Zbornik Mednarodnega literarnega srečanja Vilenica 2004 - Ljudmila

Daša Drndić
a day. My sister died aged four. She
weighed nine kilos. They haven’t given
me her brain yet. I’d like to have it. I’d
like to bury that brain.
The hospital Am Steinhof (Otto Wagner)
is located in a beautiful park with pavilions
in Art-Nouveau style. Until 1945, in
it works and experiments the cream of
Austrian and German medicine. Built in
1907, it has for a long time been considered
the largest and most modern hospital
in Europe. Some thirty years later,
in 1940, it becomes one of the forty centres
for the implementation of the Nazi
programme Aktion T4 – the programme
for exterminating physically and mentally
handicapped patients of all ages,
hypocritically named The Euthanasia
Programme. Programme Aktion T4 was
named after Tiergartengasse 4 in Berlin,
where there used to stand a beautiful
villa with the Fuehrer’s headquarters.
There, a team of monstrous and sickbrained
people then in power, had
planned how to eradicate the pathological
human gene, how to control the hygiene
of the human race, how to cleanse
those they found unfit to live. But, for
truth’s sake, eugenic theories, ideas on
the sterilization and euthanasia of handicapped
people, for the first time appear
in the United States and in Sweden during
the twenties of the last century. The
Nazis »only« adopted them and then
brought them to realization.
I‘m Friedl’s mother. We lived in a small
town some one hundred kilometres
from Vienna. The Russian troupes were
already in Austria. It was raining
heavily in April 1945, it had been raining
for days. I wanted to see Friedl. He
had already been in Spiegelgrund for
two weeks, in Spiegelgrund they said,
come in three weeks. They said, Friedl
has pneumonia. I didn’t want to come
in three weeks, I returned in two weeks,
on the 20 th of April. They were celebrat-
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