Trusting Calvin

by Sharon Peters

  Whatever the cause of the deaths, they had to be extremely careful, they decided.

  The six men set off for Amberg, twenty miles away, where there was a convalescent hospital. Still exhausted from the previous days of marching, they tried to keep up one another’s spirits, telling lies they all knew were lies, about the good things awaiting them. Sometimes they actually began to believe their own stories, and the mood grew almost giddy for a few minutes.

  Not for Moshe, though. He had never known a blind man. He couldn’t imagine how it would be possible to live on his own, earn money, find a woman willing to love him and have a family—if, after all the assaults on his body, he could even create children. He was young, better educated than most in that part of the world, multilingual, but he couldn’t even tell day from night anymore. All he could do was cling to the desperate hope that doctors would be able to restore at least some sight in his right eye, the one that had offered a tiny strip of vision before the crack of light had closed.

  Moshe said none of this. He simply walked, as they all did that day, until they could walk no more. They asked a farmer for bread and water as night fell, and sought permission to sleep not on his porch but in his barn. The farmer was a German, the enemy, and their regard for him was low. But decent people behave in a certain way, and now that they had had time to think about what probably had happened the night before in the farmhouse, they vowed never again to spread the lice and fleas that infested them in another stranger’s home.

  After days of walking past fields, farmhouses, and army equipment that had broken down or been abandoned at the side of the road, and nights spent sleeping in haylofts and scrounging for food, they finally reached Amberg, a city of about 40,000. It was April 29, not yet a full week since Allied forces had pushed through and staked their claim, and the town was in tortured disarray. Public transportation had stalled. Shopkeepers still hid their wares in case looters came through, or soldiers from one side or the other made declarations of ownership. A few survivors had arrived ahead of them and were roaming the streets and alleys with vacant expressions, sometimes erupting over small things.

  The six presented themselves at city hall where record-keepers documented their survival. The brothers, like many survivors, decided to take different first names, less Polish-sounding. Yankel became Jack, Zalmen became Sigmund, and Moshe became Max. The new names signified new life, and also conferred separation from Poland, the country they despised now even more than they had in their younger years. The country of their ancestors and their youth had watched silently or participated as Jew after Jew was rounded up and taken away; as trains crammed with Jews lumbered past; as lines of ravaged, emaciated Jews in grimy uniforms marched past every morning to work; as crematoriums belched the ash of human bodies into the surrounding countryside. The Germans may have conceived the roundups and executions, but their Polish countrymen were complicit. They could never, even as old men, forgive that.

  They received new clothes, a gift from the townspeople: underwear, socks, trousers, two shirts, shoes, and a jacket. Then they went to the public baths, where they submerged themselves in warm, glorious water. When they had scrubbed their bodies almost raw and wrapped themselves in crisp, new clothes, they set a match to their bug-infested uniforms and ruined shoes. They watched as the remnants of those years went up in flames—all but Max, who stood to the side and could only imagine how satisfying it would have been to see.

  As Sigmund and Max entered the cool efficiency of the hospital, the odor of antiseptic hung sharp in the air, unexpected after all those years of living with the dull stench of filth and sickness. But it was not an unpleasant odor. It was the smell of promise.

  In the exam room Max heard the horror in the nurses’ voices as they pulled the hospital gown away from his bony chest and glanced at his thighs, no bigger than those of an eleven-year-old. He knew he looked awful, but he was impatient with their attentions. The eye! That’s what they should be examining. Not the ruined eye, the hardened, calcified mass that seemed to interest them so much. The other one, he told the nurses, one after another. Examine that one. There had to be some process that would restore some of his sight.

  He was not the first concentration camp survivor they had seen, but the numbers had not yet swelled to the level they eventually would, and they still marveled that men so malnourished, so frail, were still able to stand. They had no data about the long-term prospects and risks, but they knew Max’s situation was dire. He weighed eighty-three pounds, they said. They feared his heart might suddenly fail or that other organs might, even now, shut down.

  The first order of business, they said, was for him to gain forty or fifty pounds so he could build up his strength and reserves for the very real chance that he might get ill or require surgery.

  “I don’t care what I eat or if I eat at all,” he snapped in frustration as day after day they forced food on him. “Every passing day is a wasted day. I need to be able to see again. This eye to be taken care of is what I need.”

  The nurses arranged an appointment with the one eye specialist in town, and Max awoke on that morning filled with apprehension. Maybe he would learn there was no hope of improvement. But the opposite was also possible, he reminded himself. He throbbed with anxiety, and when he reached the doctor’s office he couldn’t keep his breathing steady.

  Dr. Hasselt silently examined and probed, first one eye and then the other. Max heard him push back his chair and place his instruments on the desk.

  “Max, you will never see again.”

  The rage was instant. “That’s it? This is what you tell me?”

  He swung his head in the direction of the nurse who had brought him to the office. “What do you expect from a Nazi doctor?” Then again to the doctor: “And you—what are you a doctor for? You can fix nothing?”

  The nurse walked him back to the hospital, and the director there, informed of the ophthalmologist’s pronouncement, stopped by his room.

  “Max,” she said, “maybe we cannot tell everything now. Once you have gained some more weight, gained some strength, I will see that you get to Munich, to the university eye clinic.”

  He thanked her, but his mind was elsewhere, churning through thoughts unrelated to doctors and appointments. He had lived as a free man shackled by blindness long enough. He would kill himself. He might not be able to see, but he wasn’t completely helpless. This he could do on his own. It required a great deal of thought, though.

  How can I do it? he wondered. I would jump into the lake to drown myself, but where’s the lake? I can’t find it. I could throw myself in front of a bus, but where’s a bus?

  It wasn’t easy for a blind man to kill himself. There was just one way, he decided.

  Max told the nurse he was having trouble sleeping. She brought him a pill every evening, and he hoarded them, building a small pile in the bedside table, not sure how many he would need but assuming the task required a large handful. He didn’t want to fail.

  Maybe just three or four more days, he thought one morning, after a couple of weeks of caching pills. That afternoon a nurse discovered his stash. She took it away and gave him no more sleeping pills.

  Another avenue closed—for now.

  At the end of June, Max and Sig set off for the appointment with a Munich eye specialist, a hundred miles away. There was still not much public transportation available, and certainly nothing reliable, so the brothers received priority permission to travel on an army truck.

  Sig paced while Dr. Meisner, the head of the eye clinic, examined Max. The doctor, they learned, had been a high-ranking Nazi officer, and this bothered them, but he was said to be among the very best. Dr. Meisner tilted Max’s head back and sideways, pressed his fingers against the ridge of bone that bordered each eye. Max could hear the click of what he assumed was a small light turned on and off.

  “Here i
s the circumstance we have, Max. Nothing could have been done to save the left eye, and now it must be removed and the eye cavity cleaned out. We will fit you with an artificial eye. As for the right eye, I don’t know. If you had received treatment immediately after the injury, all or most of the sight could have been saved.”

  At this point, the doctor continued, it might be impossible to coax the right eye back to partial functionality.

  Dr. Meisner performed surgery to remove the left eye and started Max on long-shot eye drops in an effort to revive the optic nerve. By late August, the surgery site had healed and the treatments on the other eye were complete.

  “Take your brother home,” Dr. Meisner told Sig. “Take care of him. Bring him back in December, and we’ll see.”

  Home, Max knew from Sig, was three furnished rooms in Amberg that his brothers and friend Isaac had rented from a widow, Etta Eichenmueller, forced by finances to take in boarders. He imagined the small stuffy rooms where the three men would have to compress themselves to accommodate another person, a blind one. He would be nothing but a burden.

  Max sat silent and still as Sig filled the journey with a steady stream of talk. Sig had come up with a way to earn enough money to keep them fed with a roof over their heads, he said. During the war, the routes and means by which Germans conducted commerce had faltered and then died. The ability to buy commodities had stagnated, so Sig and friends had set up a complex but very effective chain of bargain, barter, and trade.

  There were interesting coffee shops in Amberg, Sig continued, where they could sip exotic coffee richer than anything Max could imagine, sweetened with as much sugar as they wanted. There were lively cabarets where the music was gay and the women very friendly. It was time, Sig figured, for the brother who had passed all of his adult years in camps or hospitals to venture into manhood.

  Once they had arrived in Amberg, Max joined the others on their outings to taverns that reeked of cigarette smoke and stale beer, pressed forward by their energy. But he felt numb, distant. They didn’t help, these outings.

  During the days, while his brothers and Isaac worked, Max was installed in a straight-backed chair next to a window with nothing to do but listen to the birds and the noises from the street, people with real lives busily going about their business. He came to hate those sounds and those people. They should have been a tantalizing invitation to exploration, but they were nothing but a reminder of how incapable he was.

  Mrs. Eichenmueller could see the desolation overtaking him, so in the afternoons, when her work was done, she sat and talked with him, read to him, told him of promising signs of change washing across Germany. Pitifully inadequate counterbalance, he thought, to the appalling truths seeping out about the horrors that had transpired during his years of captivity. And the full story wasn’t even known yet, he figured.

  In nearly two dozen countries, Jews had been rounded up and sent to one of the 20,000 labor camps or death camps Nazi Germany had established to imprison or kill Jews and other undesirables. About 90 percent of the Jews of Poland and Greece had been murdered; 75 percent in Yugoslavia; and at least a quarter to half in most of the rest of the countries that the Germans had occupied. This genocide—six million Jews, half of them Poles—in future decades came to be called the Holocaust. For now it was known as the Shoah, Hebrew for “calamity.”

  It was impossible to fathom so much evil, and when he tried to push this knowledge into some recess where it would haunt him less, he was unsuccessful. His mind filled with an ugly mass of swirling images.

  His brothers and friends spent hours, night after night, discussing the military tribunals that would commence soon in Nuremberg, just forty miles from Flossenbürg, to prosecute the most prominent leaders of these systematic killings. But how could any trial possibly make up for the six million Jews and as many non-Jews—prisoners of war, Gypsies, the disabled, sympathizers, and others—who had been slaughtered?

  To pull Max away from these thoughts, Mrs. Eichenmueller arranged for him to begin violin lessons with a blind music teacher named Mr. Pletschachesr, a man as kindly as he was talented. Max displayed no aptitude for strings, however, so Mr. Pletschachesr switched him to the accordion, which required less musical soul. Still nothing. The music teacher suggested that the hearing loss from having typhus might be contributing to Max’s lack of musical ability, but both Max and his teacher knew that he simply had no talent for music. One more thing he couldn’t do.

  As the weeks passed Max’s depression deepened. He could sometimes muster a slab of loathing toward his self-pity, but not very often, and not for very long. Most days, most hours of every day, he floundered in misery.

  At night, wrenching nightmares about his time in the ghetto and the camps tormented him. His cousin Chayale, lifeless, blood pooled between her legs, the smeary broomstick used to rape and kill her flung aside. Scrawny men on their knees, naked, by the ditch, lips moving in prayer as each awaited the crack of the rifle placed against the base of their skull. The writhing man taking his final gurgling gasps while that massive German shepherd roared and ripped at his throat.

  Max would awake drenched in sweat, heart racing, the fear as harsh as it had been when he’d first witnessed those horrors.

  Sig learned that autumn of a brilliant eye doctor in Wiesbaden, 165 miles away. The brothers caught rides from truck drivers, hoping for a different outcome. The assessment remained the same.

  In December, Max and Sig returned to the Munich eye clinic as directed, to see if the eye drops were accomplishing anything deep inside the remaining eye. Dr. Wesseli—who had headed the clinic before the Nazis had come to power and installed their own man—had replaced Dr. Meisner. A grandfatherly sort, he took his time examining Max, who, although not new to the facility, was new to him.

  “The medicine did not work,” Dr. Wesseli finally said. “I see no sign of improvement.” He paused a moment before continuing. “I believe you should know this, too, so you can begin to live your life: In my opinion, no eye doctor anywhere will be able to do anything, unless—and I believe this is unlikely—someone in the future develops a completely new technique or therapy.”

  It was possible, the doctor knew, for a young man without a limb to live something close to a normal life; he had seen this often when farm and industrial accidents and wars stole arms and legs. Many men had also adjusted with relative ease to deafness. But complete blindness robbed a person of his sense of independence. Now that the final shred of hope had been snatched away, this man might decide to take his life, the doctor thought, not knowing that Max had already initiated the effort once before.

  As Max began to rise, he felt a firm hand on his arm.

  “You are going to be blind for the rest of your life,” Dr. Wesseli said evenly. “What will you do about it? I see three options. Option one: Feel sorry for yourself, and be a burden to your brothers and to society for the rest of your life. Option two: The Nazis didn’t kill you; now you can do it yourself. That will prove you are a coward. Option three: Try to restore your life.”

  He urged Max to enroll in a nearby rehabilitation school for blind adults. He would make a call to the superintendent to inquire whether Max could start with the next class.

  “You will learn how to live independently. You will learn Braille and typewriting. You will learn a skill that will enable you to become self-supporting.”

  Trust a German to chart his life? Unlikely. Still, Max requested a few minutes to discuss the matter with Sig, who listened with interest.

  “We have nothing to lose,” Sig concluded.

  Perhaps, Max told the doctor a few minutes later, he would be willing to try this idea of his. “And if it doesn’t work, I can always return to option one or two.”

  On January 2, 1946, at the age of twenty-three, eight months after his liberation, Max began attending the Rehabilitation School for Blind Adul
ts in Tegernsee, south of Munich, a residential school with an iron-fisted approach to transforming blind men into productive citizens. Seventy men arrived that snow-swept winter day, all former Nazis but Max. Dr. Wesseli had warned that would likely be the case.

  “Don’t let anything that anyone says or does bother you. Pay attention to your studies, learn as well and as fast as you can, and get out of there as quickly as possible.”

  Max’s two roommates, Gerd Scholz and Sep Huber, had served as soldiers. Both had been conscripted to fight, however; they hadn’t instantly raised their arms in support of Hitler and his policies and marched off to do his bidding. That mattered to Max. The three became good friends and had little to do with their other classmates.

  The students learned, during the two to three years they would spend there, how to use knives and forks to eat food they couldn’t see; how to shave themselves with a razor—tricky business, but a man couldn’t walk about with nubs of stubble missed by imprecise swipes; how to take care of their clothes; how to walk from one place to another. They learned Braille. They learned how to avoid obstacles and keep themselves safe.

  They were not coached on how to deal with the emotional aspects of having lost their sight. Raising the issue would have merely emphasized the disability, school officials thought, and they were devoted to banishing that sort of thinking, replacing it with a level of competence so high that graduates would entertain no feelings of weakness.