Mitchell Geller

Coffee With Mengele

dedicated to Maria Emma Bussar

We worked at the same hospital
early in the war.
He was a doctor, I was a nurse.
Some mornings we would have Kaffee und Kuchen,
a cigarette and a little chat.
Ach, he had the most beautiful eyes,
dark-lashed, dark-browed and piercingly blue.

I enjoyed our breaks together.
He was a fascinating man.
I liked being a nurse.
Sometimes he would speak a bit
about his other job,
and tell me how the patients
were caged like wild creatures.
He spoke of his research
enthusiastically,
his eyes burning like a saint's, like an angel's.
But my eyes could not see past
a person in a cage
and my ears could not hear for wondering.
His eyes seemed not quite so sehr schön.
I felt a bit beklommen --
how do you say? -- uneasy.

After the war we left for the States.
Josef, they said, left Auschwitz and
went west, pretending to be just a soldier.
I heard he was a prisoner of war,
but the Allies released him,
not knowing who he was.
He divorced and remarried,
moving around South America,
denying the experiments until he died.

Who knows what was true? The surgeries,
the twins, the amputations, the dwarves?
I cannot think about it too closely.
I became a nurse to help,
not to hurt, or even know of hurt,
if I could help it.
My sleep is much deeper
if I do not think too much.

They say he tried to change
the color of the iris
by injecting chemicals into children's eyes.
I wonder if he made them as blue as his own?