But in 1943, one aspect of Max Stratman’s thinking changed. From pure scientist, he was converted to Scientist-Jew by the fanatics of Hitler’s National Socialism. He was found to be tainted, but still valuable to the state, and so he was removed from his teaching position at the University of Berlin and transferred to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the same city. In this Institute, Germany ’s leading physicists, engineers, chemists were toiling to create fission of uranium. Stratman was assigned to work on heavy water imported from the Norsk Hydro hydrogen electrolysis factory in occupied Rjukan, Norway, with the purpose of constructing a chain-reacting pile. His older brother, Walther, a nuclear engineer less imaginative, more methodical than himself (whose only minor achievement, the result of a youthful avocation, had been a scientific paper on the bubonic plague or Black Death epidemic in history), had been removed from private industry to work on a crude uranium machine-in America, it was being called a nuclear reactor-in the shed behind the Institute. Walther’s wife, Rebecca, and his young daughter, Emily, had fared worse, and been deported to Ravensbruck Women’s Concentration Camp, which had been built to imprison two thousand enemies of the Reich and now held twenty-five thousand of them. Max Stratman and Walther Stratman had been advised that as long as they co-operated in advancing Germany’s atomic programme, no harm would come to Rebecca and Emily, and so they had co-operated, minimally, and were rewarded monthly by a brief letter from Rebecca Stratman.
Now, so long after, sitting and blinking at the rain on the window of a Georgia hospital, Stratman wondered if he could tell Ilman about the events of 1945. With Berlin aflame, and Hitler’s body drenched with petrol outside the concrete bunker in the shadow of Brandenburg Gate, advance units of the Russian army were assigned to ferret out and capture German scientists. They had raided the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and placed its occupants under house arrest in a farm at the outskirts of Berlin, pending arrival of Soviet authorities.
Meanwhile, Walther had made secret contact with a similar advance American unit which went by the code name ALSOS and possessed a file, found in Strasbourg, of every German scientist and his current address. Walther let the members of ALSOS know that neither he nor his more illustrious brother, Max Stratman, wished to carry on their work under a second dictatorship. Immediately, and at great risk, American agents of ALSOS had agreed to rescue the Stratman brothers from their Communist keepers. Max Stratman had been given to understand that there were means to rescue both Walther and himself at the same time-but on the fateful night, at the crucial moment, there had been means to save only one of them. Max Stratman had refused to be that one, but had finally been persuaded to escape after extracting a promise that Walther would follow shortly after. Only later did he learn that there had never been the slightest chance to save Walther, and that Walther had insisted on giving over his place to a brother who he felt had more to offer Science and the free world.
From that moment of Walther’s sacrifice, Max Stratman had realized that he was on earth, a liberated man, as his brother’s proxy, that his obligation was that of Charles Darnay to Sydney Carton. Thereafter, at his passionate insistence, he had remained in the American-occupied zone of Germany, while the authorities had aided him in the search for Walther’s wife Rebecca and his daughter Emily. The Russians, who had overrun Ravensbruck, reported that neither Rebecca nor Emily was there any longer, and Stratman feared the worst. He had continued his search, and in short weeks, Emily, just turned sixteen, surprisingly had been located at Buchenwald-surprisingly because Himmler had earlier ordered Ravensbruck purified and had commanded all Jewish inmates shipped by cattle cars to Auschwitz, the horror compound south-west of Warsaw in Poland. For reasons that Stratman would learn later, Emily had been the sole Jewess to survive the transfer to Auschwitz, and, in the waning days of the war, had been sent south to Buchenwald instead. However, Rebecca Stratman had been less fortunate. Several months before the liberation, with her pink slip of paper, she had been carried off to Auschwitz, and had been one of three million naked women, children, men, to suffer death by gas in the camp’s busy extermination chamber.
And so it was young Emily, alone, who had become Max Stratman’s charge and his conscience, and the more so because of what Stratman had learned (from an American Army psychiatrist, who had confiscated concentration camp dossiers intact) of her existence in the female hell that was Ravensbruck. Emily had been emotionally damaged beyond repair, Stratman had learned-in a manner that he could not, to this day, revive in his own mind-and she had needed her uncle not only then, but now, just as Stratman had decided that she needed the security that he must offer her following his death.
After recovering his niece, Stratman had been placed, along with other rescued German scientists, in detention quarters, Farm Hall, an old country house not far from Cambridge in England. Here he had learned of his brother Walther’s lonely death months before in a Siberian labour camp, where he had been interned after his part in Stratman’s escape had been exposed. Today, for Emily, there was only her uncle, Max Stratman knew, only he, himself alone.
The events had occurred long ago. The traumatic results of those past events were ever present.
Only a minute or two had passed, but for Stratman it had been two decades. He turned from the window and met Dr. Ilman’s gaze.
‘My mind was wandering,’ he said apologetically. ‘Perhaps senility. I forget what you asked me, Fred.’
Dr. Ilman carefully placed his cigar in a tray. His voice was soft. ‘I had only inquired-why it was important to change your life-make more money-for Emily’s future. But you must have your reasons-’
‘I do.’ He nodded at the coiled graph paper on the physician’s desk. ‘You have not given me the results of the cardiograph, Fred.’
‘No, I haven’t.’ Dr. Ilman took up the graph paper, unwound it, and passed his eyes over the jagged line. ‘Max, I’m not going to let you take any new job that requires travel, excitement, worry, no matter how much money is in it.’ He looked up. ‘You can still have a long life ahead, and it’s my duty to see that you don’t throw those years away.’
Stratman waved his hand at the graph paper. ‘Don’t give me riddles, Fred. I’m not one of your old women patients who needs hand holding. What’s wrong with me?’
Dr. Ilman straightened in his chair. His tone was now brisk, professional. ‘There have been changes of T waves in this electrocardiogram-inverted T waves-they clearly indicate an early coronary insufficiency. Do you understand?’
‘I think I understand.’
‘No panic. Behave, and you’ll have years enough to discover ten more uses for solar energy. But take that new job, and-listen, Max-I wouldn’t give ten to one on your lasting more than a couple of years.’
Stratman sat immobile. ‘I don’t need more than two or three years, Fred,’ he said quietly.
‘You need a lifetime, like every human being,’ Dr. Ilman said sharply. ‘Believe me, Max, it’s more important to Emily to have you alive than to have an inheritance after you are dead.’
Stratman shook his head. ‘Verzeihung-Fred, you do not understand, you do not know.’ He pushed himself out of the chair. ‘Thank you. Do you see me again?’
‘Regularly. Next week to start with.’
Stratman smiled faintly and started for the door. At the door, Dr. Ilman’s voice caught him.
‘Max, about the job, what are you going to do?’
‘Think about it.’
‘Well, just think about being a vegetable, a happy vegetable. Much more fun than being a dead globe-trotter.’