Free A Perfect Madness by Frank H. Marsh Page B

cushioned chair facing his desk and drifted
off to sleep. Falling asleep in the huge chair was a loving ritual
for her that had begun when she could barely climb into it. It was
there, in the years that followed, that she would listen for hours
until she grew sleepy to intense eclectic discussions by her father
and his colleagues on matters of the mind and body. Their strange,
long words meant little to her, and it was her father’s face and
eyes that she would always watch. They spoke his passion for the
subject and for life itself, in a way that words could never
capture. All this was missing now in her father. The great winds of
life that had filled his sails for so long had stilled. He seemed
as nothing.
    Hours later Mrs. Kaufmann stroked
Julia’s cheek to awaken her, as she would do when Julia was a
child. Looking around, Julia saw the empty chair where her father
had been sitting, still facing the window. Before she could say
anything, her mother said, “Father left for the university to meet
with the rector.”
    “ Alone? The Munich Dictate
is to be signed today freeing Sudeten from the Republic. There will
be trouble, I’m sure,” Julia said frantically, jumping up from the
chair.
    “ Your brother is with him.
They will be fine. Your father is an honored professor
there.”
    Julia rushed to the kitchen, doused
her face in cold water and, ignoring the wrinkled clothes she had
slept in, hurriedly left to walk the short distance to Charles
University, hoping to find her father and Hiram.
    But Dr. Kaufmann had turned away at
the last minute from his intended mission at the university to
hurry to the American and British Embassies to request visas.
Though many Jewish friends had already done so, and many had left
Prague, he had never given thought to his family leaving Prague—it
would have meant surrendering all he believed in. Yet he had
wrestled with it from the moment the cruel insults were hurled at
him in front of Julia in the café. Keeping it bottled up inside for
the unspoken hours that followed, the decision to do so escaped him
until he recalled, as he walked with Hiram towards the university,
the rotund flushed face of Ladislav Simek, his dearest friend, who
had been sitting at the table, too ashamed to look at him or Julia.
Boyhood mates, they had sat side by side throughout their school
years, even through medical school, separating at the end only in
their chosen specialties. If Ladislav wouldn’t raise his voice to
defend him, then who would?
    “ Can’t we wait to see what
will happen, Father?” Hiram asked, unsure about his father’s sudden
decision.
    “ No, Hiram, there will be
no more springtime for us in Prague.”
     
     
    ***
     
     
    SIX
     
    Prague, 1939
     
    E rich sat quietly by
himself in the lecture hall, the events of the previous evening
still clouding his mind. Within minutes after the Munich Dictate
was signed, ripping the Sudetenland for good from the
Czechoslovakian borders, hundreds from the National Socialist
Party, including many German Sudeten students, had taken to the
streets across the so-called “liberated” lands wildly smashing and
destroying everything Jewish in their path. Nothing was left
untouched. To Erich, it was as if the ancient gods of old had risen
from their stone graves and, rubbing the dust of a thousand years
from their eyes, set forth again to destroy all that was good and
decent. Where does this German thunder come from? he had repeatedly
questioned himself throughout the night. Even the holiest of the
Germans, Martin Luther, had slaughtered thousands of Jews and
non-Jews. Perhaps the odor of intolerance is wedded with violence
and has its own special gene, Erich finally concluded, because
reason has no room for its smell. To see it this way, intolerance
must be a wide pathway for evolution, clearing the way for dumping
the unfit that stand in its way. But such crazy thinking was his
father’s along with a growing army of other German doctors