT scan of his eminent client’s brain. It demonstrates advanced dementia, a process which, according to the psychiatrist who had requested and then analysed the scans, would bring about memory loss and recurring states of confusion. It takes only another five minutes for the court to decide that, in view of the defendant’s failing health, the proceedings should be postponed for another eighteen months. However, Doctor Gross is spared more court attendances. He dies on 15 December 2005, aged ninety, in his home town of Hollabrunn. He seems not to have recovered from his selective memory loss. And he is never convicted of the murders of the Spiegelgrund children, or even of being an accomplice to the murders.

One night, as I lay in bed listening to the flow of the river, I felt it was true; I was like a river with the earth below and the air above. The true river had stopped, and I was the one who flowed farther and farther away, all alone in the center, trees on both sides.

From
Death in Spring
(
La mort i la primavera
) by Mercè Rodoreda. Translation from the Catalan by Martha Tennant (Open Letter Books, University of Rochester, 2009)

From one day to the next, without any noticeable resistance, a hospital in Wien turned into a camp for children with alleged mental handicaps. At Spiegelgrund, these children were subjected to tests of their fitness for life; they were measured, reported on, maltreated, tortured and murdered. The authorities slandered their parents and operated behind their backs. ‘Once the child has died, its relatives tend to stop caring’, one murderous doctor wrote in someone’s case notes. He does not mention that he had prevented the parents from being in contact with their child before as well as after the murder. He would later deny what had happened and stay silent until all was forgotten. Some of the children escaped from this lethal institution, others survived inside it. All those who survived have for decades borne witness to what went on at Spiegelgrund. They have described, carefully and circumstantially, the individuals who tormented and murdered the children there but who still have, unhindered, carried on living and working in this city as if their pasts were clean. After the sentence passed in the court of Oberlandsgericht Wien on 30 March 1981, it became possible to declare everywhere in this nation that Doctor Gross, a senior consultant, had collaborated in ‘the killing of an unknown number of children diagnosed with mental illness, mental retardation or severe malformations (who may or may not have been ill for genetic or other reasons) and that the unknown number of victims, while likely to have been very large, at least can be stated with certainty as amounting to several hundred’. Here, in the city graveyard of Zentralfriedhof, more than
six hundred urns have been buried. As of today, we are aware of seven hundred and eighty-nine murdered children. The number grows with every passing year. Today, we also know that no less than fifteen per cent of the total population of Wien were destined to be eliminated. This was the estimate of the ‘required negative selection’ recommended by eugenics specialists as an essential measure of ‘racial hygiene’. Even so, the doctor who had made euthanasia part of his work could continue in the post he held in 1981: medical director at Steinhof. At the time, the Secretary of State for Healthcare was Alois Stacher. Gross became a recognised forensic psychiatrist. The Minister of Justice at the time was Christian Broda. Gross kept his post at the Boltzmann Institute. The research community did not find it problematic in the slightest when we presented evidence proving that the specimens used by Doctor Gross were taken from murder victims. Herta Firnberg was the Minister for Science and Bruno Kreisky the Chancellor of Austria. At the time, only the survivors, who are represented here today, protested against this terrifying indifference. Since 1981, they have been striving towards a single aim: that the children who were reduced to medical specimens should be mourned and buried. What Antigone demanded for her brother, slain by Creon, is what we, too, have demanded for two decades on behalf of the innocent children who died at Spiegelgrund: a grave. Why deny them a grave for so long? Why has society refused to believe in the witness statements made by the survivors? Why has everyone seemingly chosen to trust the forensic medical men and women, and not the historians of medicine? The answer is there for all to see but no one cares to take it on board. We therefore want to make it clear, in front of everyone here, that the injustice has not been wiped from the slate of history, that all the perpetrators have not been punished but that they have been forgotten through a deliberate loss of memory, a forgetfulness legitimised by the authorities. Justice has not been done. There is not even a verdict of
‘guilty’. To question the usefulness and value of human life brings nothing but misery and it must never again be done, never and by no one
…

I incline my head and contemplate the painful deaths of these children. May the earth be light in which we let them rest.

A Father, Hannes Says
    As he grew older, Hannes Neubauer began to collect maps. One of them was a poster from the Nazi era which illustrates the river systems of German-controlled Europe’s (
Germanische Europa
– that’s what it says): it is beautifully done, with the rivers drawn to look like long blood vessels, coloured black, red, blue and turquoise. They wind their way across a continent so bloated with annexed and occupied territories that the landscape characteristics cannot be made out. Look, here, Hannes says and points to the region of Mähren, which has been crossed by a strong turquoise line, here’s where the Nazis wanted to dig a canal to link the Oder and the Donau. They were going to use Russian POWs to dig it. If they had succeeded in linking the two rivers, all the waterways of Europe would have been interconnected in one great vascular system and they would’ve ruled over everything, not only the roads and railtracks and harbours but also the internal flow in our circulatory systems. Why do you think getting rid of us mattered so much to them? We didn’t occupy any space; we weren’t visible on their maps. But we prevented their blood from attaining purity, from running freely. Simply by existing, we cast a shadow of doubt over the obedient and pliable type of people they had hoped to foster. The ruling race wanted to invent a slave race. But they failed. We were the stain, the shameful last resistance that they had to conquer inside themselves and never managed to break down. We were the flaw in their system, the stumps at the ends that would never join up, the ghostly
voice that whispered in the night to remind them that you will all remain other than you ought to have become, other than you were meant to be. Hannes said all this, and then explained that he had been one of the last inmates left at Spiegelgrund. When the clinical side of the institution finally closed down, he was moved to another hospital. It was on Kollburggasse, in Ottakring. He was allocated a bed in a ward full of other children who nobody had come to claim. He can no longer remember what the specialty of his ward was or for how long he was kept there, but he realises that they must have thought him very ill. A doctor came to see him several times a day and he was given medicines. A psychologist came along as well to talk to him. The psychologist was a kind young woman, quite different to Mrs Baar, who had tormented him for so long; however, even this sweetly patient creature gave up when she received no answers to any of her questions. He was given injections to make him talk but that only made him drowsy and even less willing to speak. The nurse who injected him also brought him food. You must eat now, Hannes, she said. You must grow big and strong. Her voice was warm and kind, and he deeply distrusted everything about her. The war is over now, she said in her treacherously gentle voice. Someone from the ‘administration’ visited at regular intervals, escorting an embarrassed-looking adult or a couple of them. It always went the same way. The ‘administrative person’ produced sheaves of paper and found some name or other to read aloud. The charge nurse pointed at a bed and the adult, or adults (mostly women, rarely men; sometimes a man and a woman together) sobbed loudly or howled, and rushed along to the bed where the child was lying, or else the child was forced to get up and walk obediently with lowered head towards his or her waiting relatives. Finally, the ward had emptied. Only Hannes was left. He had recovered a little by then and spent most
of his days by the window, looking out. Windows had no bars in this place but were windows all the same. Then, he suddenly hears somebody come walking along the corridor and, when he turns, the nurse stands in the doorway and tells him, sounding happy and also a little relieved:

Hannes, your mother has come for you.

She steps aside and a strange being reaches out for him and advances as if she expects him to run straight into her arms. He lets out a dreadful scream and then something close to complete pandemonium breaks out. The nurse has to call for help and two male nurses come along at a run and in the end extract him from his hiding place under the bed. Later, an administrative person turns up and there is quite an argument. The strange woman is required to state again and again that her documents are correct. The last thing he remembers from that scene is how he was clinging to the door frame with both hands and how they had to loosen the grip of his fingers one by one to manoeuvre him out of there. Of course, everything is sorted out in the end. The strange woman, who is kind and patient and not at all like the repulsive monster he believed her to be during the first few days, takes him for a walk in the park one day and tells him things. Hannes’s real mother is dead, she explains. She died soon after Hannes’s father divorced her. The woman says that soon after the divorce, she married Hannes’s father. And that was the worst mistake of my entire life, she adds. His father told her that he was a widower and really seemed to be someone who needed the help and support of a woman. Though what he actually needed was someone to vent his anger on, daily. My father is a soldier, Hannes says. The woman understands. Yes, in a way, he was a soldier, she agrees. He worked for the armaments industry and spent day after day at a metal press, a huge machine where you had to put your whole head
inside before you depressed the pedal that operated the pressurised air inlet, which in turn powered the entire machine. And, well, one day he forgot, put his foot on the pedal before he had time to move his body out of the way. He had the end he deserved, if you ask me.

You’re lying
, Hannes says.

But then, people have been lying to him all his life. How is he to work out what is true and what isn’t? This woman is, as we know, understanding. She says that she did everything to convince the authorities that she must be allowed to give Hannes a real home. Where else would he be? By now, the woman had found a new husband called Heinz Rehmer who teaches in technical college, and Hannes Neubauer grows up with these two. But he can’t get over the lie. All the time, he sits poring over his maps and books, and thinks about
what if.
What if this or that happened or didn’t,
then what
? If they really had had time to complete that canal? If their shame had not existed? If his father really had been a soldier and come to take him away after the war as he had said he would? Or if he at least had had the sense to die properly, like all the others?

The Nameless Dead
    On Sunday 28 April 2002, the remains of the nearly six hundred children were buried, all retrieved from the ‘memory room’ in the cellars under the autopsy unit at Steinhof. The memorial service in the chapel in Wien’s Zentralfriedhof is attended not only by Hannes Neubauer but also several others from the ‘old’ reform school intake. Hannes is still in touch with some of them, for instance Walter Schiebeler (Miseryguts). Schiebeler tells Hannes that he recently went to see Pawel Zavlacky, who has got himself a place in sheltered housing in Simmering. I never thought the old fucker would hang on for this long, Miseryguts said. Adrian Ziegler is not present. When people he knows bring up the subject
of Spiegelgrund, he usually says things like,
I’ve put all that behind me long ago
, though hardly anyone believes a word of it, because he still speaks about the place all the time and also carefully cuts out and saves everything he can find about the Nazi euthanasia project. On the day of the funeral, he and his son-in-law are off to pick up flower bulbs and manure from a wholesaler out in Schwechat. Adrian’s son-in-law is called Ewald. He and Missi run a small flower shop together in the 16th Bezirk and Adrian enjoys helping them by collecting goods or stacking sacks with compost and topsoil. During the few years when he worked, it was the simple, practical jobs he always liked best. In 1983, he finally acquires a driving licence, thirty-five years after the law forbade him to drive any vehicle. But his son-in-law does the driving; Ewald and Missi own a red SEAT Combi. The spring day is almost like summer; over the fields, the span of the sky is open and boundless, and a faint, light line of haze at the horizon erases the already ill-defined boundary between earth and sky. The wind blows down from the open sky and sweeps up dust and loose soil from the fields. The wind also makes the tall poplars shudder and creates swooping waves in the dense growths of willow along the verges. They have just come out of the underpass at the Ostautobahn and are on their way towards Albern when Adrian turns round and remarks to Ewald that they were driven just this way from the youth prison in Kaiserebersdorf that time when they were sent out to clear the rubble left behind by the air raids. It must have been in March, in March 1945. Never, says Ewald, they always used POWs for that kind of work. Who did? Adrian asks. Why, the Nazis, obviously, Ewald says. They have discussions like this quite often: Adrian tells Ewald about something and the younger man says that it couldn’t possibly have happened that way. Ewald is a stubborn and argumentative type who believes he always knows best, even about events he
hasn’t been part of. But he listens to Adrian good-humouredly and, on the whole, quite enjoys the company of his father-in-law. Adrian of course knows perfectly well that this was the road. He remembers clearly the strange sensation of being in the sharp light of an early spring morning, and how the mud and half-melted ridges of snow along the verge fused into a depressingly grey mist. He also remembers that Jockerl had been sitting next to him in the back of truck. Jockerl was dead but there all the same, pale and shivering with his knees pulled up close to his body. How can you remember seeing someone who was dead at the time? But it makes no difference to your memory if whomever you remember is alive or dead. By then, the tall grain silos at Albernen Hafen are towering up above the line of the forest. Please, turn off here for a while, he says to Ewald.

After the ceremony in the chapel, the congregation walks to the burial ground. By now there is quite a crowd: politicians in dark suits and journalists wielding microphones and TV crews with their heavy cameras slung over their shoulders. Of course, the camera-eyes are directed almost exclusively at the politicians and their wives, and the Mayor of Wien and his entourage. In the gaps between the dark-suited backs, Hannes glimpses a row of about fifty schoolchildren. Each child carries an enlarged photo of one of the murdered Spiegelgrund children and has raised it to head or chest height. The photographs were presumably taken by Doctor Gross because there are hardly any other ones. The urns are carried along an avenue lined with these faces. The names of the dead are read out aloud. Slowly and methodically, name follows name, but the reading voice is a little rasping or perhaps it is the wind rustling in the low trees and shrubs around the gravestones. Hannes cups his hand behind an ear to hear better: