What’s the point of digging up the past, we must learn to look ahead There’s a kind of forgetfulness, Adrian Ziegler says, that isn’t the same as failing to remember but makes you feel that your brain has gone numb. Believe you me, he says, I’m very familiar with that kind of forgetfulness. I’ve suffered from it all my life. You do things as if life is just a meaningless backdrop, and nothing of what other people say or do to you matters. Not even the very worst or most horrible events really get through to you. You might call it ‘not remembering’ or you begin to think that you don’t understand the meaning of your own acts. Can an entire country be in the grip of that kind of forgetfulness? Heinrich Gross was on the run from the collapsed Eastern Front, made a failed attempt to cross the river Elbe and was captured by Soviet soldiers. That was in May 1945. He then spent more than two years in a Soviet prison camp at Kohtla-Järve in northern Estonia. The camp held almost fifteen thousand POWs but had only twenty doctors. Gross realised that he could be seen to be useful and the camp bosses soon came to appreciate him as a keen and trustworthy doctor. He was allowed to study Russian in his spare time. When he returned to Austria in December 1947, a recently released POW, the court proceedings against the three principal defendants in the Steinhof trial were already completed. Doctor Illing had been condemned to pay the maximum penalty and was executed by hanging on 30 November 1946. Doctor Hübsch was freed and Doctor Türk sentenced to ten years in prison. Heinrich Gross knew that he would have to face the court and made some half-hearted stabs at lying low, but was found and arrested after only a few months. However, despite Anna Katschenka’s witness statement naming Doctor Gross as one of the superiors who had ordered her to kill the children, deaths that she had herself been condemned for, the Volksgericht of Wien sentenced Gross to spend just two years in prison. The guilty verdict was promptly challenged in a higher court, which declared the entire Volksgericht trial invalid due to technical errors. Unlike Doctor Türk, who could not appeal against her verdict because she had admitted in interviews that she had acted knowingly and with intent to kill – as Türk had stated: On the rare occasions when the child in question failed to respond normally to the sleeping drug, I would administer an injection of Modiscop [a combination drug of two morphine-based compounds and scopolamine], usually, say, three to four ampoules, a dose that led to death within twelve hours – Doctor Gross admitted to nothing, neither acts nor intentions. Gross knew all about death by natural causes as well as the other kind and, as far as he was concerned, the children cared for at Spiegelgrund had died from natural causes, that is to say illness, inherited or acquired. Anyone could read that in the case notes. Pneumonia, for instance, was the most common cause of death. Certainly, if certain sedatives or hypnotics like Luminal, for argument’s sake, were given in excessive doses it could lead to symptoms similar to gastrointestinal disorder, as had been described in some of the children. However, many diseases are also associated with such symptoms. Doctor Gross, unlike Anna Katschenka, never contradicted himself and maintained an aura of composed, somewhat arrogant vagueness throughout the proceedings. He admitted only to things that could definitely be pinned on him, ignored everything else, and made a show of regarding whatever was presented as ‘evidence’ of his alleged wrongdoing as no more than a ragbag of isolated items, all capable of different interpretations depending on your perspective. He also consistently talked down his own contributions as a doctor at the institution:
Yes, in 1941 I took over the responsibility for the infant care in pavilion 15.
Doctor Jekelius tasked me with medical photography of sick children under his supervision. I worked there until the summer of 1942, kept case notes and took photographs of children.
[…]
Certainly, a photographic record was kept of all the children. Including the children in the reform school.
[…]
Was there any psychiatric value to be had from the photographs? That I can’t say at present. With regard to the children I photographed, some of the marked malformations were certainly of medical interest. Dreadful cases, sometimes: children with hydrocephalic skulls a metre in diameter. That kind of thing!
[…]
No, this had nothing to do with racial biology. It is essential that you grasp the distinction between the photographs I produced for the clinic to use with the case notes, and those of the youths …
[…]
Jekelius might have used the photographs for some purpose to do with racial biology, that’s possible but I can’t comment …
[…]
Indeed, the work was very demanding. There were only two or three doctors attached to the clinic and each one had to be on call just about every second or third night. The doctor on duty also had to establish death and sign the death certificate. But signing the certificate didn’t imply that you were certain of the cause of death or were even familiar with the case.
[…]
No, I have no idea of any circular [from Berlin]. And you say it stated that members of the clinical staff were to administer medication in higher doses than recommended? Are you trying to make a fool of me? No doctor of sound mind would ever dream of doing anything of the sort.
In May 1951, all further proceedings against Doctor Gross are cancelled, the accusations against him withdrawn and he is free to carry on in his old career. Which he does, with immediate effect. During the next two decades, he publishes very frequently in medical journals. His publication list runs into hundreds of articles concerning neurological defects and appropriate diagnostic methods. In 1959, Gross and colleagues publish an article in the Vienna Journal of Neurology and Related Specialisms (Wiener Zeitschrift für Nervenheilkunde und deren Grenzgebiete) that is entitled ‘Concerning Major Malformations of the Cerebral Ventricular System’. It is a study of common pathological changes of the fluid-containing spaces of the brain, with an attempt at explaining how these defects could come about. In his introduction, Doctor Gross informs his readers that he bases his research on having been offered access to the remarkable collection of good-quality anatomical specimens kept by the autopsy unit at the healthcare institution Heil- und Pflegeanstalt ‘Am Steinhof ’. This archive of hundreds of preserved brains is probably the greatest and most wide-ranging collection of its kind available anywhere in this country. That the institutional source of the fixed brains was Gross’s earlier place of work is clear from the anonymised case histories that the authors describe in this article and in a later series of scientific articles. In other words, the specimens are the brains and assorted endocrine glands that the senior registrar in charge of autopsies, Barbara Uiberrak, spoke of during the Steinhof trial as ‘exceedingly interesting from a scientific point of view’. She then went on to suggest that, every year, a few of them should be studied, and Doctor Gross obviously followed up on her suggestion. While Doctor Heinrich Gross carries on analysing the cases of the children he had helped to kill, his reputation as a scientist and psychiatrist spreads ever more widely. In 1957, he is appointed as medical director at the Rosenhügel hospital in Lainz. By 1962, he is back in his former doctor’s villa on the Steinhof site and is applying for the directorship of the entire hospital. In 1968, he is offered the post as head of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute’s unit for research into malformations of the nervous system and, at about this time, he also starts out on a long and successful career as a forensic psychiatrist. During the 1960s and early 1970s, the courts consult him almost routinely for his written assessments of many criminals whose mental health is in question. Decisions on sentence tariffs and eventual treatments are based on his judgements. He states himself that, by 1978, he has found time to write no less than 12,000 of these reports. Doctor Gross is widely regarded as knowledgeable, thorough and efficient, and this efficiency of his is particularly appreciated by the courts. Requests never stay for long in his in-tray. And it is in his capacity as forensic psychiatrist that Doctor Gross, one morning in November 1975, encounters one of his former Spiegelgrund patients. It takes some time, though, before he realises just whom he is dealing with.
A Talk with My Psychiatrist
DOCTOR GROSS: [reads] Ziegler, Adrian … Where were you born, Mr Ziegler?
ADRIAN Z: In Wien.
DOCTOR GROSS: So you’re an Austrian citizen?
ADRIAN Z: Yes.
DOCTOR GROSS: And your mother’s name is?
ADRIAN Z: Dobrosch.
DOCTOR GROSS: [takes notes, no noticeable reaction] And your father?
ADRIAN Z: What do you mean?
DOCTOR GROSS: Do you know who your father is? Have you met him?
ADRIAN Z: Ziegler is my father’s name. He and my mother married in 1939.
They divorced later on.
DOCTOR GROSS: Is your father still alive?
ADRIAN Z: No, he died in 1970. He was an alcoholic.
DOCTOR GROSS: And before that? Did your mother and father live together?
ADRIAN Z: Periodically.
DOCTOR GROSS: And what about you, Mr Ziegler? [His lips pout and twist into something that is meant to be a smile.] I can assure you that you can be completely open with me.
ADRIAN Z: My younger brother and I were given away to be adopted. I was taken in by a family called the Haidingers. However, they didn’t want me. Instead I was sent off to Spiegelgrund. It was in 1941. Early that year, in January. Which must have been about the same time as when you arrived there, Doctor Gross.
DOCTOR GROSS: [Says nothing, lets his gaze float up towards the ceiling, then slowly back down.]
ADRIAN Z: […]
DOCTOR GROSS: [in a surprisingly sharp voice] It means that you were there … now, between which years, Mr Ziegler?
ADRIAN Z: That ought to be on record in your papers, but perhaps you’ll remember anyway. There was a largish examination room that was used as a lecture hall on the ground floor in pavilion 15. Because Doctor Illing regarded me as a sample of a mixed-race person – a Mischling – I was made to stand naked in front of a lot of nursing students until he dispatched me with a slap on the bum like some tame animal. When the treatment was done with, I was to be sent off to labour camp but the truck that was to transport us never turned up and because a young woman cleaner had left an upstairs window in the pavilion open I had a chance to get out. Which led to my first punishment. Doctor Illing ordered a report on me by a forensic psychiatrist. That was in 1944.
DOCTOR GROSS: These documents are not available anymore, I believe.
ADRIAN Z: Yes, they are. In his report, Doctor Illing writes about my grave inherited defects, about my sociopathic mentality and says that from psychiatric and psychological perspectives I must be regarded as a chronic recidivist criminal.
DOCTOR GROSS: Have you ever spoken to anyone about this?
ADRIAN Z: No, there has been no call to do that.
DOCTOR GROSS: Are there any other people from that time whom you know or are still in contact with?
ADRIAN Z: Yes, Some of them are still around. But I won’t name any of them. I don’t think that would be appropriate just now.
DOCTOR GROSS: [baffled] Well, yes. Indeed, no need to talk all that at this point. Other times, other times. I for one am glad all that is in the past. And I feel sure that you too, Mr Ziegler, are glad that the times are long gone. Indeed, we won’t rake over these old stories. If you agree to keep this between you and me I promise in my turn to put in a good word to the court on your behalf and arrange for you to be let off as lightly as possible.
Crime and Punishment But Doctor Gross doesn’t keep his promise. He does exactly the opposite and uses Doctor Illing’s report from 1944 as the basis for what he himself writes about Adrian on the same day as their talk. Already as a child, opines Doctor Gross, Adrian Z proved his seriously disturbed ability to sustain relationships by betraying and cheating and engaging in various forms of incestuous and homosexual acts. Several placements in foster homes followed until he was admitted to a clinic for paediatric nervous disorders.
He goes on to quote in detail from Illing’s 1944 report, the very same document that he had tried to deny existed during his talk with Adrian:
It follows that from psychiatric and psychological perspectives the accused must be regarded as past rehabilitation. The accused is not only an active sociopath but must from psychiatric and psychological perspectives be regarded as a chronic recidivist criminal.
Adrian Z’s crime consists of receiving 20,000 schilling as a fee for being an accomplice to criminals who had done a major robbery. The court, after consideration of the psychiatric report by Doctor Heinrich Gross, sentences Adrian to six years in prison followed by ten years in a special detention centre for gravely disturbed, recidivist criminals.
Safe Haven Adrian Ziegler’s cell in the prison in Stein an der Donau was not much larger than the solitary-confinement cell in pavilion 9. There was just room for a toilet, a wash-hand basin and, high up on the wall, a barred window which he covered with a blue curtain. He had sewn the curtain himself on an old treadle-powered sewing machine that he kept in a worn, brown suitcase right at the back of the wardrobe. This was how he gradually transformed his appalling, bitterly cold exile into a thriftily and effectively furnished home, full of useful things, though there was no room for anything superfluous. Above and underneath the neatly made bed (if there was one single thing I learnt at Spiegelgrund, he said, it was how to make beds) books were stacked, either in double rows on the shelves or in tottering piles to save space once the shelves were too packed to hold any more. His books were of every kind. He had Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, translated novels by Steinbeck and Conrad, and political biographies, as well as textbooks in social medicine and pedagogics and accounts of the development of modern psychiatry. One treatise that he had become particularly intrigued by was a 1916 essay by Julius Tandler, the well-known Social Democratic spokesman for the rights of the working classes to sanitary homes and working conditions. The essay is called ‘Krieg und Bevölkerung’ (‘War and the Population’) and was one long plea that society must stop supporting the people Tandler called society’s ‘negative variants’ (Minusvarianten; Ziegler had underlined the word) or else, if one carried on propping them up, there was a risk that racially inferior traits would be propagated into future generations instead of grafting characteristics such as strength, skill and capacity to survive onto the human breed. I realise now how little I knew as a child at Steinhof, Adrian said later. I never understood how deeply views of this sort had penetrated into every pore of society and how devilishly calculated and regulated, to the very last detail, the whole system was. How just about all parents were visited by agents from the social services, just as my mother was. And how people who worked in the social service offices, as well as the staff in all children’s homes and hospitals, had to fill in a form for every child that they figured might be flawed in some way or who seemed not to measure up – to whatever standard. And then, these children were simply taken away from their parents. While I was in Spiegelgrund, I had to sit for two weeks alone in a cell like this one. Einzeln gegeben, that’s what they called it. It was just routine; the slightest thing that annoyed the nurses could mean that you were punished like that. It’s a fact that I can’t quite remember what I was punished for, only that I, just once, after having spent something like a week, maybe ten days in the cell, I asked if I couldn’t have a book to read or a sheet of paper to write on or anything at all to keep me occupied, but instead of a book or a sheet of paper I got Doctor Illing. And he brought the clapper and was in a furious mood and said that I had no right to ask for anything at all and all I needed to learn was to bend down and obey. He made me stand on all fours like an animal while he flogged me with the clapper. If the punishments really were senseless, if they didn’t keep us locked up in order to do what they said the school was for, which was to educate us, teach us to read and write and behave decently, then what was the intention behind it all? Why hit and hit and hit until the child can neither sit nor stand afterwards? What was the point? At least I’m allowed books to read now, he said. Ziegler was regarded as an oddball by his fellow prisoners at Stein, and by the wardens and social workers and other people he came into contact with as well. Nobody else had a cell like his, kitted out like a cross between a haberdasher’s and a library. He was known as a talker who held forth without anybody understanding much of what he was on about or even picking up what was the meaning of all that talk. The words formed a screen that he held up in front of himself to prevent anyone from seeing and finding out what was buried deep inside. Ziegler was a loner who had learnt to socialise with his loneliness as if it were a kind of company. His face had grown sharp-edged and square, with its strong chin and prominent frontal and cheekbones which made it look almost like a mask, an impression that was emphasised by the broad-rimmed glasses he habitually wore at the time. His skin was coarse and grey as if all the concrete and stone that surrounded him had settled in his pores. But the look in his eyes was frank and curious although, now and then, it could start shifting about and make him seem utterly absent. At these moments, his mouth would keep moving and he became involved in long arguments with many tangled details only to say, suddenly, I don’t remember, I’ve no memory of that. He often showed photographs and documents he had collected and stuck carefully into different albums. He showed pictures of his mother (Leonie Dobrosch-Ziegler) wearing her bridal veil. And one of Uncle Ferenc, relaxed on the bare riverbank down by Hubertusdamm, lying on his side with his head supported by his hand. The naked skin on his chest shows under his jacket and is as dark as the skin on his face. The pictures of Adrian’s brothers and sisters show Laura, who looked determined even as a child, with her broad arms crossed and resting on the table the children have gathered around: Helmut clinging onto the back of a chair and the two younger sisters, Helga and Hannelore, sitting on their mother’s lap. Leonie’s red lips almost part in that anxious, cherry-lipped smile that Adrian would so often describe. He also had pictures of the woman he married and later ran away from, Elfriede, and of his daughter Missi. He had laboriously copied each and every one of the letters he wrote to her from prison into a large, black notebook and then stuck her letter in response on the opposing page. He used to write to her at least once a week. They didn’t meet that often, of course. When they did speak together, they only rarely talked about his childhood and never about his time in Spiegelgrund. He was not unwilling to tell others about Spiegelgrund, but as time went by it became harder for him to find concrete details to catch and hold people’s attention. He said that he increasingly didn’t remember things or that the monotony and uneventfulness he had experienced later in life set everything adrift in his mind. He would revisit certain sensations and events, though. One was seeing Nurse Mutsch’s mane of black hair, that one and only time when she let it down. It had made an overwhelming impression on him. Then, there was the night when Julius Becker had stabbed himself in the belly with a pair of scissors, and the battle of the bullet casings or the period of ‘Pototschnik’s rule’, as he called it. But he remained vague about what happened after his escape, when he spent time with ‘the idiots’ and then with the dying in the gallery of pavilion 17. He did say that he was subjected to one of Doctor Illing’s air-into-the-skull X-rays and described the pain and other side effects extremely convincingly. But the notes in his diary are very unclear and it is impossible to be certain that any such investigation was actually carried out. When his sentence was reduced and he was released from prison, he went out to Steinhof a few times, though it seems that these trips didn’t do much to help him remember more of the past. He walked along the long lateral driveways that extend from the rising track that forms the central axis. In early afternoon, the only sounds are the persistent cawing of the crows and the hollow whispering of the wind as it blows through the canopies of the trees; always the same unchanging wind, wide and calm. Because many of the pavilions are still in use, it is difficult for an ordinary visitor to get access. On one visit, a pavilion stands empty for refurbishment and Adrian takes the chance to have a look inside. Near the entrance, the corridor has been piled high with old enamelled items, toilet seats and the like, giving off an acidic smell of dust and damp. All the wash-hand basins have been ripped off the washroom walls and only the rust-eaten tap sockets are sticking out from the bare plaster walls. But the long row of shower cabins is still there, and even one of the big tubs where the bed-wetters were dealt with by being rolled into wet sheets and then alternately dunked into the water and lifted up again. Schlempern lassen, Adrian recalls that the procedure was called officially. (Nurses Mutsch and Demeter standing on either side of the tub with the leaden weight of the wet body dangling inside the sheet they have stretched between them.) As Adrian remembers it, the doors to the dormitories were equipped with hatches to let the nurses on night duty check that the children were in bed, but in this pavilion at least, the doors are smooth and in one piece. The waist-high band of evil-smelling brown oil paint that he remembers so clearly as running along the lower part of the corridor walls is not there anymore. But the rhomboid pattern of the floor tiles is the same and, at the doors and along the skirting boards, the tiles are so worn that the pattern is fading. And the windows, with their grilles and lockable braces, let in this very special, empty light that has all colour and substance filtered out and leached away. It is a light without shadows or space: a light without memory. In the area around the hospital, the tracks run along their old, accustomed paths, the same tracks where the children marched off to their excursions, with Mrs Rohrbach or Mrs Krämer leading them. Gallitzinberg is also there to be climbed and the air-defence culverts and passages can be examined on old blueprints. On one of the south-facing slopes, hidden behind rough boulders and half-overgrown with mosses and roots, you can locate the entrance to the entire system, the same entrance through which Baldur von Schirach must have made his way to safety when Wien capitulated in the last days of April 1945. The angels on the top of the mountain are missing, though. They were the children’s guardian angels who, or so Hannes Neubauer insisted, looked exactly like the stone angels that were part of the ornamental façade of the church overlooking the pavilions. When the air-raid sirens screamed at night he’d always thought the sound came from the angels. But only young women, not much older than the boys, worked inside the bare, cement-lined rooms carved out of the rock. They had earphones clamped to their heads and spoke into microphones. Once, when Hannes Neubauer was listening to the radio in Nurse Mutsch’s room, he had heard one of these women speak. She was Mrs Cuckoo who, in her cool ethereal voice, told of air raids to come and reported on the damage afterwards. There is a picture of her sitting at her post, a very young girl, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, with shoulder-length hair cut with a straight fringe, and a face that radiated scared self-confidence. The wall behind her was hung with abstract-looking maps showing the movements of the enemy planes. If the Allies had bombed just this installation, if only they had known that the Austrian Nazi regime had concentrated their entire air-defence control system inside the mountain, all of it could have been wiped out with one precise hit. One huge blast could have eliminated them all, not only those who were keeping watch around the clock inside the Mountain, but all the sick and retarded, the degenerate and the useless, all these inhuman creatures who inhabited the pavilions at the foot of the mountain. No angelic alarm call in the universe could have saved them.
The Archive of the Dead In March 1997, a previously locked cellar under the old autopsy rooms at Steinhof was opened up and, inside it, the body parts of almost eight hundred children, all one-time ‘patients’ at the Spiegelgrund clinic, were discovered. The items removed from their corpses were stored in thirty-centimetre-tall glass jars, carefully labelled, numbered and lined up on the dusty shelving. No personal details are given on the labels. The specimens were sorted by age and gender (e.g. 4 J – it stood for: boy [Junge], aged 4) or body weight (e.g. 10 kg) but the labels usually also state the main diagnoses, written with blue ink that has faded over the years – Results: Normal; Diagnosis: Idiocy. All belong to what Doctor Gross has referred to in innumerable scientific articles as his personal set of anatomical specimens: a remarkable range of good-quality anatomical specimens … probably the greatest and most wide-ranging collection of its kind available anywhere in this country. Behind the grimy glass, whole brains or dissected bits of the central nervous system float in viscous formaldehyde solution; a child’s jaw with a preserved growth clinging to it like swollen seaweed; an entire face floating as if in a dream, with its eyes closed while its slightly parted lips curl in an expression of perennial wonder. Between the rows of tightly packed glass jars, the jars on the next rack of shelving can be glimpsed. An ever-unfolding perspective, as one line of shelves opens out into a view of another in a space that seems without end. The search for the identity of individuals will surely also go on forever, with the numbered jars being checked against case-note entries to find the diagnosis of the brain damage so that each anonymous specimen is seen to have been part of someone once alive. Whole body paralysis. Hermine A. Hermine is admitted to Spiegelgrund on 8 February 1943 and Doctor Illing’s diagnosis is profound idiocy (tiefstehende Idiotie). On the same day, the state committee in Berlin is notified of her case. The girl’s general health is ‘deteriorating markedly’ (a case note records ‘fever, 39 degrees’) but despite this, a full pneumoencephalographic investigation is carried out five days later. Doctor Illing has already scheduled the autopsy of Hermine’s body but wants a set of the images of the live brain tissue. After the skull X-rays, Hermine dies without regaining consciousness. Fifteen-year-old Ingeborg S. Ingeborg S suffers from paraplegia but also occasional muscle spasms and cramps. The case notes show that her fits are treated with Luminal. The girl has to be ‘tied’ so as not to ‘tear herself free’ during the night. Doctor Illing notifies the Berlin committee of Ingeborg’s case – his stated reason is that the Luminal has failed to bring about any ‘progress’ – and then she, too, is subjected to a pneumoencephalography, even though she fell ill with measles the week before and, as the day nurse notes, ‘runs a high temperature’. Two days later, Ingeborg succumbs to ‘bilateral pneumonia’. As in all other cases, it is Doctor Uiberrak who carries out the post-mortem examinations, usually with either Gross or Illing present as curious observers – as Doctor Uiberrak made a special point of stating in the pre-trial interviews. The brain is lifted out and placed in the correct strength of formaldehyde solution. A selection of glands are also removed and preserved. The girl has been transformed into a nameless object to be taken out and examined, again and again. The dead don’t die just once. They keep dying.
The Last Interview with Doctor Gross In April 1997, a court case is once again brought against Heinrich Gross. This time, the charges are based on new evidence that includes a document recovered from an old Stasi archive in Berlin. In it, Doctor Illing asks the committee to approve a retrospective grant to the clinic in order to finance the work done by Doctor Gross during the summer of 1944, in view of his record of ‘support for the great task of the Reich committee’. Gross had previously claimed that, during the summer of 1944, he was resting and, in any case, he had not set foot in the clinic since he was called up to join the Wehrmacht in 1943. This time round, the prosecutor can prove that Doctor Gross was fully engaged in the work of the clinic throughout the summer, and that he, during that time, examined, notified the authorities and subsequently ‘treated’ twelve children or more, of whom the youngest was ten days old when examined, and the oldest fourteen. Hannes Pichler was one of these children. He was seen by Gross on 19 July 1944. Hannes was three months old and had been born with a severe malformation of the face. Evaluations of the child’s psychological or neurological status were ‘impossible in the circumstances’, according to Doctor Gross’s notes. Following routines that were by then established since years back, the boy is taken to the infant ward in pavilion 15, pneumoencephalograms are produced, and Berlin is notified of the case. Presumably in view of the child’s malformed face, the committee recommends ‘treatment’ and the baby dies on 26 August that year. But even though both the record of the examination and the report to Berlin carry his signature, Doctor Gross continues to deny everything.
ANONYMOUS INTERVIEWER: Does the name Hannes Pichler mean anything to you?
DOCTOR GROSS: No.
INTERVIEWER: It doesn’t remind you of anything at all?
DOCTOR GROSS: No, nothing whatsoever.
INTERVIEWER: But you have, after all, referred to his case in scientific articles published in 1956, 1957 and 1973. Also, in the articles you discuss histological specimens of his brain tissue that you prepared yourself.
DOCTOR GROSS: So what if I did? It still doesn’t mean that I know who he was.
INTERVIEWER: This is a case of a child admitted to Spiegelgrund, who died or was murdered there. You examined him and he died during the time you had taken on the post as Doctor Illing’s deputy.
DOCTOR GROSS: It is possible, but I don’t remember anything about it. Not by now.
INTERVIEWER: But Illing wasn’t there! Who was ultimately responsible when Doctor Illing wasn’t in his post?
DOCTOR GROSS: I have no idea. Decisions may well have been made earlier. I don’t remember.
And so, Doctor Gross, through the medium of his team of lawyers, continues to contradict and deny everything, despite the prosecution’s presentation of solid evidence for his participation in twelve murders. In parallel with these denials, the defence also attempts to persuade the court that Doctor Gross is incapable of following the proceedings. The court is shown medical certificates stating that the defendant is suffering from a whole array of illnesses: diabetes; chronic infection of the bladder; angina; impaired mobility; and partial deafness. 21 March 2000 turns out to be the last day of the trial. Doctor Gross is eighty-four years old, his back is bent and he moves with small steps, dragging his feet across the floor. He wears a cap pulled down over his eyes and leans on his stick while gripping the arm of his lawyer’s son, who slowly escorts him to the defendants’ seats. He sinks rather than sits down, then slumps so that all you see under the brim of his cap are his large, broad-rimmed glasses and a part of his bulbous nose. As the hearing gets underway, Doctor Gross sags so much that he almost falls off his chair, a disaster prevented only when a court attendant reaches out to support him at the last moment. By now, the judge is worried enough to incline towards the defendant: Mr Gross, do you understand what I’m saying? he asks. The reply is indistinct but something like: not so well. A bit. At this juncture, the lead advocate in the Gross team opens his document case and produces a trump card: a recently done CT scan of his eminent client’s brain. It demonstrates advanced dementia, a process which, according to the psychiatrist who had requested and then analysed the scans, would bring about memory loss and recurring states of confusion. It takes only another five minutes for the court to decide that, in view of the defendant’s failing health, the proceedings should be postponed for another eighteen months. However, Doctor Gross is spared more court attendances. He dies on 15 December 2005, aged ninety, in his home town of Hollabrunn. He seems not to have recovered from his selective memory loss. And he is never convicted of the murders of the Spiegelgrund children, or even of being an accomplice to the murders.
DOCTOR GROSS: No – no! With the utmost respect to the court. I have never, be it directly or indirectly, participated in acts that could have led to deaths, of children or of adults.
Never. Exactly that: never. I don’t remember.
I remember nothing whatsoever.
One night, as I lay in bed listening to the flow of the river, I felt it was true; I was like a river with the earth below and the air above. The true river had stopped, and I was the one who flowed farther and farther away, all alone in the center, trees on both sides.
From Death in Spring (La mort i la primavera) by Mercè Rodoreda. Translation from the Catalan by Martha Tennant (Open Letter Books, University of Rochester, 2009)