A Perfect Madness (27 page)

In a few minutes Maria returned from
the storage room carrying a tray with the luminal mixture and
morphine syringe. Together in silence, they walked to the far end
of the hall and entered the room of Wilheim, one of the two
children suffering with the same maladies diagnosed in the Knauer
boy.

“
We will keep him asleep
on the same dosage of luminal the next four to five days until he
can no longer awake. You do understand?” Erich asked, nodding to
Maria.

Maria looked hard at Erich with tears
streaming down her face.

“
Yes, but I will give him
the broth only after you have given him some. Then we will be in
this mess together.”

Erich quickly took a cup from the tray
and, holding the boy’s head, hesitated for a second, then slowly
fed him the broth, until the child would take no more, then left
the room.

In the next room, and the two after,
the same routine was followed, with Maria though, holding the
children while they drank the luminal broth. With only the morphine
syringe remaining, they entered Brigitte’s room, where the tiny
child lay awake, looking around the room as if she understood what
the world was all about. Erich gently lifted Brigitte from the bed,
cradling her in his arm as he had done the first day they met, and
softly stroked her tiny head, soothing her with his
voice.

“
My little Brigitte, you
simply were born in the wrong place and at the wrong
time.”

Maria handed him the syringe and
lifted Brigitte’s gown, exposing her left hip and buttock, then
turned away, unable to watch. Erich slowly injected the 50 mgs of
morphine into Brigitte, then waited for her to die in his arms.
Before she closed her eyes, a tiny smile, which he had never seen
before, broke through her lips as she watched his face, causing him
to turn away in tears. This moment would become a memory that he
could neither confront and absorb, nor wish away with time. He knew
other children would soon follow, yet it was only Brigitte’s smile
that he would remember.

***

NINETEEN

Julia, Czechoslovakia, 1942

M
artin Drossen was a
simple German soldier, but a good one. He didn’t believe in the
National Socialist Party, but he did believe in the German people.
And he had gone to fight not for the Führer, but because it was his
duty to do so as a good citizen. Martin’s grandfather had died
early in the Great War during a withering artillery barrage on the
Western Front. His father’s fate came one day after the armistice
was signed ending the war. After spending a short leave at home, he
was killed while returning to his unit near Aachen by a stray
bullet fired, ironically, by a drunken soldier celebrating peace.
But he had left his seed in Martin’s mother then, and the legacy of
honor and duty. Reared in Mainz by his widowed mother and widowed
grandmother, he grew up to be a gentle person, but with little
ambition. All he required from anyone who knew him was the same
respect he gave them. Loving God was unimportant though, because he
felt God had given him no right answers for his father and
grandfather’s deaths, a fact he was reminded of every day watching
his mother grow old laboring ten hours a day as a housekeeper for
two wealthy Jewish families.

Maria Wolken came into his life by
chance one day. Entering the farmer’s market to purchase a few
fresh vegetables for home, he noticed her struggling to gather
together an array of late spring melons that had tumbled into the
street as she attempted to sample one. Rushing to help her retrieve
the melons that had rolled beneath several parked trucks and carts,
brought to Martin in a few short months a treasured friend and
lover and devoted wife. Though Maria was deeply religious, she
cared little, and worried less, that he wasn’t. He was a good and
generous man, with what little he could provide, and had her own
father been killed in the war, she might have left God, too, she
knew. Neither one, though, was prepared for what Hitler and Germany
would soon demand of them. Maria entered nursing, which would take
her later to the Görden Psychiatric Hospital, and Martin enlisted
in the Wehrmacht. His only hope was that the war would be quickly
over and he could return to his beloved Maria. But he now found
himself, three years later, patrolling the main road between
Nürnberg and Prague, with his many dreams of peace still distant
for all of Germany.

As he sat this day astride the idling
motorcycle, adjusting his goggles, Martin thought of home and Maria
and wondered if she was keeping warm in the freezing winter air
that had blanketed all of Europe. No one sane would be moving about
on a day such as this, he mused. And running a patrol on the
treacherous and icy roads in ten degree weather was asking death to
ride along with him and maybe make an early appearance. But he
would go, as he always did, for no other reason but duty. He would
tarry for a while in the small villages passed through on his
patrol, talking with anyone who might listen to what he was about.
Most kept to themselves, though, saying little to him or to any of
the other patrols that passed their way. He was their enemy and
they despised him; not enough, though, for there were some who
despised the Jews more. Many Jews had already been betrayed in
their own village where they had lived for generations, and turned
over to the patrols, while others were shot on sight and their
bodies dumped in the passing rivers. A perfect storm of madness had
come to the land, opening up its vast dark clouds to rain monsters
on all those below.

Julia and Eva had each asked the other
a dozen times what they were doing tromping through woods on a day
made only for dying. What little body heat they had early in the
morning had long been taken down by the gripping cold. Little time
remained, both knew, before they would become one with the frozen
earth. They would surrender, not to the Germans, but to the
precious gift of a warm sleep, when all feeling becomes suspended
as frozen death comes to the mind and body.

It was Julia who saw the farm
buildings first through an opening in the woods. Rising out of the
snow two hundred yards distant, they looked like giant stone ogres
of old sniffing the air for any human scent. Freezing, yet warm
from excitement, Julia and Eva stayed in the woods out of sight for
several minutes, watching for any movements about the buildings.
Wisps of gray smoke broke from the chimney top on the house,
wafting upwards from the snow-covered roof in a slow spiral to meet
the early morning clouds. Eva had experienced the idyllic scene
many times before on her farm in Bratislava, and never tired of the
inward joy it brought to her long days of laboring
there.

“
It’s beautiful, isn’t
it,” she said, squeezing Julia’s hand.

“
It is for sure. Beauty is
the only thing constant in this dirty old world of ours that tells
us God may be still hanging around. It can always be found
somewhere.”

“
Who told you that
foolishness?”

“
Erich, in one of his
weaker moments I suspect, but it’s true.”

“
He hasn’t been to hell
yet,” Eva laughed, leaving the woods and starting across the
highway towards a narrow, snow-covered road leading to the
farmhouse. As she did she looked back to Julia following
her.

“
I will talk,” she said.
“I am a peasant, and whoever lives in the house will be a peasant
too. Besides, you are too citified and Jewish looking.”

Julia smiled and said nothing. She had
always wondered as a child what a Jew should look like, and no one,
not even her father knew, though he joked about it many times with
Hiram. She finally decided one day that it was their good Rabbi who
looked the way a Jew should be. But he was a man, which meant to
her that only men could look like Jews, not women, leaving her
quite disgusted. This seemed true to her even now because Eva was a
Jew, yet she looked no different than all the Slavs who worked the
fields and vineyards around Bratislava.

As they neared the farmhouse, Julia
noticed a thin wire fence circling the building as well as the barn
standing immediately next to it. The gate opened into a small
courtyard separate from the rest of the grounds leading to the
barn. Like the outbuildings, the farmhouse was made of heavy
fieldstone, one level, and elevated several feet above the ground
to accommodate the heavy snows that came in the long winters. A
wide stone staircase led to the front door. Before they reached the
stairs, the heavy wooden door swung open. A thin older man, spare
in flesh, with ruffled grey hair and a dark complexion, greeted
them with suspicion and an old German Mauser rifle used by some
Hungarians in the Great War. Julia and Eva moved no closer, unsure
of what they should do.

“
What do you women want? I
have been watching you two for some time.”

“
We are cold and lost, I
think, and want only to warm ourselves for a little while and we
will be on our way,” Eva answered.

“
Who are you? Only fools
and bad people would be out in this weather.”

“
I am Eva Pitsky and my
friend here is Julia Simik. We are from Pilsen,” Eva said. “We were
trying to get to Klatovy, when the bus slid off the road some ways
back.”

“
Does your friend here
talk?” the man said, looking strangely at Julia.

“
Yes I do, and may we
please come in? My feet are frozen solid,” Julia said softly,
smiling at the man.

Saying nothing, the man stepped back
into the house. Holding the rifle steadily with both hands, he
nodded to Julia and Eva to enter the room. Julia rushed to the open
stone fireplace holding a thick bed of hot embers slowing burning a
large, newly laid log. Removing her boots, she quickly sat down on
the hearth, placing her feet within inches of the glowing embers,
and sighed with delight.

Eva waited by the open door for a
second before entering. Nothing about the man was reassuring,
especially his eyes, which asked questions when they looked at you.
Less trusting than Julia, she stepped into the large room, watching
every move the man made. He seemed to be alone in the
house.

There were only two small rooms
opening to the right of the big central room where Julia was and an
open kitchen to the left with a small table and two chairs. A dirty
soup bowl and spoon rested on the table alongside an empty butter
dish and a slice of crusty hard bread. The toilet, she knew, was
somewhere out back. He was a poor peasant by any measure, though
her father’s house had little more. Like many peasants in this
area, each day’s task in this man’s life was to make it through
another day, that’s all.

The man walked to the kitchen and sat
down by the table with the rifle resting on his lap. He watched Eva
for a few seconds, then Julia as she continued to warm her feet by
the fire.

“
You are not cold like
your friend?” he asked, staring now at Eva.

“
No, I am a peasant like
you. We are used to being miserable,” Eva said, forcing a smile and
returning the man’s stare.

Seconds passed in silence before the
man rose from his chair and laid the rifle down on the
table.

“
I have little for you to
eat—soup and bread, that is all. You may warm yourselves a little
while longer, then you must leave.”

“
We had hoped to spend a
day or two until the days warm. We will pay you for the trouble,”
Eva said, moving to the stove and stirring what little was left of
the lentil soup.

“
You have not told me who
you are. There are many like you on the roads today causing
trouble, especially the Jews and gypsies,” the man said, still
staring at Eva.

“
Do we look like gypsies
and Jews? Look at my face and skin,” Eva said boldly, moving closer
to the man and brushing the hair away from her face.

But it was not Eva the man looked at
now. His eyes were fixed on Julia, who was kneeling now by the
fire, warming her hands.

“
You do not talk much.
Where is your home?” he asked, nodding to her.

“
Pilsen. My father works
in the iron works there.”

The man studied her face for a moment
and knew she was lying, then turned away and looked to where Eva
was standing.

“
You have
money?”

“
Some. Very little, in
fact, a few Reich marks. You may have them if we can stay here for
a few days,” Eva said.

“
I have my son’s old
bicycle. You must buy it also if I let you stay,” the man said,
looking back to Julia, who was sitting pulling her boots
on.

Eva started to respond but stopped,
and moved quickly to the door, opened it and listened. The distant
puttering of motorcycles could be heard coming from the south.
Julia had heard the sounds, too, and moved to the open door
followed by the man.

“
That will be a military
patrol. They pass by here every day many times.”

“
Do they stop here?” Julia
asked, trying to still the rising anxiety in her voice.

“
Sometimes, maybe twice,
to ask if I’ve seen any refugees or Jews on the road. If they stop,
I will tell them nothing, and they will leave. But you must buy the
bicycle,” the man said without hesitation.