Personal Narrative
Each time Elfriede is hospitalized, my mother knows she’s forever behind those bars
Photo by Getty Images via Unsplash
“Pear Soup,” an excerpt from Unexploded Ordnance by Catharina Coenen
It is late August of 1943. Elfriede and Anna are in Elisabethenpflege, an orphanage in Schönebürg, only ten miles from Biberach, where they and Lotte had lived with the stern landlady, and sixty miles from Tübingen, where their mother is now hospitalized at a Nazi-run “home for mothers…
Personal Narrative
Each time Elfriede is hospitalized, my mother knows she’s forever behind those bars
Photo by Getty Images via Unsplash
“Pear Soup,” an excerpt from Unexploded Ordnance by Catharina Coenen
It is late August of 1943. Elfriede and Anna are in Elisabethenpflege, an orphanage in Schönebürg, only ten miles from Biberach, where they and Lotte had lived with the stern landlady, and sixty miles from Tübingen, where their mother is now hospitalized at a Nazi-run “home for mothers” close to the university hospital while she waits on bed rest for the birth of their brother.
“But I am the older one,” the smaller girl says. Her blue eyes flash defiance, curls radiate from her head. She holds her sister by the wrist. The chubby-cheeked girl by her side towers over her by nearly a full head, but her bottom lip is quivering.
Sister Sabina watches Sister Canysia take a second look at the birth dates in the girls’ files, discreetly counting months on her fingers beneath the surface of her desk. Sabina doesn’t blame her. It’s hard to believe that Anna, the taller girl, is nearly twenty months younger than little Elfriede, whose sixth birthday is coming up next week.
The size reversal is so striking that, for a moment, Sabina wonders if the two girls might have been playing games, exchanging the cardboard name signs hanging from their necks. But no: the driver, who delivered them here from the railroad station in Reinstetten, would have forbidden them to take off their signs. After years of war and delivering small children from railroad to orphanage, he knows that no child can be reunited with her parents unless strict tabs are kept on who is who. Before he met them on the platform, the girls must have been on the train for less than twenty minutes—it’s just a few stops to Reinstetten from Biberach, where their mother’s landlady had put them on. They look scared enough that Sabina can’t imagine them getting bored with being alone on a train and planning some kind of nonsense.
In the weeks that follow, Sister Sabina never again doubts who is the older one. Elfriede doesn’t let her sister out of her sight. No child taunts Anna without repercussions, no adult needs to check that Anna’s teeth are brushed or that her hair is combed. On Sister Sabina’s final round through the junior girls’ makeshift dormitory in the attic, she has grown accustomed to finding Anna in Elfriede’s bed, Elfriede’s arms protectively around her younger sister, holding on, even in the depths of dreams.
Forty-three years later, my parents and I stand in a wood-paneled hall. We have walked through several locked doors to get here. The ceiling is tall, far above our heads. The nurse asks for our names before she leaves through another tall wooden door to fetch Elfriede.
I’m twenty years old, home from college for the weekend. When the call came this morning that Elfriede had been committed to a psychiatric hospital, my mother seemed to come unglued: unable to sit down, pacing between frantic phone calls. Even my father seemed shaken, unsure what to do. I couldn’t imagine getting on the train back to school, couldn’t imagine sitting in genetics class, wondering how my parents were holding up, wondering what they would find. Or whom: Elfriede, the competent nurse? Or Elfriede who glues photographs and magazine clippings all over her apartment walls, Elfriede who rages on the phone, calling her mother Satan incarnate?
“I’ve bought myself a little tiger,” Elfriede says.
I feel my mother tighten next to me, watch the image flash through both our minds: a cub, striped fur, teeth, claws. How big? From where? A wild beast snatched from its parents, bound to grow enormous, all-devouring, a raging flame—
I search Elfriede’s face, the sparks in her blue eyes beneath cropped, ash-blonde curls.
“At the gift shop?” my father asks.
My mother exhales. The gift shop. Stuffed.
Elfriede nods. She says she’s doing well. Very well. So very well.
None of us mention that the police brought Elfriede here. None of us ask about the elderly man she was hired to nurse, and nursed so very well, for months. Has he recovered from Elfriede pushing him, in his wheelchair, through busy streets, to the busy plaza beneath Cologne’s famous cathedral, at breakneck speed, singing, stopping here and there to take off pieces of her clothing, give them away? From watching her dance, naked, beneath the looming towers of the church?
We don’t stay long. This is the only time I can remember visiting Elfriede in the hospital at Marienborn, though she will be brought here over and over again. For years, she will drift from long periods of extreme caretaking into hallucinatory manias. Usually, the police bring her to the hospital after she gives away all her possessions, ending with her clothes. Each time, the doctors release her when she calms down enough that they believe she might stay on her medications for a while. Each time, eventually, there is another phone call from a hospital, or from a landlady asking who’s going to clean up the apartment, to pay for damage to the walls.
Sister Sabina catches a glimpse of Anna and Elfriede as she passes by the portal to the children’s dining hall. Again, Elfriede is standing ramrod straight, her iron grip around Anna’s pudgy wrist. Sabina can see her lips move as she turns to Anna’s tear-streaked face: “We don’t do that.”
Sabina knows the words—repeated each time Anna is ready to join the other children in a folly, a small infraction. Now, as always, Elfriede is serious, unyielding. Sabina steps through the door, scans the dining hall. Elfriede must have just pulled her younger sister away from the other kids, who are spooning soup from the floor. The tall windows are open wide, admitting a warm breeze laced with the cloying aroma of overripe pears. Sun flecks dance across the new linoleum, the white walls. Anna stands next to Elfriede, watching the children with longing. The soup has been the first sweetness these children have had in many weeks. In the midst of this war, the Lord has blessed the orphanage’s orchard with an abundance of late-ripening fruit—more pears than can fit into their supply of canning jars. More even than can be boiled down for thick pear juice, their only reliable supply of sugar.
The puddle of soup on the floor is nearly gone, and Sister Adela has not yet emerged from the kitchen to discover the damage. The older girls in charge of serving the midday dinner must have handled the entire calamity. Sabina feels pleased with them. In this time of lack, a small upset can have large consequences, but the older girls have kept their heads. Most likely, one of them stumbled when they carried the soup kettle from the kitchen. Or the kettle flipped when they tried to set it on a stool that is low enough for them to dip the ladle. They must have turned the kettle upright, then told all the girls to bring their spoons and eat the soup from the floor. They know the linoleum is spotless. Two of the girls mopped it this morning, after porridge was served for breakfast.
Adela steps from the kitchen, raises an eyebrow, then inquires with the two supervising girls, sends them for mops and buckets. She’s preoccupied, has not noticed that Anna and Elfriede are standing by.
Sabina makes her way over to them. “You children should eat!”
Anna, spoon in hand, turns to join the others, but is brought up short as Elfriede’s grip retightens on her wrist. The corners of Anna’s mouth twist in protest as she turns back to her sister, but she says nothing. Sabina looks at Elfriede’s thin, pinched face, feels steel-blue eyes seeking her gaze straight-on.
“No,” Elfriede says. “We don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?” Sabina asks.
“We don’t eat from the floor.”
Sabina considers arguing that the floor has just been cleaned, dismisses it as useless. Elfriede’s standards of cleanliness far exceed those of any other child. She will starve before she will compromise. Adela, Sabina knows, will have none of this, will send them away without food. But Elfriede, slight and pale when she arrived, has grown painfully thin in the four weeks that have passed since then. Her cheeks are hollow. Depressions have deepened below her collarbones. The letter from the girls’ father leaves no doubt that he will ask questions when he returns from Russia to retrieve his daughters—which may be months from now. Sabina glances at Adela’s back, then calmly turns toward the sisters. “Come with me.”
She walks the girls down the hallway, into the kitchen by way of the scullery. She takes two bowls from the long shelves lining the walls, ladles soup, places the bowls on the kitchen table. “Eat up quick,” she tells the girls, “and then rejoin your group.”
Perhaps two years after the hospital visit with the tiger, I stood about twenty miles from Elfriede’s hospital at Marienborn, on a grassy farm track by a field of wheat. The field was very flat. It was very silver green. It smelled of summer and it smelled of wind. It smelled of blooming wheat, the semen-like ripeness of pollen on the wind. Just then, in May or early June, it had a sort of even smell—as though nothing could ever change in the cycle of ripeness and yield. The absence of insects and birds echoed in the swish of blade against blade, the hum of the greenhouse ventilators down the road, the cultivator five or six fields over, and in our silence between the words of our guide, a geneticist in jeans, button-down shirt, and sandals, worn with socks.
“This,” he said, his hand pointing, “is the second generation after the cross. Notice how the plants are all different heights, how the awns have different lengths, the kernels different sizes.” He crushed one wheat spike in his hand, then another, thumb grinding against palm. Unripe grains popped from glumes, revealing different plumpnesses, greennesses, grainnesses.
There should have been crickets. There should have been flies and the swallows’ twit-a-twit as they swooped in circles, dove, shot up, beaks filled. Instead, only the hum of the cultivator, only the rustle of one student’s nylon raincoat against another, the shifting weight from one foot to the next.
“This,” the geneticist continued, scattering kernels and chaff, sweeping his arm toward the next neat block of plants, “is the fourth generation, this the sixth, eighth, and, finally, there’s the tenth.” The grass of the farm track slicked and squeaked under our sneakers as we spun. As our eyes followed his hand, the wheat plots became movie frames, a flip-book: The shaggy-dog look of the initial cross flattens out, morphs into crew cuts, the movie’s final frame a battalion of elite soldiers, all of them even in bulk and height.
It was 1988. We were all white. We were in Köln Vogelsang, the field station of the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research. Yes, we had grown up alongside the children of Turkish “guest workers” in our elementary schools, but few of them had gone on to university, and none were on this particular multiday field trip for a class that was supposed to show us where people with biology degrees might work.
If parents refused to give up their disabled children, authorities would threaten to take their other children away and commit the parents to forced labor unless they complied.
Was it me who asked why? Why breed for ten or twelve generations, a decade or more, to end up with this evenness? The answer was: machines. Run the combine harvester at one height. Sift uniform-sized grain away from dirt and rocks. Cut all plants on the same day, knowing each grain is ripe, holds identical, ideal moisture. Guarantee the mill, the bread factory, this much gluten, this much sweetness, starch, this stickiness, this stirrable-ness, this rise. Identical loaves, batch after batch, bag after bag.
It had been all around me growing up as I raced my bike up and down the road at my grandparents’ house, through oat and potato fields, or later, as I rode horses through summer-scented wheat-wheat-wheat that had, for centuries, made my hometown’s wealth. It had never occurred to me that the oats whose kernels released milky sweetness when crushed between my teeth, the wheat, the potatoes, the sugar beets that scented my town’s air with molasses from the factory, could be shaggy, mosaics of different greens, different rustles, different scents. Köln Vogelsang was the place, the moment when I understood that wheat, like any crop, did not just come the way it was, all one hue, one size, one frame of ripe. That we had made it so.
When I search for official records of Elisabethenpflege online, I find an Erlass, a decree, by Württemberg’s minister of the interior that passed into law on November 7, 1938. It spells out that all of Württemberg’s orphaned children were to be classified into “the following groups”:
I. Mentally and genetically healthy children
II. Physically handicapped children, including deaf and blind children, with normal mental capabilities
III. Children with genetic defects or signs of advanced neglect
IV. Children with severe mental handicaps or psychological pathologies
V. Gypsies and children that resemble gypsies.
I think of what happened to more than five thousand children classified as groups II, III, IV, or V all over Germany. When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, it immediately passed the “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases,” which enabled the euthanasia program that was later named Aktion T4. By 1939, all doctors were required to submit questionnaires about patients whom they deemed “feeble of the mind” to Tiergartenstrasse 4, a house in Berlin. There, “expert” doctors hired by the extragovernmental “Kanzlei des Führers” labeled as *lebensunwert *(unworthy of life) anyone suffering from a disease deemed “heritable,” such as schizophrenia, alcoholism, or dementia. They especially targeted patients who had been ill for a long time, were no longer able to work, and did not have relatives who checked on them frequently. The Ministry of the Interior then sent notes to the caregiving hospitals, asylums, or orphanages that these patients must be transferred to Schussenried or one of many other psychiatric hospitals that were used as “interim institutions” (Zwischenanstalten) for patients that had been selected to be sent to one of only six “killing hospitals” (Tötungsanstalten). Grafeneck alone drew its victims from a network of forty-eight Zwischenanstalten, each of which transported between two and five hundred patients to Grafeneck. A few months later, relatives of the patient would receive a note from these “interim” hospitals that their family member had, unfortunately, succumbed to a disease, usually pneumonia.
The program initially concentrated on children below the age of three, who were killed by injection of chemicals. With the beginning of the war, criteria for selecting patients for euthanasia were broadened, age limits rose rapidly, and gas chambers increased the number of patients who could be killed in one day. Eventually, as so many children began disappearing from institutions where they had been transferred to purportedly receive “improved treatment,” parents grew suspicious. If parents refused to give up their disabled children, authorities would threaten to take their other children away and commit the parents to forced labor unless they complied. Families of adult patients also began to hear of disappearances; many tried to get their relatives released from psychiatric hospitals. In Baden-Württemberg, these Aktion T4 euthanasia programs were carried out through lethal injections in hospitals or through carbon monoxide gas in Grafeneck Castle, less than an hour’s drive from Schönebürg.
Elisabethenpflege was assigned to accept only children in “Group III” of Baden-Württemberg’s 1938 Erlass. But reality might well have been much more chaotic than official Nazi rules: over the course of the war, an estimated twenty million children in Germany lost one parent, half a million lost both—orphanages were flooded with children everywhere. Most likely, the landlady in Biberach simply sent Anna and Elfriede to Elisabethenpflege because it was the closest orphanage that had space.
When I ask my mother if she has heard from Elfriede, she says no. “Not this week, but sometime next week, I’ll ask your father to look through the package that she sent four months ago.”
My mother tells me she put Elfriede’s package in the basement when it arrived. I can imagine where: top shelf, well toward the unlit end, away from the dim window, above eye level, by the boxes of winter boots and heavy binders of old tax returns awaiting the date after which they can be tossed. She doesn’t want to see it when she ventures down for bottled water, for veggies from the chest freezer, for canned tomatoes or extra shopping bags.
“Last time I called, she sounded alright again,” my mother says, “so now your dad can fish out any items that might still be useful to her and I’ll mail them back. The rest he can put in the trash. I don’t want to know about any of it.”
I can guess what the still-useful things and “the rest” might be. Decades ago, Oma Lotte occasionally mentioned the things Elfriede would send her in packages like the one in my mother’s basement now: a hand mixer, a hairbrush, toothpaste, shoe polish—household goods that, if you have to repurchase them every few months, add up for someone who lives on social security. “The rest”: collages of images from catalogs and cut-up family photographs, bizarre junk sculptures, a long letter berating my mother for not caring for my father’s early-stage dementia and mobility problems the right way. Make him drink holy water from the church’s stoup, or cart him to a faith healer Elfriede has just discovered who can heal “anything!!!!” In between recipes for miracle healings, the letter will also threaten that ignoring Elfriede’s advice will mean the devil has closed my mother’s mind. There will be vivid descriptions of what Satan will do to my mother if she does not turn away from him. Most likely, there will be lengthy passages of “proof” that Lotte too was possessed by Satan (or, in fact, embodied him) when she was alive.
I can’t blame my mother for not wanting to look.
Wild wheats are tall and short; green, gold, and red; ugly and beautiful; sickly and strong. Some plants will germinate and ripen early, some very late. Some grains will be full of the best kind of starch for bread, some will be small, low in gluten, a pain to sift and grind, unfit for fluffy, yeasted loaves.
To select against this diversity means to weaken the entire population, to lessen its chance of surviving the next catastrophe. This is why we keep seeds of wild and woolly wheats in doomsday vaults buried at the Arctic Circle deep in rock. This is why we must keep growing old and wildish wheats on farms, where they evolve with downpours, droughts, and wind, with locusts, rusts, and blights.
To grow all your wheat in just one way, to eliminate the ugly kernels, the late or early ones, is to kill your future. The plant with few, small kernels may be the one that resists drought, or insects, or disease. The plant that struggles and lags in too much rain may be the one with roots shallow or deep enough to find scarce nutrients.
All of her life, my mother has been unable to argue. Any tiny discord sends her heart into overdrive, turns her mind to cotton wool, shakes her knees. All of my life, my mother has begged me not to quarrel with my sister, because my mother’s knees are shaking. My mother wants me to keep peace with my sister: peace, peace, peace. My mother says she doesn’t want to hear what my sister has or hasn’t done. She doesn’t want to hear what I want or do not want. She says all that matters is that there is peace, peace, peace. She says there will never be peace in the world unless I make peace with my sister. My mother says all she ever wanted was to get to keep the older sister who protected her.
When I ask my mother what it was like, in the orphanage, her face closes down, the way it always does when conversations drift toward the war.
“Oh, it was hard,” my mother says, and asks, immediately, if I would like more tea.
I shake my head no, willing her not to get up from the table, not to end this conversation.
She gathers cake plates, saucers, cups, then looks up. “But I always had my sister. She was watching out for me. I never felt alone.” She pushes the stacked porcelain to the center of the table.
I exhale.
She tells me how she would crawl under Elfriede’s covers every night, how Elfriede would hold her and whisper in her ear until she fell asleep. She remembers white enameled beds, lined up under the eaves of a large attic, a makeshift dormitory. She remembers the light fading slowly outside the window in the gabled wall. She remembers dozens of little girls, alone, orphaned, traumatized. All around her, children cried from thirst. Many wet their beds. The nuns “treated” bed wetters by giving them bread with salt right before sleep, to “bind the water in the body.” They forbade them to drink.
Against the whimpers and weeping all around, against the dying light, my mother remembers her sister’s warm body, her sister’s arms around her shoulders, her sister’s voice, fervent, confident, a whispered affirmation in her ear: “We won’t have to stay here. We’ll go back home soon.”
Some little boys want to become firefighters when they grow up. Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, born in Moscow in 1887, wanted to end famine. His father had grown up in poverty and hunger because, over and over, Russian crops had failed. As a young scientist, Vavilov soon realized that ending famine depends on the ability of plants to resist adversity: drought and flood, heat and hail, attacks by snails and locusts, rots and molds. He read everything he could about the fledgling field of genetics, sure that it might help him to understand plant immunity. As a researcher, he traveled the world, collecting tubers and seeds.
During World War II, hunger threatened not only children, not only soldiers, but also the seed varieties that Vavilov had amassed in his Leningrad institute, sure that this genetic treasure trove would, one day, save humanity from future famines. From September of 1941 through January of 1943, Wehrmacht soldiers besieged Leningrad. Stalin had ordered the city’s art to be evacuated from the museums ahead of the siege—but he provided no aid at all to save Vavilov’s tubers, bulbs, and seeds. Collecting plants had been declared “bourgeois” by the communist regime—a gentleman’s pastime rather than what would be needed to avert famine from ordinary people.
When I ask my mother what it was like, in the orphanage, her face closes down, the way it always does when conversations drift toward the war.
By the time of the siege, Vavilov himself had been arrested and was slowly starving to death in prison. The scientists left behind in his institute understood that the future food security of their people was in their hands. They also understood that they were sitting on a cornucopia of edible grain and potatoes, in the center of a city that would starve.
Vavilov’s botanists armed themselves. They took turns patrolling on the roof, day and night, their guns in full display. They fought mold and rats. The rats, too, were crazed from hunger. They had multiplied because desperate people had eaten most of Leningrad’s cats. Vavilov’s scientists stayed and stayed, tending to the crops in their care all through the siege, without ever eating them themselves. Several of them starved to death as they were tending to the collection, surrounded by bags of wheat.
Based on what I can gather from my grandfather’s letters, Anna and Elfriede must have spent about two months in the orphanage, from late August until the end of October in 1943. In the middle of this, Elfriede turned six—far from her parents. I doubt that there were presents. I doubt there was a birthday cake. Sixty nights of making sure her sister’s teeth were brushed. Sixty nights of whispering affirmations in her sister’s ear as children cried all around.
Eventually, I ask my mother if she will check in with Elfriede about her memories of the orphanage when she next calls.
“Elfriede says she remembers nothing,” my mother reports back the next time we talk. “Except that we were there forever, and that she thought we would never get back home.”
I think of five-year-old Elfriede, in an orphanage full of children labeled “Class III,” desperate children, thirsty children, children who wet their beds and cried themselves to sleep. I watch Elfriede in the dining hall, tall in her shortness, her hand snapped tight around my mother’s wrist: instructed by her father, in writing, not just to take care of herself without her mother, but to watch her sister, to prevent her “follies.” I think of how closely “Group III” in Baden-Württemberg’s 1938 *Erlass *describes, in terrible words, the many foster children that my aunt will, eventually, collect into her home.
We now know that psychoses can be triggered by childhood traumas like bullying, physical abuse, moving, and abandonment. What marks a manic episode, in part, is grandiosity: The unshakable conviction that you can accomplish anything. Walk on water. Heal the sick. Protect your sister. Pray your mother back to health, your father safe through gunfire and grenades, your sister and yourself onto a train back home. Mania can increase goal-directed activities and reduce the need for sleep. A review article titled “Developmental and Personality Aspects of War and Military Violence,” published in the journal *Traumatology *in 2003, identifies children between the ages of five and nine as most vulnerable to developing psychiatric illnesses after war; girls are more likely to show symptoms than boys. Maybe human physiology and genes were selected for this triggering, this trait: a switch, activated by extreme stress, that transmutes tiny girls into superwomen who pull their younger siblings through.
My mother says that, one day, the nuns in Schönebürg put her and Elfriede back on a train. She remembers that both of them were wearing cardboard signs around their necks. The signs spelled out their names and the station where the conductor was to make them get off: Schussenried.
My mother remembers seeing her father there, waiting for them, on the railroad platform: one arm protectively around her mother’s shoulders, the other hand securing baby Alfred’s pram. She remembers the gratitude her parents expressed for having found a room in Schussenried, in the house of a couple named Baus, how kind their new landlords were, how my grandparents trusted them so much that they asked them to serve as baby Alfred’s godparents.
Herr Baus worked as a nurse in Schussenried’s psychiatric hospital—the same hospital where patients behind a barred window had dangled a doll made of dirty rags toward Anna and Elfriede months before. My mother remembers hushed conversations. She remembers how Herr Baus would return from work and collapse at the kitchen table, put his head down onto his arms, and sob.
Later, Oma Lotte told my mother that Herr Baus broke down in tears, again and again, as he told her how his patients had disappeared into gray buses with painted-over windows, bound for Grafeneck. I’ve looked it up. Between June and November of 1940, eight “transports” conveyed an estimated six hundred patients from Schussenried to Grafeneck Castle, where they were gassed, usually on the day of their arrival. Grafeneck Castle was the place where gas chambers were first invented and perfected, before they were installed in concentration camps.
After the bus transports stopped, doctors ordered Herr Baus to inject patients with lethal medicine. He said he refused—only to be forced to watch the doctors administer the injections themselves.
Schussenried’s psychiatric hospital, in operation since 1875, is still housed on the abbey’s grounds, though it moved into newly constructed buildings twenty years ago. The train no longer stops at the abbey, but satellite views on Google Maps show a large parking lot: the baroque library and church remain a popular tourist destination to this day. The bars across the windows of the former hospital are no longer in evidence—buildings that used to house patients now host art and cultural exhibits, business meetings for companies, and conventions for churches and special interest groups.
When I ask my mother about Schussenried, she reminds me that we, too, were tourists there, in 1982, when we walked around the immaculate grounds on a trip with my Oma Lotte. I remember the journey, the bright-white buildings, but not my mother’s shock at the missing bars across the windows, the traces of her horror cleared away. Now, over the phone, she tells me how deeply disturbed she was to find nothing to remind visitors of the people behind the bars. The dangling rag doll still haunts her dreams, the shouts from behind a barred window above her head, distorted faces, waving arms. Each time Elfriede is hospitalized, my mother just knows she’s there, behind those bars. Her adult mind understands that her sister never was committed to Schussenried but to Marienborn, a different monastery hospital, in the Eiffel mountains, far to the north. And yet the doll keeps rising in her dreams. To Anna, Elfriede is here, forever here, with the shouting, waving people, the people with big mouths, big eyes, behind iron bars.
Others share my mother’s pain about the erasure of the psychiatric hospital’s terrible history under Nazi rule. In 1983, Schussenried’s protestant minister finally succeeded in having a small plaque installed on the hospital patients’ division of the local cemetery. Ten years later, the artist Verena Kraft was commissioned to erect a memorial to the “victims of euthanasia” on the monastery grounds: a sculpture of concrete pillars and a concrete doorframe, outlining a room made of air, with no walls or ceiling, to signify the utter vulnerability of psychiatric patients. Each year since the installation of the sculpture, officials and community members have held a memorial service for the former patients around this wall-less room.
By the time I stood in the wheat field of the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, the institute had been in Köln Vogelsang for thirty years. Before that, it was called the Erwin Baur Institute, and before that, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which was then located in Müncheberg, near Berlin. Its director, Wilhelm Rudorf, joined the Nazi Party in 1937, and later the SS. By 1937, he wrote about the importance of plant breeding not only for making Germany independent from imported foods, but also, and especially, for “settling” yet-to-be invaded countries to the east and north. Vavilov’s research team succeeded in preserving the tubers and seeds he had collected through the siege of Leningrad. But when German soldiers marched into Ukraine, Rudorf oversaw the theft of seeds and tubers that had been accumulated, bred, and studied by Ukrainian research institutes. He employed Richard Böhme to oversee 150 women imprisoned in Auschwitz to conduct research on rubber-producing dandelions, seeds stolen from Ukraine.
By the time our sneakers squeaked over the grassy paths separating wheat plots at Köln Vogelsang, Rudorf had been retired from the institute for about twenty years. Yes. Retired. Böhme had been clubbed to death as he fled from Russian soldiers. But Rudorf, his boss, was “denazified” by British forces, with essentially no consequence, and kept his post as director of the institute. From his position, he prevented reemployment of Jewish plant scientists who had fled Germany to save their lives.
Once, when I researched Elisabethenpflege, Schönebürg, I found posted transcripts from the orphanage’s record book. The Mother Superior of the Elizabethan nuns wrote in the book that, at some point during the war, she cut out and burned all pages from 1933 onward to prevent information about newly admitted children from falling into the hands of Nazi authorities. She then tried to rewrite what she could, from memory, years later. The reconstructed entry for February 1940 explains: “The local police want to know which of our wards have criminal tendencies or parents with criminal tendencies. These children are to be listed. They fingerprinted twelve children.”
Others share my mother’s pain about the erasure of the psychiatric hospital’s terrible history under Nazi rule.
The psychiatric hospital in Marienborn where Elfriede stayed was established in 1888 by Cellite nuns as permanent housing for Catholic women suffering from intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. When Hitler was elected in 1933, the sisters at Marienborn were caring for 700 women suffering from epilepsy or from psychiatric conditions like bipolar disorder or depression. From 1941 to 1943, the Gestapo “selected” 490 of these women to be bussed to the psychiatric hospital at Hadamar, where they were killed by lethal injection, medication overdose, or gas: Anyone deemed “unfit to work,” and hence “a drain on the economic resources or genetic health of the Volk,” could end up on that bus.
The use of the word “selection” by both plant breeders and the Gestapo was no accident.
Five years ago, Elfriede finally agreed to move into assisted living. She says she likes her room, her bed, the food. She has not been hospitalized once since she moved in. Often, her medications, now administered with regularity, make her sleepy, fuzzy-minded, dull. But sometimes when my mother asks to speak to her on the phone, she’ll get a nurse who says Elfriede is busy, singing with the other residents, or in the workshop, making art. Perhaps Elfriede’s prayers saved her from the fires of hell. Perhaps they finally brought her to a place where she’s allowed her scissors and her glue stick, where she sings.
Excerpted from Unexploded Ordnance by Catharina Coenen (Restless Books, Oct. 28, 2025). Copyright © 2025 Catharina Coenen.
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