Roots of Evil(110)

She stayed absolutely still, her own heart pounding, aware of Alraune’s warmth against her shoulders, pressing back against the wall and trying to shrink the two of them, like people in the fairy-stories of her childhood. Like that other Alice who had fallen down a rabbit-hole, and drunk something that had made her tiny. If only I could do that now…If only I could do what children do, and believe that if I close my eyes no one can see me…

The door was flung open, and light streamed in. Two guards stood in the doorway, both holding machine-guns. Alice flinched and felt Alraune shiver.

‘There she is,’ said one, pointing. ‘And the child.’

They moved forward and Alice saw that a third man was with them. He remained in the shadowy passage, but when he turned his head a trick of the light caught the side of his face, and she saw the disc of glass over one eye.

‘You are such a fool to try to outwit me,’ said Leo Dreyer looking down at her. ‘I will always – always – defeat you.’

He signalled to the guards, and they twisted Alice’s arms behind her back and half-dragged her out of the laundry block and across the yard. As she went, she saw Dreyer stand looking down at Alraune for a long moment, his face unreadable. And then he picked Alraune up and followed them.



Alice was never to know if she had been betrayed, but when she could reason again, she thought she had not. She thought it was more likely that once Mengele heard that the child he had planned to use in his experiment had vanished, he would have ordered a very thorough search. The guards had probably been looking for them for several hours before they were found, and for once they had been stealthy, giving no warning, simply entering the various buildings, and ransacking them.

After the first impact of shock she was not so very surprised to see Leo Dreyer. If he had not known about Alraune’s birth at the time, he would have known soon afterwards. Had he been secretly watching Alraune growing up? Perhaps pointing him out to Mengele – saying, Why not use that child in your work? Didn’t he care that Alraune might be his son?

Alice had expected to be hanged or shot; at best she expected to be taken to the punishment block and beaten. She had not quite reached a stage where she no longer had any feeling, but she was very close to it. Even so, she was still aware of a deep aching regret that despite everything she had not saved Alraune. And now I will die, and they will be free to do whatever they want to him. And afterwards – if there is an afterwards – it will be up to Maria or Ilena to take care of him.

But she had reckoned without the warped passion that drove much of Josef Mengele’s work. Never waste anything, Mengele would say to his team. If there is anything – any situation, any remnant of humanity – that can be utilized, then do so.

And Josef Mengele was about to utilize the woman he thought of as Lucretia von Wolff in one very particular aspect of his work.

Alice was not taken to the yard with the infamous bullet-ridden brick wall, nor was she taken to the dreaded gas chamber. She was taken to a small private office in the medical block, with a large square inner window looking into one of the main surgeries. An observation room? Yes, of course. The blood began to thud in her temples and every macabre rumour and every fragment of grisly gossip she had ever heard about Mengele rushed through her mind. And he appears to have thrown in his lot with Leo Dreyer, she thought. Between them, what are they going to do to me?

It was not until they brought in two men and strapped them down to chairs resembling dentists’ chairs, and it was not until they led Alraune in and gave him a seat facing these two men, that Alice began to understand. There would be no straightforward floggings or starvation punishments for her; the Nazis were being much subtler and much crueller than that.

Ilena had said that Mengele’s team was trying to establish whether pain or fear was the dominant factor in the disintegration of a human psyche, and to this end the doctors were inflicting both pain and fear on their victims – adjusting the proportions or the ratio as they went, and measuring the different results.

But tonight they were adding a refinement to their experiment – two refinements. They were putting a child in the same room as the victim, and watching the child’s reactions to the inflicting of pain on that victim.

And they were putting the child’s mother in an adjoining room, so that she would be forced to see the whole thing.



There was nothing Alice could do. Two guards stood by the door and two of Mengele’s assistants were seated by the glass observation panel, with clipboards and pens. As a third entered the room Alice saw that more guards were stationed outside. There were no windows in the room which she might smash and try to climb through, and a second’s inspection of the observation panel showed that it was of extremely thick glass. She thought: there is no way out of here. I am shut into this room, and I will have to endure whatever is ahead.

The straps were tightened around the two prisoners’ ankles and wrists, and wires were taped to their chests and temples, and then linked to box-like machines. Alice supposed they would measure blood pressure levels, and heartbeats. Brain impulses, even? She had no idea if that was possible.

As a thick iron gyve was passed around the neck of the two men and iron braces tightened around their heads to prevent them from moving, her own heart began to pound with nervous terror, because whatever the doctors were about to do, it was clearly something connected with the men’s faces.