Strindberg's Star (5 page)

And then it started over again, making up the rhythm that had rocked him to sleep every night.

S
he had been transported to Ravensbrück in July 1942, where the medical experiments had already begun.

The SS doctors had wanted to test the germicidal effects of sulfa powder on severe infections that followed gunshot wounds. They had said that the experiments would help the German armed forces and therefore must be very realistic. The first guinea pigs had been fifteen camp prisoners, all men.

The doctors had cut open their calf muscles, from the tendons of their heels up to their knees. Then they had rubbed a solution of gangrene bacteria into the wounds in order to start a nasty infection. The bacteria had been cultivated by Hygiene-Institut der Waffen-SS, the Schutzstaffel’s institute of hygiene. The thought behind cutting up only the lower part of the men’s legs was to make it possible to have time to amputate at the knee once the gangrene started to spread.

The open wounds had been dusted with sulfa powder and then sewn up. Curious, the SS doctors had waited to see what would happen, but soon they had to declare that the wounds healed far too quickly. Experiments didn’t mimic what happened on the front lines at all, and the conclusion was that they hadn’t tried hard enough.

So they had formed a new experimental group, this time of about sixty women. All of them had been young, under thirty, and one of those chosen had been Don’s grandmother, his Bubbe. The concentration camp doctors had cut deep into both of her calves, from the tendons of her heels up to her knees. To make the injury similar to battle wounds, they hadn’t only rubbed gangrene bacteria into the wounds; they also pressed in shards of glass, dirt, and sawdust.

Bubbe’s legs had swollen up with pus, and she had lain in feverish dreams that not even the screams of the other women had been able to wake her from. But then the sulfa powder had begun to work, and after a few days, it had become obvious that none of the women would die of their infections. Thus the experiment had still not been sufficiently realistic.

The head doctors, Oberheuser and Fischer, had then traveled away to a weekend conference in Berlin, where they discussed their failed attempts with colleagues.

The German doctors had soon agreed that bacteria, glass shards, dirt, and sawdust were not enough. One must also cut off the flow of blood. In the case of actual gunshot wounds, they had noticed, several of the most important blood vessels were always injured. When they cut open the legs in this controlled manner, the blood had still been able to flow, something that had presumably prevented the gangrene from getting a deadly grip.

The first suggestion had been to simply shoot the women in the legs with machine guns. At least in that case, the experiment would not lack realism. But after a certain amount of deliberation, they had criticized that as a less practicable method. The women’s wounds would presumably differ and thus not be completely scientifically comparable.

Instead someone came up with the idea of securing rubber bands around the women’s ankles and under their knees after cutting open the calves again. In that way they could completely cut off the blood
supply to the gashed calf muscle, and the conditions would be favorable for gangrene.

This had proved to be an accurate analysis.

Five of the women in Bubbe’s group had quickly developed gangrene, which wandered up from their legs toward their upper bodies. And although they were so young, in their twenties, their bodies had given up after only a few days.

One of them had lain tossing and turning on a cot near Bubbe’s. Don’s grandmother had told him about how that woman’s legs were transformed into swollen columns bursting with bloody pus. During the night her blood vessels had completely eroded, her skin peeled away, and the gangrene spread up to her thighs and genitals.

Even if one of the SS doctors had been awake, there wouldn’t have been time to amputate. In the morning, they had made the last medical notations, and then they took the woman out of the ward to shoot her. But for Bubbe it had been
ein shrekleche zach,
a horrible thing, that she hadn’t even bothered to protest; she had only felt immense relief over being rid of the woman’s horrid odor.

I
n late fall of 1942, the SS doctors in Ravensbrück began to tire of their experiments with sulfa powder and gangrene.

Instead they decided to turn to new experiments, ones involving plastic surgery. The goal had been to invent new methods that could be used to make the wounded German soldiers more presentable after the war was over.

There had been several different experiments: from cutting off and transplanting parts of muscles and bone to prolonged investigations of how quickly one could get a broken bone or a damaged nerve to heal. Don’s grandmother and the other surviving women from the gangrene experiments were useful here, too.

With Bubbe, the German doctors had cut off strips of her calf muscles, all the way to the bone, to see if the tissue might regenerate naturally. The result had been a disappointment.

Then they had broken her tibia in four places to see how fast the skeleton could heal. The nurses had been careful with the cast. After several weeks had passed and the bone had almost grown together, the cast was opened and the results recorded. After that they had rebroken the healed places so that the experiment could continue.

At first Bubbe had received low doses of morphine, but toward the end, when the situation in Ravensbrück had become more and more chaotic, anesthetics were often forgotten. But still she had been lucky,
sach mazel;
she always wanted to emphasize that.

One of the women in the group had had one shoulder blade removed in some type of transplant experiment, and after that, she had never again been able to raise her arm above shoulder height. Others had had entire body parts cut off: a fully functioning arm along with the shoulder and clavicle, a young woman’s thigh that was cut off up to the top of her hip bone. A Polish woman—Bubbe had seen it herself—had had both of her cheekbones removed, so that her face had collapsed completely.

Each experiment, as would later be demonstrated at the Nuremburg trials, completely lacked any medical value.

I
n the last year of the war, in the spring, the Red Cross buses had arrived from Sweden to rescue concentration camp survivors. Bubbe had been one of those whose back was marked with a big white cross. She had been taken to Padborg, and from there on to Öresund. On April 26, 1945, she had been carried off the Helsingborg ferry on a stretcher. At that time she was twenty-eight years old. It took three years before she was able to walk on her own again, and the cavities in her legs had always remained. Along both of her calves ran the gnarled scars. As an eight-year-old, Don had been allowed to feel them with his fingers, and he had thought they were like the branches of a dying tree.

E
ach summer had continued in the same way, while the apples rotted in the yard. She had told her story in a muddled mixture of Yiddish
and Swedish, and he had listened, because he loved his grandmother. She had called him
mayn nachesdik kind,
my treasure, my happiness, while the Germans were
yener goylem,
people who lacked souls.

When she got tired of her own stories, she told him about the mass executions in Lublin or the carbon monoxide gassings in Sobibor, about Zyklon B in Treblinka and Auschwitz or the high-altitude experiments in Dachau, where the SS doctors dissected the brain tissue of living people to see if it was possible to see the air bubbles in their blood.

And each story had been stored in Don’s memory like razor-sharp shards. But no matter how deeply the stories had marked him, they were not his most frightening memory of Bubbe’s 1950s house.

On the top floor one summer’s day, he had happened to open the cupboard that contained his grandmother’s hidden collection. There had lain worn leather cases with the Schutzstaffel’s symbol, a dagger with the
Wolfsangel
symbol, and bronze medallions with the pinwheel cross of the swastika. She had bought yellowed portraits of Gestapo and Wehrmacht officers and several copies of the Schutzstaffel Honor Ring for herself. Under the pile of Nazi symbols was a large crystal plate on which someone had engraved Himmler’s black sun,
die schwarze Sonne.
Its twelve rays twisted out like tentacles, and Don thought it looked as though the tentacles were searching for him to suck him in.

In a box he had found the auction newspapers, with her purchases circled in red ink. He never dared to ask her why she had brought this sickness into her own home and didn’t know whether Bubbe would have been able to give him an answer.

To him the cupboard with its ominous objects became a whirlpool of darkness, from where the horror of her past flowed freely into his present. For hours he would stare into this abyss, spellbound by Himmler’s black sun, until there was no longer any distance between Ravensbrück and himself.

B
ack home in Stockholm, Don had not dared talk about the collection or about Bubbe’s whispered stories. He had written some of them down in the colorful notebook that his elementary school teacher had handed out. But he had never let anyone read them, and with time her words settled deeper and deeper. The summer he turned eleven, Don had refused to go back to the house in Båstad. He had a baby sister, and he didn’t want, or dare, to be alone with Bubbe and her ghostly cupboard anymore. His dad and mom had pleaded with him, but finally they had let him stay home in Enskede with his own key. And so it was eleven-year-old Don who answered the telephone when they called from the hospital down in Skåne to say that Bubbe was dead.

After that moment, Bubbe sank away into the great silence. Her house had quickly been sold, and Don’s dad hadn’t said a word about the Nazi symbols or the cupboard.

It had been as if his dad—now that Bubbe was finally gone—had seen an opportunity to transform them into a family without a history. He had forbidden books about the Holocaust, and if anything about the war was on TV, it was immediately turned off.

The silence about Bubbe metastasized with time, until life in the house in Enskede had consisted only of squeaks from solitary silverware and monosyllabic conversations.

In the end, living at home had been like drowning, and Don, in a hurry to get out, had left his sister behind.

P
erhaps it was a strange choice, considering Bubbe’s stories, but right after secondary school, Don decided to study to be a doctor. He found he needed to devote himself to something practical, or else he could easily slip away, losing the boundary between reality and dreams.

He had completed his education without taking any notes. He immediately memorized what was said in the lectures, and he had hardly needed to open his books before he could recite them from cover to cover. After his internship, he first tried to specialize in surgery,
but he had fainted when it came time to cut with the sharp blade of the scalpel. Instead he chose to devote himself to psychiatry, and that was when he finally found the drugs that could soothe and heal the shards of his own memory. They could at least temporarily stop the stories that had continued to consume him since he was eight.

At first Don tried only small doses of sleeping pills and mild tranquilizers, but after a few years he had switched to benzodiazepines and morphine. Just before he turned thirty, he had become so dependent that they kicked him out of the department of psychiatry at Karolinska Hospital. The fact that he later managed, in the early 1990s, to secure a position at the hospital in Karlskrona may have been due to the shortage of doctors and that they neglected to call his references. It was on a cloudy August day in that sleepy town that he first met the brownshirts from the National Socialist Front.

He had read in the local paper about the young men who used the
heil
greeting and yelled about a vigorous Sweden. But it hadn’t been until he ran into them himself, up by the apartment buildings in Galgamarken, that he confronted the stories face-to-face.

The neo-Nazis had been handing out brochures with the yellow Vasa sheaf on them, but on their flags fluttered the swastika. The SS symbol, the iron cross, and the German eagle were all raised toward Blekinge’s rain-heavy clouds. The black sun stretched its tentacles toward him from one of the largest streamers. While he told himself it was only a graphic symbol, for him, on that day, it was as if Bubbe’s cupboard had flung open again. From its whirlpool of darkness gushed the streams of all his fears, and at that moment he knew he would never be free.

He had sunk down into a crouch on the grass, cradling his head in his hands, his heart clenched. And then, when he leaned forward on his fingertips, he could feel how the very ground beneath him began to tremble. In the next moment everything around him went dim, as he was drenched by the wave of unrestrained memories and pain.

T
he intern from Stockholm looked down at the floor, hunched his shoulders as much as he could, and then took a circuitous route past the bathrooms in order to avoid walking past the permanent reporters’ corridor.

The morning meeting at
Dalakuriren
had been agony. One of the oldest pros from the crime office had cast the first stone.

“I’m ashamed,” he had said, holding up the intern’s thin four-columner.

Then everyone around the table, except for the news director, started picking on him.

Where were his own leads and ideas? Why hadn’t the intern gotten hold of a good police source? Why hadn’t he gotten further with the part about neo-Nazis and the Æsir faith—it was day four now, after all. And why, why, why hadn’t he gotten an interview with Erik Hall himself?

Impossible?

Really? Well, this morning that diver sat on a
TV sofa
and told them about everything that happened. So it really couldn’t be completely impossible, could it?

The intern had sat there staring at his coffee mug and hadn’t dared
to say anything, fearing that his voice would break. In the end even the lady with the smoker’s cough from the family pages had joined in and declared how embarrassing it was that an inexperienced intern had been put on the country’s hottest story, and that she’d heard that even the free papers in the Stockholm subway had produced more unique information about the Æsir murder.