The Unforgotten
I'd been working in the OR since 8 A.M.and at 5 P.M. my energy reached
the subzero level. It was a hectic and difficult day and all my patients
had serious medical problems.
The 5 P.M. syndrome of somnolence and weariness in every bone crawls
into my body and refuses to leave. In the anesthesia office, the untidy
room next to the OR, my colleague, Liesel, is on the phone, "Schatzi" she
says in German to her husband,
"jawohl, ich komme gleich." I enjoy her conversation
in a language I understand and speak quite well. I have the ear for its
sound and flowing rhythm; I like its difficult but logic grammar, its
long-paired words and the unique phrase structure. I had never associated
Liesel's German with the barking sounds I had heard more than 40 years
ago, during the war, when the language was littered with a Nazi lexicon
that grated on my ears and caused palpitations. Liesel was far removed
from Hitler's Germany geographically and ideologically for she is an
ethnic German born in Bolivia. She is for - me the epitome of the other
Germany, the Germany of refined culture, tolerance, freedom and progress.
The 5 P.M. syndrome keeps me in its lasting power but I must interview
patients scheduled for tomorrow's surgery. First on my list is Hans Dietrich
Schmidt. He's Schmidt, not Smith, and Hans Dietrich is unmistakable Deutsch.
His bed covered with a snow-white blanket, near the window, with a sweeping
vista of the Prospect Park, is impeccable clean. Shining slippers wait
in "Achtung"
position under the bed and a blue robe is folded neatly at the foot of
the bed. Strange, but the US-made inanimate accessories acquired already
a Teutonic flair for detailed organization. And then he is, Hans Dietrich
himself, his eyes a bright blue must have been quite beautiful forty
years ago. The blue pajamas lend color to his gray-blue eyes making him
look like shades of a blue palette. His blond hair has a touch of silver-gray
and is neatly brushed and slicked back. He is neither fat nor thin, and
towers over me even when he is sitting in bed. Schmidt is greeting me
with a kind smile of good manners and radiates that sure-of-himself feeling.
A picture perfect, well preserved, old fashioned gentleman. His fluent
English has a tinge of his native German and he likes to intermingle
English with German.
"You're the anesthesiologist, die Narkotiserin.." He
says and continues to scrutinize me, "I rather expected a male-doctor,
but I'm not a chauvinist-pig, Frau-Doktor" The examination
must be orderly and short, I am reminding myself, while asking routine
questions.
Allergies? The cold-metallic blue eyes look at me intensively before
he says
"none"
Past medical history: Frostbite on the Eastern front followed by amputation
of two toes, right foot, in 1944. He shows me the stumps with a pained
face.
Schmidt interrupts me suddenly in a military tone of one who had been
through years of army service. "I recognize a familiar accent. Are
you Polish? Where are you from?"
"I'm from Lodz, Poland."
"Litzmannstadt" he corrects me and his eyes acquire a nostalgic
softness as if the city brought back pleasant memories.
Litzmannstadt! I feel an icy shudder, and a chill starts
in me and trickles down. The Nazis changed the name of my native Lodz
to Litzmannstadt and the usurped name brings back, and stirs memories,
which I had hoped to forget.
"I stationed there from 1942 till 1943 in the Kriminal Polizei in
Litzmannstadt-Ghetto. I wasn't an interrogator; I was a soldier, a young,
18 years old boy, ein Knabe, guarding their building. I had
a very good time in your city before they sent me to the Eastern front.
I was In love with a Polish panna." He talks in a bragging
tone of voice and his remarks sound casual, as an American might have
speak of vacation in Acapulco. And so the "panna" evoked
the sentimental look in his eye and Lodz, a rather drab and ugly city,
is only a background for this wartime romance.
He was a soldier in the KRIPO, the most feared Nazi institution in the
ghetto. Kripo was a Nazi special agency of torture in addition to hunger,
diseases, and deportation. They occupied a former rectory, a beautiful
redbrick house, straight from the brother Grimms tales, located in a
bucolic garden. In the cellar of this "Märchen-Haus" the
combined and brutal forces of Kripo and Gestapo interrogated and demanded,
from the beaten to a bloody pulp Jews, dollars, gold and diamonds. The
prisoners seldom left the cellar alive and the corpses were send to the
families for burial. Kripo arrested my father who had as his whole possession,
a few thousand worthless Polish zlotys, his life savings from before
the war. They came with my father to our apartment to retrieve the money
hidden in the wall- two Germans in civilian clothes and a young man in
uniform. My father's face was bluish with two slits of eyes and an open
wound where it was once his nose. He mumbled for his lips were swollen
and the gums bled. Bubbles of air like small grapes accumulated above
the sausage of the upper lip. He walked like a duck, swaying on his unsteady
legs, and looked at us from the slits of his eyes as if to say, "I'm
finished. I can't take it." The zlotys he gave the Nazis made them
furious.
"Du Dreck, we don't need zlotys, where are the dollars?" screamed
the Hunchback, a familiar and feared by us Kripo man, and he kneed my
father in the groin, struck him in the pulp of his face and lowered him
to the floor stamping on him with the heel of his foot. His footwork
was like a ritual dance and I couldn't look anymore at this Quasimodo
dancing on my father's body. The ugly stamp of sadism was on his brutal
and savage face. But the young soldier, as if his eyes were plucked out,
yawned widely out of sheer boredom showing a mouth-full of white teeth
and a pink palate freckled with brown-black spots. In his stony face
there was no crack in which compassion for another human being could
take root, and I despised him for the coldness of his heart-he was so
young and yet so inhuman.
"I was in Lodz-Ghetto." I said and shifted the topic explaining
the two types of anesthesia suitable for his operation. I felt that the
conversation had gone the wrong way on a verboten-territory. His smile
disappeared but then quickly returned. I could hear his breathing, rapid
and heavy. He remained speechless and a silence of embarrassment hung
in the air.
"In Lodz-Ghetto." He repeated turning the eyes on me with a
wondering look and added quickly. "Sorry, I was too young to understand
what was going on. I was only a soldier." He went on spitting out
words of apology; He recited a phony alibi, and a kind of Nuremberg defense
I had heard thousand times before.
"My life was not a bowl of cherries either. I was on the Eastern
front." Almost by a way of an afterthought he asked in an Inquisitor-like
tone. "How did you survive?"
And smiled, but the bravado of his smile couldn't conceal his discomfort.
He knew well that it was almost impossible to survive, and I am not going
to satisfy his curiosity.
"OK" I said in a good-clear voice, but I felt tightness in
my chest while my heart was beating fast in a tumult of emotions. My
head was so light, as if suspended in the air.
"Spinal or epidural would be the best and safest anesthesia for
the excision of hemorrhoids. I'll see you tomorrow morning." It
signaled the end of the conversation. Schmidt detected something in my
eyes for he didn't ask more.
I couldn't sleep that night. "Why does an old, forty-three years
old scar hurt so much? I must tear down the wall in my head," I
talked to myself, "it's 1985, and the time of forgiving has arrived.
Don't demonize Hans Dietrich Schmidt, he's a harmless, pleasant, well-adjusted
citizen of a country that adopted him and me. We both grafted ourselves
successfully into a multiethnic family of the New World far away from
the killing fields of Poland and Germany. I must leave all the ghosts
of my past in their habitat. Perhaps Schmidt, who seems anything but
a contemplative or self-aware person, had little knowledge of what was
going on and he is not the heartless soldier who had witnessed the beating
of my father without a trace of humanness in his eyes."
The following day was a sunny, beautiful day, a perfect day for a person
willing to come to peace with an inner battle, a day that had asked for
cordial solutions.
"How are you, Mr. Schmidt? I hope you had a good night sleep."
I asked Hans Dietrich who was sheeted on a gourney and wheeled into the
waiting area of the OR.
"Gutten Morgan, Frau Doktor. I slept very well." His
voice with its heavy German accent traveled well through the hall. He
smiled widely and at that moment I saw the brown spots on his palate.
I felt a paroxysm of abhorrence so strong that I had to distance myself
from him. I couldn't share the same air with him, and thus I knew that
I couldn't give him anesthesia, not today, not tomorrow, not ever.