It was not until they brought in two men and strapped them down to chairs resembling dentists’ chairs, and it was not until they led Alraune in and gave him a seat facing these two men, that Alice began to understand. There would be no straightforward floggings or starvation punishments for her; the Nazis were being much subtler and much crueller than that.
Ilena had said that Mengele’s team was trying to establish whether pain or fear was the dominant factor in the disintegration of a human psyche, and to this end the doctors were inflicting both pain and fear on their victims – adjusting the proportions or the ratio as they went, and measuring the different results.
But tonight they were adding a refinement to their experiment – two refinements. They were putting a child in the same room as the victim, and watching the child’s reactions to the inflicting of pain on that victim.
And they were putting the child’s mother in an adjoining room, so that she would be forced to see the whole thing.
There was nothing Alice could do. Two guards stood by the door and two of Mengele’s assistants were seated by the glass observation panel, with clipboards and pens. As a third entered the room Alice saw that more guards were stationed outside. There were no windows in the room which she might smash and try to climb through, and a second’s inspection of the observation panel showed that it was of extremely thick glass. She thought: there is no way out of here. I am shut into this room, and I will have to endure whatever is ahead.
The straps were tightened around the two prisoners’ ankles and wrists, and wires were taped to their chests and temples, and then linked to box-like machines. Alice supposed they would measure blood pressure levels, and heartbeats. Brain impulses, even? She had no idea if that was possible.
As a thick iron gyve was passed around the neck of the two men and iron braces tightened around their heads to prevent them from moving, her own heart began to pound with nervous terror, because whatever the doctors were about to do, it was clearly something connected with the men’s faces.
Alraune was watching these preparations with faint curiosity, but he did not seem especially afraid. He has never known the ordinary world, thought Alice, only this dark hopeless place. So he may see nothing horrific in whatever they are about to do, and he may be unaffected by it. And then, far down in her mind, she thought: but I don’t want him to be unaffected! I want him to be capable of pity and compassion – to be able to put himself in another’s place – to feel hurt when a friend hurts.
When Mengele himself entered the room he did so quietly and unobtrusively, and it was difficult to connect him with the monster of the legend. But it’s in the eyes, thought Alice. There’s a coldness, an emptiness behind his eyes. As if he has no soul.
She was just trying to attract Alraune’s attention, thinking that the sight of her might reassure him, thinking that she might somehow signal to him not to be frightened, when the door opened again, and Leo Dreyer came in. At once the menace in the room escalated; icy sweat slid between Alice’s shoulder blades, and the palms of her hands were slippery. This is it, she thought. It’s about to begin.
Without knowing she was going to do it, she banged hard on the glass partition with her fist, and when the men on the other side of it looked round, she cried out to Leo Dreyer. ‘Leo! Let the child go! Keep me, but take him back to the hut – please!’
Dreyer turned his head and smiled. He shook his head.
‘He could be your son!’ cried Alice, hating having to say it, but doing so. ‘There were six of you that night, remember? That’s a one in six chance.’
‘He’s not my son,’ said Leo Dreyer at once. ‘I am unable to father a child. I was rendered sterile from an illness in my youth. But,’ he said, with a sudden glitter in his eyes, ‘I am not impotent, baroness, as you very well know.’