Either it was the charts or Alma’s progress, but he had left in excellent spirits, whistling a tune to himself.
Outside, the motor of the staff car roared to life, its sound soon fading in the distance. In the silence that followed, Dr. Ránki stood motionless and pale, not quite daring to touch the papers with the photographs of the identical twin boys attached to them that Dr. Mengele had left on his desk.
At last, he muttered, almost without moving his bloodless lips, “You have not the faintest idea what you have just volunteered for.”
The twilight stole through the windows with their green anti-mosquito screens and colored the whitewashed walls of the pathologist’s quarters drowned-blue. The inmates came and took away the latest body. Dr. Ránki watched them go with an unreadable expression, released a heavy sigh and went to clean the dissecting table. It occurred to Alma that the table never remained unoccupied for long.
With some grim obsession, Dr. Ránki kept polishing the nickel taps and the basin, all three porcelain sinks that were immaculately clean even without his attentions, the glass on the medical cabinet, the microscopes in the adjoining room—harsh, unforgiving strokes, as though he was trying to wipe away his own presence from these quarters to which he was confined against his will. His own hands he washed just as obsessively; scrubbed them raw with soap and a medical brush as his eyes stared, unseeing and doomed, at the white tiled wall in front of him.
“If I weren’t such a coward, I would have long ended it all,” he said suddenly, in a very quiet and bitter voice.
Alma looked at him, startled. “But you’re a pathologist only. I mean… all you do is dissect bodies for him. They’re already dead when they arrive here. The Sonderkommando, they have to assist the SS in murder.”
He gave her a very strange look, as though he considered saying something but changed his mind and went back to his frantic scrubbing.
Alma thought she heard him mutter, I’ll never wash all that blood off my hands, but the running water muted his words and she thought it rude to ask him to repeat what must have been plaguing his mind ever since his arrival here.
When the inmate brought their dinner—potatoes with blood sausage, two generous portions—Dr. Ránki hesitated and suggested that perhaps it was best to leave it for… after, he finished, refusing to meet Alma’s eyes.
“I have a strong stomach,” she assured him with a grim grin, gesturing toward the marble table on which a body lay not an hour ago.
Not for what you are about to see, his sad eyes seemed to read. Yet, he said nothing, only picked up his fork and began to eat in small, delicate bites. Alma bit into a piece of sausage, tasted copper on her tongue, realized that she didn’t have much of an appetite, and proceeded to chew mechanically simply because sausage and potatoes were a delicacy in camp terms and snubbing it would be an insult to the ones who had to make do with a pathetic piece of sawdust bread that night. She wondered what her girls were eating for dinner. Hopefully, sausage as well.
Tense silence, interrupted only by the sounds of their utensils on the plates, made the air heavy. In the corners, the shadows were gathering, creeping toward the table with its green lamp, the only island of light in the world of darkness.
Abruptly, Dr. Ránki rose from his chair, marched across the room—a mere shadow himself—and groped for the light switches on the opposite wall. He turned them on, one by one, and all at once, the room was flooded with white, sterile light. Now, it was possible to get the rest of their food down. Alma smiled at him in gratitude. In an awkward, paternal gesture, he reached out and patted her hand.
It was ten past eight when they heard a child’s wails outside.
“Herr Doktor has arrived,” Dr. Ránki whispered, his eyes riveted to the still-closed door with an anguished look in them.
The door flung open. An inmate walked through it first, carrying a child’s lifeless body in his arms. Dr. Mengele followed right after, his black eyes never leaving the corpse. He scarcely noticed a boy of around seven who clung to his sleeve and yanked at it, demanding for him to give him his brother back.
“Right there, on the dissecting table,” Dr. Mengele commanded to the inmate. “And remove all of his clothes.”
“Don’t touch him, you vile Nazi!” The little boy positioned himself firmly in front of the SS doctor and pressed his tiny hands against Dr. Mengele’s belt with its holster in a futile attempt to ward him off his dead brother’s body. He was screaming in German, with a faint trace of a regional accent Alma couldn’t quite place. She saw that he wasn’t shaved, just like his brother; his wheat-blond hair was tangled and dirty and his cheeks, streaked with tears, hadn’t lost their healthy, round shape.
“Wolfgang and Wilhelm Bierlein, seven years old, Sudeten Germans; parents—political; children aren’t suitable for re-education on the conclusion of the Reichsführer’s office of Race,” Dr. Mengele announced by means of introduction and chuckled, positively delighted, when the boy hit him in the chest with his tiny closed fist.
With great effort, Alma forced herself to remain still and impassionate despite her limbs turning into ice at the horror of the unraveling scene.
“That’s the spirit!” Instead of shoving him aside, Dr. Mengele ruffled the child’s hair. He hardly felt any impact from the child’s blow. “The Wehrmacht could use you on the Eastern front, little fellow. Now, hop onto that table next to your brother and give your shirt to kind Herr Doktor.” He motioned his head toward Dr. Ránki.
The latter had just finished pulling on his medical gloves and now stood, miserable and helpless, with his shoulders stooped.
“I’m not doing anything you tell me. Wilhelm let you give him that shot and now he’s dead!” The boy broke into sobs. “I will shoot you!”
It was a pitiful picture, watching him paw at the SS man’s holster.
With his arms folded behind his back, Dr. Mengele watched him with an amused expression on his face as though observing a harmless pup at play. The boy wasn’t strong enough even to undo a tight button to get to the weapon.
Alma felt a lump growing in her throat.
It appeared, Dr. Ránki couldn’t bear watching it either. He scooped the child in his arms and set him on the edge of the dissecting table, holding him firmly in place.
The boy squirmed and screamed something frightful; even the inmate who stood by the wall with the dead boy’s clothes in his hands began to wince from all the agony that they all felt, as though they were connected to the child by some invisible thread.
Only Dr. Mengele remained perfectly unfazed. Having removed his overcoat and cap, he donned the medical gown and gloves and went to the medicine cabinet, from which he had fetched a sedative for Alma the night before. She remembered clearly which shelf he had taken it from. The twenty cubic-centimeter glass container he had extracted now came from a completely different shelf and box.
Chloroform, Alma glimpsed the blunt black letters running across its side. Danger: poison. The skull and crossbones framing the warning bore eerie similarity to the ones on Dr. Mengele’s uniform cap that lay, forgotten, on top of his overcoat, thrown carelessly onto the desk.
The boy’s shrieks turned outright animalistic. He struggled against Dr. Ránki’s arms and tried kicking at the hand in which Dr. Mengele held a syringe filled with clear liquid.
A feeling of lightheadedness swept over Alma. Dazed and trembling, she saw the SS doctor give the boy a wolfish grin.
“Now, now, the more you struggle, the less chance I have to bring your brother back. You do want him back, don’t you?”
The boy stilled at once, staring at the doctor with suspicion and something else. Hope.
It was that look of hope that had ignited in his swimming eyes that tore at Alma’s heart.
“He’s dead,” the boy spoke with uncertainty. “You can’t bring him back.”
“Oh, but I can. This is the new medicine I have developed, but it works only on twins. Did your mother and father tell you ho
w twins are connected?” he asked, holding the syringe upright. After the boy nodded, still unconvinced but listening carefully, Dr. Mengele continued, “I have discovered that if a twin dies and I give the other twin this shot straight into his heart, the other twin wakes up as though nothing happened. But it has to be done within an hour and only inside the heart, otherwise, the medicine won’t work. We ought to hurry. You will be brave for your brother, won’t you?”
Alma nearly choked at the resolve with which the little boy removed his shirt and handed it to Dr. Ránki. He wasn’t looking at the syringe or the SS doctor any longer; half-turned toward his brother, he was clasping at his hand and saying something to him in a pacifying voice of an adult as Dr. Mengele was probing at his chest. He flinched for one instant when the long needle pierced his skin and muscle tissue and turned toward Mengele, a flash of mortal betrayal passing through his eyes. They widened; a small, inaudible gasp escaped his mouth. Then, he slackened in Dr. Ránki’s arms.
When the Hungarian pathologist laid him out next to his brother, Alma saw that the boy was still holding his brother’s hand.
“Children are so gullible,” Dr. Mengele commented, smiling and shaking his head.
Alma lifted her head toward the ceiling and blinked rapidly a few times until the tears were gone. When Dr. Mengele turned to her, she met his gaze, perfectly calm and unrattled. Inside of her, a war was raging, but her face betrayed nothing at all. She’d made a grave mistake of showing her weakness in front of him before. Alma swore to herself that no matter what it took, he would never see it again.
Chapter 15
Dr. Mengele reappeared early the following morning. He walked in with a medical case instead of a briefcase and ordered Alma to a chair near the window. From his case, he produced an odd instrument with which he began measuring her face with such profound concentration as if all other scientific research had suddenly ceased to exist for him along with Dr. Ránki. The latter regarded him silently and motionlessly from his usual post by the dissecting table, relieved to be left alone.
For a time, Alma sat in her chair compliantly while Dr. Mengele was transferring all the measurements into a paper file. She had to thank the Hungarian pathologist for her passive state and the fact that she didn’t feel the natural urge to recoil at the touch of Dr. Mengele’s hands. Despise her protests, Dr. Ránki had injected her with yet another dose of a sedative the night before and gave himself one right after—“to keep the nightmares at bay,” he had explained with a tragic imitation of laughter, which, it was Alma’s profound conviction, concealed the sobs crowding in the pathologist’s throat just as they were crowding in hers after the horrors they had witnessed. No, not just witnessed; participated in.
“It’s best to forget it for now. It’s best not to think altogether,” he’d told her. “You’ll drive yourself mad if you do. Later, after the liberation, we’ll remember it all. But not now. Not just yet. We’ll all fall apart if we start mourning everyone who we have lost.”
That morning, Alma was grateful for his words and for the sedative, the effects of which still lingered. It made Mengele’s ministrations almost tolerable for her dulled nerves. But it was when he extracted a metal plate with a number of hair samples of all possible colors attached to it out of his medical case and began comparing those samples to Alma’s hair, she finally couldn’t contain herself any longer.
“What are you doing, Herr Doktor?”
He made no reply, preoccupied with his hair-color chart. At last, when he had finally discovered a perfect match—V, braun-schwarz—he pulled back with a self-satisfied look on his face, as though he had just found physical proof of the Theory of Relativity. “Are you aware that you and I, we have the same exact hair color?” he asked.
Alma regarded him, puzzled. “What are you saying, Herr Doktor? That we’re some long-lost brother and sister or something of that sort?” With the best will in the world, she couldn’t keep sarcasm out of her voice.
He exploded into laughter at that. “No, I’m not saying anything of that kind,” he replied, his shoulders still quivering with chuckles. “I’m saying, you have the features of an Aryan. Alpine racial type, to be precise, according to your facial measurements. The same type I fall under.”
“But I’m Jewish.” Alma’s desire to make him see the ridiculous logic of his statement overpowered her instinct of self-preservation.
“I know.”
“A full Jew.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re Aryan.”
“That’s correct.”
“And yet, according to your scientific parameters, we fall under the same racial category.”
“That’s what I just said.” He was playing with the chart’s hair samples, curling and uncurling them with his fingers.
Alma read the name on the metal plate, Fischer-Saller.
A smile began to grow on her face. It would be idiotic to laugh just then; it would be even more idiotic to say out loud precisely what she was thinking, but Alma couldn’t help herself. “Well, doesn’t it render your and Herren Fischer and Saller’s racial science… nonsensical?”
Dr. Mengele drew himself up, his expression turning defensive. “Science is science. It doesn’t make mistakes. And doctors Fischer and Saller are an established eugenicist and anthropologist, respectively. In fact, Professor Fischer’s ideas inspired the Nuremberg Laws.”
Once again, Alma should have kept quiet and once again, she didn’t. “But what you’re saying contradicts your own Führer, Adolf Hitler. He declared that there is such thing as Jewish physics after Einstein had fled Germany for the United States in order to discredit Einstein’s work. According to your Führer, Jewish physics was not a real science. But if you’re saying that science is science, and physics is certainly science, then—”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dr. Ránki signing to her to stop it right that instant by making cut-throat gestures behind Dr. Mengele’s back.
There was a tense pause.
“Perhaps, you’re not a full Jew after all,” Dr. Mengele concluded and began prodding at Alma’s face with renewed vigor.
“My late mother would take great offense to that, Herr Doktor.”
“I wasn’t insinuating anything,” he muttered, feeling the bridge of her nose. “This is not a natural deviation. Your nose has been broken and broken recently.”
“You’re very observant, Herr Doktor.”
“Not while you were in custody?” He pulled back, regarding her with disbelief, as though it appeared unconceivable to him that one of his fellow SS cronies would stoop so low as to hit a woman. Perhaps, in his imagination, it was indeed a behavior unworthy of an SS man. He had no qualms about killing them personally or by ordering them to the gas or murdering twins in cold blood, but he had never hit anyone, not in front of Alma, at any rate.
A real chivalrous gentleman, Alma mused to herself with great sarcasm.
“No, not in custody. I broke it myself, by accident.”
“How could you break your own nose by accident?”
“I tripped and fell down the stairs at my hosts’ house in Holland. Landed straight on my face and smashed it rather badly. There was blood everywhere. I looked like a right beauty for a couple of weeks afterward.” She snorted softly at the memory. “My eyes were black as pitch and swollen to slits.”
“How does one land on their face when they fall?” He regarded her skeptically. “A natural human reflex is to—”
“Bring one’s hands forward to break the fall, yes,” she interrupted him with a smile. “But I’m not a regular human, Herr Doktor. I’m a violinist. My hands and arms are my everything. I held them behind my back on purpose when I was falling in order not to break them. My face doesn’t matter all that much.”
Dr. Mengele was looking at her in astonishment. “What admirable self-discipline,” he muttered at last. His eyes brightened when a realization dawned on him. He began to smile. “So that’s why you were in such a
hysterical state when those two SS fellows brought you here. That’s the reason for all that Herr-Doktor-Give-Me-A-Shot-Of-Phenol blooming nonsense. I didn’t realize how important it was to you, the ability to make music. I thought you staged that scene solely due to weak nerves, but now I see that yours are made of steel, Frau Alma.” He motioned his head toward the dissecting table, now thankfully empty. “I apologize.”
That was the last thing Alma had expected. “Thank you, Herr Doktor.” She searched his face. “Am I free to go then?”
“Stay here for a few more days. You ought to rest your arm at any rate. And, besides, I like having you here. You interest me. Scientifically,” he added a tad too hastily, as though to clarify a misunderstanding.
In the afternoon, Zippy arrived carrying a violin case and a wrap under her arm. After hugging Alma briskly, she deposited the wrap on top of the doctor’s desk.
“I brought you a change of clothes and your violin. How is your arm?”
Alma was already pushing her away from the desk and toward the door. “You shouldn’t have come; he’ll be here any moment and if he sees you—”
Zippy seized her shoulders, smiling. “Almschi, it’s all right. He knows I’m here. It was him, who sent me. Specifically ordered me to bring you your violin, too.” She drew closer and lowered her voice, “He didn’t do anything to you, did he?”
Anything meant experiments, most certainly.
The Violinist of Auschwitz: Based on a true story, an absolutely heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 novel Page 16
