Unlikely Warrior

by Georg Rauch

  During one of his visits, Dr. Petrovsky established the fact that I also had pleurisy. The fever continued to rise. I had excruciating chest pains and more and more difficulty breathing. The complete loss of appetite and the diarrhea had weakened me to such a degree that I was no longer able to sit up in bed without help. The orderlies had to lift me onto a bedpan several times a day.

  One day during this period the doctors pierced my back in the lung area with a very long needle in order to find out whether my pleurisy was dry or wet—whatever that was supposed to indicate. The verdict was dry, but once the needle entered my body, I fell over unconscious from the shock.

  I lost all sense for the passage of hours, days, for time in general, and didn’t even notice at first when they stopped administering the glucose injections. Well, once again it’s come to that point, I thought. The end seems to be almost here.

  But this time it was different. I didn’t feel driven into a corner, with the need to mobilize all my capacities like a good chess player seeking the right move to avoid the final checkmate. To the contrary, I lay peacefully in bed, running the events of my life past me like a pleasant movie: my childhood, Vienna, the glorious Austrian mountains, my parents …

  Russia, sometime toward the end

  Dear Mutti,

  My thoughts aren’t very clear today. A short time ago a priest sat for a few minutes on the edge of my bed. He said I was on my way to another kingdom where everything would be beautiful, where I wouldn’t have to fight anymore, and where I would finally see all my loved ones again.

  It seems to me as though I’m dying like an old person, where all is being reduced in equal amounts—the physical and mental strength, the will to live, and the creative spirit. Even the pain and fever are becoming less, as well as any resistance to my evidently unavoidable end. You are so close to me in my thoughts, soft and warm, as though I could reach out and touch you. It is getting darker fast; it must be evening. Your son embraces you …

  It seemed as though I sailed soundlessly into a dark and friendly tunnel. All was completely still around me, soft and dark. I sailed away into eternity.

  The orderly’s report on my case, justifying the hospital’s actions, must have read more or less as follows:

  On January 12, 1945, the head physician left on vacation, taking with her the keys to the medicine cabinet by mistake. It became impossible, therefore, to administer the patient’s daily glucose injections.

  Dr. Petrovsky was also out of town for a week and unable to attend to the patient, whose condition worsened by the hour. The doctors and nurses knew from experience that the patient was close to death. The suspension of the injections, as well as Dr. Petrovsky’s nonappearance, were taken to mean that all were in agreement that the patient could no longer be saved.

  On the afternoon of January 15, the German field chaplain arrived, a man who also recognized the correct moment for a final prayer and a few words of comfort. He administered the last rites to the patient.

  That same evening forty new patients were delivered. I tried to find patient Rauch’s pulse, and when I could discover none, I had him transferred to the morgue so that I could make his bed up fresh.

  The next day Dr. Petrovsky arrived and asked for the patient. I informed him that he had died the previous day, whereupon he asked to see the body. Since I knew that it hadn’t been picked up yet, I took Dr. Petrovsky to the morgue.

  Shortly afterward Dr. Petrovsky yelled something, and all the other doctors came running. They carried the patient to the examining room, and what took place there is unknown to me, but later a bed was found for him in a different room, where another patient had died the night before.

  I am not concerned with exactly why my flight into eternity was interrupted. The only thing that really matters to me is that I left this world for an indefinite period of time and returned as someone considerably different. However long or short that period was, it initiated the end of one life and the beginning of a new one.

  When my interior lights were turned back on and I started to be aware of myself once more, I tried to open just one eye in order to see this world to which I had returned. After straining for some time, I finally succeeded in the effort, and the first thing I saw was the wooden spoon next to my bed, the spoon with which I had been eating my soups and gruels for the past months.

  With great difficulty I stretched out my right hand and picked up the spoon—more a ladle, actually—and brought it closer to my eyes. What a personality it had! The bowl was whittled rather roughly, but it had been polished smooth through use. The handle, somewhat longer than normal, had a little knob at the end with facets like a diamond. There were small notches at regular intervals along the handle, so that the dark reddish wood could be held securely between the fingers.

  How many people had already filled their stomachs with the help of this spoon? Who had felled the tree and provided the wood from which someone else had so carefully and lovingly carved this utensil? How many thousands of years had it taken to develop such a practical form, so perfectly adapted to the size and shape of the human mouth?

  Everything around me appeared in a vastly different light from before. Each thing I saw or feeling I perceived provided sufficient material for contented hours of thought. It seemed to me as though part of my personality had been left behind somewhere and replaced by something new and excitingly different. My relationship to the idea of life and death had altered drastically, and I determined that I would enjoy to the fullest, using all my senses, this indefinite but additional span of time that had been granted me.

  I remained on the critical list for the next few weeks. Dr. Petrovsky seemed to have taken on my recovery as his personal goal. He was a good doctor of the old school, a wise man with little or no apparatus at his disposal but with all the more experience and concern for humanity.

  Slowly my appetite returned, and the doctor told me that my eyes had a brighter shine. After another week I began playing a game of chess now and then, or reading a chapter or two in those books by Lenin and Marx. Then, in order to help reduce my diarrhea, I was given an oak bark tea that was brewed too strong, and as a result my fever soared again for a few days. Oak bark contains tannin, which is a diuretic, but too much of a good thing acted as a poison on my overweakened system, and my recovery was set back considerably.

  Meanwhile, the other patients in the room had become accustomed to my special status. I ordered enormous amounts of food and gave it to them. To show their gratitude, each one spoiled me in his own fashion. Some brought me the bedpan when there were no orderlies nearby. One man tore off a piece of sheet and embroidered two very artistic napkins. Another made me a gift of a knife with a beautifully hand-carved handle.

  As prisoners we weren’t supposed to possess anything other than eating tools, a cup, German money—worthless to the Russians—family photos, and a piece of fabric that served as handkerchief, hand towel, and napkin. I, however, was permitted a sack that I kept hanging at the head of my bed and in which I gathered together all sorts of things: the borrowed books, a bright orange butter can, a little cloth sack filled with sugar, a glass, and an aluminum set of folding knife, fork, and spoon.

  In spite of the prohibition on personal possessions, many of the others also had things that they had smuggled in for their own use or to trade for other items. They hid these items under their mattresses or somewhere in the building, for example, under the water container in the toilet or in the roof spouts outside the window. Once a month we received a handful of machorka, a coarse tobacco that could be rolled in newspaper into long, thin cigarettes. Heavy smokers, often with tuberculosis, traded their food for this tobacco. For many it was one last pleasure before they died.

  It must have been February when I sat up in bed for the first time and let my legs dangle over the side. I immediately lost consciousness. After a few more attempts, I finally succeeded, and looking out from my third-floor window I was able to see the snow-covered roo
fs of the destroyed city. Another patient pointed out to me the bombed-out factories where they allegedly took the bodies of those who died in the hospital and walled them up. No records were kept of these deaths, no lists of names.

  My body was now just skin and bones, and my muscles had disappeared completely. Making a circle with the thumb and forefinger on one hand, I could run it all the way up and down the other arm. Skin detached itself everywhere in large dry scales. I also had many painful sores on my back and sides from lying for so long on the hard bed.

  * * *

  Captain Pushkin appeared on one of the first days of March, bringing me two red apples. “Well, it looks as though you are back among the living. Dr. Petrovsksy thinks the worst is behind you now, and you are on the way to recovery. Tomorrow you will be transferred to a camp infirmary near the woods, on the outskirts of the city. The air is better there, and pretty soon you’ll be able to lie outside. How does that sound to you?”

  “It sounds wonderful,” I said. “Anything that will get me back up on my feet is fine with me!”

  The woods hospital was a barracks surrounded by trees and meadows, similar to the one in the bunker camp. A few steps away, behind a wire fence, was the part of the POW camp from which columns of prisoners went out daily to work in the nearby dairy farms, nurseries, and forests.

  I was placed in a room with twelve others. At first my fellow patients gave me the usual cold shoulder when they noticed my preferential treatment. Nobody asked why I was receiving all the special privileges. But I had learned by now how to thaw the most stubborn blocks of ice with presents of food. In this way a pleasant atmosphere soon reigned in the room, and that was more important to me now, since I hardly slept anymore during the day. Contact with the other prisoners helped a great deal to pass the time.

  Each of my roommates had an interesting story to tell. I asked unusual questions about their professions, and I was a good listener. In this way I found out, from a delicatessen store owner, that one can keep large wheels of cheese freshly stored if they are wrapped from time to time in towels dipped in vinegar. Another told me how to look for and prepare the different kinds of wood required to build a cuckoo clock.

  One morning an orderly appeared and said, “They just put a countryman of yours in the next room, a Viennese.”

  “From Vienna? What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

  “Just a broken arm. It was a woodcutting accident.”

  “Well, give him my regards,” I said. “Maybe he can visit me soon.”

  He came the next morning, an educated-looking man in his fifties, wearing a white cotton shirt with the corresponding regulation long white underwear.

  “Grüss Gott,” he said, with a light Viennese accent. “My name is Oskar Fuchs.” He stretched out his hand in greeting.

  “Georg Rauch. It’s nice to see someone from back home. How are you doing?”

  “Oh, it’s not much. The bone was just splintered,” he answered, pointing to his arm. “It shouldn’t take long. And how about you? Have you been here a while?”

  After half an hour’s conversation we knew the general outlines of each other’s life histories, and his contained quite a surprise for me. He had been a cello professor at the conservatory in Vienna. As a young music student he had come into Vienna daily by train from the suburbs. In the evenings he often played chamber music with friends, and it was in this way that he had met my mother, who was twenty years old at the time and studying piano.

  My grandfather was a very well-to-do man and a great music lover. It was not unusual for the musical evenings at his home to include up to twenty instruments, and hardly a mealtime went by without guests, often from other countries. Many of the young musicians who were “at home” in my grandparents’ house went on to become conductors of the Vienna Philharmonic or famous soloists. Oskar told me that he often stayed overnight at my mother’s when it became too late for him to catch the last train home. What an incredible coincidence!

  Oskar was in much better physical condition than I was, since he had never been forced to take part in any of the long starvation marches, nor had he been in camps with outbreaks of dysentery and other similar epidemics.

  He spent a great deal of time with me during the following days, and when a bed was vacated in my room, I asked the head doctor for permission to move Oskar in.

  Although he must have noticed my unusual status very quickly, during the first few days Oskar said nothing concerning my special care, books, and vitamin pills. Once when I ordered an extra bowl of soup and gave it to him, he finally posed the question that had never been asked before. “How is it that you can get food on demand, and all the other things?”

  I couldn’t tell him the truth, so I gave him the answer I had already prepared much earlier. “Before I became ill, I worked as a draftsman for a friendly Russian captain. Evidently he took a shine to me, and when I got sick he arranged all of this. Now and then he comes to visit. He’s married to a Viennese Jew.”

  “Not bad. One just has to be lucky. ‘A Viennese doesn’t go under.’”

  “Without him I would have gone under, underground, a long time ago,” I said.

  A little later Oskar asked, “Is it possible for you to order butter or oil?”

  “Why? There’s some butter in the can in my sack hanging there.”

  “Your skin is so dry. I could massage it with the butter.”

  With this began a daily routine that continued for the following weeks and demonstrated to me what a disciplined and caring person Oskar was. Every day he spent at least an hour systematically massaging one part of my body after the other with butter. He spent another hour bending my joints and having me press my arms and feet against the palms of his hands. I soon felt my skin becoming softer and more elastic, and sitting also became less of an effort.

  Self-portrait. Reduced to a skeleton in the camps.

  Next he made plans for my diet. He told me to order two loaves of bread and extra butter. When they arrived he disappeared with them. He also took the wine bottle half full of vodka that I had in my cloth bag. Weeks earlier someone had come up with the crazy idea that two tablespoons of vodka per day would be good for my digestion and would also stimulate my appetite. I accepted the vodka, but when the nurse left I always poured it out of the cup into my bottle. The only time I had tried it, it burned my tongue and I had been unable to swallow it.

  When Oskar returned a couple of hours later, he brought two plates, one with lightly browned fresh fish, sliced new potatoes, and a fresh green salad. The second was filled with beautiful red strawberries, partially covered with cream.

  When I saw all this, I thought I had to be hallucinating. I, the poor fellow with no appetite, felt my mouth watering for the first time in months.

  “Where did you get all this?” I asked.

  “I traded the bread and butter at the fence with workers coming home. If someone has had nothing but fish all day long, he dreams of bread and butter. The same for those coming from the nursery and dairy farm. All of them steal something and smuggle it into camp. I found out that there’s always heavy trading every evening at the fence.”

  “But who prepared it so beautifully?”

  “Oh, that overstuffed cook will do anything for a little extra vodka.” Oskar laughed.

  Everyone in my room ate well. Thanks to Oskar, I ate particularly well. A large part of Oskar’s day was occupied with my exercises and obtaining special foods. Often when I ordered shamelessly large amounts of food, I would think I had surely overstepped my limits, but nothing happened. Promptly, and without further ado, I received whatever I had requested.

  By mid-April I had made such progress that I was able to walk up and down the room, and I began visiting the large barrel out in the hall a few times a day. Two men could sit on it at one time, and all that were able to get out of bed used this primitive toilet facility. Quarrels often broke out if the barrel was occupied and someone was in a particular hurry. After so m
any months, with no reason or occasion for laughter, it struck me as really funny to see my fellow skeletons, their white pants halfway down, fighting to decide who would sit on the barrel first. On one such occasion the half-full barrel was tipped over, and the skinny squabblers lay exhausted in the brew.

  Once again, the world was beginning to bloom, and I obtained permission to lie outside on a mattress in the shade. Supported by Oskar, I would walk back and forth for several minutes a few times per day. I began to enjoy ever more fully the reality that I was still alive.

  Spring also had its less pleasant aspects, however. When it rained the water came through the roof, and the orderlies pushed our beds into a chaotic arrangement so that we wouldn’t get wet. The flies also returned with the warmer weather and crawled around on us endlessly. After a while we gave up shooing them away, because they were everywhere, by the hundreds.

  Bedbugs also fell down on us from the ceiling to suck our blood during the night. At dawn they crept past our beds on their way back up the walls to the ceiling, where they disappeared into the cracks for their hard-earned rest. When they passed my bed within reach on their way up the wall, I squashed them, trying to produce an interesting design at the same time.

  One afternoon, as I was lying under a tree in the meadow, Captain Pushkin came and sat down beside me.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “I’m doing much better, thanks to my compatriot, Oskar Fuchs. He has been massaging me with such patience and persistence. I’ll miss him when he is well and has to go back to work.” I imagined I was being subtle.