THE CHOSEN ONES
By Steve Sem-Sandberg
Translated by Anna Paterson
561 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.
The Nazi atrocities of World War II still haunt our imagination, as evidenced by the number of films and literary works that continue to be produced about them. Much of this art is awful, but not all: In the past year and a half, Laszlo Nemes’s film “Son of Saul,” about a half-crazed member of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, won the Grand Prix at Cannes and the Oscar for best foreign-language film. Affinity Konar’s novel “Mischling,” out this summer to excellent reviews, tells the story of twin girls who suffered the horrific experiments of the infamous Dr. Mengele. Such works are by their very nature difficult to read or view. Some have provoked acrimonious debates: Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” and Jonathan Littell’s novel “The Kindly Ones” were international blockbusters, but that didn’t prevent many critics from finding them unendurable, if not downright evil, profiting from atrocity. Others admired them, or at least considered them important.
Steve Sem-Sandberg’s “The Chosen Ones” is a worthy addition to this list. The author, a prizewinning Swedish journalist and novelist, has published several books related to the Holocaust, including “The Emperor of Lies,” a novel about the Lodz ghetto. The subject of “The Chosen Ones” is not the Holocaust but is close to it. The novel recounts the story of a children’s hospital and reformatory in Vienna, Am Spiegelgrund, which functioned from 1940 to 1945 as part of the Nazi medical killing and “racial hygiene” program. In his classic work “The Nazi Doctors” (1986), Robert Jay Lifton showed how the so-called euthanasia program, which sought to eliminate individuals “unworthy of life,” led almost seamlessly to the killing centers of the Holocaust. In 1941 Hitler put an official end to the euthanasia program, but the children at Spiegelgrund went on dying. Close to 800 children were murdered there, often after having endured excruciating medical procedures designed to prepare their brains for post-mortem “research.” One of the doctors in charge of the hospital, Ernst Illing, was tried after the war and hanged; a previous director, Erwin Jekelius, died in a Soviet prison in 1952; but the one who served longest, Heinrich Gross, evaded punishment despite being tried three times. He became a leading forensic psychiatrist in Vienna and was decorated by the Austrian government in 1975. He was stripped of the decoration in 2003, not long before he died.
The story of Spiegelgrund remained little known until recently. In 2002, the last remains of children whose brains had been preserved in glass jars in the basement were buried in the Vienna cemetery. There is now a memorial to the murdered children on the hospital grounds — for it is still a hospital. Some testimonies by survivors have been published. I had to do a lot of digging online to get the basic history, for Sem-Sandberg provides very little guidance as to his sources or the historical status of his characters and their actions. In “The Emperor of Lies,” he listed mini-biographies for the historical figures and included an informative afterword. Here, he writes that there is by now such an “extensive literature” on Spiegelgrund that it would take too long to refer to it. I would bet, however, that to most American readers the subject is new; a few guideposts would have been helpful.
A question kept nagging at me as I plowed through the catalog of horrors recounted here: What is the gain for my pain? The author clearly wants to provoke pity and outrage in his readers, and he succeeds — but to that end, why not write a punchy reportage instead of a very long novel? In fact, two late chapters read like reportage, detailing the postwar trials of doctors and a nurse. But the overall mode is novelistic: The narrative enters the minds of historical characters and introduces fictional characters and events, with no distinction between the two — that is a novel’s prerogative. My question about gain versus pain concerns the novel as such.
Consider pneumoencephalography, a ghastly procedure that Dr. Illing ordered for many children. We have two graphic descriptions of it in the novel. In the first, the victim is a boy named Jakob Nausedas, whose family history is unknown but who is assumed to be Jewish because he is circumcised (Illing refers to him as “the little Jew boy”): “The long lumbar puncture needle is eased . . . into the space around the spinal cord to extract some of the fluid. . . . The child’s skin blanches and turns bluish, as if slowly suffocating; then, just as suddenly, the skin blushes and the eyes bulge and roll upwards, white with terror as the pain slashes the child’s head like a thousand sharp knives. Because the child is immobilized, the nurse holds an enameled basin in readiness for when the stomach contents come spraying out.” And so on for another half page that describes the boy’s suffering and, a few days later, his death in the pavilion of the “chosen ones.” (To be “chosen,” in this world, meant to be selected for death.) Never mind whether Jakob Nausedas was a real person or not. Is it enough for me to feel outrage as I read the description of his martyrdom, one of many in these pages? Or do I expect more from a work of imaginative literature — some deeper understanding of human motivations and emotions or a sense that language can, by inventive means, rise to the challenge of depicting historical horrors?
Most of the characters in “The Chosen Ones” are one-dimensional, either grotesque villains (the Nazi doctors, mouthing banalities about duty and racial science) or passive victims (the suffering children). By an interesting choice, much of the story is seen through the eyes of the nurses, who are not outright villains — some truly care for the children. Anna Katschenka, an actual nurse who was tried after the war, is a central figure. She was not a Nazi, and we are told a bit about her family history, but her character too appears schematic. She is in thrall to Jekelius, who once treated her for depression — hardly a sufficient motivation for her rigid execution of orders to kill. None of the characters evolve and there is no plot, only a series of episodes. The one child we follow from beginning to end, Adrian Ziegler (modeled partly on a survivor the author names in his afterword), endures torments that would have killed most others and continues to be a victim for decades after the war, imprisoned for various small crimes and still hounded by Nazi reports that branded him as “past rehabilitation.” But he remains strangely opaque as well. All he can do is insist on remembering what was done to him, while the perpetrator Gross — whom he encounters again in 1975 — claims to have forgotten everything.
Sem-Sandberg’s precise, resolutely nonpoetic prose is highly effective, even in translation, and appears to be a conscious refusal of aestheticism: The brutality of the subject requires a brutal style. The danger, however, is that it can backfire. In one episode, after an injection by Gross sends Adrian crawling onto the floor in spasms of pain, we read that the guard looked at him and left, “as if he, too, had had more than enough of this spectacle and didn’t care to stay on for more.” The reader, alas, may feel the same way.
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