The Boy in a Plaster Cast: A Story of a Childhood Experience

By Peter Saunders

At the end of World War 2, the German people suffered another major catastrophe in terms of economic disaster which befell them. This story tells of the damage done to one particular family both during and after the war.
In particular, it focuses on a four-year-old boy who had the misfortune to contract tuberculosis in his hip joint, which caused him to be incarcerated in a hospital which was run by nursing staff who had very little sympathy for the children in their charge. The subsequent marriage of his widowed mother to a British soldier had a considerable impact on the quality of his life!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Jan 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493139446

Peter Saunders

Peter Saunders was born and educated in Croydon, England. He spent more than twenty years teaching sociology at the University of Sussex, where he still holds the title of Professor Emeritus. He also taught in universities in Australia, New Zealand, Germany and the United States. He built an academic reputation with major books on city life, home ownership, British politics, social inequality and meritocracy, but in 1999 he abandoned his academic career and went to live in Australia where he found work in public policy think tanks. In Australia, he continued to write on social issues such as poverty and welfare reform, but he also began commenting on current affairs in the press and on radio and television. By the time he returned to Britain in 2008, the Sydney Morning Herald hailed him as ‘the most prominent liberal intellectual’ in Australia. He is now developing a third career, as a fiction writer. The Versailles Memorandum is his first full-length novel.

Book preview

THE BOY

IN A PLASTER CAST

A Story Of A Childhood Experience

PETER SAUNDERS

Copyright © 2014 by Peter Saunders.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2013923158

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-4931-3942-2

             Softcover     978-1-4931-3943-9

           Ebook       978-1-4931-3944-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a true story based on the author’s recollection of his experiences, however, some names have been changed to false names to protect the privacy

of certain individuals.

Rev. date: 12/18/2013

Xlibris

0-800-056-3182

www.xlibrispublishing.co.uk

521346

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Ward 4

Chapter 2: Medical Mismanagement

Chapter 3: Ellie Lieberman

Chapter 4: Rosalia Boll

Chapter 5: Hans Meier

Chapter 6: The War

Chapter 7: Barbarossa

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 1

WARD 4

O n the morning of 17 July 1945, Peter woke up at the usual time of 6.30 a.m. in a state of acute anxiety. He remembered with great trepidation that his crayon had rolled off his bedside locker on to the floor and had broken in two pieces.

He had managed to stretch down to the floor from his hospital bed to regain the damaged writing implement, which was no mean feat in view of the fact that his plaster cast covered his body from the foot of his left leg, half way down his right leg, and to the top of his chest. An iron bar was set in the plaster just above knee level and attached so as to prevent any movement of either hip joint. This bar was used by the nursing staff to lift the boy up when he needed the bedpan.

Only his genitals and rear end were exposed to enable necessary bodily functions. He was four and a half years old and had already spent six months imprisoned in the plaster cast since he contracted tuberculosis in his left hip joint.

He was not to know that in Germany, from 1940 to 1945, bovine tuberculosis was common in the cows in Nordrhein-Westfalen and that for children who were evacuated from the towns in the area to country farms, the drinking of milk directly from the pails after milking was a dangerous pursuit.

When his mother, Rosalie, was evacuated from the town where she lived with her two sons in early 1944 to a small farm, she was not to know that the cows on the farm were infected with tuberculosis, and when the farmer offered her a small pail of milk every day, she readily accepted it and fed the milk to her two sons.

In view of the fact that the once mighty German pharmaceutical industry had not yet discovered Streptomycin, PAS, or any other antituberculous drugs, patients who contracted the disease simply had their joints (if this is where the bacillus was located) immobilised in the hope that the disease would not spread to other parts of the body. They were then incarcerated in the great open wards of the various sanatoria which were built for the purpose of housing the sufferers of tuberculosis.

Those who contracted the disease in their lungs would hope that the fresh air, together with their natural immune system, might one day conquer the disease. However, Peter’s auntie Eli, at the age of nineteen, was not so lucky and had succumbed to the disease some eight years ago.

The hospital in Sendenhorst included such a provision for the management of this prolific disease. The ward, which was on the fourth floor, had an open veranda which overlooked the church of St Joseph. Whilst this imposing building may have been a comfort to many of the thirty-two occupants of the ward, the proximity of the church with its mortuary was a constant reminder of the precarious nature of some patients’ condition.

They were able to see the bodies of the deceased being wheeled into the mortuary, sometimes on more than one occasion per day. The ward had a single row of thirty-two beds, each with their feet pointing towards the veranda. The patients were able to see the mortuary through the huge glass doors which led to the veranda.

In the summer, the nurses simply wheeled the beds out on to the veranda in order to enable the patients to benefit from the full healing powers of the sun and open air. They were then simply wheeled back in, in the evening when the temperature dropped.

Each bed consisted of an iron frame with a small headboard, also in the form of an iron grill. The ward looked like a barrack room rather than an abode suitable for housing disabled children. The walls were cracked and in need of decoration. The curtains were drab and were made of thin, coarse material. Nobody ever thought to draw the curtains at night, and when a thunderstorm struck, the children were terrified by the bolts of lightning, which seared across the sky, as well as the deafening sound which pervaded their sensitive young ears.

Returning to the problem of the broken crayon, any sane person would not regard this minor infringement of hospital rules by a four-year-old as being of any significance at a time when Germany was suffering the horrendous consequence of losing a major war for the second time in three decades.

Unfortunately for the occupants of ward 4, the existence of Elsa Schmidt, who was a nursing auxiliary and ruled the ward, these minor incidents enabled this tyrant to exercise her rabid desire to inflict punishment on children without any fear of recrimination from any authority within the hospital complex.

Peter had on previous occasions been the subject of Elsa’s fury. The major crime which he had been guilty of had been to spill a small amount of soup on his bedclothes during a lunch period a week before. Elsa’s methods for meting out punishments were varied. Her favourite method was to use a four-foot cane, which she hid in the linen cupboard on the ward, to beat the children on legs and buttocks, where the signs and injuries sustained could not be seen by the very occasional visitors to the ward.

Her second favourite punishment, which was only slightly less risky, was to simply move the offending child into the linen cupboard and leave him there in the dark for several hours. One might reasonably ask why such a creature was left to wreak havoc on a children’s ward at such a time. In any society, there are people who enjoy inflicting pain and suffering on their fellow human beings. Those who manned the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Auschwitz would hardly be described as being caring members of society. War brings these miscreants to the fore, and society, on the whole, may be unaware of the fact that crimes of the most heinous kind are being committed behind the scenes.

Elsa was one such person. She was a particularly unattractive twenty-eight-year-old spinster who because of her horse-like features was so far removed from the perception of the ideological Arian that she was unable to join the Hitler Youth Movement, which left her ideologically challenged. She was also unable to complete her nursing training due to her failure to achieve the necessary academic standards and thus remained an unqualified nursing auxiliary.

Whilst other members of the German Nursing Fraternity were engaged in caring for the German soldiers who were wounded in the war, patients in the children’s wards, maternity wards, and geriatric care units had to make do with a reduced secondary care provision which was mainly provided by unqualified staff or poorly equipped and inadequately trained nuns.

The only qualified nurse on ward 4 was Sister Maria Terese, a forty-five-year-old nun who was fully aware of the cruelties inflicted on the children by Elsa, but who seemed content to let her rule the ward and occasionally helped her to carry the more incapacitated children into the linen cupboard when requested to do so. In a predominantly Catholic community, middle-class German families often encouraged their daughters to take up holy orders, particularly when the prospects of a suitable marriage were unlikely to be arranged.

This was particularly pertinent after World War I when very