The Ragged Edge of Night(35)

The man’s face darkened with disgust. He muttered, “‘Life unworthy of life’ is correct.”

We should have seen this coming. We have known; we have heard. Since 1939, Hitler has scoured what parts of the world he holds, searching for the deficient, the unwhole, the meek and innocent. It began by scrapping adult institutions, where nurses administered to those who could not care for themselves—those who remained like children all their lives. In those days, there were forced sterilizations, so those deemed unfit couldn’t breed and contaminate the pool of perfection, the Germany Hitler would shape from our imperfect union if we allowed him to do it. And we have allowed it. We have sat by, complacent or disbelieving or relieved that it was happening to someone else, not to us—not to the people we love.

It began with sterilizations, but it followed a terrible black crescendo, a rising scream. It became something worse. We have read the stories in the papers and in the pamphlets passed hand to hand by the White Rose. Caretakers answered the knocks at their doors and found men in SS uniforms, come to take their helpless charges away. Redistribution. We’re going to place them in a facility better able to care; that’s what the SS say. We will lift the burden from you; there is no need to trouble yourself any longer. But everyone knows, everyone sees (even in our blindness) that those called “life unworthy of life” are only redistributed to their graves.

We have known, and we have heard—but somehow, we thought it could never happen to us. Or perhaps we willfully blinded ourselves, preferring ignorance and fantasy to the terror of reality. And one day, you look out the window of the classroom to see the gray bus arriving, with the handprints of ghosts clouding its windows, and the trucks emblazoned with the swastika, and men with guns and deadened eyes.

Rillie Enns looked up at Bruder Nazarius. She had few words, but she was not so simple that she couldn’t see, couldn’t understand. Her cheeks were red with fear. Her expressive mouth opened and she wailed, again and again.

Anton, in his gray friar’s guise, moved past the muttering SS man to another, one whose face betrayed, just for a moment, a terrible anguish of despair.

“Please,” he said to that man, the one who had allowed himself to feel. “Please don’t do this.”

From the steps of the school, someone barked, “Get them onto the bus. All the children, every last one. Check inside, somebody. Search the grounds. Be sure none are hiding. Be sure none of these gray Catholic rats have hidden them away.”

The anguished man held a Karabiner across his chest. But he couldn’t meet Anton’s eye—Anton, a man of the cloth, armed only with his rosary. “It’s not my choice,” he said quietly, hoarse with shame. “It’s not my doing.”

“But you know it’s wrong. These are innocent children. Their parents have entrusted them to our care. Who will take care of these unfortunates, if not we?”

“They’re only being sent off to another facility,” the man said, and it was all he could do to speak now. He was trembling.

“You know that’s not true. We all know it.”

“Step aside, Brother. We all must do what we’re told.”

Anton shook his head. Light, drifting, scarcely believing what he was doing, he placed himself between the SS and the children. “I can’t. I can’t just… let you. You know this is wrong. You know it’s a sin. You know you’ll answer to God for it, someday.”

His fury rising, sudden and swift, the man thrusted the muzzle of his rifle against Anton’s chest. Somebody cried out in a panic—one of his fellow friars—“Brother Nazarius!”

“Stand in my way again, and I’ll run out the bayonet.” But the man choked on his words. Tears lined his eyes.

“What have they done to you?” Anton whispered. “How have they made you consent to this?”

The man shook his head, too pained to speak, but his rifle still bit into Anton’s chest. He breathed raggedly, half sobbing, but quietly, so only Anton can hear. “I have a wife. I have two daughters, nine and twelve. They told me… they said…”

The man could say no more, but anyone with a heart could infer. They had told him what they would do if he refused. This man’s wife, tortured. His little girls, raped by dozens of men. This is the knife they hold to your throat. This is the precipice to which they drive you. In the name of making Germany great, we have forced our men to choose between the lives of innocents and their own wives and children. We have cut the flesh of our women while their husbands look on. We have branded them with irons, disfigured them with beatings until they beg for a bullet to end the pain. We have thrown little girls to the rapists’ queue. Deutschland über Alles.

Because the man’s pain was too much for him to bear, Brother Nazarius stepped aside. No—that was not why he did it, but it was what he tells himself later. Every night when regret wracks him and keeps him from sleep, he tells himself, I let those men take my children because the act was no easier for them than it was for me. Because the men in black uniforms also suffer, and are haunted by what they are made to do.

But the Karabiner lowered in the man’s shaking hands, and the moment it fell away from Anton’s chest, relief overwhelmed him. That was why he let them take his children away: to save his own life. What redemption can he ever hope to find for such a sin?