Strindberg's Star Read Online Free PDF Page B

trace the neo-Nazis’ fascination with Norse mythology back to the Thule Society and someone called Karl Maria Wiligut.
    Just another boring expert, thought the intern, and he slunk disappointedly down the stairs to
Dalakuriren
’s morning meeting.

4
Bubbe
    T here was only one person Don Titelman had loved completely and unconditionally, and that was his grandmother, his
yidishe
Bubbe. She was the first person who had treated him seriously. And he remembered that he had felt chosen when, for the first time, she had turned to him as a confidant. He had been only eight years old then.
    *
    B ubbe’s 1950s house, with its scent of mothballs, stuffy closets, and rotting seaweed, was Don’s memory of summer. Neglectful, his workaholic parents were in the habit of dumping him there in Båstad as early as the beginning of June and then reluctantly bringing him back to Stockholm again in September. He was usually at least two weeks late for the beginning of the school year.
    The house had been in shabby shape. The plaster on the front had fallen off in large chunks, and her yard had slowly become covered in rotting fruit, which neither of them had the energy to pick. His excuse had been laziness, but for Bubbe it had been her legs, which couldn’t carry her anymore.
    The last few summers, she couldn’t even manage to go up the house’s only staircase, and Don had had the whole top floor to himself.Despite the dust and the boarded-up windows, it had been better to sleep there than downstairs, because during the night Bubbe had never found any peace.
    He had listened to her monotonous ritual every night from the bedroom above the stairs. First those creaking steps on the parquet, then the heavy sigh that revealed that she had sunk down into the corduroy sofa. She would usually sit there for a while, and he knew she would lean forward and let her fingers run along the scars and pits on her calves. Then the sound when she once again got up, and then another creaking lap around the room, a sigh, and the squeak of the feathers as the sofa welcomed her for another bit of rest.
    And then it started over again, making up the rhythm that had rocked him to sleep every night.
    S he had been transported to Ravensbrück in July 1942, where the medical experiments had already begun.
    The SS doctors had wanted to test the germicidal effects of sulfa powder on severe infections that followed gunshot wounds. They had said that the experiments would help the German armed forces and therefore must be very realistic. The first guinea pigs had been fifteen camp prisoners, all men.
    The doctors had cut open their calf muscles, from the tendons of their heels up to their knees. Then they had rubbed a solution of gangrene bacteria into the wounds in order to start a nasty infection. The bacteria had been cultivated by Hygiene-Institut der Waffen-SS, the Schutzstaffel’s institute of hygiene. The thought behind cutting up only the lower part of the men’s legs was to make it possible to have time to amputate at the knee once the gangrene started to spread.
    The open wounds had been dusted with sulfa powder and then sewn up. Curious, the SS doctors had waited to see what would happen, but soon they had to declare that the wounds healed far too quickly. Experiments didn’t mimic what happened on the front lines at all, and the conclusion was that they hadn’t tried hard enough.
    So they had formed a new experimental group, this time of about sixty women. All of them had been young, under thirty, and one of those chosen had been Don’s grandmother, his Bubbe. The concentration camp doctors had cut deep into both of her calves, from the tendons of her heels up to her knees. To make the injury similar to battle wounds, they hadn’t only rubbed gangrene bacteria into the wounds; they also pressed in shards of glass, dirt, and sawdust.
    Bubbe’s legs had swollen up with pus, and she had lain in feverish dreams that not even the screams of the other