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Carla watched Peter. His supercilious air had gone. It was a remarkable transformation. After years of hearing the prosperous Catholics of this sylvan suburb confess their little sins, he had suddenly been confronted with raw evil. And he was shocked to his core.
But what would he do?
Peter stood up. He took Ilse by the hands and raised her from her seat. "Come back to the Church," he said. "Confess to your priest. God will forgive you. This much I know."
"Thank you," she whispered.
He released her hands and looked at Heinrich. "It may not be so simple for the rest of us," he said.
Then he turned his back on them and knelt to pray again.
Carla looked at Heinrich, who shrugged. They got up and left the little room, Carla with her arm around the weeping Ilse.
Carla said: "We'll stay for the service. Perhaps he'll speak to us again afterward."
The four of them walked into the nave of the church. Ilse stopped crying and became calmer. Frieda held Heinrich's arm. They took seats among the gathering congregation, prosperous men and plump women and restless children in their best clothes. People such as these would never kill the handicapped, Carla thought. Yet their government did, on their behalf. How had this happened?
She did not know what to expect of Father Peter. Clearly he had believed what they had told him, in the end. He had wanted to dismiss them as politically motivated, but Ilse's sincerity had convinced him. He had been horrified. But he had not made any promises, except that God would forgive Ilse.
Carla looked around the church. The decoration was more colorful than what she was used to in Protestant churches. There were more statues and paintings, more marble and gilding and banners and candles. Protestants and Catholics had fought wars about such trivia, she recalled. How strange it seemed, in a world where children could be murdered, that anyone should care about candles.
The service began. The priests entered in their robes, Father Peter the tallest among them. Carla could not read anything in his facial expression except stern piety.
She sat indifferent through the hymns and prayers. She had prayed for her father, and two hours later had found him cruelly beaten and dying on the floor of their home. She missed him every day, sometimes every hour. Praying had not saved him, nor would it protect those deemed useless by the government. Action was needed, not words.
Thinking of her father brought her brother, Erik, to mind. He was somewhere in Russia. He had written a letter home, jubilantly celebrating the rapid progress of the invasion, and angrily refusing to believe that Walter had been murdered by the Gestapo. Their father had obviously been released unharmed by the Gestapo and then attacked in the street by criminals or Communists or Jews, he asserted. He was living in a fantasy, beyond the reach of reason.
Was the same true of Father Peter?
Peter mounted the pulpit. Carla had not known he was due to preach a sermon. She wondered what he would say. Would he be inspired by what he had heard this morning? Would he speak of something irrelevant, the virtue of modesty or the sin of envy? Or would he close his eyes and devoutly thank God for the German army's continuing victories in Russia?
He stood tall in the pulpit and swept the church with a gaze that might have been arrogant, or proud, or defiant.
"The fifth commandment says: 'Thou shalt not kill.'"
Carla met Heinrich's eye. What was Peter going to say?
His voice rang out between the echoing stones of the nave. "There is a place in Akelberg, Bavaria, where our government is breaking the commandment a hundred times a week!"
Carla gasped. He was doing it--he was preaching a sermon against the program! This could change everything.
"It makes no difference that the victims are handicapped, or mentally ill, or incapable of feeding themselves, or paralyzed." Peter was letting his anger show. "Helpless babies and senile old people are all God's children, and their lives are as sacred as yours and mine." His voice rose in volume. "To kill them is a mortal sin!" He lifted his right arm and made a fist, and his voice shook with emotion. "I say to you that if we do nothing about it, we sin just as much as the doctors and nurses who administer the lethal injections. If we remain silent . . ." He paused. "If we remain silent, we are murderers too!"
xii
Inspector Thomas Macke was furious. He had been made to look a fool in the eyes of Superintendent Kringelein and the rest of his superiors. He had assured them he had plugged the leak. The secret of Akelberg--and hospitals of the same kind in other parts of the country--was safe, he had said. He had tracked down the three troublemakers, Werner Franck, Pastor Ochs, and Walter von Ulrich, and in different ways he had silenced each of them.
And yet the secret had come out.
The man responsible was an arrogant young priest called Peter.
Father Peter was in front of Macke now, naked, strapped by wrists and ankles to a specially constructed chair. He was bleeding from the ears, nose, and mouth, and had vomit all down his chest. Electrodes were attached to his lips, his nipples, and his penis. A strap around his forehead prevented him from breaking his neck while the convulsions shook him.
A doctor sitting beside the priest checked his heart with a stethoscope and looked dubious. "He can't stand much more," he said in a matter-of-fact tone.
Father Peter's seditious sermon had been taken up elsewhere. The bishop of Munster, a much more important clergyman, had preached a similar sermon, denouncing the T4 program. The bishop had called upon Hitler to save the people from the Gestapo, cleverly implying that the Fuhrer could not possibly know about the program, thereby offering Hitler a ready-made alibi.
His sermon had been typed out and duplicated and passed from hand to hand all over Germany.
