Charlotte, Ionized

In early July, after Charlotte turned nine, she was brought from the camp to the infirmary not by the doctor’s van, emblazoned with the red cross, but in his personal car. She sat back in its plush upholstered seats and breathed the combined odor of the doctor’s spent cigarettes, pomade, and cologne. Some of these smells reminded her of her home, long forgotten. Home seemed so foreign now in a world where the stench of toilets, sweat, rotting teeth, open wounds, chimney ash, and human bodies eclipsed even the usually heady scents of hedge and meadow flowers beyond the camp fence.

Again the laboratory air was humid, and Charlotte’s animal senses, which had been further honed by captivity, bristled at the lingering odor and ionic charge of acute fear. Her eyes darted around the room looking for something, although she could not say what it was.

The doctor was not yet there. She had been to see him several times over the foregoing months. He always treated her with a kind of dazed reverence, as if searching for something in her that even she did not know she had. He held her on his lap like a holy object, always stroking her golden hair and commenting on the clarity of her blue-green eyes. “My little marvel from Krakow,” he said.

Now, though, her ringlets were gone. In fact, her head was entirely bald, having been shaved when an adjacent women’s cell block had developed a case of lice. They were all gassed. Charlotte was not. Her head revealed itself to be perfectly spherical, like a globe, without a single wayward bump, blemish, or freckle. In her last meeting with the doctor, he had measured various parts of her body and drew, with a grease pencil, strange markings across her forehead and over the breadth of her abdomen. He made notations in his notebooks, while he passed her crisp butter biscuits dipped in chocolate. Like every good collector, he was cataloguing attributes for future reference.

A nurse removed her clothing, readied a tray of implements, and two of them hoisted her onto the metal examining table. The nurses would not look at her, did not speak to her. They handled her without roughness, but without the gentleness of previous visits. Now, they were all business. Before, they had been extraordinarily careful, even tender. “Do not spoil the doctor’s treasure,” their actions said. Now they set her down firmly on a metal table that, even in the heat of July, was shockingly cold.

The doctor came into the laboratory, his green button down shirt and matching pants covered by a blindingly white lab coat. He smiled at Charlotte. “My good girl,” he said. He walked to the exam table and examined her skull, nodding with appreciation at a man, also in a lab coat, who had accompanied him.

“Better than we imagined, Helmut. No cranial topography to speak of.” He felt the girl’s scalp with his fingertips. Charlotte sat still.

“She is nine,” the doctor noted to his companion as he pushed on her kidneys and moved up to appraise the muscles in her neck.

“I think we’re ready then,” said Mengele, glancing again at his companion.

The man nodded quietly. The doctor put a hand on Charlotte’s chest to indicate that she was to lie down.

He took the large syringe from the rolling tray of instruments near the examining table, and for the first time, fear gripped Charlotte. A yellow puddle bloomed on the metal table top, brimmed over the surface lip and dripped onto the white tile floor. No one seemed to notice.

The doctor, however, did notice the fright in the girl’s eyes, in her trembling lips and chin, in her face, which had blanched entirely, and he placed his warm hand on her cheek. “No, no, duckling. Nothing to fear.” He smiled at her reassuringly, and then, in one deft and rapid motion, before Charlotte even knew what had happened, he had stuck the needle between her ribs and shot her heart full of phenol.

As Charlotte was dying, the filmy residue of her soul, which tore away from her body like cheese cloth, stopped in front of the doctor’s face and shrieked. Although neither the doctor nor his companion could hear it, it was so shrill that it raised an electric charge in the air immediately surrounding them. Twice the doctor shocked himself on the metal table; his companion developed a headache that temporarily robbed him of his peripheral vision. Both of them commented on the sudden cold.

Her weightlessness carried her upward, and she settled finally near the laboratory ceiling, at one corner, where she was able to observe. First, they slit her open, harvested her eggs, inspected her childish uterus and disconnected it from the fallopian tubes. Next they examined her organs. After opening up her chest cavity, a gruesome business Charlotte was able to watch with a wraith’s detachment, she observed the doctor removing the heart, squeezing it gently, laying it tenderly on a cloth-covered tray brought to him by a nurse. It was carried away to another room. Charlotte felt no desire to follow it.

When they were done, both men walked from the body, which lay gaping and empty of most of its vital organs. They talked of trivial things. At one point, the doctor laughed aloud, throwing his head back. Eventually, his companion departed, and he was left alone with Charlotte’s body. While wiping his wet hands, he turned and was contemplating the child’s form silently. And then, with a startled hop forward, he moved towards the tray of instruments. He picked up a scalpel, moved to Charlotte’s head, where he carefully excised her right ear. After looking at it for several minutes, he wrapped it in what appeared to be felt cloth and inserted it into his pocket. When he left, two orderlies came in and removed the body. By dinnertime, Charlotte’s body was in Birkenau, reduced to a fine powder of ash, which mixed with the insubstantial particulate matter of at least a dozen other people she had never before seen.

Her soul, however, lingered on, loitering around the infirmary building, listening to the nurses chatter, treading behind the doctor and putting her small, spectral feet into the thermal pattern of his steps. Understand, this was not the end.