The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  When Dr. Grodzo believes any of his twins are homosexual he sends one or both of them for special experiments. He wants to find out what causes homosexuality and he wants to find out how to get rid of what causes it. He invites me to have dinner with him one evening because he wants to explain these experiments to me. His quarters are located in a distant part of Mungel, requiring a long ride in an automobile with armed guards. I live in a tiny room in a dormitory where the twins are kept. I have my own room. No one else has his own room. He lives in a very nice brick house with a garden. Rivka would have admired the furnishings.

  “I believe it is thought that camps are only to kill people. Camps are the laboratories where changes in human nature are tested.”

  He talks to me as if I am a grown-up and can understand everything he says. I have not been a participant in a lot of these experiments. But I have been made to watch most of them, placed in front of them to see what is going on. I am also aware that a long line of people is always walking slowly past the room where I sleep. The window is high and barred and the glass is thick, so I can only hear them slowly marching, and their crying. I can’t see them but I can feel them through the wall. I know they are there and I know that for some reason I am not with them.

  I have watched Grodzo in action day and night and I have watched him watch me watch him. I have watched everyone I have met here disappear.

  He has demonstrated the effects of electricity pumped into a body. “Will this locate the cause of your homosexuality?” He is looking at me as the boy screams and tries to break loose from his restraints. “Will this kill homosexual cells?” The boy has fainted. I have seen him “washing the bladder” and “massaging the rectum.” I have witnessed several “lobotomies.” I watched him drill into skulls. I watched as twins were sewn together back to back, or face to face. I watched as eyes were removed and sorted by color. He removes many testicles, dropping them all into the same large container. He removes whole bowels. I have watched him attach electric prods to every part of a body, particularly penises. I have seen semen from many injected into many others. I have watched as bodies were inoculated “with various strains from all over the world.” I have received a number of these inoculations myself. He talks out loud to me, explaining what he is doing. I have watched as bodies died on the table and were taken away to an incinerator. I have watched as many “medicines” were administered, by mouth, by needle, by enema. Many bodies go into spasms and die. Rarely does a body lie down on a table and get up from it alive.

  Boys are made to masturbate all the time. Semen is collected at all hours. If someone fails to ejaculate often enough he is taken away and shot. Doctors watch everything without expression. There are many other doctors and nurses. I begin to notice that often there are bulges in the guards’ trousers when they watch Grodzo at work.

  There are no female twins. They have their own building. “Dr. Mengele is more interested in the female and I am more interested in the male,” Dr. Grodzo tells me.

  During every act I witness I feel him looking at me, studying me, as if he wants me to learn quickly. Once he says, “This is what life is all about.” Another time he says, “I am happy to be your teacher.”

  “What is going on here at Mungel is evil,” he told me at that first dinner in his house. “You do not know much about evil yet. You have only seen it. Evil comes about when hate becomes so strong that no longer can it be contained. Each instance of evil is like a new strain of poison from a virus that was thought to have been tamed. But it escapes and grows. It becomes increasingly actual. It becomes its own event. If you know what you are looking at, it is an amazing thing to witness. Properly done, it inspires deeds and accomplishes them. What you have witnessed thus far reflects only a certain amount of what interests us here. One can learn only so much from cutting off penises. We have come to a certain end of the road with what our experiments reveal to us. We must locate a way to move faster toward the more useful knowledge that is awaiting us. That is what research doctors do.”

  I realize that I understood what he was saying. It had not occurred to me to question how and why his English was so good. He told me he had visited America often. “I toured when I was a Brownshirt. I should like to live there someday. I do not believe the pressures put upon one are so extreme.”

  I was fed beef with a delicious sauce for dinner, and chocolate ice cream with melted chocolate over it. I did not know that food could be so fine. It was brought to us by handsome young men in tuxedos who would not look me in the eye.

  “Do you believe that there could be such a thing as a particular gene or germ you are carrying that makes you infect others with what you have or what you are?” he asked me with excitement, looking directly into my eyes, as if he might still find an answer there, inside me. “No, of course you do not have any idea how to answer such a question. Just know that you are of particular interest to me. You are Jewish and homosexual and of course a twin. Although I did not believe that young man was your brother, it is no longer important to me. You say you are a twin and I believe you. And there are other reasons to be interested in you.”

  I still did not know what a homosexual is, much less how he knew I was one.

  After dinner he stood up and took my hand. “I find you quite sympathetic, which is unusual for me. I have never been personally interested in a young boy before, most especially a Jew. Jews have different kinds of bodies, different kinds of bone structure. And of course different kinds of brains and different kinds of minds and thoughts. All this interests me. You are going to live here with me. You are going to be treated well and studied carefully. You have my promise that you will be kept alive. You fascinate me because what you witness does not frighten you or make you ill. This is what Mr. Hoover told me. You also appear to have a remarkable tolerance for witnessing cruelty, a tolerance equal to mine. What has happened to either of us that we should be this resilient, in the face of the horrid tribulations of others? What a gift to humanity it would be to the world if we could find out! Do you understand me at all?”

  I did not.

  * * *

  I don’t know how long I lived with him. I had no sense of time. I had been put to sleep many times. My arms were sore from needles and my body continued to be covered with more spots and scars. All this time Dr. Grodzo studied me carefully. He measured and calibrated every part of my body, sometimes from day to day. His hands were very gentle. Then he neatly made entries in a journal. He seemed particularly concerned with my head, my skull, which he would hold between his palms as he searched for any changes. He would smile when he finished. Once he said, “I cannot believe such excellence in a Jew.” Once he took me to a room filled with skulls lined up on shelves and tables. They all looked alike to me but he pointed out one table. “These are the perfect ones. Here is where your skull would be.”

  I would wake up in the middle of the night and find him staring down at my body. He would hold my penis and try in vain to make his get hard. One night he masturbated me until I had my own erection for the first time. He didn’t explain the shivers I had, or anything, as he usually did when with me. When a tiny bit of hair began to show on my legs, under my arms, around my penis, he shaved it and sent it away for study. Periodically he would carefully collect my bowel movements and urinations. He was always very affectionate toward me. He performed on me like a housewife doing pleasant chores. He kissed me often, though never on my lips. He would study his own skin constantly, to see if he was catching anything from me. “No, not yet,” he would say, smiling. “We can stay together a little longer.” We were sleeping in the same bed now, both of us naked. I came to realize that his body was not unattractive. He was not circumcised and his foreskin was long. He explained these differences to me. He would put his fingers on my eyelids and close them. “Shhhh,” he would say. “Go back to sleep.” Then he would kiss me good night again.

  Each morning and each afternoon I was taken to a classroom where a woman taught me
the subjects I would have learned in school, mathematics and science and literature, even philosophy and history. She was a very good teacher. I could see that she was a prisoner by her number and her Jewish star. She was terrified of me and fearful that she would say or do something to provoke the guards. One day, like almost everyone, she was no longer there. There was a new teacher for me. Over the years I had a number of other teachers, always very smart and always shaking as they replaced the one before, but that first one was the best. Much later I would see photographs of world-famous scientists who died in Mungel. I recognized several of them as my teachers. I am indebted to this strange group of schoolteachers for whatever formal education I have. It will turn out to be a far better education than I would ever have received in America.

  As I get older I’m taught higher forms of mathematics and science and chemistry. Grodzo helps me with my homework. He is a doctor and a surgeon but he is a chemist most of all. When we work on my chemistry assignments I can tell from his excitement how much he loves it. He says he dreams that after the war he will invent medicines. “I believe that medicines can be invented to accomplish almost anything!” He will not talk about his life before Mungel but he makes me talk. He is constantly interviewing me about my family, about all my relatives, about everyone’s health and physical characteristics. We were never a close family and I didn’t know many relatives. This doesn’t stop him from trying to get me to remember things. He is particularly interested in everyone’s teeth. It will be discovered years later that Dr. Mengele was obsessed with teeth because his own were bad and he was ashamed of them.

  We live a very orderly life. I am at school much of the day and when I return he makes our dinner. He enjoys cooking and is good at it. Then we do my homework. And then we go to bed. It’s cold at night, so it’s good to have a warm body to sleep with.

  Never will he talk about what we both know is going on elsewhere in Mungel. On many days and nights, even where we are located, the sounds are hard to ignore and the smells can become awful. The names Adolf Hitler and Josef Mengele are never heard. Dr. Mengele is not at Auschwitz, which hasn’t opened yet. Whether he was here at Mungel I don’t know.

  I am put to work as an assistant to Dr. Nyiszli. He’s a surgeon. He’s a British Jewish prisoner too. His job is to do autopsies on all the twins Dr. Grodzo thinks are homosexual. There are hundreds of sets of twins in Mungel. Each day guards wheel dozens of dead bodies in on flat carts and place each set of twins on a white marble slab with channels for the blood to drain into holes in the concrete floor. Then Dr. Nyiszli begins his work. As he carefully enters each body he dictates his findings to me and I type them. He talks out loud to me as he works, like Grodzo does. There are always guards with us, but never the same ones. It is hard for many of them to do this duty and they are often taken away in the middle of the day.

  Grodzo says to me over dinner one night, “Pay attention, for there is much you can learn from autopsies. I am always amazed by autopsies. Bodies opened and exposed reveal subtle and grotesque transformations. Ghastly cancers perforate tubes and organs. These are part of the mystery that causes death. We always want to know what causes death. Autopsies can be our key to finding out why we die.”

  Dr. Nyiszli works quickly. “It is important that these twins have died at the same approximate time. Otherwise we would not be able to compare them accurately. These bodies have been killed by different means just before they come to me. Most of them have been gassed to death. Their skin falls from their bones most easily. Some of them have been shot in the back of the head. Their bodies are the most tense. And some of them have been killed by injections of chloroform into their hearts.” He points to the tiny dot. “Many of these young men had syphilis.” He shows me the tumors in their hearts.

  Once in a while someone who was shot is still alive. We hear a groan or see a movement in the pile of waiting bodies. Dr. Nyiszli injects their hearts so death comes. Then he teaches me how to do it, explaining that we are giving this one a gift by helping him finally to die.

  Dr. Nyiszli dissects them quickly. He studies them with great care. There are receptacles for all the parts he removes. Brains. Throats. Tongues. Lungs. Hearts. He washes them. He studies them closely. He throws them in their buckets. He studies penises and testicles particularly.

  One day I am allowed to help him. Grodzo comes to watch. I make the initial incisions myself. Blood spurts all over me and down my body’s side and into the channel below. I remove the lungs of a young man who is going through puberty like I am. I remember when Dr. Grodzo had first said this word. I can feel him watching me intently, but I’m used to that by now. “I am proud of you,” he says. That night he finally gets an erection with me and inserts it into my rectum until he has an orgasm, as do I.

  But mostly I type reports. They’re for the Biological, Racial, and Evolutionary Institute and they must be neat. I ask Dr. Nyiszli again if he sees anything different in the bodies classified as homosexual. He does not answer. I help him do more than two hundred autopsies.

  Twin boys lying side by side in each other’s arms make me think of Daniel often.

  I work for Dr. Nyiszli for a long time. And then he, too, is gone. After the war I learn that Dr. Miklós Nyiszli went to work for Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. He wrote a book about it: Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account. In it he does not discuss his work on homosexuals prior to Auschwitz, at Mungel.

  * * *

  One night after dinner Grodzo stands up and takes my hand. “I shall not see you for a while. You are a smart young man now. I hope one day you will appreciate how fortunate you have been. I am sorry you must go out into a world that hates you so much.”

  He has tears in his eyes.

  “You may wonder why I remain a true believer. A true believer in what, you have every right to ask me. In almost every town and village of my country you will find some kind of prison or concentration camp or labor camp, all indeed death camps, all until very recently filled to capacity. We are finished here for the moment.

  “You will now be sent out to see ‘the real world.’ You will be sent on the next part of your journey, where you will find the world no different from what you have seen here.

  “Your father’s files are filled with interviews of dying people. That has been his job for many years. He does not know it but his ability in this area has become well-known in certain quarters. His reports are excellent and moving. He has a gift for this particular work. We hope he has many years left to do it. There is a world filled with people burdened by the awful experiences of their lifetimes. To record misery and unhappiness on the widest possible scale is a necessary task. There really are few happy memories, and those who delude themselves with them must be shown how little there is to believe in. That is the true state of man. I hope you have learned that here. That is what we have been teaching the world. That will be our lasting legacy.

  “Some will think that you have been spared. And so you have. You have been dealt with in a different way. You are being ushered into strength. When we meet again perhaps I can tell you more. Perhaps we shall know more by then. If any of us are still alive.”

  With that, Grodzo leaves and the next thing I know I am being taken to a bunker. There is a network of them all over the country so that you can go underground from one place to another. The German leaders have been expecting trouble, so years ago they began preparing for it. The rooms in the bunker are not unlike prison cells but they are not for prisoners. They are for important people. I sense as I walk down endless corridors that I am in the presence of some great frightening power waiting behind these walls.

  Hankl, the man who’s escorting me, asks me if I would like to stay here.

  “Why, should I want to?”

  A few minutes later he says, “You would be safe here.”

  That night I leave the bunker and walk out into the dark streets of some place I don’t know. Just being outside makes me conscious suddenly of the man
y years I’ve been inside.

  Light is dim. I’m tired. I can’t remember when I’ve had a peaceful night’s sleep. Not sleeping enough can leave me unprepared for whatever the daylight may do to me. I am feeling something else. When you’re isolated and alone, it’s difficult to be angry. I’m beginning to feel I should be angry. My stomach aches as always. My stomach will ache for the rest of my life.

  Grodzo told me someone would meet me at the gate. Someone is following me. I stop and wait for him. It’s a boy my own age. I’ve seen him on the inside, always in the distance. I don’t think he was a prisoner but I don’t think he was free. There were a number of people in this category. Like me. There were different levels of torture and of prisoners, of participation.

  I greet him and try to get him to talk. He shakes his head. I don’t know if this means he can’t talk or won’t talk or won’t talk yet but he stays with me and I let him. He’s handsome, and he would be more handsome still if there wasn’t such sadness in his face. When I ask him how he got out, he just looks at me. I look back at him and realize he’s beautiful to me. He reaches out suddenly and grabs me in his arms. We kiss and I feel another boy’s lips and tongue. There’s an air raid going on around us but we don’t seem to notice all the people running for shelter. We’re in a field kissing and discovering each other’s penis. We’re crying out uncontrollably, as if our bodies are acting on their own. And then we realize what we’re doing is good. Neither of us understands anything, but for these moments we think we do and we smile in happiness. Indeed, we laugh out loud. Then he tells me his name is Klaus.