For Services Rendered

His father and grandfather and great-grandfather had all practiced medicine in Berlin. Dr. Ernst Weldmann never questioned—rather, he embraced—the ancestral tide that swept him along a similar stream. Especially since his father’s career had ended too soon, as so many others’ had ended too soon, at Verdun.

But how could he explain the specific decision to treat the ills of the young? His wife, who had sought treatment in Vienna early in their marriage, espoused a theory that the motivation stemmed from his own childhood experiences. Of course, Klara knew about the death of his younger brother, then aged six, from scarlatina. And she had seen for herself the sadness in his sister, born less than a year after the burial. Almost from infancy Lise had seemed to recognize herself as the “replacement” child who could not quite compensate for the one her parents—and elder brother—had lost. Perhaps that was why she had married so young, escaped to her new husband’s home, in Munich. She rarely wrote or visited. Sometimes, especially when he watched his own children playing, Ernst wished she would.

But most days Dr. Ernst Weldmann was far too busy for such reflections. The pace of his practice had, from the start, compelled him to employ an office manager, two nurses, and, each year, an intern selected from tens of applicants. In his desk he stored appreciative letters from those interns, and from parents of patients for whom he had cared in particularly acute circumstances.

On the walls he had placed his certificates and diplomas and the awards he had received from the municipal and even state medical societies. The bookshelves held not only his old textbooks but also the newer paediatric encyclopaedias to which he had contributed articles on scarlatina—the subject of a postgraduate fellowship, as Klara had reminded him. They contained, too, the neat volumes of Deutsche Pädiatrie, for which he had served as editor for six years. Until Jews could no longer occupy such offices.

He possessed a reputation, he knew, for being quiet and kindly, gentle and gentlemanly. The children seemed amenable to his ministrations; the mothers appeared to find in him a source of calm and comfort, even on the most alarming occasions.

“You never show how worried you may be,” Klara said. “That helps.”

In most instances Dr. Ernst Weldmann did not interact with his patients’ fathers. Naturally die Frauen brought the children to his office. And when Dr. Weldmann visited their homes only in extreme circumstances might the men be disturbed.

The situation was no different with the family of young Edda, whose mother was among the most attentive parents, despite her ceremonial obligations—as the Reichsmarschall’s wife—and her more routine responsibilities running the family’s favored residence at Karinhall.  “The Second Lady of the Reich,” the Reichschancellor had called her on the occasion of her marriage in 1935, because the Reichschancellor himself was unmarried.

Dr. Weldmann’s own Lady worried and fretted, more and more. Klara Weldmann’s distress was hardly new, dating back at least to the election in ‘33. But for a long time she’d said little in words; Dr. Weldmann could only read the dismay in the line of her mouth and the white of her knuckles when he could no longer treat insured patients, when the societies that had given him those awards dismissed him from their membership rolls, when two of his favorite professors, men who had arguably appeared most dedicated to the art and science of saving other people’s lives, had ended their own.

But once he began treating the Reichsmarschall’s daughter Frau Weldmann spoke.  Often.

“I don’t understand it,” she would say at the dinner table, while their twin daughters spooned soup or applesauce or custard into their mouths. “Surely he knows you’re a Jew. And still he has you care for his daughter?” Klara had never seen the child, a flesh-and-blood being like any other; for her, Edda’s name must conjure only images of the christening ceremony, chronicled by so many cameramen, pictures of the Bishop bestowing his blessing with the doting Reichschancellor in attendance.

Confronted with Klara’s energy and conviction it seemed almost impossible for Dr. Weldmann to convey his own insights. In any case he wished she wouldn’t raise the matter in front of Ruth and Rosa, who were barely old enough for kindergarten.

Perhaps he should not have told Klara about this case. Not revealed what had happened the summer day when the Frau Reichsmarschall—whom he’d recognized from the papers, naturally—had rushed into his consulting-room, a screaming toddler in her arms. A cinder had flown into the baby’s eye while mother and child were strolling on the busy Ku’damm; the Frau Reichsmarschall had found a pharmacy at once. Was there a doctor nearby, the anxious Frau Reichsmarschall wanted to know? The sales clerk at the pharmacist’s had recommended (surely with some hesitation, the doctor imagined) Dr. Weldmann, around the block. And that same day, impressed by his office, its journals and diplomas and most of all, she’d told him, his very self: the way he’d so smoothly managed to pacify the child and treat the eye within five minutes—and how Edda had squirmed and wriggled in her own mother’s arms!—the Frau Reichsmarschall had insisted on having Dr. Ernst Weldmann serve as her daughter’s paediatrician.

“Frau Reichsmarschall,” he had said, quietly. Already the intern had stopped coming in, without even a word of farewell. And the office manager and non-Jewish nurse had explained that they could sustain the risks no longer. “I am quite willing to care for your child.  But of course you realize that I am a Jew?”

The Frau Reichsmarschall had shrugged, then smiled at her little daughter. “What does that matter to me?”

But it mattered very much to Frau Weldmann.

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