The Chosen Ones

by Steve Sem-Sandberg

Genres: World War II; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The Am Spiegelgrund clinic, in glittering Vienna, masqueraded as a well-intentioned reform school for wayward boys and girls and a home for chronically ill children. The reality, however, was very different: in the wake of Germany's annexation of Austria on the eve of World War II, its doctors, nurses, and teachers created a monstrous parody of the institution's benign-sounding brief. The Nazi regime's euthanasia program would come to determine the fate of many of the clinic's inhabitants.

Through the eyes of a child inmate, Adrian Ziegler, and a nurse, Anna Katschenka, Steve Sem-Sandberg, the author of the award-winning The Emperor of Lies, explores the very meaning of survival. An absorbing, emotionally overwhelming novel, rich in incident and character, The Chosen Ones is obliquely illuminated by the author's sharp sense of the absurd. Passionately serious, meticulously researched, and deeply profound, this extraordinary and dramatic novel bears witness to oppression and injustice, and offers invaluable and necessary insight into an intolerable chapter in Austria’s past.

Release date: August 8, 2017

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Print pages: 576

Sample

I
Fostered Children
 
The Institution    They brought him to Spiegelgrund for the first time in January 1941, on a cold, clear winter’s morning when the pale light closest to the ground shimmered with frost. Near the top of the mountain that rose behind the pavilions, Adrian Ziegler remembers seeing the institution’s church, its dome green with verdigris against a blue sky, an unreal blue like that of postcards or colour-printed posters. The car stopped just inside the hospital gate, in front of the buildings that housed the directorate and the administration. A nurse came to escort them, first to meet the elderly director, a grave, pale gentleman in a dark suit, who signed the documents, and then to a pavilion to the left of the main entrance, where a doctor was waiting to examine him. Another nurse was there as well and she shouted at him to undress at once and step onto the scales. Adrian would claim that he had no idea who the doctor was until much later. It was only then, when he finally saw the medical report and recognised the signature of Doctor Heinrich Gross, that he identified the Spiegelgrund doctor as the man who pursued him for the rest of his life, even long after he had been set free. But on this first day, the doctor is simply a frightening stranger in a white coat who forces his jaws apart as far as they will go, and then probes and squeezes the bones in his skull and spine with strong fingers. The examination lasts for an hour and the doctor uses instruments that Adrian has never seen before. The top of his head is measured using a kind of circular tool with a sharp point at the tip. He is told to sit on a tall seat made up of a loose board with flaps on either side and then Doctor Gross lowers another measuring thing to determine the distance between his eyes, and between each eye and his chin. Next, the doctor pulls on a pair of gloves, prods Adrian’s testicles and pushes a finger up his anus. When the examination is done, the escort nurse comes to collect him. It is still early. They walk along a corridor where the white winter daylight bounces off the monotonous pattern of rhomboid floor tiles and it will often come back to him afterwards how the floors and walls in corridors and dormitories glowed with an unearthly luminosity as if alive in their own right, independent of the children who stayed there and somehow more substantial than they were. But, of course, the nurse has no patience with him. Stop staring and come along, we haven’t got all day! They go outside through a door at the back of the building. Now, he has his first glimpse of the extent of the place that will be his home for several years, of its many pavilions lined up side by side, pale and shut-off in the long, frost-white shadow below the mountain. All the pavilions look the same, with barred windows and plain brick frontages broken by bays. The narrow tracks of a tramline apparently link the pavilions. From a little higher up, a small train comes along, three freight wagons pulled by a red and white locomotive. It looks like a toy train. He is to be housed in pavilion 9, in the third row to the left of the central path. The nurse pulls out a huge bunch of keys from her apron pocket and flicks through them with practised fingers until she has located the right one. The dormitory doors must be locked even though it is mid-morning. If there are any children behind the doors, they aren’t making the slightest noise. The nurse leads the way to a store cupboard next to the washroom and hands him a towel and a piece of grey institutional soap. He has a bath and afterwards she inspects his fingernails and ears, then lets him have his clothes back. She gives him a pair of felt slippers to wear indoors and a short, grey woollen jacket, but he isn’t allowed to put the jacket on even though the corridor is as cold as sin. She leads him to a tall white door with IV painted on it. At first, he thought the children behind that door were just sitting very still and holding their breath. Later, he thought maybe they were already dead but pretended to be alive for his sake. So he wouldn’t lose heart straightaway.
The River    Adrian would sum up his early childhood as hardly the happiest years of his life, but at least a time he could look back on without feeling ashamed. He used to spend his summers with his favourite uncle, one of his mother’s younger brothers who lived out in Kaisermühlen. His real name was Ferenc Dobrosch, though his sister called him Franz. At the time, Adrian and his siblings had the surname Dobrosch, because their mother wasn’t married to their father. Ferenc said that that Dobrosch was a Hungarian surname even though it didn’t sound the slightest bit Hungarian, and explained that the entire family came from a couple of small villages in a part of Hungary that now belonged to Slovakia. Adrian’s mother insisted that the family name was Slovakian and in no way Hungarian, not that it mattered since it was just as good as any Austrian name because all names are fine in Austria, or had been in the old days. Uncle Ferenc had no education to speak of but was a hard-working and enterprising man who earned a living from occasional jobs that he seemed to pick up easily, or at least he did back then. During the summer, he minded the animals down on the allotments at Hubertusdamm, where many of the plot-holders used to keep cows or goats on the old floodplain between the high-water dam and the river. Adrian and his little brother Helmut helped to feed the animals and were rewarded with a churn full of fresh milk to take home. The animals were calm and warm. If it rained, they would stand close to each other, as if asleep. Ferenc and Adrian lay on their backs on the ground. It was covered in animal dung and rubbish like old tyres and nails from the workshops along the road, so if you were running around barefoot you had to look out or you might get hurt. The air was moist after the rain, the summer sky high and bright. Dense insect swarms rose like pillars above the puddles in the river mud. Ferenc wore an old suit jacket and a beret, but had nothing on under the jacket. His hairy, sun-scorched chest was dotted with red insect bites and he would squeeze the worst ones with his hard nails, then suck the blood from his fingers. It didn’t hurt one bit, he said. Sometimes, he taught them things. How to cheat hunger by chewing grass, for instance. Lying there, looking out over the river, Ferenc said that the river was a curse on the land. Once, Kaisermühlen had been one of the numbered city districts – it was the 2nd Bezirk – and the local farmers had come here to have their grain ground to flour in the water-powered mills. Then the emperor ordered dams to be built across the old branching creeks of the river to direct the flow through a new main channel dug along a line that changed the relationship of the land to the river. For instance, what had been the left bank of the Donau ended up on the right, cut off from everywhere else by the river. From then on, Kaisermühlen was changed by word of mouth into Hunger Island. People would come looking for work but never managed to cross the river. The same thing happened when they dug the Panama Canal, Ferenc said. And then, as now, many of the labourers had drowned. Adrian asked if he knew anyone who had been a navvy on the river channel but no, Ferenc had been too young at the time, though he had heard that relatives on his father’s side had worked there. They mostly took on foreign labour, though, because the work was so dangerous. The men had died from typhus or were carried off by the river and surfaced months or even years later, so you never knew who they were or where they came from. Adrian liked the river, especially on clear days after rain, with open sightlines in every direction that meant you could see faraway places like Kahlenberg and the Reichsbrücke and the tower of the Kaiser Jubiläumskirche in Leopoldstadt. He also liked to watch the river, the controlled but irresistible power of the flowing water, and the way it and the sky exchanged light, so that the river looked different from one hour to the next. At dawn, the wind would raise ripples across the mass of water which later, at dusk, could be so still and translucent it seemed you might walk on its glassy surface. This was when they would set out for the walk back home, Ferenc in front carrying the milk churn, followed first by Adrian and then his little brother. Helmut was only three and it was hard for him to keep up. He was a slight, blue-eyed boy with a shock of blond hair. Seeing him, no one thought that this little boy could be Eugen Ziegler’s child, not even Ziegler himself, who accused the mother of having produced this Dobrosch offspring with another man. All the same, Adrian, who shared his life with his younger brother, thought Helmut’s ingratiating smile and the unconcerned look in his eyes made him a dead ringer for their father. The boys walked barefoot because their mother thought it was silly to wear shoes when it wasn’t necessary.
Simmeringer Hauptstrasse    Adrian grew up in Simmering. But not just grew up, as he would say later in life. Apart from the time I was kept at Spiegelgrund, I’ve spent my whole life in Simmering. They had me adopted but even then, where would I end up but in Simmering? Why, I was jailed in Simmering. In Kaiserebersdorf prison. He laughed when he said that but the listener understood that, to Adrian, it had been something like a curse. There are places you never seem able to leave behind. When Eugen Ziegler moved to Simmering, the Social Democrats had only just set in motion the gigantic building projects which they were determined would once and for all wipe poverty off the map, as their election posters claimed. Simmeringer Hauptstrasse was still its old self, as it had been for several centuries: a heavily trafficked through-route that linked a network of workshops, shops and pubs. The family lived in a nineteenth-century building which, like most of the larger ones in the neighbourhood turned a ‘respectable’ front towards the street while the tenements around the inner courtyard were crawling with dubious, lower-class life forms. The house was only two storeys high, but wide, with two separate stairwells on either side of a broad gateway for wagons that wasn’t broad enough, Adrian said, because the oak uprights on either side were deeply scored where loads had scraped past, on trucks as well as horse-drawn wagons. There was a pub in the building next door and the landlord preferred to unload the heavy beer barrels in the yard. Mr Streidl, who owned the shop at the front of the building, brought his stock in the same way. The flats were reached by narrow galleries along the inner frontage, one for each storey. The Dobrosch-Ziegler family lived on the first floor, at the far end of the gallery on the right. Tucked well away in a corner of the yard, where the latrines were clustered under a tall horse-chestnut tree, there was a wash house that served the entire building. Every day, regardless of weather or time of year, the women would be doing the laundry and some would bring hordes of noisy children. One of Adrian’s earliest memories is of coming home on an overcast day in the winter, when a billowing cloud of sour-smelling steam fills the big room, washing hangs on the line in the gallery and over the cooker, and Emilia and Magda, their faces glistening with sweat, lift the big pans of boiling water and shout at him in loud, shrill voices to keep out of the way or he’ll get scalded. Emilia and Magda (Magdalena) were his mother’s younger sisters and, because neither of them had yet got herself a husband, Adrian’s father had condescended to let them live with his family. The flat actually consisted of this kitchen and another, slightly larger room where one wall was covered in mould. That so many people could share this place was really beyond all comprehension. Adrian’s uncle Florian, his mother’s older brother, occupied a kitchen alcove. Florian had always been what was known as ‘peculiar’ and never got round to getting a job, despite his sister’s endless nagging and despite Eugen, Adrian’s father, who whenever he came home would have a go at Florian; although, Adrian said, you wouldn’t catch him saying that he had come home, that was below his dignity at the time, only that he had dropped by, often bringing booze with him and being generous at first, when he would offer everyone a drink, until suddenly he lost interest and broke into a violent rage that almost always targeted Adrian’s mother and her brothers and sisters, whom he abused, called parasites and vermin, and claimed that they stayed in the flat without his permission and that he had to pay for them all, though there was of course no truth in that, Adrian said, because Florian was only one of the Dobrosch brothers who lived with them, and Uncle Ferenc paid for him, always adding a little extra when he could since Ziegler himself never contributed a cent even though he kept telling them about the big business deals he had on the go. Eugen Ziegler treated Uncle Florian especially badly. Adrian clearly remembers one particular row, when his father grabbed a handful of his uncle’s long, black fringe and slammed Florian’s head against the wall, as if it was a wrecking ball. And did it over and over again. The regular, dull thuds sounded like the back of a wedge axe hitting the chopping block. Florian didn’t try to resist or defend himself; the whites of his eyes swivelled further and further up and back into his eye sockets. This was one of the few times that Leonie, Adrian’s mother, dared to speak up against Eugen. She shouted that he was to leave her Florian alone and, if he didn’t, she would leave him and never come back. She might well say that, but if she walked out, what would happen to the others? They were all her dependents: her brother and her sisters and her growing number of children. Instead, she wiped the blood off the floor, hid the empties under the sink and set Uncle Florian to glue the kitchen table leg that Eugen had broken (he was good at simple, practical things, was uncle Florian; all his sense of the here and now seemed concentrated in his hands). And so Leonie pulled on her beret, buttoned up the brown cotton coat she wore in all weathers, and went to catch the 71 tram to Schwarzenbergplatz and then go on to Wieden or Josefstadt, where she spent all day cleaning for one wealthy family after another, scrubbing their floors and beating the dust from their carpets, though some of her employers might live really far away, as when she had to walk all the way to Salmannsdorf in Döbling because she didn’t even have the money for the ticket. What Leonie Dobrosch earned from her skivvying was barely enough to pay the rent so she would try to bring back scraps of food, leftovers from the tables of the well-to-do that she had begged them to give her, things like day-old bread or potatoes or Knödel that could be fried up, but before cooking the family meal she had to start cleaning and tidying all over again the moment she arrived, because everything went to pieces at home when she wasn’t there. She had only one day a week that she could call her own: Sunday. Once a week, she threw them all out and allowed no one back in – you’d be told off if you so much as showed your face in the door – got down on all fours next to a bucket of water, scrubbed the floors and covered them in newspaper afterwards. When the floors were done, Leonie sat down at the kitchen table, on her own or with Florian for company (he alone was allowed to stay), and just stayed sitting there, doing nothing, saying nothing. Because the children had nowhere else to be and because wherever they happened to end up they’d sooner or later be chased away, they ganged up, regardless of age, and drifted from place to place, sometimes begging for things to eat or to trade. They stole, too; mostly easy pickings like fruit and vegetables from the open boxes grocers displayed outside their shopfronts. Adrian, whose aunties rarely had time for him, had belonged to the local gang since the age of just three or four. The children ran about down by the old hospital barracks in Hasenleiten, or by the Donau canal where the banks in the summer were miracles of cool stillness under the canopies of the trees, or they might go to the field with the huge gasometers, monumental brown-brick structures which loomed over his earliest childhood. When they lived on Simmeringer Hauptstrasse, he was often the youngest of the child drifters and would quite often get lost. One story that was repeated about him in the family (his sister Laura kept telling it) was about how Adrian once, when he was four, apparently fainted outside the Sankt Laurenz church. It was in the middle of winter and it took time before anyone spotted the tiny snow-covered bundle at the bottom of the church steps. The verger found him in the end. Since no one knew anything about him and there was no one to ask, the parish priest’s housekeeper took pity on the child and brought him home with her, gave him a bath, a meal, and a bed to sleep in. This was the first time he had a bed to himself instead of sleeping at the bottom of his aunties’ bed or sharing with Helmut or Laura. He spent three days with the kind lady and then his mother, brimming with shame and worry, came to collect him. Not that she was ashamed because he had been looked after by someone else. The other children had of course said where they had been that day, and she’d had a shrewd idea where her little boy was all along but hadn’t wanted to get mixed up with the police (like most people in her position, Leonie Dobrosch dreaded anything to do with the authorities) and, besides, what had happened had happened and the boy might as well stay and sit down to a few decent meals. This was also how Adrian Ziegler himself saw it many years later: his mother had in a way already handed him over to strangers. And it had seemed easy to do because she felt that, when all was said and done, staying with the priest’s housekeeper was for his own good, perhaps even a lucky break. Later on, in Spiegelgrund, he would have nightmares about that housekeeper with her hard, thin-lipped mouth and her unkind eyes with bright blue irises that seemed to suck in everything they saw but never offer anything in return. One day, she had fixed him with those blue eyes of hers and asked him if he knew who He was who was throned in Heaven and what His Son was called and then, when he had no answers, she had smiled haughtily, turned away and refused to explain. At home, they talked of neither Heaven nor Earth. They hardly ever mentioned anything that wasn’t right there in front of you. Only Ferenc was given to hold forth about whatever came into his head and his siblings would often rebuke him for it. When the psychologists at Spiegelgrund asked Adrian where his mother and father came from, because they naturally had to find out what kind of blood flowed through his veins, he couldn’t answer that question either. The past was the one thing no one spoke about at home because it was guaranteed to cause trouble. That his mother had been a sewing machine operator in a Vorarlberg factory for many years before she moved to Wien and got pregnant by that man Ziegler, was something he learnt while at Spiegelgrund, and then only by chance, when one of the staff decided to punish him by reading aloud from his notes; and as for who, or perhaps rather what Eugen Ziegler really was, that is, what he was in terms of biological heredity, Adrian would grasp only when, after being fostered for four years, his foster parents rejected him and sent him off to reform school in Mödling, where the staff informed him that he’d never be any good, what with his father being of Gypsy stock. But then, something happened. Perhaps it was simply that the war began. One morning, in October 1939, he was told to go to the director’s office. There was a surprise for him, the director said and he opened a door that Adrian had thought just led to a cupboard and none other than his Gypsy King father popped out, like a rabbit out of a hat, beaming at his son as he declared that it was time they let bygones be bygones and started afresh. By then he was ten years old but hadn’t seen his father since he was six and even before then, only a few isolated occasions many months apart. The director told Adrian that he was to go home with his father. And seemed to expect him to be happy. Actually, he had never been more scared in his life.
Portrait of a Father    Eugen Ziegler took a great deal of pride in his appearance. Before going to bed, he smeared nut oil into his strong, dark hair and kept it in place by pulling a ladies’ stocking over his head. Whenever he might be coming to stay the night, Leonie always put a towel on the pillow to protect it from the oil. To Adrian, a towel on the pillow at bedtime meant that his father was on his way home. Though the towel on his father’s pillow was often untouched, he remembers how hopeful he would feel every time and then how overwhelmingly disappointed, because his father was a great one for making generous promises about the special things he would bring next time he came home. A toy car, perhaps, or a steely marble or a collection of colourful bottle labels that he had showed Adrian once, promising that, next time, he’d have got hold of another collection just like it for his boy. Then next time, and the next and next again. At times, if and when his father did come home, it could be grim. He often arrived so late at night that Adrian was asleep and never heard the noise of the door slamming. In the morning, his mother was lying half on top Eugen’s body as if she had tried to wrestle him down during the night or as if something inside her had broken and left her unable to move away on her own. Eugen Ziegler kept very quiet about himself and his relatives, which was strange for someone usually so cocksure and boastful. He had told Adrian that the name Ziegler had to do with his descent from one of the thousands of Czech labourers who had travelled to Wien to labour in the brick works – the Ziegelbrenners – without whom no houses could have been built in this city. Or so he said. Ziegler became his name because he was a Czech, and moulding and firing bricks was what the Czechs did. It didn’t take Adrian long to realise that this was no more than a tale. Sometimes, his father would speak of his work as a handyman in a railway station somewhere in eastern Slovakia, and how he had just happened to get on a train to Donetsk in Ukraine where he got himself a job at a steel mill and stayed for years. The revolution had just ended and thousands volunteered to go to Russia because they were fired up by Lenin. I’ve always been a communist at heart, Eugen Ziegler would say, beating his breast. This was sheer bombast. Ziegler had no heart but reckoned he could get away with pretending that he did or, at least, that being so handsome would make up for the defect. As Auntie Magda kept saying, Eugen’s looks made women turn their heads. Well, a certain kind of woman, Auntie Emilia would add. When Adrian asked her if his mother was one of these women, Auntie Emilia told him that Eugen had been different in those days. But if Adrian went on to ask more about what he had been like, in those days, the answers became vague and muddled because one wasn’t to speak about what had been. Still, it was fact that Eugen Ziegler spoke Russian, so there might have been a grain of truth in the story about running off to Donetsk. Once, he and Adrian almost paid with their lives for his language skills. It happened in the autumn of 1939, just weeks after Eugen had collected Adrian from Mödling and they were planning to start a new life. They lived in the 3rd Bezirk, on Erdbergstrasse, which is only a few blocks away from Rochusmarkt. Every day, Eugen would go to the pub to negotiate business deals and, every night, his oldest son Adrian was told to go and walk him home. On the slow, unsteady way back to Erdbergstrasse, Eugen, who was usually dead-drunk, would go on about how Wien was no longer the city it once was, the streets were crawling with Piefkes, he said, traitors and Nazi swine, and, once, when he saw two of them in Wehrmacht uniforms on the square at Rochusmarkt, he swayingly pulled up in front of them and, before Adrian had time to react, let out a stream of Russian abuse, all presumably meaningless to the soldiers. What they did grasp was that this man spoke Russian. Spitzel, a fucking spy, Adrian heard one of them snarl as he whipped the rifle off his back. Adrian grabbed his father’s arm and managed to drag him behind one of the remaining market stalls where they crouched, squeezed tightly together, and heard the two soldiers run past, rifles rattling against the buckles of their Sam Browns, the heels of their boots thumping on the cobbles, and then Eugen pulled his fingers through his hair and turned his face, stinking of alcoholic fumes, to Adrian and hissed:
If you ever get matey with one of these Nazi swine I’ll kill you, you hear me?
It would take six long years before the Nazis were run out of Wien but when it finally happened, a new life also opened up for Eugen Ziegler, incredible as it may sound. Earlier, his business deals had to be managed hand to mouth. ‘Business’ had always been hugely important for him. No day would pass without his doing deals and Adrian couldn’t remember him speaking about anything else. Much later, Adrian would recognise more than a little of this in himself. My father, he said, was incapable of living with what was closed or already decided or concluded in some way. He existed in the present and for the promise of something to come. When the business was done and he was left facing the results, so many tons of brown coal or cubic metres of logs, he had no idea how to handle the goods he had acquired, or even how to transport the stuff. When he turned up at home, it was never to see me or Helmut or even our mother, whatever he might claim at the time, but to persuade Uncle Ferenc to fund the delivery of his brown coal on time or the down-payment on something he was after, Adrian said, and the rows with my mother broke out every time because he kept trying it on with Florian or Ferenc, and Leonie refused to allow either of her brothers to do business with Eugen. You don’t know what you’re doing, she would say. Leonie, who always stepped into the breach, was the one who got hit. When Eugen Ziegler beat up his woman, he went about it in a properly systematic way. First, everyone else was ordered to leave the flat. They gathered in the yard to wait while the screaming Leonie was hauled from wall to wall. The punishment could last from about twenty minutes to more than an hour, with increasingly long breaks in between bouts. Then the beating seemed to be over, until they heard a terrible scream and it started all over again. If in the end Eugen was too drunk to storm out in a rage, he collapsed exhausted in a corner while Leonie limped around, picking things up and tidying as always. Adrian remembered the time when his father had ordered a schnitzel and a beer to be brought from the restaurant across the street. Abusing Leonie must have made him hungry. Without a word, the table was laid with a white tablecloth and they all stood around watching the head of the household eat his supper. He ate as methodically as he beat his woman, but something about the way he brought fork and glass to his lips showed that he was out of his head with drink. Before going away, he emptied the coffee tin of the money Leonie and Ferenc had saved up for the rent. He left afterwards, without a word to anyone.
I know it’s no fault of yours, Mrs Dobrosch, the landlord, Mr Schubach, used to say when Leonie went to see him the next morning and, with an ingratiating smile on her lips, asked him to be allowed to wait with the rent. It’s that man Ziegler, a bastard who doesn’t know how to behave decently. But, you know, this can’t go on.
Foster Home    And they were evicted in the end, on a day in May 1935. Adrian remembers that it poured with rain. Ferenc and Florian had carried the sticks of furniture the family still owned down to the yard: Leonie’s bed, the bed all the children had slept on in turn, and the much-hammered kitchen table, always glued together again by Florian; the chairs, and the wardrobe for Leonie’s dresses. She had packed Laura’s, Adrian’s and Helmut’s clothes into a large suitcase. They had nothing to cover their things with and it rained so hard that the drops bounced many centimetres up in the air when they hit the wooden surfaces. Adrian still remembers this. Their neighbours had come out to watch from the galleries outside the flats. And the boys with whom he and Helmut used to drift around the streets. Now, they stood still and silent, just staring. Next to them, their fathers in their vests, leaning uncari