28. Februar 1944
I wake up in the middle of the night. It is dark. I can hear soft moans coming from some of the beds. You feel the pain more acutely at night because you have no distraction. During the day, talking or reading or what’s going on in the room can draw your attention and distract you from the pain. One of my comrades groans particularly loudly. He is lying in the centre of the room. Now he calls for the nurse. But nothing moves. He repeats his calls, but to no avail. A Landser drags himself to the night bell and presses the button. No one from the nursing staff is to be seen. He rings the bell while other comrades also start calling. Finally, a night nurse appears and goes to the seriously wounded man. In the meantime, half the room has woken up. Light flares up. The nurse suddenly becomes restless and starts running. The wounded man’s bandage is bleeding through. The nurse calls a doctor. The wounded man is wheeled out. Calm gradually returns to the room.
Two medics approach my bunk, place me on a stretcher and take me to the operating theatre. As the six operating tables are all occupied, they put me on the floor for the time being and leave. I’m now lying on the stretcher on the ground floor between two open doors in the draught. But as I will probably be taken to the slaughtering block at any moment, I say nothing. There are six operating tables next to each other in the theatre. There is a wounded man on each table, with several doctors and nurses working around him. The air in the room is stale. Bales of used cotton wool and balls of bloody bandages pile up on the floor. Instruments clink on glass plates, short instructions buzz through the room. Wounded patients suddenly cry out or utter inarticulate sounds while under anaesthesia. The room is filled with feverish activity.
At the table closest to me, a senior surgeon is operating with an assistant surgeon and a nurse. They’ve cut open a wounded man’s rind at the temple and folded it over. I can just see the wounded man’s head. The senior surgeon is poking around in the wound. He’s obviously looking for something and can’t find it. He’s obviously nervous or annoyed. It doesn’t take long for a dispute to break out between him and the assistant surgeon, which soon degenerates into a loud argument. The assistant surgeon scolds him while the senior surgeon shouts at his assistant. As far as I can see, they give up the operation and leave in a rage.
The bell rings for lunch. The operating theatre gradually empties, the tables are vacated and the staff go to lunch. Before I can ask what is actually going to happen to me, the last doctor has disappeared through the door. The room is suddenly empty. Forlorn, I lie on my stretcher at ground level in the draught between two doors that are wide open.
It’s an amazingly bloody operation (in the figurative sense) here in this military hospital. When the first member of the operating theatre staff reappears after lunch, I tell him clearly what I think of this mess. He doesn’t seem to be shaken. In view of the impossible conditions here, they probably hear complaints like this frequently and are immune to them.
I am the first to go to the slaughtering block. The smooth leather of the table is cold. The doctor looks at my foot, but can’t do anything definitive as no x-ray has been taken yet(!). So I am carried back to my bunk in the large hall.
I enjoyed three days in war hospital 1/606.[1] Then I am picked out for a transport home, which is to leave tomorrow.
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- ↑ 27-29 Feb 44 acc. to pay book p. 12/13