Authors: Steve Sem-Sandberg
The Female Escapees
Afterwards, the talk was that Doctor Jekelius’s downfall had been brought about by two madwomen on the run. Anna Katschenka knew that this was untrue. Jekelius had come close to the abyss long before the affair of the two girls who escaped from pavilion 17 had emerged as final confirmation of the gossip that was already circulating: he had lost his grip, Councillor Gundel had lost confidence in him and no longer thought him competent enough to lead the work of the institution. Anna Katschenka assumed all that wasn’t entirely true either, but what would the assumptions of a lowly ward sister matter? In the trial that followed much later, she was to state that, in her opinion, Jekelius had been the victim of a conspiracy. That was all. The two girls who escaped were a Gertrude Klein and a Marie Tomek. In December 1941, Gertrude was eighteen and Marie fifteen years old but both had already acquired reputations as unrepentant rebels. A couple of months before their first escape attempt, they had broken into a cleaning cupboard and stolen a large can of undiluted Lysol. They had made a suicide pact to kill themselves by drinking disinfectant. Actually, only Marie drank it. Gertrude sat next to her and urged her on:
Drink more, Marie, drink the lot …!
Their relationship had been like that from the start: Gertrude was the one who had the insane ideas and drove them to completion, while Marie was the meek one who agreed and followed. If Nurse Storch hadn’t caught sight of Marie Tomek’s unconscious body in the corridor and managed to call a
doctor in time, the girl’s life would soon have been past saving. Miss Tomek was taken to pavilion 3 and had her stomach pumped. Afterwards, the two rebels were put in the same isolation cell. That turned out to be an awful mistake. The ward sister had hardly locked the door behind her before she heard heart-rending cries from inside and, when the cell door was opened, they found Marie on all fours on the cell floor with Gertrude sitting on top of her and whipping her like a horse with wet towel-rags.
It’s your fault, you fat whore!
Soon afterwards, the girls carried out the first of their two escape attempts. Gertrude managed to steal the keys to the front door of the pavilion from the nurses’ office and, the same night, the two girls slipped unseen past the guard’s hut at the main gate. It took several days and nights before they were found, frozen to the marrow and desperately hungry, waiting for a tram at the Brunnenmarkt stop. By then, everyone was clear about Klein’s role as the instigator. After two weeks in an isolation cell, she appears in front of Doctor Jekelius. This time, she is on her own. Marie isn’t at her side now as she and Jekelius confront each other. As always, when facing censure, Gertrude pretends to be dejected and submissive but her gaze hovers at floor level full of barely suppressed hatred. Doctor Jekelius is restrained. He doesn’t raise his voice and shows no other signs of being upset. He asks Gertrude Klein if she feels any remorse about her pathetic, meaningless attempt to escape, especially in view of its consequences. Miss Klein repeats a previous accusation: Jekelius is a
killer-doctor
who intends to poison not only her but all the girls in the section. Also, that he has deliberately prevented her parents from visiting so that nobody will find out what is
really
going on here. And it’s the same for all the girls in the section, she adds. The idea is to keep them all locked up in this hellhole until they go insane and die, or else the killer-doctor and his gang will put poison in their
food. Whatever happens, they’re all doomed to die. To this tirade, Doctor Jekelius replies that what the institution offers her is not imprisonment but actually an opportunity to reflect in peace and, without disturbing influences from the outside world, make her own decisions about what she wants the rest of her life to be. Either she learns to do as she is told by the staff and leave the other girls alone; or she continues to instigate rebellions, to misbehave and harass others. The decision is up to her, no one else. To prove his goodwill and emphasise that he has no goal other than her welfare and good health, he intends to give her one last chance. Christmas is four weeks away. If she shows that she can behave properly until then, he will arrange for her to be allowed to begin her ‘duty year’ sometime after the New Year. If she misbehaves, he will have her moved to a youth labour camp, a placement which, as Miss Klein is surely well aware, is much less desirable for a young woman. The choice is, and will be, entirely her own. Young Miss Klein nods in her browbeaten, seemingly servile way but, of course, has no intention of turning over a new leaf. Only two weeks after her talk with Doctor Jekelius, she engineers her next escape attempt and this time, as one of the nurses puts it, it is
total war.
Not only Marie Tomek follows her, but another four girls who join in the breakout: Edith Holtemeyer (15), Friedrike Roth (16), Margarete Schaffer (14) and Stefanie Wolfing (16). While Schaffer and Wolfing set about breaking the windows in their dormitory, the other four ambush the nurses who come rushing in to investigate the noise. Erna Storch is on night duty again but so is Nurse Erhart, who runs downstairs as soon as she hears the sound of glass shattering against the flagged area outside the pavilion. Presumably, it is because two members of staff are on the scene that they get away without serious injuries. Nurse Storch already has Margarete Schaffer’s arm across her throat when Nurse Erhart enters and is
met by the sight of Gertrude Klein’s face, its features stretched and bloated by madness, as she leaps up from behind a bed wielding a shard of broken glass. The hand holding the piece of glass is already smeared with blood. At the last moment, Nurse Erhart knocks the weapon out of Miss Klein’s hand. Together, the two nurses control Miss Schaffer. Nurse Storch locks both her arms across her back in the so-called Steinhof-tackle while Nurse Erhart manages to grab hold of the hem of Miss Wolfing’s nightdress and pull her to the floor in a corner of the room. However, the other four get away, including the clearly deranged Gertrude Klein. Later, Erna Storch declares in a witness statement that several things had been stolen from her earlier in the evening, namely a watch, a small metal box of sewing materials, and forty marks in cash, all of which had been kept in the handbag she always carried with her. At some point that day, one or more of the girls must have gained access to the wardrobe where the staff locks up their clothes and other belongings. The girls must also have been able to steal the keys with which they opened the pavilion front door, although how and from where was not easy to work out. Now, wild, furious screams come from the paths outside and then, again, the sound of breaking glass. Inside one pavilion after another, outraged nurses and caretakers stand holding telephone receivers into which they speak of being under attack. Hordes of youths, they say, are roaming in the dark outside and throwing stones at the windows. These ‘hordes’ are the four, not yet captured escapees from pavilion 17 who, led by the blood-spattered Gertrude Klein, next turn up at the main gate. The guard, who has run out of his hut, is struck to the ground by young Miss Roth, who uses for that purpose a spade left by the door to a tool shed. However, the girls’ attempt to instigate rebellion in other pavilions has delayed them. In pavilion 17, the nearest police station has been alerted by
telephone and their escape route has been cut off by the police before the girls have had time to cross Hütteldorfer Strasse. They are brought to the police station for identification and interrogation, and then delivered to Spiegelgrund. Doctor Jekelius meets them. It is early dawn. He has been waiting since receiving the phone call from the duty doctor in pavilion 17, who told him about the upheaval. Doctor Helene Jokl is at his side, as are two male asylum nurses, ready to intervene should any of the girls try something again. Facing them in a line are the dishevelled, dirty runaways. Once again, Gertrude Klein is keeping up the pretence of submissiveness, her gaze drifting along door frames and table legs. Her right hand is bandaged, and the swellings around the cuts on her face make her look grotesque, more like a wounded animal than a human being. Jekelius speaks first. I entrusted you with a decision, he says. But you betrayed me. Gertrude Klein, who hasn’t even listened, takes one step forward, pushes her chin out as she always does and screams:
Murderer!
All those present catch their breath, awed by her recklessness. A moment passes. Then Klein starts laughing hysterically. She folds herself double, squirms, kneels and, with her hands raised in supplication, entreats the doctor …
please, please
… and, before Jekelius has had time to react, the other girls start laughing, too. Neither doctor says anything at first. Then, Jekelius orders the two nurses to hold the newly submissive Gertrude Klein steadily and asks Doctor Jokl to give him the scissors. Klein tries to pull free but Jekelius has already grabbed a bunch of hair at the back of her head and started to cut. Klein shrieks like a stuck pig and her three companions burst into tears. Jekelius drops the scissors to the floor as if struck with weariness and tells Jokl to carry on. Don’t leave a single hair on their heads, he says, then turns away and leaves the room. The last they
see of him is his back in his doctor’s white coat. The shorn Gertrude Klein carries on screaming as if she could make floors and walls – indeed, the entire building – tumble down on top of him.
*
Reflections on Monstrosities
Members of the clinical staff were given a gratuity for Christmas that year, a bonus on their wages. The size of the sum was between one and two hundred Reichsmark depending on grade; Anna Katschenka received one hundred and fifty marks. During a brief ceremony, Jekelius had explained that the money should not only be regarded as compensation for their testing, occasionally painful work, but also as recognition of the care and devotion to duty shown by the institution’s employees as they go about a task that was of
crucial importance
to the Reich. You are fighting alongside the men at the front, he told them. Thanks to your steadfast fight, the sick and unfit for life are made to retreat and make room for the sound of mind and body. He did not need to add that the gratuity amounted to an insurance premium: the authorities needed to make sure of their loyalty and silence. It was only too obvious. To Anna Katschenka, for one, speaking about her work to outsiders was unthinkable. Her mother wouldn’t have endured hearing about any of it and her father would have found it incomprehensible. Twenty years after qualifying as a nurse, Anna Katschenka still stayed with her parents in the old Fendigasse flat, where she slept in her girlhood room. Her mother never left the flat so Anna or her father had to cope with day-to-day business in the world outside. Father and daughter had entered into an unspoken treaty: at any cost, her mother must be protected from anything that might distress or offend her. This pact was especially critical now, when Otto, Anna’s brother, had been called up and sent eastwards as part of the big offensive against the Soviets. He was in the military
engineering services and had so far seen little of the fighting, or so he had said in one of his rare letters to his family. On the other hand, his unit had been on the move most of the time, often in armoured vehicles but sometimes on foot. The only roads were forestry tracks. One day, he wrote, they had been forced to do a thirty-kilometre-long march with full load. After Otto’s call-up, his father spent more and more of his time by the radio in the sitting room. It was always on, though at low volume so that Otto’s mother wouldn’t pick up any troubling news. As if to signal his lack of interest, he mimicked ‘just happened to pass’ by standing near the radio and never sitting down on the nearby armchair to listen. He could stand there for hours with an unvarying, awkward smile on his face that just made him look anxious and tense. He and his wife never spoke about their son or about the war or anything that might be at all upsetting. The quiet mumbling of the radio in the sitting room reported new German advances. One morning in December 1941, it announced that German forward units had reached a line just thirty kilometres short of Moscow. During the month of December, the temperature in the interior of Russia never went above minus thirty degrees centigrade. Anna Katschenka imagined her brother ploughing steadfastly through the Russian snowdrifts, as if swimming through tall, rolling waves, but he sometimes disappeared and dissolved, encapsulated in snow and ice. Even so, from time to time, the ice melted, and all that they were forbidden to talk about, or that they forbade themselves to mention, penetrated the surface. At night, she could wake up feeling that her mind was terribly crowded. She saw images of ill-proportioned and malformed children, who jostled for her attention, saw their distorted limbs and huge, helpless eyes as they filled her head with their noises, the crazy babble of high fever or the heart-breaking, helpless songs they sang as if begging to be let out. Because they were
all inside her, she had no face that could be turned away from them. She also had no hands to hide the face that she didn’t have. She had no defences against these moronic, monstrous children who pushed and chafed and fed on her, and she knew that if she made the slightest attempt to rid herself of them, the crowding and painful chafing would only grow worse. And so the monster children merged with the terrible devastation of the war. She carried it all inside her, aware of a guilt that couldn’t be redressed just as it couldn’t be dismissed, and nothing ever changed because nothing must be allowed to change. At such moments, she felt just as young Anna had felt when blood was flowing out of her: as if she was falling and, as she fell, she or her surroundings acquired a kind of weightlessness. Because she was weightless, the fall itself seemed to lack momentum. She
was
her own fall. Weightless, she fell day after day – for weeks, months and years – but didn’t have a sensation of time either since time, like her falling, had neither space nor direction.