A Perfect Madness (9 page)

Mrs. Kaufmann brought a sandwich and a
glass of milk for her husband and set them down quietly on his
desk. Reaching to him, she gently touched his neck, then left the
room, leaving Julia alone with her father.

Julia continued trying to break into
her father’s mind, speaking to him softly every few minutes at
first, then yelling in frustration, something she had never done,
not even as a child. Still he remained away from her world, staying
as silent as a fieldstone. Refusing to leave him alone, Julia
curled up in the soft cushioned chair facing his desk and drifted
off to sleep. Falling asleep in the huge chair was a loving ritual
for her that had begun when she could barely climb into it. It was
there, in the years that followed, that she would listen for hours
until she grew sleepy to intense eclectic discussions by her father
and his colleagues on matters of the mind and body. Their strange,
long words meant little to her, and it was her father’s face and
eyes that she would always watch. They spoke his passion for the
subject and for life itself, in a way that words could never
capture. All this was missing now in her father. The great winds of
life that had filled his sails for so long had stilled. He seemed
as nothing.

Hours later Mrs. Kaufmann stroked
Julia’s cheek to awaken her, as she would do when Julia was a
child. Looking around, Julia saw the empty chair where her father
had been sitting, still facing the window. Before she could say
anything, her mother said, “Father left for the university to meet
with the rector.”

“
Alone? The Munich Dictate
is to be signed today freeing Sudeten from the Republic. There will
be trouble, I’m sure,” Julia said frantically, jumping up from the
chair.

“
Your brother is with him.
They will be fine. Your father is an honored professor
there.”

Julia rushed to the kitchen, doused
her face in cold water and, ignoring the wrinkled clothes she had
slept in, hurriedly left to walk the short distance to Charles
University, hoping to find her father and Hiram.

But Dr. Kaufmann had turned away at
the last minute from his intended mission at the university to
hurry to the American and British Embassies to request visas.
Though many Jewish friends had already done so, and many had left
Prague, he had never given thought to his family leaving Prague—it
would have meant surrendering all he believed in. Yet he had
wrestled with it from the moment the cruel insults were hurled at
him in front of Julia in the café. Keeping it bottled up inside for
the unspoken hours that followed, the decision to do so escaped him
until he recalled, as he walked with Hiram towards the university,
the rotund flushed face of Ladislav Simek, his dearest friend, who
had been sitting at the table, too ashamed to look at him or Julia.
Boyhood mates, they had sat side by side throughout their school
years, even through medical school, separating at the end only in
their chosen specialties. If Ladislav wouldn’t raise his voice to
defend him, then who would?

“
Can’t we wait to see what
will happen, Father?” Hiram asked, unsure about his father’s sudden
decision.

“
No, Hiram, there will be
no more springtime for us in Prague.”

***

SIX

Prague, 1939

E
rich sat quietly by
himself in the lecture hall, the events of the previous evening
still clouding his mind. Within minutes after the Munich Dictate
was signed, ripping the Sudetenland for good from the
Czechoslovakian borders, hundreds from the National Socialist
Party, including many German Sudeten students, had taken to the
streets across the so-called “liberated” lands wildly smashing and
destroying everything Jewish in their path. Nothing was left
untouched. To Erich, it was as if the ancient gods of old had risen
from their stone graves and, rubbing the dust of a thousand years
from their eyes, set forth again to destroy all that was good and
decent. Where does this German thunder come from? he had repeatedly
questioned himself throughout the night. Even the holiest of the
Germans, Martin Luther, had slaughtered thousands of Jews and
non-Jews. Perhaps the odor of intolerance is wedded with violence
and has its own special gene, Erich finally concluded, because
reason has no room for its smell. To see it this way, intolerance
must be a wide pathway for evolution, clearing the way for dumping
the unfit that stand in its way. But such crazy thinking was his
father’s along with a growing army of other German doctors and
scientists, not his. So why would he even consider such a
ridiculous connection?

Erich was shaken from his thoughts by
the entrance of Rector Mann onto the stage followed by a high Nazi
medical officer in full uniform, who had been kept hidden from the
students until now.

“
Students and future
doctors of the Third Reich, be seated,” Mann ordered in a military
tone. “Those of you who will not become German doctors are excused,
unless you too wish to hear the good news being offered today by
Dr. Weber from the Health Ministry.”

Extending his hand, Mann brought Weber
to the large lectern positioned boldly in the front-center of the
large hall, emblazoned with the ancient university crest. Erich
watched the short, squash-like medical officer move to the podium,
wearing tiny rimless spectacles that only emphasized his rotund
bald head. Though he was from the Health Ministry, he wore the
officer’s green ensemble of the German army, complete with a side
arm and Nazi insignia. Observing the man, Erich wondered if his own
father too had relinquished the sacred white coat for the Nazi
uniform when he succumbed to the call of the Nazi temptress, so
cleverly disguised behind the mask of eugenics. Years had passed
since he walked away from Berlin and his father in disgust at the
growing voices calling for the cleansing of the Aryan race. His
father’s voice had been one of the loudest and most influential in
the medical profession in supporting the virtues of sterilization.
What Erich did not know now was the full extent of his father’s
involvement in the Nazis’ medical ethos, the Nazification of the
medical profession. Nazi policies with regard to sterilizing or
killing people considered unfit for a society of the strong had
been subtly combined with a vigorous enthusiasm for extending
various forms of medical care to the entire German population. In
this way, his father and the other doctors could continue to view
themselves as authentic physicians, regardless of whatever evil
smell the Nazis showered on their profession. Later, Erich would
come to realize that a society of the strong did not include the
“pitiful” Jew.

“
Good morning, future
healers and saviors of the glorious Third Reich,” were the most
understandable words Erich heard from Dr. Weber’s high, shrill
voice, as he began what would become to some, including Erich, a
very troublesome speech to follow. For thirty minutes he talked of
Germany’s awaited day in the sun, praising its righteous might that
all nations near and far trembled from. Then in an awkward gesture,
he flung his short arms open wide, which caused him to look even
more ridiculous to Erich, and made the pronouncement that the
students must be the new medical and biological warriors for the
state. Erich heard little else, his mind fixed on the words
“biological warriors,” until Dr. Weber spoke of a new shortened
curriculum for the medical school, one that would focus on military
medicine and population politics and racial biology, not that which
would ordinarily be expected of a well-trained German doctor. His
mind raced ahead to what this man was speaking in truth about, that
the students were to become involved in a holy synthesis of
marching boots and books. They were to engage in paramilitary
training as students with a commitment of their bodies and minds to
an all-out war against alleged enemies of Germany.

Then they came, as Erich knew they
would—the only words that would give any rational meaning to what
Dr. Weber was saying. They had always been there, unhidden for many
years. But no one heard them as doctors except the likes of his
father, who saw only what the greatness of science could do when
combined with an ideology calling for racial purity.

Pausing before he spoke, Dr. Weber
looked slowly around the room, staring at times at different
students until they became uncomfortable with the coldness in his
eyes.

“
The Jews are our
misfortune, a grave misfortune to a greater health for Germany. But
let me say, that problem will be dealt with in time, medically, I
promise you.”

The silence invoked by these words was
deadening, as if no one had heard them. Or perhaps they weren’t
even uttered, in of all places, a medical school. For Erich and
some other students, it was like preaching a sermon to a full
congregation on why believing in the Trinity was such a terrible
mistake and needed to be dealt with. Erich, though, looked down at
his textbooks, away from the source of the vitriolic rhetoric
steaming up the lecture hall. His father’s day had come, and in
time he knew he would have to go home to face him.

Dismayed from the continuing blackened
words spewing forth from the doctor, Erich started to walk out in
protest, but thought better about doing so. Such a defiant act
alone would be silly and laughed at and would accomplish nothing.
Besides, something the man had said earlier before the ranting
against the Jews began had stirred his interest. All medical
studies would be shortened, which would allow hundreds of students
to join Hitler’s great crusade immediately.

Erich wasn’t about to join Hitler’s
legions, but a pretension of doing so, he realized, would turn him
loose much earlier from the clutches of the university. He could
graduate in the coming spring, a matter of months, two years ahead
of time. How qualified as a doctor he and the other students would
be, absent the extra years of clinical work, was not his problem.
He would be a psychiatrist, anyway, far removed from all the blood
and guts pouring and leaking out of wounded soldiers, treating only
their broken minds, might they have one. It seemed the ancient
Nordic gods were smiling on him again, and would soon do so for
Julia and her family, something the Hebrew God seemed reluctant to
do at the moment, he thought. Surely now, a medical degree, albeit
a woefully shabby one, would carry Julia and him far away on the
happy wings of sanity to a safe new homeland.

When Dr. Weber finished, Erich stood
up, applauding wildly in pretended joy with the other students at
what he had said. Spotting Franz Kremer, the tall, blond Sudeten
student whom he detested, Erich waved to him with a forced smile,
then walked over to where he was standing.

“
A wonderful message,
don’t you think, Franz?”

Franz studied Erich’s sudden change of
character, for their dislike of each other went far beyond mere
opinions, striking at the heart of anti-Semitism. He hated Jews
with a passion, while Erich slept with them. It was that simple.
The persona Erich projected now was strange, and probably a sham,
Franz quickly concluded, yet the door was always open to converts.
Whether from fear or a belief in the cause didn’t matter, so long
as they became Nazis. In fact, to Franz, a conversion out of fear
was far more reliable than belief. Fear makes demands on the most
basic of our instincts—surviving; nothing else matters. One’s soul
can easily be bargained for then, because one has become nothing
more than a terrified blob of human cells, each fighting for
survival regardless of the cost.

“
Yes, a great message of
hope for us,” Franz said finally, responding to Erich. “I am
surprised, though, by your remarks. They seem strange coming from
you. The little Jewish whore is no longer important to
you?”

“
Julia? No, she is
history, a mistaken experience. Forget her. I have been studying
the words of Professor Franz Hamburger of Vienna, a true medical
believer in a real renaissance of medical science on Nazi
foundations. You have heard of him, I suppose?” Erich said,
inwardly delighted in the sophistication of his lies to
Franz.

“
Yes.” Franz replied,
though he hadn’t. “Do you agree with him?”

“
In every way. He is a
very influential thinker.”

Erich was unsure whether he could
carry the façade any longer without laughing in Franz’s face and
turned to leave. Pausing at the door, he looked back at Franz and
the Nazi armband he was wearing.

“
Tell me, where can I get
such an armband?”

“
You must join the party
first, like your father, Dr. Schmidt. He would be proud,” Franz
said, half smirking.

Stunned by the mention of his father,
Erich struggled to keep his composure. To hear his father’s name
tossed so casually into their conversation by Franz brought
threatening new questions to Erich, not the least of which was how
important was Franz to Berlin now.

“
My father? Do you know
him?”

“
Not personally, but the
Gestapo does. He is a highly respected doctor whom the party will
look on with great favor when the Jewish question boils
over.”

“
What does the Gestapo
have to do with my father?” Erich asked meekly, regretting terribly
his rash decision to talk and josh with Franz.

“
Not so much your father,
but you.”