Fräulein: Struggle for Identity

(The following is an excerpt beginning on page 334 of the hardbound edition)

Panic

And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.

Friedrich Nietzsche

5 February, 1951

Annika was getting ready to punch out when she was summoned to Mrs. Russo’s office. “Thank you for coming in, Tritzchler. I’m afraid I have some unpleasant news. I’ve spoken with the Director of Human Resources, and, ahem, he agrees that we’re going to let you go.”

“What?” Annika was dumbfounded. “I don’t understand.”

“Well, it’s really quite simple. You crossed a boundary yesterday. Your duties are quite specific, and they don’t include

intervening on a patient’s behalf with doctors. That’s the job of social services. The patient whose baby was born dead . . .” Annika winced at the words. “. . . she told us what you had done. She showed us the hair . . . You obviously don’t understand your role.”

“She . . . was upset with me?”

“I don’t think you understand. We can’t have our cleaning staff interrupting the doctors or running special favors for every Tom, Dick, and Harry that tugs at . . .”

Annika interrupted her. “Mrs. Russo, I may be mistaken, but I’m part of the nursing unit. No disrespect to anyone, but I’m not a member of the cleaning staff.”

“Just the same, what you did yesterday was inappropriate. We can’t have that.”

“But . . .”

“Please, no ‘buts.’ I’m sorry, Tritzchler. You’re done here. You can turn in your uniform and pick up your final paycheck next week. Or we can mail it . . .” Annika stood as if in a stupor. The supervisor could see it in her face. “Do you have any questions?”

Annika’s mind was spinning. She was back in Germany. “Nein,Chef Oberaufseherin.”

Russo stood up, and leaning forward with both hands on her desk, said, “Are you being smart with me? I don’t cotton to any of that Nazi talk.” She assumed Annika was insulting her in German. But it wasn’t sarcasm. In that moment, Annika saw before her not Mrs. Russo, but Anna Klein, the chief supervisor at Ravensbrück, a woman who could order a severe lashing or twenty days in the Bunker as dispassionately as she might have ordered her breakfast.

At a loss for words, Annika stared, then slowly turned and, in a daze, walked out. She was tired, bone-weary and emotionally overwhelmed. Instead of a ten-hour day, it felt more like twenty hours. She had eaten very little all day, but her appetite was gone. All she could do now was get to her apartment in Queens. She’d have to call Sarah, let her know what happened.

A little after five o’clock, the sidewalk was already teeming with people, bumping and jostling in their individual quests of getting home to cocktails, evening news, supper, and some limited family time. This was Midtown’s rush hour, that incarnation of capitalism that tempts civilized people to suspend propriety in securing a coveted seat on the next commuter train as if lives depended on it. But Annika had herself become part of the same phenomenon. She joined the lemmings in a collective cadence that snaked through streets lined with cafes, laundromats, paint dispensaries and everything in between.

Along the boulevard, she coughed through exhaust fumes,triggering a flashback to Ravensbrück’s Lagerstraße. It was the same choking sensation she used to have when downdraft from the chimneys filled the camp with the smoke of burning flesh. Now, with it once again in her lungs, her psyche took her from downtown Manhattan to the depraved hell outside of Furstenburg. She struggled to stay in the present, reminding herself: This is New York . . . I’m on my way home. But the interaction with her supervisor had been destabilizing. She couldn’t think of Russo without conjuring an image of Sturmbannführer

Reusch, her Gestapo inquisitor. Both had blindsided her with misinterpretations of things she had done with the best intentions. She knew she was losing her grip. I’ve got to get home. She walked faster, relying on exercise to control the anxiety which escalated by the minute.

It took less than twenty minutes before she was boarding the subway to Grand Central Station. The mob of commuters jamming the doorways prompted a flashback to Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof. In an instant, she felt herself being forced into a cattle car for transport to Litzmannstadt. Once inside, it was standing-room only, faceless people packed like sardines. Annika grabbed the handhold for support, but as the train lurched forward, she felt the man behind her nonchalantly rubbing up against her backside. She spun around, staring directly into his eyes. It was Freidrich Brunner, a kapo from Sachsenhausen, one of the most reprehensible men she had ever met, and there had been many, too many. He grinned at her through beady little eyes. Behind him were two young soldiers, talking and laughing. SS, she thought. They’re leering at me. Paralyzed with fear, she saw a group of women huddled a few meters in the opposite direction. One wore a striped suit, the others had long dark coats. It’s my work group. She muscled her way over to them in a full-blown panic, watching the floor to avoid tripping over the slop bucket.

Grand Central was jammed. Her heart was beating so fast, she could hardly breathe. Bits of trash circulated like dirt devils, nipping her ankles as she walked to a second subway, this one taking her across the East River to her neighborhood in Long Island City. A loudspeaker blared as officers approached from the opposite direction. Instinctively, Annika, still disoriented, removed her hat and looked down, hoping they would pass without noticing her. Once their voices faded, she rushed to the staircase leading to her train and descended through stagnant layers of tobacco smoke, having to skirt the intermittent gobs of spit and chewing gum. The hum of the city with its montage of automobile horns gave way below ground to a din of voices drowned out by the intermittent whoosh of passing subway cars.

Walking shoulder to shoulder in this subterranean purgatory, acrid body odors competing with occasional whiffs of Chanel or Old Spice, Annika was unable to avoid a puddle of vomit. She paused briefly to inspect her shoe, but was bumped from behind and almost lost her balance. She continued walking, slowing only to drop a quarter into the open guitar case of a street musician. Homeless men were wrapped in dirty blankets underneath tiled walls thick with scum. A quick glance at them brought to mind the emaciated muselmänner of the camps, those who, with no more work capacity, were resigned to death. She wedged her way onto the last subway car and stood between a smartly dressed businessman and a scraggly beatnik with long stringy hair and a beard. Reeking of alcohol, he clutched a brown paper bag curled at the top.

The remainder of her journey was on foot through working-class neighborhoods contrasting sharply with those in upscale Manhattan. Something here was incongruous. These were the victors of the world war, the people who had fought for freedom and morality. But looking around, they seemed to treat the homeless and hungry no differently than they had in Warsaw, or Leningrad, or anywhere else throughout the fascist empires. There, people went about their day-to-day business by stepping over bodies of fellow countrymen who had perished not from bombs or street-fighting, but from disease and starvation. Was this the reward to those who had suffered and died in their battles against fascism? Were these the spoils of victory? Was this even democracy?

Her mind was back in Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen. She walked past a construction site, but instead of dirt, she saw a pile of rotting corpses. Turning to her left was a woman perched on the stoop of a brownstone, but instead of a carefree apartment dweller, she saw a partially clothed young woman, dazed and immodest, on the steps to her barrack, her open legs caked with blood from unchecked menses . . . one of the new arrivals, Annika thought.

By the time she walked up the stairs, she was in a wash. Nothing looked familiar. She had long been an expert in comforting others,crying at the bedside of the dying, hiding women slated for the gas chamber, tenderly massaging ointments into the lacerations of flogging victims, even nurturing expectant mothers. She had done all that while repressing her own traumas. Stay busy to keep from thinking – that had been her mantra. But it wasn’t working this evening. Her experience with Ellen had been unnerving in ways she hadn’t expected. For the first time, she was having flashbacks: fetuses ripped from the wombs of screaming young women, tiny bodies floating in pails of bloody water, abortions performed at full-term, babies bludgeoned against train cars; it all came rushing back in a syncopating delirium of psychedelic malevolence. The more she struggled, the more insistent they became. She thought of the teenagers twisting from gallows; the “rabbits” undergoing excruciating medical experiments, ashen corpses stacked like firewood . . .

Not one ordinarily given to drink, she nevertheless reached for a bottle of schnapps that had been set aside in her cabinet for guests. She gulped first one, then a second shot. Anything to calm the nerves, to stop the hallucinations. She recalled admonitions she had made to anxious patients. “Write it down,” she would have instructed. “Externalize your feelings to gain control.” She grabbed her notebook and commenced to scribbling, trying desperately to make sense out of fleeting cognitions, chaotic and disturbing. She wrote like a woman possessed, pages and pages of tear-stained thoughts, passages that began rationally, but which became increasingly disjointed with each passing hour.

. . . Living beings turned into defenseless zombies passively awaiting consignment, numb to serpent-like flames that tease the sky in flickering tongues of crimson. Mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, friends and neighbors; some lined up against a wall, others kneeling at the edge of a pit, all awaiting deliverance. Deemed sub-human, they are the unworthy, their existence to be erased from all eternity.

But what about morality? Is there such a thing? Or just a word, an invention of the powerful designed to sublimate man’s most primitive impulses. Morality. The word sounds meaningless – an empty concept muscled out by the inexorable instincts of man’s primordial bestiality.

Ideologies are temporal; they imprison us in chaos and debauchery . . . false prophecies aimed at deceit, tricking people into believing they are the fulfillment of evolution, the pinnacle of perfection. But there is no utopia, no Kingdom of God and no heaven on earth. No, this is a Darwinism bereft of all ethics. We are the alpha and the omega, the host and the parasite, and like all parasites, we kill ourselves through ignorance and self-interest. If God is in the firmament, He must be shaking His head and asking Himself, “What hath I wrought?”

Reason had given way to uncertainty, even contradiction. She was confused. Nothing seemed to make sense. Her writing became disjointed.

***** The following page left intentionally blank *****

It was almost dawn when Annika stopped writing. She had been awake for more than twenty-seven hours, and her mind was still racing, though with just enough self-awareness to realize she was losing her grasp. That alone made her want to scream, yet she couldn’t. Instead, she sobbed. Unlike other situations in which crying had been cathartic, her tears this time failed to dampen the searing images threatening her sanity. She staggered through the small living room, bumping a table, knocking her phone and a pile of papers onto the floor. Splashing water on her face accomplished almost nothing; she climbed into the shower, still in her pajamas. She closed her eyes to the water, but doing so immersed her in a blackness that simply intensified the claustrophobia.

Stumbling out of the shower-stall, she wiped the foggy mirror with her hand, trying to make out a likeness, but all she could see was a blurry image of hollow eyes and wet, tangled hair. As quickly as it appeared, it faded in the steam. Is that me? she asked herself, leaning forward. She swiped the glass with her towel, around and around, determined to see more clearly, but staring back at her was a wraithlike apparition with deep-set eyes ringed by heavy, dark circles. It was disarming. She blinked repeatedly as the image disappeared in the fog. Forcing a smile, needing to see something familiar, the mirror refused to smile back. Instead, as the steam dissipated, a face took shape, but not one that she expected. Scraggly wisps of thin gray hair sprouted from the sides of a once-bloated face where skin now hung in pallid folds. Annika rubbed her eyes and all at once beheld, in front of her eyes, an apparition, one she recognized immediately. It was Rabbi Bergmann.

Beside herself with irrepressible horror, she pounded the mirror like one possessed. Shards of bloodied glass fell resoundingly into the sink and onto the floor below as she buried her face in her arms, screaming at the phantom, “Go away, Bergmann! Leave me alone!” She reached down for a long, dagger-like sliver and, grasping it firmly, incised her fingers almost to the bone. The intense pain bought momentary relief, but seeing the blood dripping from her hand, she lost any remaining semblance of reality and instead sliced the sharp edge of the glass across her forearm, cutting deep into her muscle. Torrents of plasma extruded from her flesh like a broken water main. She dropped the glass and retreated to the living room where, exhausted, she slumped into a chair.

She hadn’t been there more than twenty minutes before there was frenzied knocking at the door. With no response, the banging became more insistent until finally the door to her room burst open. It was Sarah.