REVIEW: ‘The Jewish Hospital’ by Jonathan Hammel
Yad Vashem estimates nearly 200,000 books have been written about the Holocaust. We gain some fragments of insight from such works as André Schwarz-Bart’s Last of the Just, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, Nikolaus Wachsmann’s comprehensive history, and even Mel Brooks’s parodies.
To decide to write a new book about the Holocaust is a curious endeavor in the face of that vast body of literature and its nearly endless variety. But the true story of the Jewish Hospital of Berlin is so unlikely, even absurd, that it justifies yet another addition to that literary genre.
Jonathan Hammel’s historical novel recounts how the Nazis allowed a hospital staffed by and serving only Jews to exist throughout the entire duration of the Third Reich. He does it through the story of his grandmother, Gerda Schild Haas, who worked as a nurse in the hospital.
The setting is March 1943, a full year after the Wannsee Conference where Reinhard Heydrich and 15 officials of the Reich agreed to the final solution of the Jewish question. Earlier plans for emigration of Jews to welcoming countries failed as there were no welcoming countries. Later emigration to neighboring countries only led to death as the Nazis swept through Eastern Europe and killed as many Jews as they found. But a more efficient and organized solution was in the offing.
The rationale for this hospital reveals the ludicrous and insane mindset of the Nazi bureaucracy. Apparently, they believed the 70,000 Jews of Berlin needed to be in good physical shape before they were transported to the labor camps like Sachsenhausen where they survived an average of about two weeks or to the death camp of Auschwitz where they lasted about two hours. Any pregnant women would deliver their babies there and then go on transports to their death.
Some of the characters in the book have been given pseudonyms, including the author’s grandmother. Gerda Schild Haas is called Lena Schild, and her close friend Sophie Gollschmidt portrays Stella Goldschlag, a notorious Nazi collaborator forced to spy on her fellow Jews. Schild eventually is sent to Theresienstadt camp, the Potemkin village created by the Nazis to pretend that Jews were well treated whenever any investigation was performed. The actual head of the hospital, Dr. Walter Lustig, retains his name. Lustig was a physician who lost his license as part of the Nuremberg Laws but worked closely with the Nazis in his efforts to keep the hospital open, prevent the staff from being deported to the camps, and ensuring his own survival.
Several incidents that the staff of the hospital actually experienced are presented in this fictional account. Attempts at deporting 50 percent of the staff were avoided by playing off the bureaucratic wrangling between the Gestapo and the SS squads over jurisdiction of the hospital. Children were housed there, and some avoided deportation. Jews who worked in the hospital were recruited as Nazi spies to identify Jews who were living openly in Berlin under assumed names and identities. Adolf Eichmann and Alois Brunner appear in the novel and were involved in overseeing the hospital as part of their portfolio in organizing the destruction of European Jewry.
The book captures the fear that hung over the hospital and the painful betrayal by Jews who were forced to collaborate with the Nazis, typically after they were tortured. That sense of fear permeates the book. Unfortunately, we never gain any insight into the weird Nazi mentality that allowed survival of this singular institution. Why were the staff allowed to roam freely around Berlin? Why did they maintain a psychiatric ward when the final solution was well underway during 1942, the year of the book, and efficiently murdering Jews by the millions all over the East? Was it to preserve the façade of some sort of Jewish relocation plan for propaganda purposes? Who can fathom Nazi evil?
The storytelling is effective and the finale is deeply satisfying after the painful immersion in the lives of Jewish Berliners trapped in the Nazi quicksand. The Jewish Hospital of Berlin is still there, still functioning as a hospital. Am Yisrael Chai.
The Jewish Hospital
by Jonathan Hammel
Skyhorse, 240 pp., $29.99
Stanley Goldfarb is an emeritus professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and father of Washington Free Beacon chairman Michael Goldfarb.
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