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“No! I mean— Please, I need to see your face.” Schramm looks around and gestures toward an olive grove clinging to a nearby terrace, high above the coast. “Over there,” he orders, adding stiffly, “if you will.”
A tethered goat grazing beneath the silver-gray leaves lifts its horned skull to consider the newcomers. Gulls wheel in air scented by wild thyme and rosemary. Eye level with Osvaldo, the birds cock their heads in passing and inspect the priest with brainless optimism. Food is scarce; scraps for gulls are nonexistent. Don’t look at me, Osvaldo thinks irritably. Go find a Franciscan!
“Does heaven exist?” Schramm demands.
Osvaldo blinks. “Yes. Of course.”
“One who dies without the stain of sin on his soul goes to heaven?”
“Herr Doktor—”
“Children under the age of reason are not responsible. They ca
“If they were baptized.”
“What of souls trapped in bodies that can never achieve reason?” Schramm asks in the same peremptory tone. “The feebleminded? The mad? They, too, go directly to heaven. Their stainless souls are freed by death. They are with God.”
Osvaldo frowns. “Yes,” he says more slowly.
“And if they are not baptized? What about—”
“Herr Schramm, if you wish to engage in doctrinal debate—”
“A priest’s office is to instruct the faithful!” Schramm shouts.
The grazing goat shies away, and the German is swamped by another coughing fit. Disgusted by the pulpy noise, Osvaldo looks away to hide his grimace. The paroxysm passes. Schramm leans against the terrace wall, wipes his mouth on a handkerchief, reaches into his suit coat for cigarettes. Osvaldo accepts one, but he puts it in his pocket, unwilling to smoke during a sacrament. “These can’t be good for you,” he remarks. “Not with a cough like that.”
“They’re poison,” Schramm says flatly, “but useful camouflage.” He pulls in the smoke, then makes the little choking sound that comes when one tries to suppress a cough. “Bless me, Father, for I have si
Osvaldo laughs. You’re joking, this laugh says. You can’t be serious! “Ninety-one thousand,” he repeats. “Eight hundred…”
“And sixty-seven. Yes.”
The number is absurd, but Schramm does not laugh. He does not smile and exclaim, “Oh-ho! I really had you going there for a minute, didn’t I, Father!” He sits, smoking, eyes tracking the flight path of a gull as it veers away, toward the sea.
Confused, Osvaldo attempts to divide 91,867 by 365, but he has no facility with numbers. Make it easier, he tells himself. Ninety thousand divided by 300 would be three hundred a day, for a year. If Schramm were a bomber pilot… But a doctor? “How?”
“Barbiturates at first. Luminal tablets dissolved in tea. Morphine, scopolamine, if a child didn’t die quickly. Then there was a study at Brandenburg, comparing methods. Gas was faster, more humane—”
“Gas?” Osvaldo has no idea what this can mean.
“Carbon monoxide. Twenty, thirty at a time. At Belzec, they decided— It took too long. So we went to prussic acid. I didn’t drop the canisters myself, but I decided who— There were trains, and doctors had to decide. You sent them left or right. There were thousands. I was required to decide.” Schramm stops, swallows. “I asked for a transfer out of the extermination camp, but—”
Osvaldo shakes his head as though to clear it. “Extermination?”
“I had done research in nutrition, so I was reassigned to Kremer’s project at the Monowitz labor camp. There were two medics. They were needlessly— there was no reason to be cruel! So I started doing the intracardiac injections myself. Phenol is quick, and has no effect on the viscera.”
“The viscera?”
“To describe the anatomical effects of starvation, it was necessary to preserve organ integrity. Those people were doomed, either way. At least we could derive useful data, but— It was too much, too far! I asked for a transfer again—”
“Herr Schramm, what has this to do with mental defectives—?”
“You’re mixing things!” Schramm cries. “That was the euthanasia program.”
“Euthanasia?”
“Of the feebleminded, the deformed, the hopelessly ill. You’re mixing things! I was a doctor in a state hospital in the late thirties. You have to understand! If their families didn’t want such children, why should the nation? If healthy young men died for their nation in war, why shouldn’t their hopeless sisters and brothers do the same?”
Head aching, Osvaldo tries to follow, but it’s as though he is listening to a conversation taking place on the other side of a plate-glass window, and—
The window! he thinks, recognizing the sudden, impossible feeling of having experienced this before. His first week in Sant’Andrea: he was sitting in a café, sipping an espresso, reading La Gazzetta dello Sport. There was a tremendous bang! Flame and smoke erupted from the docks. Wreckage and dust descended. He thought, A steam engine in one of the ships has exploded! But there was a second, a third detonation. Explosions— closer and closer, moving uphill from the port toward the café. All around him, patrons and waiters dove for cover. They shouted that it was an air raid. He knew they were right. He was certain that the concussion from the next bomb would shatter the window, cut him to pieces. He was going to die in a puddle of coffee, but he simply couldn’t move. He just stood there like a statue until the planes passed over, and the city burned in relative peace.
The German’s words fall like bombs on Osvaldo Tomitz now. Words he has never heard before. Concepts that paralyze him. Numbers that strike him speechless. Places with names so foreign he ca
“I didn’t mean to— I never thought— But you see, I was compromised, because of the T-4 program, and I had to…” Schramm passes a hand over his eyes. “I requested transfer to the eastern front. To be a doctor for a combat unit, there was some honor in that.”
“Ninety-one thousand, eight hundred. And sixty-seven,” Osvaldo whispers. “How can you know the number so exactly?”
“Records were kept. Meticulous records, at the camps. And at the hospital, the death certificates were fraudulent— I lied,” Schramm confesses. “I told the families… this was part of my medical training! I followed a guide. A written guide. I was to tell parents their child had died of pneumonia, or septicemia. Later, in Russia, it was worse, almost. Thousands and thousands, executed nine at a time by firing squad. There were breakdowns. Soldiers cried and begged to be excused. The officers would scream abuse at them— they were a disgrace to the German race! To the Vaterland! So they’d fire at the targets, with tears streaming down their cheeks—”
“Targets?”
“Not all of them cried. Some enjoyed their work— they got extra rations, all the liquor they could hold.”
More bombs fall. A noncommissioned officer who held shrieking Jewish toddlers by the hair, shooting them in the head and laughing at the bloody skullcap left dripping in his fist. A Ukrainian volunteer systematically beating people to death with his rifle butt while the SS watched, stu