The Writers' Circle

DISTORTIONS
     I was a doctor once.  Heidelberg University, graduation class of 1940.  Twelve of us, only twelve qualified with full honours.  And we didn't confine ourselves to  medicine in those seven years - it was Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Voltaire - even Einstein, Freud and Meyerhof in the very early days.   
    "Above all, do no wrong."  How did I turn the Hippocratic Oath into a blood-soaked curse?   They were so persuasive.  It all seemed so simple; so logical. They came, two of them.  Elegant - shining, in their black uniforms.  Supreme, almost god-like, in their confidence.  They spoke to us for an hour.  They didn't cajole or coax us.  They gave us the facts and let us make up our own minds.   We were, after all, trained scientists.  The ancient Romans had used the results of medical experiments on slaves to treat their wounded legionnaires.  For the first time in two thousand years we would  have that opportunity. A chance to conduct experiments on homo sapiens. Not mice, or guinea pigs or rats, or even apes, but humans.  Similar to rats in many ways, but their physiology was the same as man, even if their souls were damned.   I was the only one to accept, the others preferred to use their skills at the front, repairing the bodies of our brave compatriots  in the Wehrmacht. 

       Dachau was a universe turned upside down, a monstrous world in which all I had learned had to be unlearned.  But we were the ubermenschen.  The others, they were worse than animals.  Skeletal, filthy,  ready to die.  No, expecting to die - if not today, then tomorrow.  What did it matter to them?  Their God, their Yahweh, was waiting for them - He had called them to him.  That's what I really believed. 
     Don't misunderstand me.  I wasn't doing work which had no relevance to the war effort.  I wasn't interested in working with poison, or twins, or sterilisation like Mengele.   No, this was important work - we were saving lives, helping the Luftwaffe.   My mentor was Dr. Sigmund Rascher.  A brilliant man;  quite brilliant.  The objective was to find out how to save our pilots if they were forced to bale out into freezing seas or pushed by a dogfight up to high altitudes.  We used healthy young Polish officers for the freezing experiments, lowering the temperature until their blood literally froze.   The Jews, we would put into low-pressure chambers which simulated altitudes as high as 68,000 feet.  Then we would monitor their physiological response as they died. We took cine film, photographs, recorded vital signs every few minutes -   pulse rate, ECG.  We even dissected the subject's brains while they were still alive. It was fascinating.  Do you know we were able to prove that high-altitude sickness resulted from the formation of tiny air bubbles in the blood vessels of the pre-frontal cortex.   No-one survived.  If they didn't die during the experiments, we would give them a simple injection.  No point in taking chances.
    A number of us saw the writing on the wall after America was dragged into the war by the Japanese in 41. But when we were defeated at Stalingrad in 43, all the officers knew the position.   I resigned my post late in 43 and joined the regular army on the Russian front.  Changed my name of course - got new papers.  We all did.  There would be records of the doctors who had worked at Dachau.  We Germans always were obsessive about record-keeping.   
      Those last 16 months helped me forget.  I was working a 23 hour day, trying to save children and old men. Doing what I had been trained to do - setting fractures, staunching appalling wounds, amputating gangrenous limbs, putting the worst cases to sleep with a kind word.  And all the time I was keeping sane by stretching my body to the limit, exercising into the night - press-ups, star jumps, sprinting, long distance running -  whatever I could do to keep as fit as possible.  Something that had been drummed into us at Heidelberg - mens sana in corpore sano.  Something I never forgot, never abandoned, even later, much later.
      After the war, the Russian camp, the starvation, the indoctrinations,   I began to see what we had done. What I had done.  The horror of it.    The past was all around me.   I would be standing on a station platform and the words "Achtung! Achtung!" would blare out from the speakers, sending me skidding back to that nether world.   

It was almost a relief when the phone call came, a distant anonymous voice late at night using  my real name after all these years, telling me that I would receive "further information".   I slept better than I had for years.  At last I would be allowed to pay.   But nothing happened. No knock on the door. No police. Nothing.  Three days went by, three  days of cold terror.   On the fourth day a letter dropped through the door - a letter without heading or signature.  
July 1946
Dear Herr Doktor
We are aware of the valuable experiments which you undertook during the war.  We believe that your work should be extended so that more lives can be saved.  We would like to offer you a position as head of one of our research facilities in America.  Your salary will be commensurate with your professional status.  You will be given a new identity.  All transportation fees will be taken care of.
There is no need to respond to this letter.   We will telephone you when arrangements are in place.
Yours sincerely
Chief Executive'
   
That letter, that contemptible letter, crashed through my defences.    How could those monsters think that I was capable of profiting from what I had done?   
But if they had found me, others could do the same, so I left Germany as soon as I could.  Came to England. Took a job in a place where I knew I would be safe - the King David Hotel, Bournemouth,  serving the very people I had defiled.    I don't pretend to like them.  They are not an attractive race.  The overweight women with their whining and their wigs.  The unclean men with their beards and their endless babbling to their deity.  The pushy, greedy children.   Twelve years - and all the time, I was aware that they thought I was beneath them.  They saw themselves as the Chosen People and the rest of the world, the goyim, as they call us, as inferior, worthy only to serve their needs, to be their slaves.  Now, they were the Ubermenschen.  No-one asked where I was from or what I had done in the war - but some knew.  Those who had been in the camps knew.  Yes, they knew.  I am sure of it. Some of them even spoke to me in Yiddish.  They knew.

 My ability to insulate myself from the past had been perfected.   I felt nothing, remembered nothing until..until they showed a television documentary about Dachau.  And there it was - my film.  The film I had shot of Prisoner number D7643259F.  My film.  He sat there in the chamber, passive, impervious, resigned.  Not too emaciated or depressed, that would have skewed the experiments.  I hadn't noticed it at the time, but in fact he was quite good-looking.  A sort of Paul Newman look-alike, with shaven hair and a slight fuzz of beard.    When the distortion started, I was completely transfixed.  The mouth first ; teeth bared as the lips achieved high lability, then the rest of his face - contortions of the cheeks, the eyes, even the nose.  Atrial fibrillation, The body in a puppet dance.  Myocardial infarction  - death.  When we stopped the machine, the face instantly became tranquil, peaceful, benign. 
     The nightmares came back then.  Sounds first - the screams, the wailing, the dogs, the shouting, the sirens, the machine guns.   And then the faces, vivid in their greyness.  Each of them contorted into a hideous grin.     I could have coped with that.  I had been through those nightmares years before.  No, what happened next was worse - much worse.
     I began to see the people I had tortured and murdered. They were sitting in the huge dining room,  waiting to be served.  They would call to me, 
"Hans, where is our chicken soup?"
"Hans, we have been waiting 15 minutes for our lokshen pudding. "     
Others would shuffle shaven-headed through the lobby, wearing those striped uniforms and clogs, staring at me. 

     Nothing in my clinical training had prepared me for what happened next;   Even now it is hard for me to accept that my sanity would be saved by a sliver of milk on the impeccable black sleeve of Reuben, the head waiter.      Reuben was a Salonikan Jew - built like a house.   He was rumoured to have been a member of the Greek Resistance Elas during the war. It was said that his family had been tortured and murdered by the SS because they would not reveal his whereabouts.  So, at least we had that in common - unbearable guilt, guilt which you carry with you everywhere, even into your dreams - especially into your dreams.  

     Breakfast was always a frantic time.  The whole dining room would fill up at once, immediately after morning prayers,  everyone shouting for their French Toast, Orange Juice and Coffee.   I was so careful in that tiny, claustrophobic breakfast kitchen. There were always too many people in there, and the chef was in a terrible mood at that time of day.  But I still can't understand how my tiny pewter jug left a sliver of milk on Reuben's sleeve.  Maybe I turned round too fast or someone knocked into me?   The result was the same.  Reuben went berserk - he wanted to fire me on the spot, but the Manager stopped him.   You don't get staff like me coming in off the street every week, someone who works for 12 years without once asking for a rise.  But the matter had to be resolved - we both knew that.

     The candelabra sat solidly on the grand piano in the hotel lounge.    Twenty five kilos of pure silver.  On Chanukah, their Festival of Lights, they would hold a series of ceremonies every night for eight nights.  I would have to go scurrying round with special drinks and cakes while they gabbled and sang and lit candle after candle.  I never did find out what they were celebrating.   
      I don't know what perverse part of my psyche made me suggest it.  A competition - a trial of strength between Reuben and me.  It had to be held in secret of course.  No-one except the other waiters would be there.  Reuben and I would draw lots and then each lift the candelabra in our right hand, holding  it at shoulder height and pushing up and out until the arm was extended at an angle of 45 degrees to the horizontal.  One of the waiters would keep count of the number of times we extended our arm.  The loser would find another job.  That was the only time Reuben spoke to me,   
"You should find this easy, German.   All that wanking you've done. Your right arm must be pretty strong by now."
     We both went into training for a week.  The nightmares stopped. The delusions disappeared.  I worked out even more than I had before.  Not just my right arm.  I knew that the winner would need their whole body strength - and a clear focussed mind.  I meditated twice a day.  Increased  my press-ups to two hundred.    But most of all I ran - for miles and miles every night.    
     We met in the lounge an hour after dinner on Friday.  No television on the Sabbath, so all the guests went to their rooms early .    A surreal scene - faded wine flock wallpaper, rococo flowered carpet, and Reuben, already waiting, bare to the waist. He wasn't looking quite so confident now.  He looked even less cocky when I stripped off and he saw my torso.  We drew lots.  I won and chose to go second.   
      He planted his feet like a weight-lifter and took five huge breaths. I saw he was wearing a support - was that cheating?  Two of the audience came forward carrying the candelabra with difficulty. They hoisted it onto his tensed right arm. After he had lifted the candelabra 26 times, his face changed. His eyes bulged, and he went puce.  Then his whole frame became suffused with blood.  At 30 lifts his shoulders sagged forward and the blood began to leave his face - the pallor spread throughout his body. At 32 he staggered and fell.  
     I reached 20 lifts with ease.  Even the next 9 lifts were no real trouble. Then a series of new physiological reactions began to occur.  The growing lability of my lips, the teeth bared in a hideous grin, the contortions of my cheeks, the eyes, even the nose.  I recognised what was happening at once, of course - radiating pain in the lower left arm, palpitations, angina pectoris.   I knew that my pulse had become irregular, that it had stopped corresponding with my heart rate. Atrial fibrillation had begun.  And then I started laughing.  I saw it.  I saw it clearly.  I had made myself the subject of my own experiment.   A grotesque parody.   Still I kept lifting. 'Zeig Heil. Zeig Heil'. Laughing and lifting. Laughing and lifting.  Then the classic symptoms - cold clammy skin,  nausea, shortness of breath, oppressive centralised chest pain, myocardial infarction.    Excruciating,  ecstatic. 
And now, as my body atrophies, I wait.   I wait for the inevitable.   
END   2,267 words