For at street level everyone knew what had happened at the epidemic hospital near Plac Zgody. An SS detachment under Oberscharführer Albert Hujar had entered the hospital to close it down and had found Dr. Rosalia Blau standing among the beds of her scarlet fever and tuberculosis patients, who, she said, should not be moved. The whooping cough children she had sent home earlier. But the scarlet fever sufferers were too dangerous to move, both for their own sakes and for the community’s, and the tuberculosis cases were simply too sick to walk out.
Since scarlet fever is an adolescent disease, many of Dr. Blau’s patients were girls between the age of twelve and sixteen. Faced with Albert Hujar, Dr. Blau pointed, as warranty for her professional judgment, to these wide-eyed, feverish girls. Hujar himself, acting on the mandate he’d received the week before from Amon Goeth, shot Dr. Blau in the head. The infectious patients, some trying to rise in their beds, some detached in their own delirium, were executed in a rage of automatic fire. When Hujar’s squad had finished, a detail of ghetto men was sent up the stairs to deal with the dead, to pile the bloodied linen, and to wash down the walls.
The convalescent hospital was situated in what had been before the war a Polish police station. Throughout the life of the ghetto, its three floors had been cluttered with the sick. Its director was a respected physician named Dr. B. By the bleak morning of March 13, Doctors B and H had reduced its population to four, all of them immovable. One was a young workman with galloping consumption; the second, a talented musician with terminal kidney disease. It seemed important to Dr. H that they somehow be spared the final panic of a mad volley of fire. Even more so the blind man afflicted by a stroke, and the old gentleman whose earlier surgery for an intestinal tumor had left him weakened and burdened with a colostomy. The medical staff here, Dr. H included, were of the highest caliber. From this ill-equipped ghetto hospital would derive the first Polish accounts of Weil’s erythroblastic disease, a condition of the bone marrow, and of the Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. This morning, though, Dr. H was concerned with the question of cyanide. With an eye to the option of suicide, H had acquired a supply of cyanic acid solution. He knew that other doctors had too. This past year depression had been endemic to the ghetto. It had infected Dr. H. He was young; he was formidably healthy. Yet history itself seemed to have gone malignant. To know he had access to cyanide had been a comfort for Dr. H on his worst days. By this late stage of the ghetto’s history, it was the one pharmaceutical left to him and to the other doctors in quantity. There had rarely been any sulfa. Emetics, ether, and even aspirin were used up. Cyanide was the single sophisticated drug remaining.
This morning before five, Dr. H had been awakened in his room in Wit Stwosz Street by the noise of trucks pulling up beyond the wall. Looking down from his window, he saw the Sonderkommandos assembling by the river and knew that they had come to take some decisive action in the ghetto. He rushed to the hospital and found Dr. B and the nursing staff already working there on the same premise, arranging for every patient who could move to be taken downstairs and brought home by relatives or friends. When all except the four had gone, Dr. B told the nurses to leave, and all of them obeyed except for one senior nurse. Now she and Doctors B and H remained with the last four patients in the nearly deserted hospital.
Doctors B and H did not speak much as they waited. They each had access to the cyanide, and soon H would be aware that Dr. B’s mind was also sadly preoccupied with it. There was suicide, yes. But there was euthanasia as well. The concept terrified H. He had a sensitive face and a marked delicacy about the eyes. He suffered painfully from a set of ethics as intimate to him as the organs of his own body. He knew that a physician with common sense and a syringe and little else to guide him could add up like a shopping list the values of either course—to inject the cyanide, or to abandon the patients to the Sonderkommando. But H knew that these things were never a matter of calculating sums, that ethics was higher and more tortuous than algebra.
Sometimes Dr. B would go to the window, look out to see if the Aktion had begun in the streets, and turn back to H with a level, professional calm in his eyes. Dr. B, H could tell, was also running through the options, flicking the faces of the problem like the faces of riffled cards, then starting again. Suicide. Euthanasia. Hydrocyanic acid. One appealing concept: Stand and be found among the beds like Rosalia Blau. Another: Use the cyanide on oneself as well as on the sick. The second idea appealed to H, seeming not as passive as the first. As well as that, waking depressed these past three nights, he’d felt something like a physical desire for the fast poison, as if it were merely the drug or stiff drink that every victim needed to soften the final hour.
To a serious man like Dr. H, this allure was a compelling reason not to take the stuff. For him the precedents for suicide had been set in his scholarly childhood, when his father had read to him in Josephus the account of the Dead Sea Zealots’ mass suicide on the eve of capture by the Romans. The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender. Principle is principle, of course, and terror on a gray morning is another thing. But H was a man of principle.
And he had a wife. He and his wife had another escape route, and he knew it. It led through the sewers near the corner of Piwna and Krakusa Streets. The sewers and a risky escape to the forest of Ojców. He feared that more than the easy oblivion of cyanide. If Blue Police or Germans stopped him, however, and dragged his trousers down, he would pass the test, thanks to Dr. Lachs. Lachs was a distinguished plastic surgeon who had taught a number of young Cracow Jews how to lengthen their foreskins bloodlessly by sleeping with a weight—a bottle containing a gradually increasing volume of water—attached to themselves. It was, said Lachs, a device that had been used by Jews in periods of Roman persecution, and the intensity of SS action in Cracow had caused Lachs to revive its use in the past eighteen months. Lachs had taught his young colleague Dr. H the method, and the fact that it had worked with some success allowed H even less ground for suicide.
At dawn the nurse, a calm woman about forty years old, came to Dr. H and made a morning report. The young man was resting well, but the blind man with the stroke-affected speech was in a state of anxiety. The musician and the anal-fistula case had both had a painful night. It was all very quiet in the convalescent hospital now, however; the patients snuffled in the last of their sleep or the intimacy of their pain; and Dr. H went out onto the freezing balcony above the courtyard to smoke a cigarette and once more examine the question. Last year Dr. H had been at the old epidemic hospital in Rekawka when the SS decided to close that section of the ghetto and relocate the hospital. They had lined the staff up against the wall and dragged the patients downstairs. H had seen old Mrs. Reisman’s leg caught between the balusters, and an SS man hauling her by the other leg did not stop and extricate her but pulled until the trapped limb snapped with an audible crack. That was how patients were moved in the ghetto. But last year no one had thought of mercy-killing. Everyone had still hoped at that stage that things might improve.
Now, even if he and Dr. B made their decision, H didn’t know if he had the rigor to feed the cyanide to the ill, or to watch someone else do it and maintain a professional dispassion. It was absurdly like the argument, in one’s youth, about whether you should approach a girl you were infatuated with. And when you’d decided, it still counted for nothing. The act still had to be faced.