So Doc Joe was arrested and I never saw him again. One more time seized by doubts, as regular as stomach colic, about supreme justice, which eventually gives everyone what they deserve, I learned the truth from Sister Angela, and it was the following:
After the capitulation of Fascist Italy and the immediate German occupation of northern Italy that followed, a rather fierce partisan war flamed up in those mountainous places. Led by the insane paranoid idea of the “Final Solution,” the Nazis undertook arrests of Jews here too, even though it is well known that some more sober heads from the Führer’s circle were already sensing that the Final Solution was indeed not going to be late, but was moving in a slightly different direction. So somewhere in the region of Trento, a temporary transit camp was organized for Jews and other harmful elements, before deporting them. The major from the medical unit, Johann Schmidt, was taken off the rolls of his military hospital and enlisted in the “Special Unit” as a doctor who had to attest to and record in the documents the data about the medical status of the “merchandise.” With respect to this some were sent to the stone quarries of Mauthausen, and those physically unfit for this heavy labor quite a distance further, to a resort in Poland, where despite mounting difficulties, created by the rapid advance of the Red Army, they were still well stocked with sufficient quantities of the round boxes of crystals under the code name of “Zyklon B.” With the advance of the Americans the camp in Trento was quickly dissolved, and the unit was given an order to withdraw toward the former Austrian border.
This, more or less, is it. I don’t want to and I can’t judge either the degree of Dr. Schmidt’s guilt, or the sincerity of his deeds given his forced participation in the nastiness, because years later I met some doctors in Kolyma, under a polar cap, and for some of them I kept in my memory a dose of quiet gratitude for their humane attitude or just professional conscientiousness, and for others—the most simple contempt. I only know that the finger with which the little Italian pointed at Doc Joe was the finger of Retribution, but such was the time—straight-shooting, without alleviating nuances and mitigating clauses.
Later on I learned that the doctor was sentenced to eight years in Milan, even the newspapers wrote about it—some with surprise, others with satisfaction—then that he performed diligently as a doctor in the prison hospital and was granted amnesty as soon as the third year. And if now he is a pensioner in Ottobrunn by Munich and if he by chance reads these lines of mine, I would like to tell him: “Hello, Doc Joe, I know that war is a nasty thing and makes the person an accomplice—sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious. I’m not the institution that hands out sentences and that’s why I only want to tell you that I remember good things about you.”
I’m convinced that someone will furiously disagree on the above topic and I don’t doubt the fairness of his disagreement, that’s why I’ll reply to him like the old rabbi: “You are right too!”