She’d first been put to work as a physician in a camp in Wesen, caring for ninety-six children and eighty-six women, under the direction of an authoritarian pro-Nazi who forced his charges to go on “health marches” around the freezing grounds of the camp. She had arrived at night, after a train ride with a young military escort who gave her dark chocolate to eat—the first she’d tasted in years—and perhaps listened to her reminisce about taking the very same train during her years in medical school. “When, as a student, we came along this lake,” she wrote me,
the train-rails ran so close to the shore that one could hear the murmuring water … the hills and mountains on the opposite shore were clearly visible. The lake’s look was mysterious … overhanging mountains threw strange shadows which blackened the water … with the play of the sun it created iridescent hues of numerous shades.… In my fantasy I [would] stop … one day to explore its mysteries.…[My] fantasy was to be fulfilled, but not in the circumstances of my choice. I was to live along its shore, but hardly be able to enjoy its beauty.
Upon her arrival, my grandmother was led through the cold, blacked-out streets to an uninviting hotel, which had been transformed by the Swiss military into refugee lodgings. She followed her escort through a lobby filled with women chatting in a mixture of German, French, and Yiddish. Their conversation died down as she walked past and resumed again as she climbed the stairs to a tiny, unheated attic room. Her new quarters, which must once have housed the hotel’s servants, contained a single bed, a rickety wardrobe, and a washstand. Even dead tired, Anna was careful to dwell on the positive: “My relief and thanks for having a single room were immense.” Left alone, she undressed and lay down, noticing as she did the extreme cold seeping in from the single, drafty window. She shivered miserably beneath the covers, unable to warm up. A bare fifteen-watt bulb hanging above her new domain only added to the gloom.
Her battle against self-pity was interrupted by the sudden appearance of the village doctor and the camp director. She spent several tense minutes listening to them discuss her future. Dr. Gygax, who had been caring for the inmate population in addition to his normal roster of patients, had requested a pediatrician to relieve him; now he learned that Anna was a chest physician. The central administration, assuming that any woman doctor was necessarily an obstetrician or a pediatrician, had failed to ask her about her specialization. The two men argued back and forth until Gygax thought to ask Anna whether she had worked with Dr. Paul Rohmer, a renowned professor of pediatrics at the Strasbourg medical school. “My answer (I had done two instead of only one [rotation] in his hospital …) seemed to please him.” Dr. Gygax announced he would bring her a pediatrics textbook and let her figure things out for herself. “True to his word, he returned the same evening with the pediatric textbook. Did I start going through the book, which I finished in two days, the same evening and read through the night[?]” I wondered if she had written to Armand about that awkward meeting and whether imagining her receiving two men from her bed had sent him into a lather of jealousy that prevented him from empathizing with her lonely, chilly predicament.
Since the hotel in Wesen was only a transit camp, it slowly emptied as the women and children were transferred to homes or other specialized camps. After a time, Anna was assigned to a new internment home, this time with Erna, who worked as the assistant to the director.
This camp was being prepared for pregnant women, some very close to delivery, mothers with infants and/or toddlers up to age four. […] After arrival of the refugees, I only slept fitfully, a few hours, during the night. Frequently summoned by anxious mothers about their child who had awoken them or women with false or real labor pain, I had long days and insufficient rest at night. The women who had to be examined by an obstetrician, other than myself, or were ready for delivery, accompanied by me, had to be brought to the hospital in Sierre.
I knew from the refugee files that my grandfather had been interned for a time in Sierre, and I considered the possibility that my grandparents saw each other there. I checked the dates; naturally, they did not coincide.
It appeared as if their luck had diverged when they separated. While my grandfather slept in a filthy straw bed in a makeshift dormitory in an unused factory, my grandmother had her own room in the maids’ quarters of a vacant hotel. Then again, if my grandfather had dwelt upon the speed with which he was released from the camps to return to his studies, or upon the fact that he was often exempted from manual labor to help with secretarial tasks in his camps’ administrative offices, or the fact that his position as group leader afforded him a larger allowance than the other refugee laborers, and if my grandmother had dwelt upon her festering chilblain, frostbitten toes, hours of overwork, and unpleasant role as middleman between the inmates and the camp administrators, perhaps I would think of their luck in exactly the opposite terms. If their fortunes differed, it was likely because my grandmother had taken her stubborn high spirits with her when they parted ways.
“My luck always held,” Grandma wrote, recalling the precious minutes she’d lose negotiating with the camp director for a taxi to the local hospital every time a new mother went into labor at night. By the time the director conceded and the taxi arrived, “I often feared the event would occur in the car. The driver, hearing the labor wails, became nervous and had to be reassured.” Anna would sit in the back, enjoining her chauffeur to keep his eyes on the road, and then make the taxi wait while she checked the patient into the hospital. Afterward she’d rush back to the camp to update every baby’s nutritional chart so that the milk kitchen could prepare the correct formulas for the following day. Each baby was fed a carefully tailored combination of barley, oats, corn, rice, and wheat, whose ratios my grandmother would adjust over time. Her staff was given only two cans of Nestlé condensed milk per month, which was barely sufficient to supplement the formulas of the weakest babies and which explains why, ever after, my grandmother refused to purchase anything marked “Nestlé.” To reassure the mothers and give herself some measure of peace, she also posted her young charges’ growth charts on her office door, another task that ate into her already short nights.