From the Ashes

by Sandra Saidak

  Except maybe for his contribution to Finster’s death. And as far as he could tell, that hadn’t done a damned thing for the suffering masses other than getting a few of them hauled in for interrogation and torture.

  It had come as quite a surprise, but Adolf had discovered he didn’t want to be part of the killing; any killing. Not even of someone as malignant as Rupert Finster. I guess that makes me a failure as a traitor along with everything else, he thought.

  Someone was approaching his table. Adolf looked up, expecting his contact.

  Two Waffen SS stood by his table.

  Adolf had been detained often enough by now that he knew what to do. He drew his ID from his pocket in a bored manner, and remained perfectly calm until the older soldier spoke. “Adolf Goebbels?”

  Then his blood turned to ice water. If they knew who he was, it was over. Still, he was not about to waste all these months of training. He muttered a protest in garbled German and waved his ID at them.

  Fortunately, the soldiers were trying to avoid a scene. Just as they were about to manhandle Adolf out of the café, an explosion shook the street. In the middle of a crowded intersection, a private car was now burning. Whether it was a rescue from his contact or a coincidence, Adolf never knew. He took advantage of the momentary distraction, not by running, as any good soldier would have expected, but by dropping to the ground and rolling under the table. Then several more tables.

  And then he was up and running. Adolf knew he could never evade capture if he stayed in town. They knew the place better than he, and no one would risk hiding him now.

  His salvation rode into view in the form of a covered transport vehicle that was forcing its way through the chaotic traffic jam toward the city gates. A government seal on the windshield promised that the truck would not be searched when it left the city.

  Whatever danger awaited Adolf inside the truck was no match for what he faced out here. He dropped to the pavement and slithered along the street until he was just beneath the transport. At that moment, the road became clear enough for the transport driver to finally move.

  Adolf caught hold of the tarp over the back, just as the truck accelerated. Cursing in every language he had ever heard, he struggled like a hooked fish to get inside the truck. Finally, it was not his own strength, but a large pothole in the poorly maintained street which catapulted him inside the vehicle.

  The truck was crammed with people. Adolf tumbled inside, banging into elbows, knees, heads, shoulders and stomachs before skidding to an awkward halt. There were no guards watching the occupants; Adolf allowed himself a sigh of relief while he wedged himself between a middle-aged man and a young woman and regarded his surroundings.

  The thirty or so men, women and children in the truck were a mix of Aryan and subject races. A few regarded Adolf curiously. The rest just stared vacantly, or slept. No one raised an alarm. Adolf could not believe his good fortune. Then he noticed that most of the people who sat listlessly in the truck looked ill, although with what he could not tell. There was certainly the smell of sickness in the stuffy air.

  Adolf had “escaped” into to a quarantined transport.

  “Where are we going?” he asked the man next to him. When the man did not reply, he tried again in French, even though everyone in the world spoke German by law.

  Adolf’s neighbor remained silent, but a teenaged boy across from him grinned. In heavily accented German he said, “We’re going to hell.”

  That was all Adolf got for the next hour. Then the truck lurched to a stop. The tarp was thrown back and Adolf cringed, shielding his eyes against the blinding light of afternoon sun. When he could see again, faceless guards in full protective gear had arrived and were now pulling out the prisoners.

  Adolf leapt gracefully off the truck before a gloved hand could force him, but most of the others were too ill to move quickly enough to suit the guards. When all who could walk or crawl to the pavement had done so, the two suited men lifted the remaining bodies and tossed them to the ground. Only one of them groaned; none of them moved to get up.

  Adolf forced his gaze from the ground and looked around. They were in a fenced compound, which contained two long, low barracks and a small administration building. A sign above the gate bore the standard Party Medical Insignia and the words “Lourdes Polio Colony”.

  “Welcome to hell,” said the boy from the truck.

  CHAPTER 14

  “So you see,” said Dr. Speer, “We can still serve a purpose. Everyone here: criminals, vagrants, inferior races—once exposed to polio, all become useful subjects for experimentation. Perhaps it shall be from this very colony that the Party finds the cure.”

  “And if not this one,” said Adolf. “Then, one of the others.”

  “Exactly.” Speer opened the single door of the administration building, and held it open for Adolf. “Coffee?” he asked as they went in, shutting the door on the November wind.

  Adolf accepted a chipped cup of what passed for coffee and sat down on a folding chair beside a desk that groaned under the weight of papers, files, dirty dishes and an ancient typewriter. Dr. Speer took the lopsided sofa, rubbing his neck and rotating his head carefully.

  Adolf copied the doctor’s motions without realizing it. In the three days he had been here, he had experienced none of the fatigue, headache, fever, vomiting or stiffness that might indicate polio. But he had become intimately familiar with all the symptoms as he assisted Dr. Speer in his rounds.

  The doctor smiled wryly at Adolf. “Incubation can take up to five weeks, you know. And it takes at least four days. If you have it, you won’t know until tomorrow at the soonest.”

  “Thanks” said Adolf. “That’s a real comfort. Anyway, you were saying? The lack of interest those in authority have shown for this place recently?”

  “Ah, yes, that would be of special interest to you, wouldn’t it? But you’re safe—from the Gestapo, at any rate—regardless. They never come here.”

  “That could mean an even greater drain on their resources than anyone has previously thought,” said Adolf. “If this new strain of polio is as deadly as you say, then finding a cure would have to be a top priority. The fact that no one has come to harvest subjects for new studies, or give you new experimental drugs to administer—“

  Speer shook his head impatiently. “It could just as easily mean that they’ve found something really promising at one of the other sites. We’re cut off here. And they’d certainly never tell me anything. Secretary Heydrich had little enough use for me—“

  “Heydrich? Josef Heydrich?” asked Adolf.

  “My, you really have been out of touch, if you haven’t heard about the Führer’s latest golden boy. He’s in charge of the search for a cure. Not just polio. The other big killers as well. He’s going to save the Reich, according to his press agents at any rate. The rest of us just hope he doesn’t kill us all in the meantime.”

  Adolf frowned. He hadn’t kept up with Heydrich since his graduation three and a half years ago. Heydrich’s decision to marry a girl from the Eichmann family a year later had been enough of a relief to dismiss the obnoxious bully from Adolf’s mind. “I hadn’t heard he went to medical school. Even if he did, how could he have finished already?”

  Speer laughed. “He’s not a doctor! Who needs a doctor to head up a medical operation? This is the Reich we’re talking about! He’s an efficient administrator, feared by everyone, and has the Führer’s every confidence. What more do we need?”

  “Of course. Silly me.” Adolf sighed. “So Dr. Speer, what did you do to get banished to this place? You’re obviously a brilliant physician. The Party can’t afford to disown many like you.”

  “I was agitating for a ban on human experimentation. And for an inquiry into some of the more questionable methods of some of Mengele’s disciples.”

  “That would do it,” said Adolf. “So they sent you here, to be half human subject, half administrator of their experiments. Very artistic.”
>
  “Isn’t it? Especially when you consider that if I do nothing; refuse to give my patients the drugs that randomly arrive here, I’ll have to wonder if maybe it’s a cure I’m withholding. It makes it all the harder when it turns out to cause cells to mutate hideously, or children to die in screaming fits.”

  “That you continue to heal at all is a tribute to your strength and courage,” said Adolf. “Never let them take that away from you.”

  Speer sighed. “I guess it’s my own fault for finding that damned copy of the Hippocratic Oath, and then taking it so seriously. The Medical Corps had good reasons for banning it.” He finished his coffee and gazed at Adolf. “Now it’s my turn to ask questions. What’s a rich Aryan college boy like you doing in a place like this?”

  “Waiting to get polio.”

  Speer shook his head. “Come on now! I told you my shameful secret. What about you? I know you were running from the authorities; desperate enough to not care which truck you jumped into. But why the heroics? Why spend half your waking hours heating towels, cleaning up vomit, and running errands for me? Why spend your other half reading to patients and massaging joints in people you would never have been allowed to speak to as a child?”

  “I have to do something. I’ve spent the past seven months on the run, lugging around the wisdom of the ancients—and I’ve accomplished zero! Now, here I am, surrounded by death, knowing that at any moment, I could be next. It feels like now or never. So I do what needs to be done. At least it doesn’t take a lot of brainwork to figure out what that is in this place.”

  “Some of the boys are saying you’re a prophet. Here to bring the word of God to the dying.”

  Adolf groaned. “Not again.”

  “If there’s time this evening, I’d like to look at some of the notes you brought with you.”

  “Yes, yes.” Adolf nodded. “I’ve been meaning to sort them for you. But it’s been a little—“

  “—busy. Yes, I know.”

  “Still, some of those notebooks I brought are medical journals. It might not mean anything at all, but I figure you need all the help you can get.”

  “Just the thought of reading another physician’s notes gives me energy. Dead or inferior, it makes no difference to me.”

  “How many languages can you read?”

  Speer laughed. “Ah, yes. I forgot that Jews were everywhere. I can read German, French and Latin.”

  “That will cover about half.”

  “We do have a language expert here,” said the doctor. “But I doubt she’ll help us.”

  “She?” Adolf felt a sudden irrational hope.

  “Varina. Slavic girl. Younger than you, and amazingly bright. But pretty mad at the world.”

  “No surprise there,” said Adolf.

  Both men looked up as a young woman pushed the door open. One of two nurses currently assigned to the camp, she was already showing the symptoms of the first stage of polio. “Doctor, please come,” she said. “Patient number 163 has stopped breathing.”

  Adolf watched as Dr. Speer tried to revive the boy. When he finally gave up, an attendant—himself a polio survivor—took the body to cold storage, to await the cart that transported the bodies to the colony’s crematorium.

  Only the cart wasn’t coming around much anymore, and the bodies were piling up.

  Adolf left the men’s dormitory, laughing bitterly at the name. Few inmates were old enough to be called men. Like the original polio virus, this new version—a biological warfare experiment gone wrong—continued to strike children most often.

  For those who had the Medical Priority Points, there were iron lungs and new therapies. For the rest: places like this. And if a cure had been found somewhere, or if civil unrest was actually, finally, threatening the Reich, then places like this could easily be forgotten. For now, the supply trucks still came. But that too could change.

  Adolf paced the compound. Worn wooden benches bore testimony to warmer weather, when patients might be brought out to sit in the sun. Now, with winter fast approaching, most stayed in their beds. Though many who survived the disease were sound from the waist up, wheelchairs were not provided, and with the diminished staff, few besides Adolf had the inclination to transport anyone.

  He stopped in front of the women’s dormitory, and knocked. When no one replied, he tried the door. It swung open to reveal an arrangement identical to the one Adolf now slept in: three dozen white sheeted hospital beds, half of them occupied. Of the women and girls present, most slept or stared listlessly.

  “I’m looking for Varina,” Adolf said.

  An older woman who could barely raise her head, shot Adolf a curious glance, then moved her gaze to the next bed, where a younger woman sat up, reading. “Go away,” she said without looking up from her book.

  Adolf didn’t know if it was her reaction, or the fact that she had a book, but he burst out laughing.

  That seemed to annoy the girl, because she looked up, and stared at Adolf as if he were a cockroach that wandered in.

  Adolf moved closer and tried again. “What are you reading?” he asked.

  “Nothing you’d be interested in, rich boy.”

  The old woman began to laugh. Adolf considered a retreat, but decided against it. Anyone who could care about books in a place like this was someone he wanted to know.

  “I have a reading collection myself, but it’s got more languages than I can translate. I heard you’re the person to talk to.”

  She put down the book. “Did you now?” she asked. Varina was about nineteen years old. Her complexion was too dark to be considered attractive, but her raven hair and huge brown eyes were lovely. Healthy, Adolf guessed she could have caught and held the eye of any man she wanted. Now, pallor and bitterness marred her fine features.

  “Show me,” she said.

  “I’ll go get them,” said Adolf.

  “Wait.” Varina leaned to the side, and began digging for something by the bed. Adolf noticed that her arms were very well muscled. Varina sat up, though with difficulty. “Don’t you want to empty my chamber pot first?” She thrust a covered, but still reeking, porcelain bowl at him.

  The girl was grinning with more malice than Adolf had ever seen on a human face. And he sensed, even without looking, that all the other women in the room were wearing similar gleeful expressions, as they waited for his reaction.

  Although his first impulse had been to recoil, he overcame it gracefully enough, and took the vessel from her. Varina’s expression changed to one of amazement. Glancing around, Adolf saw other women looking their way, toothy grins changing to puzzlement and suspicion.

  “I’ll be right back,” Adolf said.

  He went to the latrine and emptied the chamber pot, then to his bed for the books. When he returned to the women’s ward, Varina took the pot warily, as if expecting a nasty surprise. When nothing jumped out at her, she looked at Adolf, still scowling.

  “Why did you do that?” she asked.

  “Because it needed doing.”

  “And I’m supposed to believe that?”

  “Believe what you want! Me, I’m just trying to find a cure for polio before I get it, develop a therapy that will fix your legs, and figure out the meaning of life.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Varina. “You’re a lunatic. They must be sending you guys here now, instead of the incinerator.”

  “Right. Will you help me?”

  Varina still glowered, but she was eyeing the books curiously. Sensing she would never ask for them—or anything else—Adolf set them on the bed next to her.

  Scowling, Varina picked up a notebook at random, then another. As she became engrossed in reading, some of her beauty peeked out from behind the angry mask.

  “Hmm. Hebrew.”

  “You can read Hebrew? You know about the Jews? Where? How?”

  “There’s very little in print I haven’t read,” said the young woman. “I’m a mutant: a woman with a brain.”

  “Yes, I know t
he type.”

  “Sure. I’ve heard that in Germany, Aryan women are allowed an education. But I was born in a little peasant village in Serbia. My parents had eight kids to feed, even after the smallpox came through and wiped out half the countryside. When I got through it without a scarred face, they hoped I might improve their fortune with a good marriage.

  “But they hit the jackpot when wealthy stranger—a Party scientist—came through the village. He bought me from my family for twice what they earned in a year.”

  Adolf looked away, ashamed of the society he had once been part of.

  “Don’t feel bad, rich boy. It happens all the time, and at first, it was great. He had more books than most libraries, and since he kept me locked in his house when he was away, I got to read them all.”

  “So what happened?” Adolf asked. “He found out you were smarter than him?”

  “Something like that. Oh, at first, when he learned that I was reading, he thought it was terribly amusing. Then, when he discovered I actually understood what I was reading, he decided to make me part of some grand experiment. He wanted to find out how much I could really learn—sort of like teaching a monkey to talk, you know? He was even talking about publishing the results.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “I turned out to be too smart for his own good,” Varina said bitterly. “He used some new table he developed to measure my I.Q. When he got the results, it stopped being funny. He put me through the test five separate times, looking for the error. It turns out I scored higher than he did. By a very wide margin. Once he realized there was no mistake, he sold me to a colleague doing medical research, and here I am.”

  “That stinks,” said Adolf.

  “Hey, you’re smarter than you look, rich boy. Now, try living it.”

  “Someday, when you’re not so pissed off, I’ll tell you my story, and maybe you’ll see I already am.”