Lilli and I carry Mama to the wooden trolley and lay her down. Lilli adjusts the bloodstained coat around Mama with gentle, soothing hands. This is a side of her I rarely see. Her hands are usually busy, gesturing around her face and body as she speaks.
“I will handle it from here,” Manz says to Lilli. It is not said coldly, just directly; perhaps such a tone is for my benefit since their relationship is less than formal. “It is not safe for anyone after curfew.”
“Except perhaps for you,” says Lilli, her eyes locking on her lover’s. “You will no doubt return safely.”
“Yes,” he says, and there is a faint lift at one corner of his mouth, suggesting something more in this exchange, something that I am excluded from.
She nods. “Thank you,” says Lilli before turning to me. She grips my chin with her narrow, bony fingers.
“Now, Elsi, look after her and do everything that Herr Manz tells you to do, yes?”
Mama does not want me to know that she has lain with another man while my father has been gone in a labor camp for fifteen months. And though I pretend that I don’t see, I know what is happening. She has been suffering from morning sickness. I didn’t put the pieces together until recently: the conversations I overheard between Mama and Lilli, and the times she would disappear just before curfew, then come back in the morning, coupons in hand and the strain lines around her eyes deepened. It was not only for food that she sacrificed her dignity but to stop the loss of a daughter to deportation.
The crimes and misdemeanors that occur in the ghetto are piling one on top of the other, the layers becoming so high and thick that it is often difficult to see above them, to see forward. Theft and murder are commonplace and acceptable under the banner of oppression and war. Mama has said she will never resort to theft, and that we must be able to live with ourselves when the war is over. That was in the early days, before she sold herself for food and Leah’s safety. I hope she can live with herself now.
Hope is something I still have. I wear it around me like a favorite shawl. I cannot—I will not—die. And I will not lie down for any man. Mama used to joke that I would tease the boys who came knocking at our door, that I could not make up my mind so I chose none. I chose myself, she said. She used to call me fanciful, a dreamer, but Papa saw something else. Papa said I was like a butterfly that did not know how to land, that flitted from one thing to the next. He said that I preferred to float in the air, but that one day, when I finally found my place to land, I would give the whole of myself to someone who was worthy.
At the time those words flew above me, not landing, perhaps because they could not catch me in the air. Now they are firmly planted in my heart because they are precious words spoken by my father—words that are worth even more now that he is gone.
“And, Elsi, it is not what the world will give to you—it is what you must give to the world that matters. If we all just give a little . . .”
That was years before we were sent to the ghetto, before he disappeared. Before we kept giving until we ran out of things to give.
I follow the officer and push the trolley that holds Mama. We pass a guard who salutes Herr Manz and lets us walk by. I have to walk very fast to keep up with him while also trying to keep the trolley steady. Mama moans as it rattles and bounces over the cobbles. We arrive at a small office door that he attempts to unlock with several different keys, cursing and fumbling in the darkness before finally the door swings free. There is no sign on the front of the building.
“Sit there,” he says, pointing to some chairs in a waiting area. I lift Mama up and allow her head to rest against my shoulder. The officer walks to the desk and uses a telephone. He asks someone to come. I know this because Mama, Leah, and I have spoken fluent German among ourselves since we arrived in the ghetto, because the Polish language is considered offensive to Germans. The officer replaces the receiver and sits on another chair, to stare at a wall ahead of him.
It is quiet, and Mama has fallen asleep. I look around the room. It is neat, with a desk and papers and a phone and a door with frosted glass that leads into another room. There are paintings here, landscapes of places I know and some I don’t, of large cities that I plan to visit one day, of cafés where I will sip lemonade with friends, of mountains I plan to climb.
Memories filter in through the gray less often now. It is my imaginings that I look to, which have become more real.
CHAPTER TWO
WILLEM
The women I see are referred to by some as Nazi whores. They are part of a new order under which some of the rules can be broken, some bent, but it is a system that is not by my design. And women are just one of the many groups who must conform to the new order, who must accept the control. Some might say they are best viewed peripherally, because they are easier to work with if we don’t study their faces too deeply, if we don’t know their stories—if we tell ourselves that these people, these Jews, do not feel like we do. This approach, perhaps, is something I have failed to master since I am interested in their stories, their backgrounds, and because I believe it is essential to learn much about patients before I can accurately treat their illnesses. But I am also able to distance myself from them. I am able to shut the door firmly behind me when I leave the surgery. Some would call me cold. Many would call me efficient.
A consequence of this war is presented to me daily in a form that very few prefer to see. Women who are forced to endure not just imprisonment but a type of Viking subjugation as well, though I am told that such arrangements are agreed upon by both parties. I deplore the whole idea of it, yet I profit from it, also.
My life is a juxtaposition. I break with one hand and fix with the other: it just depends on which line you stand behind as to which service I can offer you. The type that heals and offers hope, or the one that simply heals with inevitability. The first service for wives of ghetto administrators, the second for Jewish mistresses.
I was called in the night, broken from deep sleep. Lena, my wife, rolls over, her growing belly taking up part of the room—a third person in our bed.
“Do you have to go?”
“Do I have a choice?” I say.
She sighs. She knows my father. She knows that privilege comes with restrictions. I kiss her closed eyes and another for the belly. I could dive into her loveliness. Sleepy and warm, she is achingly alluring. She is mine.
“Don’t wait up,” I whisper.
She murmurs and nestles into the pillow, her face now turned away from the light in the hall.
Outside the bedroom is the sitting room where we hosted dinner for our party counterparts the night before, and beyond that, the gleaming pots in the kitchen lead me to the front entrance. The housekeeper left only two hours earlier and will let herself in again at six o’clock. She was handpicked by my father, as are all the staff we employ. A Polish woman who hates the Jews, who rarely converses, thankfully, though she did speak up once. She revealed to Lena that several months earlier she reported a family of Jewish fugitives living next door with fake identities. She perhaps thought that Lena would repeat this revelation of her competence, and I in turn might mention it to my father, who has the power to offer a letter of commendation, or more important, increase her pay. I do not know, nor do I care, how much she gets paid since that is organized from headquarters in Berlin.
I pass the windows at the front of the apartment, with views of a narrow, lethargic stream, and step quietly across the diamond-patterned tiles. The apartments in the building have spacious rooms and, by my father’s account, were formerly owned by self-indulgent, bourgeois Jewish families. The extravagance of owning anything of quality is now reserved only for the German elite. I sometimes scoff quietly to Lena about this swap in fortune that likely portrays us as a nation of scavengers, but I am by no means ungrateful for our circumstances.
On the side table at the entrance stands a framed photograph of my father standing taller beside his friend Heinrich Himmler. I climb into my coat, then
upon exiting, lay the photo facedown. Not because of who is in the picture, but because I feel restrictively obliged to place it there in case my father visits with unfair warning, sometimes with other dignitaries, as happened the previous evening. The photograph is proof that I belong to the order that can suppress the masses with a stroke of a pen and a finely tuned military. I know the significance of the photo, since our station is a topic of conversation that my father seizes upon at every opportunity. Behind my father and Himmler, the National Socialist flag flies proudly in the wind. It is a reminder of where I am from and where I am headed. Where all of Germany is headed. We will no doubt win this war, but—that niggling word I often have to force to the corners of my mind—at what human cost?
At dinner parties, the obliteration of selected humans and their rights is something that we discuss more in terms of ideology for future generations, of the potential for greatness because of it, rather than dwelling on the atrocities that are happening right now. That is not to say I do not view the ironies. As I pointed out to my father, ours is a system full of holes and contradictions. After sitting through a painfully dull film—The Eternal Jew—commissioned by Goebbels, I pointed out a certain fact to my father: if Hitler so abhors anything less than race perfection, as outlined in Mein Kampf, why is it that he has employed a cripple to act as party spokesman? Blunt and cold—and somewhat ashamed that such thoughts could be expressed by his son—my father, a devoted party member, reminded me that we were on the side of good, not evil, of greatness, not mediocrity. Through teeth that barely separated when he spoke, he told me to never again question the motives of our Führer.
I have continued to question, but only to Lena, who does not reproach, who considers everything with openness. We share opinions—secret discussions held in our dark sanctuary between the sheets—though neither of us complains about our enviable circumstances.
Lena will right the photo when she rises, as she always does.
There is a car waiting out front, along with a driver, and I slide into the backseat and check my watch. It is one o’clock in the morning. An autumn fog builds outside. The air is crisp.
At the checkpoint, the guards are quick to open the gates; the presence of an official Nazi vehicle is synonymous with fear and urgency. We drive northeast of the ghetto, along its lonely, wide streets and eerily vacant tram tracks lit only by our headlights and a few dim street lamps. The ghetto is a bleak, bland enclosure by day and a strangely alluring, ghostly town at night. Except, of course, for the wire fencing, the guards, and the smell of open sewerage. These give away the horror. These are what set it apart from other places. I am glad that Lena will never come here.
Inside the surgery is a rather detestable colleague whose arrogance steps over a threshold before he does. Hermann Manz was called upon for help by one of his own concubines, Lilli, whom I have treated more than once for an unwanted pregnancy. Lilli’s case is not the worst I have seen. Self-inflicted fetal termination that has been left too late for treatment, anal damage caused by licentious Gestapo, and sexually transmitted diseases rate as the worst. The most common, though, are menstrual pain, mild infections, and a rarely welcomed pregnancy confirmation for the wives of administrators.
I am not always prepared for the sights I see. That is not to say I am in any part squeamish, but there is often a temporary adjustment of emotions that occurs in the first stage of diagnosis, and a rush of adrenaline before I begin treatment.
It is not my job to judge, to be motivated by sympathy or hastened by patient anguish. That being said, the sight that confronts me moves me slightly before I have time to calibrate my feelings—to tell myself not to feel. A woman in pain, a girl in fear.
The woman I am here to treat is dripping blood on the floor beneath the chair. This patient request comes from the imbecile, “the ghetto rabbit”—this term given by Lena, knowing of his many affairs—whose ego it is necessary to stroke for the sake of goodwill. I am disgusted that the bleeding woman has not been led to the treatment room at the back to lie down and has not been given a towel at least. Though I suppress the disgust by keeping my expression passive as always.
“Thank you, Herr Manz,” I say. “I will take it from here.”
“Do not write this in a report. This one is unofficial. She is a Jew, of course.”
Of course. Most of them are. Lilli, for one.
I was told by my father not to question the directions of Herr Manz, as most of his orders come directly from the Reich Governor. But I doubt this is one of them.
Hermann Manz is a senior ghetto administrator whose power has gone to his head and who has deciphered how to administer it in his own way. He is loathed by many of his colleagues, but because he is feared he is also obeyed. Things rarely end well for the people who question his decisions. It is my intention to never be on first-name terms with him, to avoid a friendship. Our forced alliance will not contaminate my reputation outside the ghetto.
Despite the political side I am fated to take, I have yet to determine a patient’s level of care based on his or her race or character. I am guided solely by the affliction.
“I will keep a guard outside in case you need some help,” Manz croaks. “Some help” is code for “someone to be carted away”; should patients die in my care, their bodies are then dumped unceremoniously.
The air becomes cleaner once he is gone from the room.
I feel the forehead of the woman who is slumped sideways in the chair, her knees pulled up, blood seeping through her woolen skirt and down her worn tights, body shivering. Her hair, though unwashed, is pulled back and pinned. A woman who, I notice straight away, wishes to appear well groomed despite the fact that she has been given few tools to achieve this. A woman, I imagine, who was once of means.
I pay very little attention to the girl beside her as I help the woman up and lead her to the surgery. The girl helps me lift the patient on top of the bed.
“You must wait outside,” I say to the girl.
“Will she live?” she asks.
Her tiny wrists made me consider her a child, but it is only when I focus on a face that wears experience beyond her years that I realize she is a woman.
“And you are?”
“Her daughter.”
She is of medium height like her mother, similar in features yet with different coloring. The girl, lighter skin, fair-haired. The irises of her eyes are a flawless blue, sullied only by the flesh beneath, which is reddened and swollen from crying.
“I will do what I can,” I say. “But you must wait outside.”
She looks at her mother and opens her mouth to say something else, words that never come. She is reluctant to leave her mother’s side, mistrust hanging between us. It is unlikely that she trusts anyone. I feel the first pang of self-reproach that I must again squash into the corners of my mind: shame over the luck of birthright that I should be the one on the side of victory.
These thoughts creep around the back of my mind, infiltrating the parts that are currently unfortified by Nazi expectations. It is not just her vulnerability that moves me, or the despair that lies beneath her delicate frame, threatening to surface should the person she loves most in the world die; it is the weight of her heritage that she carries on her narrow shoulders that bothers me most, and the question of how someone so delicate, so Aryan in appearance, could end up in such a dark, ugly place as the ghetto.
“I promise I will do what I can,” I say. “Now, please leave.”
The girl closes the surgery door behind her as she retreats to the waiting room.
I roll the woman on her back and place a small pillow under her head. She is reluctant to stretch out her legs, which I have to gently straighten. I put on gloves, then take a needle from the cupboard and inject her with enough pethidine to calm her. Manz has said that I must not “waste” so much on those who are unworthy, even though he knows I have the advantage of my father’s power to keep up an endless supply.
As I pier
ce her arm, her eyes open, and I see they are olive-brown. She is watching me without sound, without complaint, trying desperately not to wear her suffering on her face. Her eyes roll back as the drug slowly takes its effect, her arms slackening beside her body. She is relaxed but conscious.
I ease her skirt off and lift her now-heavy legs into the stirrups so that I can examine her.
It is not good. I sigh and shake my head. This is not the first such occurrence I have seen.
“What did you use?”
“A metal pipe.” She makes a small coughing sound.
There is damage there, of course—not just to the fetus, but a slight tearing of the lining. Her skin is hot to the touch.
“Twelve weeks?”
“Eleven. The sickness has always started at eleven.”
“How many children do you have?”
“Two.”
“And pregnancies?”
“Three . . . four. A daughter. One baby died straight after birth . . . the second one. The third terminated itself. Then another daughter.”
“Just relax now. I have some work to do.”
She has done half the job herself. Only remnants of her pregnancy remain, though there is some infection that might have killed her eventually. With the aid of a curette and medicine, she may recover in a few days. In my experience, the women in the ghetto are resilient.
“The man involved is a senior officer, I presume?” I can’t think why else Manz would call me for this. I would think it extraordinary if he was doing a favor for Lilli only.
“I didn’t have time to ask him his rank,” she says wryly. She has not winced or flinched throughout the expulsion. When you become a doctor, you see the full character of a person in these testing times. You learn not just of their ailments but of their fortitude and their ability to function above the pain. The temperament of this woman reminds me of Lena’s.
Once the procedure is complete, I help remove her feet from the stirrups and recline the bed to a sitting position.
Broken Angels Page 2
