Spiral A – Into History

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The Press

 

21 April 2025.

Professor Dr Lea Mendel was on the telephone. The press again. More information wanted about yesterday’s centenary. At the same time the pager in the side pocket of her white coat went off. Someone knocked at the door. Her assistant, Dr Eva Bernstein, laid a printed report on her desk.

“The government’s new austerity programme! The Jewish Children’s Hospital to be taken over by the Charité?”

Professor Mendel glanced at the paper, raised an eyebrow, pulled the beeping device from her pocket and looked briefly at the display. Red.

She turned to her assistant. “Urgent?”

“Yes. More urgent than the report. I think we’re losing Miri—unless her mother’s donor kidney comes through after all.”

“What’s holding things up?”

“Blood pressure. And her haemoglobin keeps falling.”

A curt nod. “See to the child. I’ll check on the mother. One minute.”

For a moment she stood perfectly still—one second, no more—and then she was already out in the corridor. No further instructions.

Dr Bernstein remained behind. Then she sprang up from her desk, grabbed her white coat and wondered for a moment whether there was anything she still had to do before going to the child. Her own heart was racing.

The office, her desk, suddenly looked abandoned, as though whatever they contained were already dissolving. The printer was still purring to itself, and the report on the austerity programme slipped almost of its own accord beneath the other papers as Dr Bernstein closed the door.

People mattered more than lines and letters.

She ran to the operating suite where Miri was being prepared for the transplant. The nurses pressed the charts into her hands, brought her up to date. She went over to the child, felt her pulse and the temperature of her skin, checked her pupils, stroked her cheeks. Then she gave her instructions.

The door flew open. Professor Mendel stood before her.

“Thank you. Miri’s mother is stabilising. I’ll take over. You can go back to the office. I’ll deal with the report later. And prepare tomorrow’s video conference with the Mao Clinic. I’m supposed to give the opening address.”

Dr Bernstein acknowledged the instructions and turned on her heel.

Back in the office, requests from newspapers and broadcasters were flashing on her screen. The first read: “For our report on the centenary of the Children’s Hospital, we still need material on its history between 1933 and 1945.”

She knew that this was hers now, at least until Professor Mendel returned. Her boss, however, had anticipated questions of this kind and prepared a short text: two neutral sentences that concealed everything essential while pointing to the ninety-three children whom the Red Army had found alive at the end of the war.

Dr Bernstein was supposed to choose the appropriate reply, copy it, send it.

Supposed to. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. Yesterday, in her anniversary speech, Professor Mendel had touched only briefly on those years. She had not wanted to stir them up. Dr Bernstein thought she knew why.

She picked up the papers she had prepared for her boss for the centenary celebrations. Beneath the text of Mendel’s speech lay an article about the hospital’s foundation:

 

Berliner Morgenblatt, 20 April 1925

 

A New Children’s Hospital of the Jewish Community Opens

 

Yesterday, Sunday, the Jewish Community of Berlin marked, in a simple and dignified ceremony, the formal opening of its new Rothschild Children’s Hospital in Auguststraße.

Professor Dr Ernst Abraham, the city’s senior medical officer, welcomed to the courtyard of the hospital numerous representatives of the municipal administration and the medical profession, among them Dr Dinah Halberstam, newly appointed director of the Children’s Hospital; Dr Alfred Baumgartner, representing the Municipal Health Office; Dr Julius Hartmann, chief physician of the Berlin Police Medical Service; and Max Fürstenberg, district mayor of Berlin-Mitte.

In his address Professor Abraham emphasised that the new hospital was “dedicated to the weakest and most vulnerable members of our community”, and that in establishing this general hospital, open to persons of every confession, the Jewish Community was making “a contribution to the health of the life of the city as a whole”.

Representatives of the authorities thanked the Jewish Community for its social commitment and assured the new institution of the “benevolent support of the municipal authorities”.

Following the ceremony, those present were invited to inspect the hospital’s modern wards, infant rooms and treatment facilities.

The opening, which took place in brilliant spring weather, was warmly received.

 

A hopeful beginning, Dr Bernstein thought. Her boss had referred to it in her speech. Should she simply scan the article and send it to the press? Would that be enough to throw some light on the darker years?

Hesitantly, she leafed through the rest of the material. Professor Mendel had read aloud the glad tidings with which the next article began:

 

Berliner Tageblatt, 11 May 1945

 

First Jewish Child Born in Berlin—a Symbol That Jewish Life Can Begin Again

 

The dark years since 1933 are over. The Jewish Children’s Hospital in Berlin was the only Jewish institution of its kind in Germany to survive National Socialism. A place of healing and a place of terror. Here, in cellars and secret connecting passages, more than seven hundred children, relatives, members of staff and doctors survived—in spite of Allied bombs, in spite of the Gestapo and the SS. A harbour of arrival and a harbour of deportation. And yet a symbol of hope.

 

Dr Bernstein stared at the final lines, blurred slightly by the poor digitisation. A place of healing and terror … deportation.

She couldn’t possibly send that to the press. Not now. Not with the populist right waiting for precisely this sort of thing. She could already see the headlines, fat and black:

So Much for the Holocaust—Jewish Children’s Hospital Operating to the Bitter End

Nazis and Jews in Bed Together

Did the Jewish Children’s Hospital Help with Deportations? The Right Demands Access to the Files

 

Not now, with the hospital itself under pressure, rumours of a takeover leaking out, the Charité supposedly already drawing up restructuring plans, and her boss with no idea where she was going to find the sixty million needed to repair the flood damage—which had hit the archive too.

Was Western money going to accomplish what the Nazis had failed to do?

Her eyes returned to the first line: First Jewish child born in Berlin …

A sentence from another world.

A sentence that sounded like the first breath after a century-long wound, a breath that should never have been possible.

Not in Berlin. Not in German air.

Air that was thinning again.

She was about to put the article aside when she noticed something in the margin she had overlooked before: a caption, barely legible, crooked in the scan.

“Senior Nurse J. Lewin with the newborn child.”

Dr Bernstein frowned.

J. Lewin? She knew that name. From today’s post? Or from the archive inventory—the material Professor Mendel had asked her to consult in the Charité archive, but which remained inaccessible because of the flood damage?

Her eyes moved to the list still waiting in the tray. On the third page she found the entry:

Papers of E. Lewin.

Same surname. Perhaps a relative of the senior nurse. Before she could speculate further, her pager sounded. An internal message from theatre coordination.

Mother unstable. Transplant uncertain. Prof. Mendel cannot be reached.

Dr Bernstein touched the display. It would not wake. Stayed black. As though the world were trying to take its leave of itself. A moment in which it did not turn, neither forwards nor backwards. Simply stood still.

She hesitated. Gave the device, gave herself, the moment. Black. Night. Nothing.

After a deep breath, she tried again. The display came back to life. And allowed her to see the message glowing up at her: thank God—Professor Mendel had just come out of another operating theatre and was already on her way to the mother.

She looked again at the faded line in the old article.

Senior Nurse J. Lewin.

She could not have said why—but she felt cold. A cold that came neither from the corridor nor from outside. Something about that name …

Had Professor Mendel ever mentioned it? Or deliberately never mentioned it? No—the name had appeared in none of the files so far, nor even in the brief history on the hospital’s website.

Dr Bernstein knew she would have to be patient a little longer. Her colleagues had sent the damaged parts of the archive away for restoration. They had been unable to tell her when she might have access to them again.

She tried to think of a suitable sentence for the press release.

Don’t touch it, she told herself. Not now.

Her fingers found the edge of the lid, the warped rim of cardboard yielding beneath them like old skin, worn by decades and the recent flooding.

A shout rang out from outside:

“We need Professor Mendel NOW!”

Dr Bernstein called back, “She’s on her way!”

Then she heard two sounds almost at once: a door slamming and a faint knocking, barely audible—not from the corridor, but from somewhere deep inside the box.

Or was it only the draught?

She lifted the lid.

Right on top lay a thin envelope.

Written across it:

“Dr Dr Mavet—Vienna 1924.”

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Reconnecting in Vienna

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1924. Vienna.

Dr Dr Chaim Mavet left the Hotel Bristol, the concert tickets in one hand, his gloves in the other. He loved the music of the young prodigy Leonard Kornberg, then being celebrated in Vienna. At twelve, Kornberg had already composed a pantomimic ballet and orchestrated a piano work by his teacher Alexander von Zemlinsky. Even then, his music showed the influence of both Romanticism and modernism, while already creating a sphere of its own.

That evening one of his most recent piano sonatas was to be performed, written two years earlier, when he was seventeen. Felix Weingartner would play it.

For Dr Dr Mavet, that alone was reason enough to set out early and in the best of spirits.

Beside him walked his colleague Dr Hertha Lindhoff, half a head taller than he was—Hertha in private, as he was permitted to call her, but always Dr Lindhoff when they were on duty. The Ringstrasse pulsed with life; beneath the gaslights, horse-drawn cabs mingled with luxurious Effinger motorcars, while a mild breeze drifted across the Stadtpark. The traffic regulations interested him no less than the displays in the elegant shops.

Chaim stopped outside a hatter’s and studied the precise lines of the felt, the edges finished by hand.

“Jewish workshop,” he said quietly.

Hertha nodded. “You can tell by the quality.”

“Craftsmanship and tradition learnt over generations.”

They had met in 1916, while serving at a military hospital in Breslau during the war.

She had caught his eye with her long brown-black hair falling over the white uniform of a nurse. Fresh from her Abitur, she was preparing to study medicine in Munich and, before beginning her studies, wanted to gain practical experience as a nursing auxiliary. He had volunteered for military service, wanting both to deepen his surgical experience at the front and to help people. He had already qualified as a physician and was working on his doctoral thesis as a medical anthropologist, studying skeletal finds from his native Palatinate near Ludwigshafen. The six years between them seemed offset by her stately presence: an unequal pair who took pleasure precisely in their differences.

They walked on, and as the street began its gentle rise towards Schwarzenbergplatz, Hertha spoke of her years in Munich, where she had studied towards the end of the war and afterwards, eventually qualifying as a physician and completing her doctorate there. She spoke with enthusiasm of the seriousness of her professors and of the care they devoted to the war-disabled and the sick in hospital—something she had first been allowed to witness in Chaim at the military hospital in Breslau. He had been the first to teach her what it meant to be a doctor with one’s whole heart.

Chaim looked at her, a little embarrassed. The praise had reached him. He had a question he wanted to ask, yet thought silence the deeper expression of the bond that had grown between them during those years spent struggling for the wounded, the mutilated and the dying. That the old bond had returned here, now that they had met again in Vienna—he had invited Hertha because of their shared love of music—gave wings to him as he listened. She seemed to be enjoying the walk to the concert hall no less than he was.

He told her of his plans to return to Vienna in the near future for a period of research, spending several weeks working on anthropological collections to which the director of the institute there had promised him access. One more reason he had invited Hertha to Vienna. And then—with a kind of casual pride, unaware of the uncertainty he was introducing into their conversation—he told her that he had received an offer from Mainz and was seriously considering it. It would give him the opportunity to combine his ethnographic and anthropological research with the development of a public-health service for the People’s State of Hesse, perhaps extending beyond it into Prussia. That, he said, was where his real ambitions lay.

Were they?

With great fervour he had sketched out for Hertha his future, hers, theirs—and then, halfway through drawing breath, he faltered, as though he had choked on the emptiness of the air itself. He coughed, struggled to regain himself. To an observer it would have seemed no more than the slightest stumble, but Hertha had noticed the uncertainty. Before she could touch his arm, encouraging him, steadying him, Chaim had already recovered and flung himself once more towards the future.

Only such a powerful political force, he continued, had a future and could transform the world of medicine. He already had in mind a foundational work on medical practice in the public service. It might provide a way to rise to the very top, perhaps to obtain a position in Berlin and, through the capital of the Reich, to win international recognition.

Hertha listened carefully. She was uncertain how to understand him. Until now she had always believed that he wanted to be a doctor and nothing else. Now she heard that he intended to remain in research, perhaps even inclined towards a career in the civil service, while harbouring ambitions higher still. Yet only a few months earlier he had opened his own practice in Ludwigshafen. She knew Berlin only fleetingly and had never been to Mainz or Ludwigshafen. But what Chaim was describing sounded like a determined search, even if it was far from clear where that search was meant to lead.

In some respects it took her back to Breslau: to his uncompromising commitment, but then also to their arguments over whether wounded soldiers should be restored to fitness for war or given the chance to escape the dangers of the front. She had argued for the latter; at first he had defended the former, until in the end he had come round to her position.

Perhaps, she said after a brief pause, the position in Mainz would allow him not merely to respond to suffering after it had occurred, but to prevent illness before it arose. Was prevention what attracted him? Perhaps in that way he could give his profession the direction it had possessed for him from the beginning.

They reached the entrance to the concert hall. As the audience gathered around them, Chaim stopped for a moment and turned to Hertha.

“What are your plans now?”

“I’d like to pursue further training in paediatrics, but I’ll go with you as well. My aim, in keeping with my Lutheran upbringing, is to devote myself to the health of the little ones, and the very littlest. I can do that in different places. My dream would be to work in a children’s hospital.”

Chaim tilted his head. “We have a great deal ahead of us. There’s a children’s hospital in Ludwigshafen, not far from B.A.S.F. I could try to make my own negotiations conditional on finding a position for you as well.”

“You mean: draw closer again and fight for our careers together, the way we fought during the war?”

“Not without wounds!”

“What sort are you thinking of? Your turn towards Christianity?”

“You’ve put your finger on it. My pacifism marked a turning point for me, and towards you as well—two shock waves for my family. But that gravely wounded man, a convinced Baptist, who would rather die than shoot the enemy aiming at him, who lay before us beyond saving and died beneath my knife—he changed my life. Put me on a road along which I could only go forwards, never back.”

“And yet it became our road. It was with a heavy heart that I left the military hospital when I went to Munich to study. I was worried about you too.”

“Without that experience, we wouldn’t be here today.”

“It wasn’t easy either. More of a struggle.”

“And our decision.”

A little later, as they sat in their seats in the concert hall and the opening bars of the sonata sounded, Chaim felt a tranquillity spreading through him that he had scarcely known since Hertha’s departure from Breslau.

It seemed that they were doing more than sitting in the same hall, listening to the same music and taking up the thread of their earlier life together. Hertha leaned against him. Their slightest movements found one another and revealed their accord. Weingartner played the Romantic passages gently, yet did not shrink from bringing out the occasional modern rupture, setting harmony against dissonance.

And so they listened to the alternation of clarity and darkness, spinning further the thread that was to determine the years ahead.