Let Me Go Read online

  "I was nothing more than an irrelevant pawn," she announces with false modesty, as though openly seeking more blandishments from me.

  "Oh, no, I don't believe that for a moment," I say, contradicting her. "I'm sure they must have entrusted you with difficult tasks in Ravensbrück, tasks that only the best, the strongest, and the most efficient guards could have carried out. Am I wrong?"

  For a fraction of a second I wonder what's going to happen.

  She has pulled herself up in her chair in fact, and I can tell from her expression that my flattery has hit home.

  "It was my job to assist the doctors," she replies quickly, though with a hint of reticence.

  I don't give her time to change her mind. "And what did those doctors do?"

  "They cured the prisoners," she replies vaguely.

  "And what were your tasks?" My eyes have caught hers and won't let go.

  "I had to . . . take their temperature." She's lying, probably guided by some distant instinct, but I keep at her.

  "You just said your task was to assist the doctors!" I remind her impatiently. And immediately I rebuke myself: I've spoken too harshly; she'll get annoyed.

  Now she's locked herself away in stubborn silence. She purses her lips and stares at me like a wounded child.

  "Well?" I insist; then I try to sweeten my tone. "What other tasks did you perform as an assistant, apart from taking the patients' temperatures?"

  "Nothing," she replies irritably.

  Gently, now, whispers my demon, apply a little pressure.

  "Fine," I say, pretending to give up. "You don't want to talk and I'm not coming back tomorrow. I'm not coming back to see a mother who has nothing to say to me."

  "I want yellow roses," she mutters crossly.

  "No yellow roses," I declare while a small voice deep within my conscience rebukes me: She's weak in the head; you're not equally matched; you're playing a cowardly trick.

  But some dark force drives me implacably onward.

  "I want you to come back," she says, giving in. "And I want yellow roses."

  She begins to sob, then immediately stops again. She wipes her eyes with the hem of her military fabric.

  "Then talk," I insist. "What else did you have to do as an assistant?"

  She swallows, then replies in a strange gurgling voice. "I had to tie the prisoners to the tables."

  "What for?"

  In 1942 Dr Ernst Grawitz, the doctor who took part in almost all of the experiments carried out by the SS on human guinea pigs, ordered some prisoners in Ravensbrück concentration camp to be infected with staphylococci or the bacilli of gas gangrene, tetanus and mixed cultures of various pathogenic germs, to experiment on the curative effects of sulfalinamides. The doctor in charge of this project was Professor Karl Gebhardt, professor of orthopedic surgery at Berlin University and doctor in charge of the Hohenlychen clinic, friend and personal doctor to Himmler. He had the operations carried out by SS doctors Schiedlausky, Rosenthal, Ernst Fischer and Herta Oberheuser, without exercising any real and responsible surveillance over their work.

  The prisoners were infected in the lower part of their legs, while being left in the dark about the real purpose of the interventions to which they were being subjected. Often, as the scars of the few survivors demonstrate, and as witnesses confirm, the flesh was cut to the bone. In many cases, apart from bacterial cultures, fragments of wood or shards of glass were added to the wounds. The legs of the guinea pigs soon began to suppurate. The victims, who were not given any kind of treatment so that the progress of the condition could be observed, died in terrible pain. . . . For each series of experiments, repeated at least six times, between six and ten young women were used—usually chosen from among the most attractive.

  Professor Gebhardt only came irregularly to Ravensbrück, to inspect the results and examine the wounds of the "patients" who, tied to the tables in rows, had to spend hours waiting for the arrival of the "Herr Professor."

  Professor Gebhardt referred to the results in May of 1943, in a paper entitled Special experiments on the effects of sulfalinamides, on the occasion of the third convention of specialist medical advisers to the Academy of Military Medicine in Berlin, which included, among others, the heads of the Medical Services of the Wehrmacht, and the Luftwaffe, the department of public health and so on, along with directors of university clinics and institutes of medical study and research, Hitler's personal doctor Karl Brandt and a large number of eminent and honored professors of the German Reich.

  In his paper Professor Gebhardt made no effort to conceal the fact that the experiments had been carried out upon prisoners, and even went so far as explicitly to assume full responsibility for them.

  None of those participating raised any objections. 3

  "Didn't you feel any compassion for those human guinea pigs?" I ask my mother. As I do so, I realize the pointlessness of my question.

  She hesitates for a second, lowers her head, and stares at her hands.

  Then she raises her eyes and declares with a kind of obtuse arrogance, "No, I felt no compassion," and she seems to stumble over the words, "for 'those people,' because the operations were being carried out for the good of humanity."

  "Meaning?"

  "Are you going to tell me that science doesn't always work for the good of humanity?" she asks emphatically.

  "Those doctors were nothing but charlatans," I reply with quiet contempt, "they were pseudo-medical sadists and pseudo-researchers."

  She gives a start, as though she's just been slapped unfairly for something she hadn't done. Now her eyes are staring at me with glassy stupefying clarity.

  "How foolish you are," she explodes, "and how mistaken. Our doctors were outstanding professionals, and the results of their experiments were published in all the most authoritative medical journals, both in Germany and abroad!"

  She gets her breath back; her cheeks have turned strawberry-red with rage.

  "Our researchers were invited to the most prestigious medical conventions in the whole world!" she adds heatedly. "You know nothing. Nothing!"

  And she underlines her statement with a peremptory and impatient wave of her hand.

  "And I had no right to feel compassion; my sole duty was to obey. Loyalty and obedience, nothing else. Loyalty is an important virtue, believe me!" Now she is waving a pale and severe finger under my nose.

  A pause. She turns to look out the window toward the tops of the old plane trees swaying in the misty air.

  Then she murmurs, "Ich habe doch eine Harteausbildung erhalten," as though talking to herself.

  I underwent dehumanization training. Might that be an almost unconscious attempt at self-justification?

  Yes, Mother, I know, I've read your file. They trained you in order to desensitize you to the atrocities that you would witness at the extermination camps; and only the hardest, the thickest-skinned were destined for those.

  That's why you were chosen for Birkenau, the most selective camp of all.

  Another silence. I'm feeling hot, and I'm getting more tired by the minute, but the demon within me is driving me onward.

  "So you didn't feel any pity for anyone? Never, not for any of the prisoners in Ravensbrück? Not even for the very old or the very sick?"

  Eva gives me a little nudge with her elbow. What on earth are you doing, it seems to mean. I pay no attention; something inside me is starting to boil with rage.

  Ask. Ask again. It may be your last chance.

  "It's no fun talking to my daughter!" My mother explodes, sticking her fingers in her ears. "I'm not listening to you anymore."

  Eva takes the opportunity to whisper to me, "Why are you torturing her? Can't you see there's no point?"

  I don't reply. My mother is darting resentful glances at me. Outside, the weather is getting worse. A viscous wind lashes sheets of rain against the windowpanes.

  Could it be, I wonder, that this woman has never really experienced an emotion apart from those inculc
ated in her? Love as well as hate, pity as well as cruelty?

  "Once," I hear her say suddenly.

  I gesture to her to take her fingers out of her ears.

  "Once what?" I ask, curious.

  "Once I felt sorry . . . a bit."

  "What had happened?"

  "One day a prisoner was assigned to my block. She had been a comrade, but then she had moved across to the Resistance, and the Gestapo sent her to the camp. The minute she saw me she spat in my face."

  Instinctively I ask, with some irony, "Did you have her executed?"

  She doesn't need to consider her response. "I put her in the selection for the brothel."

  "What brothel?"

  She seems to rummage around in her memory for a moment, then picks up her thread again.

  "Yes, it was in 1943. We'd had instructions to set up brothels in the larger camps, and the first one was to be organized in Buchenwald. One morning we guards were ordered to choose suitable prisoners for the transfer, and I chose her."

  Her face hardens, and a subtle satisfied smile settles on her lips.

  "Shortly afterward I learned that she had died of a venereal disease," she adds, and twists her fingers in an unusual manner, while I have the impression that a kind of veil is falling across her eyes. It lasts only a moment.

  "At first . . . I felt a kind of sorrow," she admits, as though confessing to a deplorable weakness, "but I soon overcame it. I couldn't allow myself that kind of emotion, I mean pity and regret for people who deserved to be in a camp. It never happened again. I was in the Waffen-SS. I couldn't permit myself the sentimentality of ordinary people."

  She had transferred sovereignty over her feelings to the Führer, and she continued to defend the fact.

  HOW MANY WOMEN, on the other hand, in a Berlin ablaze and thick with the stench of corpses, had the child Helga heard raging against their Führer? They had fought tooth and nail, the women of Berlin, to defend their children, often having given birth to them in air-raid shelters or beneath the arches of the underground. In order to feed their own children, they had not hesitated to take up arms and confront the guards of the few food warehouses that had remained open, the ones that supplied the Wehrmacht or Hitler's entourage. As they fled from Eastern Prussia with the Red Army at their heels, they had dragged five, six, or seven children behind them, tying them one to another with a clothesline so as not to risk losing them. After the war, widowed and with no future in sight, they had gritted their teeth and had liaisons with the men of the victorious powers, preferring the shame of being called whores over the unbearable thought of seeing their own children dying of hunger. I wonder how many of those women still loved the Führer during the battle of Berlin.

  During those days we lived in utter chaos. Was there any solidarity? Certainly there was, but there was no sentimentality. Hunger had abolished all rules, all principles. If you had to steal to get hold of a bit of food, then you did: everyone, even the children and the old people.

  One evening my brave grandfather by marriage risked his life at Anhalt station to steal a sack of dried peas. He shot without hesitation—and he a law-abiding man—at the legs of a man who had come after him. He had violated the Sperrstunde, the curfew imposed by the Allies. Anyone found on the streets of Berlin after a certain hour was shot on sight by the intransigent military police.

  But the people of Berlin were survivors, which is why, Sperrstunde or no, they were forever in search of something, mostly food.

  Once the catastrophe was over, the women of Berlin— I can bear witness to them above all—got busy clearing the streets of rubble and consoling and encouraging those returning, drained and exhausted, from Hitler's war.

  SHE HAS DOZED OFF. She has leaned her head against the back of the armchair and gone to sleep like that, without having shown any sign of tiredness.

  I look at her, my old mother, whom I'm seeing for the second time in half a century, and in spite of it all I can't help feeling an impulse of tenderness.

  She sleeps motionlessly, her breath barely perceptible, looking unbearably defenseless and forlorn. A new thought pierces me, followed by an attack of anxiety. One day she will go to sleep like this, silent and vulnerable, never to reawaken, and I will be far away. Perhaps someone will inform me by telegram, by the time she's already underground. I feel a pang. She's still my mother, and when she goes, a part of me will go with her. But which part? I can't find an answer to that.

  "Look at her—she's like a child," Eva whispers to me.

  "Yes," I murmur in reply, "a little shadow."

  "You mustn't torment her," my cousin adds, "I don't know what got into you."

  "I don't know either. She provokes me somehow. She irritates me, and at the same time I'm moved by her. I'm so confused."

  At that moment my mother wakes up, looks around with frightened eyes, and when she sees me mumbles with relief, "Ah, you're still here." She yawns. "What were we talking about?"

  I avoid reminding her about the inmate she sent to the brothel in Buchenwald, and say, "Why don't you tell me something about yourself? How do you spend your days, for example?"

  She runs a hand over her forehead.

  "I stopped doing it in Birkenau," she announces, as hough to justify herself for something she mentioned earlier.

  "Stopped doing what in Birkenau?" I can't help asking, despite my good intentions a moment before.

  "Tying women to tables."

  She angles her head, but I have time to see her eyes: Are they really misted with tears—or is it just my determi-lation to grasp at the merest hint of regret?

  She leans forward once again and grips my hands before I can do anything to stop her.

  "You mustn't think I was acting on my own initiative," she says quickly, revealing a hint of concern. Her hands, so cold and bony, fill me with a sense of unease.

  "What are you talking about?" Her proximity disturbs me. I free myself from her grip with an almost hysterical gesture. I feel relieved, while she stares at her hands as though someone had just taken away something she was holding.

  "I'm talking . . . about Birkenau," she replies slowly and uncertainly.

  "You said you weren't acting on your own initiative," I suggest.

  "Oh, yes! That's it . . . . I mean . . . the fact that I treated them strictly."

  "Who?"

  "The prisoners on my block. I couldn't treat them with kid gloves, could I?" She smiles, in search of agreement.

  I nod mechanically.

  "I had orders to treat them with extreme harshness," she crows, "and I made them spit blood."

  The mask she was wearing a moment before slips from her face; all concern vanishes.

  "I'm talking about those idlers who worked in the munitions factories—you know the ones? They were always tired and difficult, and at night they whined for the children they had lost along the way."

  She adds with enthusiasm, "I put a rocket under them!" And she immediately continues as though explaining a technical term. "It's military slang. That's what they used to say. Putting a rocket under someone meant working them to death."

  She stares at me, her expression as it was before.

  "They needed discipline, you know? Those Jewish whores had to understand where they were and above all why. And there was only one way of doing that—discipline, harsh and inflexible discipline. That's the secret if you want to maintain control of a camp."

  I look at you, Mother, and I feel a terrible lacerating rift within me: between the instinctive attraction for my own blood and the irrevocable rejection of what you have been, of what you still are.

  THAT'S ENOUGH, I tell myself, you've come here to see her one last time, to try to ensure that it ends well. I try to smile at her, but my lips are set in a rigid grimace, hard as concrete. The demon returns to drive me onward. Why not give in to it?

  What was the food like for the guards in Birkenau?

  While she was acting the incorruptible SS woman, my brother and I we
re suffering from the most terrible hunger. After 1944, food supplies for the ordinary German population had almost entirely dried up. They ate bread made with rapeseed; they ground tree-bark and acorns to make flour—which gave you a terrible stomachache—or gulped down terrifying soups made of nettles.

  "Were you short of food?" I ask. Eva casts me a disappointed glance, and my mother cackles. The question seems to amuse her.

  "We had everything," she boasts, "the comrades made sure we wanted for nothing: real coffee, salami, butter, Polish vodka, cigarettes, scented soap. We had silk stockings and real champagne, although only at Christmas."

  Your comrades, Mother. After more than half a century, you still talk of them with such a sense of solidarity, with such undying deference.

  "I was an absolute bookworm, for example," she continues animatedly, "and the comrades, when they came back from Berlin, always brought me something interesting to read." She straightens herself up proudly. "I wasn't one of those who read only popular newspapers like some of my comrades, no, I read important books, you know? And that reading helped me to relax before going to sleep. After all, I was a human being, wasn't I?"

  I can't contain myself: "How could you go to sleep knowing that thousands of corpses were burning only a few yards away?"

  I don't need to look at Eva to feel her sad eyes upon me. But it's done now.

  My mother, in turn, replies almost contemptuously.

  "I never suffered from insomnia in Birkenau. And anyway I've already told you, I'd been strictly trained. I couldn't permit myself to . . . " But then a strange thing happens: Her jaw begins to tremble. It's a grotesque, piteous spectacle.

  She presses her lips together tightly in an attempt to stop the trembling, but rather than diminishing, it grows; it becomes uncontrollable; it alters her features. Now her face is both helpless and contorted with rage.

  "The ones who were burned were just scum," she announces contemptuously. "Germany had to get rid of every last Stilck, every last member of that wretched race."

  "And did you support that?"

  "What? Did I support the Final Solution? Why do you think I was there? For a holiday?"