their left elbows, breeches and jackboots stuck under a trestle table covered with papers.
They questioned me for two hours, keeping me standing while they smoked cigarettes and drank coffee. Why was I in Germany? I protested that my work permit was in front of them. Yes, but why was I _really _in Germany? I observed that their country was most interesting and educative to visit. Had I any Jewish blood? Did I look it? I asked. Where did I learn to speak German? And why? How much money had I saved in Germany? Did I transfer money to London? What was my father's work? They wanted the names and addresses of all the people I knew in Wuppertal.
They were a pair of jacks-in-office, dressed in an authority which was neither little nor, to the world's pain, brief. But the icicles of my reserve began to melt. A citizen of the British Empire expected to be above the antics of the natives when they grew restive. I had a feeling of always being watched, in reality too dramatic a notion. The Gestapo had been in business only six months, a minor organization confined to the State of Prussia, christened by a clerk at his wits' end for a set of distinctive initials among the hundreds newly proliferating in Germany.
A few days later I encountered Gerda in the hall of the Dieffenbachs' house, below a newer and larger photograph of Hitler. Her face was scarlet, her eyes spilling tears. I had often seen her indignant and sometimes angry, but never weeping. It was Jeff, she explained.
'The school say I must not mix with foreigners. If I do, they tell me I shall lose my job. It's not thought right for a German in my position to ride about in a big American car, when there are workpeople with hardly enough to keep alive.'
'What's it to do with the school, whether you ride in an American car or the Schwebebahn?' I protested, though not displeased.
'My whole life is of concern to the authorities,' she said desperately. 'Everything that anybody does has the Government nosing into it. You never know if the teacher sitting next to you is an agent for the Sicherheitsdienst.' This was the SD, the early State Security Service, under the cashiered former Naval intelligence officer Reinhard Heydrich, whose later extermination in Prague led to the elimination of Lidice and its whole population. 'There're Brownshirts and officials I've never seen before, in and out of the school all the time. I don't want to end up in the Special Court.'
I had heard plenty of the Sondergericht, with three Nazi judges and no jury, established after the March elections to deal with dissenters.
'People have been in trouble you know, quite a lot of them,' Gerda continued, hesitant and fearful of what she was saying. 'Now the police and the Storm Troopers are entitled to go into any house they like, and ferret out whatever and whoever they wish…There are people Papa knows who have just disappeared. Like that.' She snapped her fingers. 'Papa doesn't say much about it, but for all he knows they could be dead and buried. Perhaps they are. All over Germany they're keeping people as long as they like in protective custody…Protective! The camps are far worse than the detention barracks in the Army. Anyway, the Storm Troopers ransom people to be let out, it's a racket like Jeff's gangsters in Chicago.'
'I suppose some lady teacher was jealous of you with Jeff and his car, and told the Brownshirts?'
'No, it was Gunter.'
'Your own brother!' I was horrified.
'He passed the story to his schoolmaster. You know how Gunter thinks absolutely everything about the Nazis is wonderful, just because they organize camps and give him a uniform and they all sing songs round a fire. They tell him it's his duty to inform on anything at home which goes in the slightest against the thinking of National Socialism. You can't blame him. All kids are instructed to put their country first, even before their parents. He doesn't know any better.' She ended charitably, 'I expect he'll grow out of it.'
I decided to guard my tongue carefully within earshot of the young man. I noticed that Gerda took every chance afterwards to slap the cheeks of Hitler's little enthusiast.
These two incidents decided me to quit Germany. I had no knowing who might be itching to report me to the SD, and put me in serious trouble. Or perhaps my mind was already made up, they were the clicks of a shutter admitting light to a sensitized film. Jeff was nettled. He had bought a cosmetics firm in Berlin, and had planned my concocting voluptuously-smelling perfumes and powders from chemicals.
'What's the matter? Homesick?'
'You know I haven't a home to pine for.'
'I guess Germany's getting too noisy a jungle for the explorers to sleep soundly,' he agreed, after trying to dissuade me. 'These Nazis are nuts, when you come down to it. A government's job is to declare war and raise taxes and keep the railroads running, not to tell a girl who she can go out with and who she can't. Sure you've made your mind up? I guess England's just like the States right now, full of college graduates selling apples.'
I was to leave just before Christmas 1933, through Ostend again, and by night. On my last day in Wuppertal I met Professor Domagk for the second time.
Dr Dieffenbach gave a small evening party to speed me on my way. There was French champagne and spiced biscuits and _pets de nonne_-nun's farts, the name given to delicately flavoured pastries by Voltaire. Gerda wore her blue and white dress with diagonal stripes. I invited Jeff. She seemed to have accepted renouncing him as she accepted having to raise her arm when the Storm Troopers marched past. Dr Dieffenbach invited the Domagks. But the Professor arrived alone, late and agitated.
'Gertrude can't come,' Domagk anxiously explained the absence of his wife. 'It's our four-year-old girl. You heard she was ill?'
'No, I hadn't.' Dr Dieffenbach looked concerned. 'What's up with the child?'
'She pricked herself with a needle, and it went septic. It may have been contaminated with some virulent organisms which I'd brought back from the laboratory. On my clothing perhaps, one can never be sure of these things.'
'My dear Gerhard, I'm so sorry.' He grasped the professor's hand. 'What's the pathogen? Have you identified it?'
'Yes, it's a streptococcus. She's developed a suppurative
'But she's receiving the best treatment?' Dr Dieffenbach asked urgently.
'She's in hospital. The surgeons are trying to arrest the infection, they've already made fourteen incisions in the arm. The only hope left is amputation.'
_'Du lieber Gott!_ But has the decision been made?'
'It's being made at this moment. I'm on my way to see them.'
'You should never have delayed by coming here.'
'I came intentionally. Listen-' Domagk dropped his voice, but I was near enough to hear. 'Do you suppose I should give her 'Streptozon'?'
'Why not? It's been proved safe.'
Domagk frowned. 'Has it? Who can say? It's still in the experimental stage.'
'You've no alternative,' Dr Dieffenbach told him sternly.
'It's never been used on a child before, never.'
'You simply reduce the dosage, exactly as you would for any other drug in your armamentarium.'
Domagk stood shaking his head. 'Amputation might save her life. The sulphonamide might equally well kill her.'
'Give her the drug,' Dr Dieffenbach repeated firmly. 'You know perfectly well that you cannot make a proper clinical judgement within your own family. When your brain's clouded with emotion, you're like a sea-captain trying to navigate in fog.'
Domagk still demurred. I stood listening, while my host read him a lecture lit by the candid light of true friendship. 'Gerhard, you're a fool. Or rather, you're a bacteriologist, which in clinical matters is much the same thing. You sit all day in your laboratory pottering with your Petri dishes and squinting down your microscope, and you forget those beastly germs of yours infect real people, not just the mice which you use as biological litmus paper. Real men and women, who like eating and drinking and making love to one another and going to the pictures. Listen to me-I'm a clinician. You've always got to be taking chances in clinical medicine. An unadventurous doctor leaves nothing but a trail of carefully-treated corpses.' He ended revealingly, 'I didn't hesitate, when I saw
