Later, after the game ended, I retreated to my attic room to go over my notes from the day’s lectures and read the assigned texts for my courses. I also frequently wrote to my father in a Russian military prison, although he wrote to my mother rather than me. She relayed his news to me, though I found little interest in his heavily censored postcards. He mainly described his endless work at the camp, where he eventually remained for ten years. I still have many of his cards. They don’t reveal much and are difficult to read, but they are a connection to my father.
Unfortunately, since my attic room didn’t have any heat, when the winter became very cold in January, the water in my washbowl froze, and I had to break the ice to wash. However, since a lot of students lived in unheated rooms, the university helped us by permitting students to study in a small heated room next to the cafeteria. I went there from time to time and usually found the room crowded with students reading. After an hour of sitting in the warm room, I went home to my cold room.
Another problem with living in such a cold space was that the bathroom on the next floor down had no hot water. But after a few weeks, the couple permitted me to use a ground-floor bathroom that had warm water, so I could wash properly.
So this was how I managed going through medical school. Despite the hardships, I was glad to be there, and I was eager to work hard to advance in my chosen career.
Chapter 11
Training to Become a Doctor
While I had been accepted at medical school, I still had to get the money to attend, although I had absolutely no money at this time. Fortunately, the university gave funds to needy students, who had to pass a test to qualify. Thereafter, they had to pass tests each year to show they were doing well in school. Since I passed the test and continued to do so, this paid for my university fees and a free supper each day.
I also got a little money from my mother from my father’s pension, which covered some of my other meals and books, and from donating blood, working on the railroad, and selling food on the black market. But this still wasn’t enough, since I had to pay for my accommodations. So I found a job with the pharmaceutical company Firma Wolem, and they probably hired me because the firm wanted to help needy students, since its employees could have easily worked a few extra hours each week. But regardless of how I got the job, I was grateful to the people who hired me, even though I only earned a small amount. I proofread letters, which benefited from my review, ran errands, and did a little filing. I spent the money on food, since I was always hungry, and on a few items of clothing.
My first hours of medical training started with anatomy. We crowded into a large amphitheater used as a lecture hall, where about one hundred students sat in a semicircle of rows, while the professor stood at a distant podium. Students who came early enough might get a seat, while latecomers stood against the wall or sat on the stairs. When several young female colleagues came late and had to stand, I and a dozen other men, well trained by our mothers, got up and offered our seats. But to our surprise, the women reacted angrily, offended by our offer.
“No, we’ll stand since we came late,” one of them told us. “Just treat us like everyone else.” Though we didn’t understand it at the time, the women responded in this way because they were conscious of their equality, long before the women’s liberation movement.
My other courses were biochemistry, botany, zoology, and physiology. The professors prepared their lectures well and made a great effort to introduce us to the mysteries of medicine. As the professors wrote and drew diagrams of various organs on the blackboard, we frantically took notes, because the next day they would question us to insure that we had read our texts and reviewed our notes.
From time to time, the professors looked around the room to call on different students to ask them questions about the lectures and reading. As the professors waited for the selected student to respond, they looked like hovering eagles waiting to pounce on their prey and gobble them up if they answered incorrectly.
I remember the first question the professor asked in my biology class. As I said a silent prayer that I would not be the mouse the eagle pounced on, the professor asked, “Where in the hippocampus might we find the neurons that involve memory?” Fortunately, he did not call on me, and I exhaled in relief. Then he asked more questions to selected students about long- and short-term memory, and again I escaped any questions.
After that first day, each day in biology I felt the terror of waiting to see if I would be called on to answer a question in what had become a regular class ritual. But my luck could not hold out forever. One day the professor aimed his beady eye at me and asked, “Which area of the brain controls language?” Relieved that I knew the answer, I triumphantly answered, “It’s the cerebral cortex.” As soon as I saw the professor nod, I knew I was correct. I felt a glow of pride and let out a quick sigh of relief that the day’s trial was over.
By contrast, on those days when I missed an answer, the professor glared at me and I slunk down into my seat, feeling a sense of shame wash over me. At least I felt relieved that the professor was on to the next victim with another question. Other students told me they felt a similar trepidation at being suddenly called on and asked to respond correctly or felt a deep shame if wrong.
Once the lectures were over in any subject, the professors disappeared out a side door, while we filed from the classroom into the hall, talking among ourselves. This physical separation created a clear barrier between the professors and students. Aside from sitting in the classrooms each day, we had no contact with our instructors outside of the lecture hall, and they had no idea who we were until the exams. It was an us-versus-them situation. The professors were literally and figuratively on a pedestal.
At that time, being a university professor in Germany was a very high status position, as was the case in the pre-Nazi era. But now, the Jewish professors were gone, because they had fled Germany or had been murdered, and the remaining professors took over their chairmanships, except for one holdout—Professor Kraier. He rejected the offer, in part because Harvard invited him to join their medical school, which was a great honor since Harvard was considered one of the top medical schools in the world and still is, but also because he felt it would be immoral to usurp a Jewish professor’s position. He soon left Germany to go to Harvard.
Unfortunately, the reputations of all the German professors suffered after reports of the medical experiments on concentration camp inmates were presented at medical congresses. As some of our professors told us, since students did not attend these congresses, no professors from the many German universities had objected during the war to the experiments or the presentations about them. But information about these experiments gradually leaked out from the papers published in scholarly journals and from professors reporting about these presentations to their classes. As the professors explained to us, the experiments had been perversions of medical practice in the name of science, which left some subjects dead or badly maimed. Although we didn’t know if the professors in Göttingen were involved in these abominable experiments, the participation of any professors, as well as practicing doctors, lessened our respect for them, as well as the academic profession generally.
Initially, though, none of the medical students expressed these negative attitudes toward these experiments openly. Our professors rarely talked about the war or about the medical or other abominations in the camps. They never expressed the slightest regret to us about the fate of their Jewish colleagues, and we were too intimidated to press them for details. We just hoped that none of them had anything to do with the experiments, and as far as we knew, none of them did. In fact, after the war, some professors joined in the humanitarian efforts to bring the East German professors who had conflicts with the Communist authorities to the West to find new jobs.
The Dissection Room
At last the day came when we put our knowledge of anatomy to practical use by dissecting human cadavers. To begin, the administrators to
ld us to report to the dissection room in groups of fifteen at a certain time, as they assigned fifteen students to each lab section. When it was my time to report, I joined fourteen other students at the door of a large delivery room for cargo from trucks in the basement of the building. At precisely three p.m. a security guard motioned to us, and we entered the large, cold dissection room that was surrounded by walls covered with tiles. As soon as we stepped inside what looked like an underground vault in a horror film, we were hit with the smell of formaldehyde. The aroma made many of us lightheaded, while the sight before us was numbing. Five nude cadavers each lay on a gurney, with parts of their bodies cut open like slabs of beef, so we could observe whatever organ we wanted to explore.
This first time in the room was so frightening and shocking that several students passed out cold from the smell and grizzly spectacle. They slumped to the floor, and our professor told the rest of us who were still standing, “Just haul the students who fainted into the small room at the side of the cadaver room, so they can recover for several minutes to regain their strength.”
What was so surprising and upsetting to me and many other students is that these bodies were laid out like the bodies of the mice or chicken we dissected in our high school biology class. Also, our professor treated the dead women coldly, like dead animals, not people. Once these stone cold bodies with large holes showing their inner organs and muscles had been human beings. But now they lay on the slabs like mannequins for us to use as models. Those of us who were still standing smiled smugly to ourselves, as we carried the collapsed students into the recovery room. We, at least, had braved this grim display and had shown our courage to withstand the horrors before us.
Then the professor announced, “Get into your assigned groups around each body.” I joined the fourteen other students in my group and a professor around a body with an open cranial cavity, while other students joined a professor at each of the other cadavers. Our group had to first search in the cranial cavity for the parts of the brain where the neurons stimulated various muscles, eye movements, and other bodily functions. “You want to find the nerves that stimulate each activity,” the professor with our group told us.
I found it fascinating to see these different structures in the brain for the first time, though I didn’t know then that studying the brain and its effect on the muscles would become my life’s work. After these dissections, we finally started to feel like doctors, since we now could apply what we had learned in lectures and from books to real life—or perhaps more appropriately—to death.
Exams
At the end of each year we took an oral exam for each subject. We picked a partner, usually a student of the same level of ability, and teamed up with another pair of students. The four of us then went to the office of the interrogating professor to answer questions, while a more advanced student sat in on the exam to make sure the professor was fair. This system was adopted because the professors viewed it as the way the American occupiers would act, based on the principle of liberty and justice for all. By contrast, before the war no students sat in as proctors on these exams—the professors were viewed as gods—a law unto themselves.
Yet despite this new openness, the exam was truly an exercise in terror, especially at the end of the first year, when we had to show off what we had learned for the first time. I felt myself shaking as I sat in the professor’s office with my fellow students. The shelves around the room, filled with medical and other books, made the test seem even more daunting. The many books were a reminder of the vast amount of medical information that the professor had learned but we had yet to know.
Then the test began. The professor turned to each of us in turn and asked a question, such as, “What is the role of glucose in the performance of the brain?” Though I felt terrified at the thought of not knowing an answer, and we all quivered with anxiety, the other students and I were able to answer correctly. “Well done,” the professor said at the end, and he smiled beatifically, like a parent proud of his children’s accomplishments.
The four of us left exhilarated and went out for drinks, though we couldn’t afford to drink much. Later we went to one of the students’ houses to play cards. Since we felt we had done so well working together, we formed an exam study group for the duration of our medical school studies. As a perk for passing, the senior doctors who practiced in various specialties in the university hospital invited those who passed to work with them. Since we could each choose which doctor to work with, I chose one specializing in internal medicine.
While my student group had passed with flying colors, other students didn’t fare as well. The students who missed a question could return to the professor’s office to answer it again the next day, and if correct, all was well. But if a student missed most of the questions after two tries, he flunked and had to leave medical school, though he could reapply for the following year and start over. Some students in this situation switched to another university, while others simply gave up. Yet, while the classes and testing were very rigorous, only about 4 percent of the students flunked each year.
This period of studies, which included lectures and yearly tests, ended with a final exam after four years called the physicum. Until then we were called studmed; after passing the exam we became candmed. To take the physicum, we returned in our group of four and took the exams as we did for individual classes in a professor’s office with a student proctor looking on.
In taking this final exam, I and the other students dressed like we were going to a formal dinner party or conference—in a black suit, black shoes, white shirt, and silver-gray tie. As we walked to the office of one of the professors judging us, many drivers honked and waved to wish us good luck. Over the years, the citizens of Göttingen had seen dozens of pale-faced, well-dressed young men walking along the road, so they knew where we were going. On hearing their horns, we waved and smiled back, grateful for their support at a time when we were all very anxious about whether we would pass or fail.
The grueling oral questions and the essays were not the worst part of the test. After the oral and essays, every candidate had to accompany his professor to the hospital. There, we went to the bedside of a sick patient and had to diagnose his condition. We began by asking the patient, “Why are you in the hospital?” followed by questions about what he or she was eating and about his or her excretory functions, energy level, and degree of pain. We also asked about the patient’s home life, job, daily duties, and other factors that might contribute to the illness.
Next we listened to the patient’s heart with a stethoscope, and checked his or her blood pressure, pulse, and temperature. After that we placed our hands on the patient’s body over various organs, tapped with the fingers of one hand, and listened to the tapping sound. Was it a hollow noise? A dull thud? The nature of the sound could tell us if the organs were normal or enlarged.
Finally, using all the evidence we obtained from the patient’s answers and our observations, we came up with our diagnosis. To do so, we filled out a form with the test results and our decision based on these results. Then we had to determine the treatment. More than anything, this test helped to show our ability and sensitivity as doctors.
In the afternoon, after we finished a section of the exam, we went to the home of the student with the biggest room and friendliest landlord to play Skat, a German card game still popular today. In the game, three people play in a series of rounds, while the fourth person acts as the dealer. With each new round, another player becomes the dealer. We kept the results for each game in a notebook, and after we finished all sections of the exam, the loser of the games was expected to pay for the dinner celebrating the end of our studies. By the end of medical school, we four students were a tight group. All four of us eventually went to America, though the other students later returned to Germany.
Once the exams were over, all of us felt an enormous relief. To celebrate, we went to the finest, most expensive restaurant in Göttingen. The
tables had white tablecloths and napkins at each place, and in the center was a small vase of flowers and a candle. While it was exhilarating to be in such a luxurious restaurant, as poor students, we ordered the cheapest thing on the menu—stew or noodles, and a glass of wine each. Since the cost was still hard for the loser who was supposed to pay, in the end we all chipped in.
Home, Family, and First Love
While we were in Göttingen, we had to study so hard that we had little time to party during the week. When we got together, we usually read and discussed our studies. The weekends were a different story.
I went home to Eschwege every weekend, ostensibly to see my family, and I enjoyed spending time with them. But seeing them was eclipsed by my spending time with my first real girlfriend, Ilse, whom I met at a dance given by the rowing club. To me, she was beautiful. She was tall and thin, with curly black hair and big eyes, and later she became a model. I adored her, and so did my mother—the first and only one of my girlfriends to meet with her approval. My mother liked Ilse and was very comfortable with her, since Ilse was a local girl and the daughter of my parents’ acquaintances.
Ilse and I spent the weekends hiking in the countryside, rowing on the river, and dancing. We loved going to the movies and listening to jazz, which had been forbidden during the war. American movies were very popular, as they, too, had been off limits during the war. When it was warm, we swam in the quarries and the river Werra. Ilse’s parents owned a clothing store and worked almost all the time, which gave us some privacy in her house. So for a time our relationship was like a love fest—my mother liked Ilse and her parents liked me.
Any weekends with Ilse went by like a whirlwind, since we did so many things together and had so much fun. The following Monday, when I returned to Göttingen, my friends could always tell if I had spent time with her. I invariably fell asleep in class, and they had to poke me to wake me up.
From School to War: Growing Up in Hitler’s Germany (Contemporary Nonfiction) Page 17
