A Perfect Madness (18 page)

“
Why?” the professor
responded. “Where is any value in such a life? Where would it come
from? Certainly not from such an existence we are talking
about.”

Julia had no answer and sat
embarrassed, not looking at Erich.

“
You give up too easily,
Miss Kaufmann,” the professor said. “Think for a moment. Could you
not argue that life itself has an intrinsic value, a worth in
itself simply because it is life?”

Again, no one would take the bait,
except Julia.

“
Then no life would be
without value. All would be equal,” she replied proudly.

“
Yes, but that idea would
be very difficult to accept, I daresay, by many. Would it not be
then that the dregs in our society, the outcasts, would be of
relative worth to those of us sitting here today in this
classroom?” the professor said, smiling at Julia, as the rest of
the class laughed, even Erich at first.

Refusing to concede her argument to
the professor and the class, Julia waited a second before
answering, to be sure her voice would speak her convictions
clearly.

“
No, that is not so,
Professor Wise.”

There was no laughter this time, only
surprised gasps at the boldness of Julia’s reply, challenging a
professor so blatantly.

“
Where is your reason,
Miss Kaufmann, since you have questioned my conclusion?”

Julia did not look at Erich this time
for support, nor hesitate to respond.

“
You are mixing apples and
oranges, Professor Wise, intrinsic worth with systemic—that which
we are born with at our first breath with that which society
decides we are worth.”

“
And?”

“
It is the systemic worth
that gives way to evil at times. We care not for the intrinsic
worth, only what we believe someone is worth.”

Nothing more was said in the hush that
followed Julia’s remarks. But the joy in Professor Wise’s face over
her ramblings could not be mistaken. Erich would later learn that
Professor Wise was one of the first Jewish professors to disappear
from the university and Prague, never to be heard from
again.

Though he disagreed with Julia’s
arguments, he had sat quietly, not wishing to challenge her. A
life’s true worth is in its potential, he would have argued, not in
merely existing. And when that potential is missing, life has no
value. This would allow matters of greater worth to take priority
by society. Do we not say this when we hang a murderer who has
wasted his potential, he would have insisted. But he worshipped
Julia and would do nothing to possibly embarrass her in front of a
class of angry young German students. Later, they would discuss
each other’s position with her father, whom he deeply
respected.

After leaving the child’s room, Erich
quickly left the hospital and wandered aimlessly among the artisan
shops in Leipzig, many still open. His favorite shop, a menagerie
of old maps and great literary books of knowledge, was closed,
however. The front windows had been smashed in one rainy night by
rampaging members of the Nationalist Socialist Party, most of whom
were university students, leaving the priceless tomes to be
trampled in the mud and water along the streets, where they lay for
weeks, rotting. Only a few ragged glass pieces of the Star of
David, marking the store as Jewish owned, remained on the front
door as a reminder of the violence. Little was left of the owner’s
devotion to knowledge.

Erich walked into an open beer garden
and sat down at one of the many empty tables. Most of the young men
who gathered here every day before going home were missing, now
soldiers for the Third Reich, the joy of their melodious voices
silent like the city. Everything was changing with the war. One
could sit here for a day, watching in unmoving time, and yet,
nothing would be the same tomorrow, Erich felt. If he was going to
try to leave Germany, he must do so soon.

“
Herr Dr. Schmidt, may I
talk with you a moment please?” said a small man, dressed much like
a peasant of the fields. Though he didn’t know him, Erich easily
imagined who the man might be.

“
I am Rudolph Knauer,
father of the child you saw today with Dr. Catel in the
hospital.”

“
Did Dr. Catel send you to
speak with me?” Erich asked, irritated with the unwanted
intrusion.

“
Please, no. I was sitting
in an empty room next to my child’s, and could hear you and the
other doctors talking.”

“
Then you must know that I
strongly disagree with Dr. Catel’s recommendation that we kill your
son. That is what we would be doing, killing him.”

“
I know. But let me tell
you, please. I am the one who petitioned the Chancellery for the
mercy killing of my son. The decision to do so did not come easy to
me, yet, you have seen how pitiful my son is.”

Rudolph Knauer’s mention of the
Chancellery in Berlin surprised Erich and bothered him. Whatever
the final decision was regarding euthanizing the young child would
come from Hitler’s personal office. Since Dr. Catel had involved
him, along with the other doctors, his name would now be on the
lips of those handling the case in the Chancellery. A dubious honor
at best, and certainly a frightful place to find one’s name,
whichever way the decision might go. More importantly though, Erich
knew that every word he uttered now to Mr. Knauer, or to anyone
else about the case, would easily find its way back to
Berlin.

Suddenly drenched in paranoia showered
on him by this man who had appeared from nowhere to talk about
killing his son, Erich listened carefully to the man’s story. It
was Dr. Catel and Dr. Brandt who sought the petition from Mr.
Knauer to have his son euthanized because of his horrible
disabilities, and then carried it to the Chancellery. Hitler, they
happily promised to a weary father, would look with great favor on
such a request. Mr. Knauer’s story ended then on a second promise
that Dr. Brandt would come to Leipzig soon to examine the
child.

Erich decided to end the conversation.
He knew little of Dr. Brandt, other than that he came from a
distinguished medical family in Alsace and was a young, gifted
surgeon. Being Hitler’s personal physician was enough to know the
importance of the man and what he would bring to the Knauer
case.

“
He is not a man to be
taken lightly,” were the only words his father had used to portray
Dr. Brandt after Erich called to talk with him later in the
evening. But it was what his father voluntarily revealed to him
that kept Erich awake during a long night of fitful nightmares,
screaming to a world that had no ears to hear. The old Jewish man
and woman had come back to haunt him once again. Both looking
together at him through the old woman’s dislodged eyeball, they
smiled and cried, then smiled again. As a member of the Reich
Committee for Hereditary Health Matters, which he had never heard
of, it was his father who had passed onto the Chancellery Mr.
Knauer’s petition to have his child killed. Now, with Hitler’s
orders in hand, Dr. Brandt was coming to Leipzig to see that it was
done.

Erich stood at the doorway of the
child’s room, not wishing to enter. The gentle air currents moving
through the long hallway would be better there and help keep him
awake. Standing near the window was Karl Brandt. Tall and
impressive and young, he seemed to fill up the whole room. Erich
could not help but be impressed by the man’s aura of elegance. If
one were to need a goodwill ambassador for killing innocent babies,
Dr. Brandt would be his candidate. Though he was talking directly
to Mr. Knauer, who was standing next to his child’s bed, to Erich
it seemed the words were meant for every doctor in the Third
Reich.

After explaining to the crying father
that the Führer had personally sent him because he was very
interested in the welfare of his son, Brandt stopped for a second,
gently stroking the child’s hair before continuing.

“
Your child has no future.
His life is worthless.”

Then, as if granting a wish from the
good princess in a Grimm fairy tale, Brandt said with great pride,
“You and your family will not have to suffer from this terrible
misfortune any longer because the Führer has granted you the mercy
killing of your son.”

Nothing more needed to be said, and
Mr. Knauer continued to thank Dr. Brandt between loud sobs of
crying until escorted from the room by a nurse. But the ears in
Erich’s mind would hear the distraught father’s pitiful sobbing
long after he had left the hospital. When evening came, he went
back to the room to watch Dr. Catel administer an overdose of
morphine to the child, killing him in seconds. For a moment, Erich
wondered how it feels to kill someone, especially a helpless child.
But it was the dying and being dead that he thought most about.
There’s no prettifying death, leaving all that you know and
stepping into a strange new dimension that you had never seen
before where all you knew and were is no more. To Erich, unless the
soul has eyes to see and ears to hear and a mouth to speak, it
seemed dying and being dead would be the most frightening thing in
the world.

Later still, he sat alone in the same
beer garden where he had talked earlier with Mr. Knauer. Sitting
several tables away from him were the two doctors who also
witnessed the child’s death, as he did. They sat silent, swirling
their warm beer, acknowledging no one, not even each other. What
had happened was so sudden and unexpected, especially in a
children’s hospital. Like Erich, they knew an ancient prohibitive
line of medicine had been crossed. A cure for sickness of the mind
and body had been discovered: the eradication of life unworthy of
life. Soon, both doctors left the table, going separate ways
without speaking to each other, or to Erich.

Alone with his thoughts now, Erich
wished only that his father was with him now to explain his role in
the grim killing of the child. After all, it was he, with Brandt,
who had carried the petition requesting to do so, to Hitler. It
would be difficult for any son to see his father as a failure,
Erich believed, but that was how he now looked upon his father. The
true prestige his father had so earnestly sought at first in the
world of science, to have his name etched alongside that of Koch
and other great German doctors, had eluded him. All that his father
would ever achieve would be that which the Chancellery might give
him in exchange for his intellect. How could his father ever have
agreed to such a poor exchange, Erich wondered, when he had
preached to him so many times that the integrity of the mind was
the only thing sacred in the world. It must be defended above all
else, he would insist, or man’s idea of God would die, and then
nothing else would matter. Erich believed his father then, and
still did, but could do so only by pretending.

***

THIRTEEN

I
t is the wind
blowing through the Black Forest pines that sounds like the howling
voices of fairy tale monsters and witches and dragons and little
children lost. And Erich heard them all again, as he had at ten,
hiking with his father through the dark woods. He would stay close
to him then, holding his hand until the voices stopped and only the
birds could be heard singing to each other. The voices, he knew,
were make-believe, but he wasn’t sure. They were there too often
not to be. Poets and dreamers lived there, too, sometimes. And when
they did, Erich went with them, hiding in secret runaway places
that the real world knew nothing of. It was so now, the voices. But
they were not the poets and the dreamers, or the fairy tale
monsters, he knew. Children’s voices, thousands and thousands, all
as one, it seemed, filling the forest with their sounds. Heard
loudest among them was the silent voice of the child who could not
speak, whose hand he had gently squeezed the day he went to sleep
forever.

Erich had come to the forest late the
night before, staying at a small inn near the edge of a wide
wildflower field where a trail begins, leading into the forest. The
woods and the streams nurtured him, and he was never happier than
when he wandered aimlessly among them. Before he could leave
Leipzig, Dr. Catel had requested that he and Dr. Schneider, the
assistant chief of psychiatry, and one other doctor that Erich
didn’t know, accompany him to the Knauer child’s room to observe
while he killed the infant. Then they were to sign the record as
witnesses to what was still essentially a crime. There was nothing
unpleasant about the boy’s death. But death is never
unpleasant—it’s the dying that’s so hard to watch. When the child
stopped breathing, and the vile smell of his loosened bowels
covered the air, Erich fled the room. Now alone in the innocence of
the ancient forest, he realized it was not the sickening stench of
the dead child that had made him run away to hide, it was himself
covered with his own shit. Dr. Catel had purposely involved him as
a witness in the killing of the child, making him an accessory of
record. As it was with the old Jewish man and woman, he had just
let matters be, saying nothing, offering no protest against a
terrible wrong. That he would be a coward to the end, and die a
thousand deaths for being so, was all he was able to feel
now.

Before leaving the hospital grounds,
Erich had sprawled out on a grassy knoll in back of the hospital
watching a small riverboat trying to navigate the rain-swollen
Weisse Elster River below. The spring rains had come and everything
was green and fresh, and he imagined for a quiet minute sailing on
the river straight back to Czechoslovakia where its life began. But
Dr. Schneider, who had been looking for him, came and sat down next
to him, waiting a few minutes before speaking.