Service in the Hospital in Hranice, Moravia
(Memoirs of Edith Stein)
(Part 4 – conclusion)
The night shift was particularly dear to me because during it one was in contact only with the sick, not with other nurses and the rest of the staff. On the surgical ward, where I later worked, there was a Viennese sculptress as an assistant who only worked nights so she could attend to the wounded without unpleasant conflicts. I adhered to the usual procedure and was content with my two weeks.
Naturally, one breathed a sigh of relief when one could leave the room in the morning, aired out by sixty sick people. At first, I always headed to the bathroom on the ward. After this morning wash, I felt somewhat cleansed of germs. Then I left the riding hall, quickly ate my breakfast in the large dining room, and rushed outside. Usually, there were companions for a smaller or larger walk.
One time, when I woke up from my daytime sleep in the room for the night shift, I found letters and a package from home on the bed. Suse Mugdan had arrived and quietly placed these greetings here without waking me. How happy I was when I could greet her! We had only spoken once in Wroclaw, and both of us were reserved, so elsewhere we surely would not have gotten close very quickly. But here we soon felt intimately connected. Oh, what a blessing it was to know that there was someone here of such purity of heart, such genuine thinking, and such tender and profound feeling!
It also meant a great support for her that she found me here. She would have probably managed even worse than I did. Suse was a jinx. Richard Courant, who knew her very well and liked her, said that it was impossible for anything to happen with Suse Mugdan without all the difficulties one can imagine. This was proven now as well. It was a great sacrifice that Suse interrupted her studies, which she had started late, after only a few semesters; her relatives absolutely disagreed. She did it purely out of a sense of patriotic duty and naturally expected that now she could fully devote her efforts. Instead, she came to a then-little-used ward in a higher secondary school – to Sister Susi; the assistant was referred to as “Sister Susanne” for distinction – and had to take care of an initially completely empty room for officers. When the room finally received one occupant, it was a pharmacist sick with gonorrhea. With the utmost diligence, Suse cared first for the furniture and flowers in the officers' room and later for the young man with that embarrassing disease; (he needed no special care from the sister; he just needed someone to bring him food, to chat with him a little, and to encourage him); but still, it distressed her that she was not presented with greater tasks. That changed later when large transports of the wounded arrived.
Suse was very concerned about her dearly beloved brother – twin Albrecht, who was at the front. And then there was another burden that she bore heavily: the Mugdans were of Jewish descent, but Mrs. Mugdan had had all her children baptized Protestant after her husband's death: out of a strangely misguided maternal care, to ensure that they would do better. I later recognized her as a kind and charitable woman who had no thought of external advantages for herself at all. Suse never thanked her mother for this arrangement; it was repugnant to her pure and sincere soul that a conversion, which did not arise from the deepest conviction, had taken place. Since she reached adulthood, she often contemplated whether she should reverse that step. But how could she return to Judaism when it was completely foreign to her? Besides, in school, she had received a Protestant upbringing, and although she was not positively religious, she nevertheless acquired a certain Christian character and became fond of many things. Naturally, we sometimes had to listen to expressions of antisemitism in the hospital. Suse directly envied me that I could simply declare that I was a Jewess. (By the way, it always caused great astonishment because no one considered me a Jewess.) When she remained silent about such a remark, she felt cowardly; and when she wanted to say something, she had to provide a lengthy explanation that alienated and was seldom understood.
We talked about all these questions with complete honesty and warmth. However, we did not address each other as: “You,” throughout our stay in Hranice. The silly familiarity with which the other sisters spoke to each other while internally having nothing in common led us to keep “You” as a sign of mutual respect. It happened quite naturally; we didn't even speak a word about it.
After I had been in Hranice for some time, Greta Bauer fell ill and had to go home to recover. The “little community” asked me to take her place so that they wouldn't have any disruptive element in the room. With great joy, I agreed; in the room for the sisters in the large riding hall, I continually felt most uneasy. In my daily coexistence with the new companions, I became particularly friends with Sister Alwine.
Meanwhile, the typhus ward saw a decrease in severe cases. We had to succumb to death two more times. Once it was a little waiter, a fragile, lung-sick person. He died during the day, and Dr. Pick and all the sisters stood by his bed. Then another sick person called me over. “Sister, what if it were me now!” he whispered excitedly. I nicely discouraged him, but I knew that he also had little hope left. He was a twenty-year-old bricklayer with a terrible pleurisy. He had long been entirely without appetite and had hardly taken anything from his patient’s portion. One time I asked him if he really had no desire for anything at all. He said he would like an orange. Thank God – oranges were available in the canteen. In those days, I also received a package with chocolate by field mail. I offered him some, and he liked it. From then on, I fed him oranges and chocolate. That probably made him more trusting. Before, he had mostly been grumpy and silent – it was no wonder considering his bad condition. A few days after that death case, we noticed that he too was nearing the end. When I heard that there was unrest in the house during the night, I would have liked to go there to help that poor fellow. But we couldn't – someone else was on the night shift. He asked for Dr. Pick to be called. The young doctor willingly came, even though he was not on the night shift. The next morning, he told me completely shaken: “Oh, Sister Edita, if you had only seen it!” He showed me how the young man had put his head in his hands and screamed: “Not to die, not to die!” The corpse was opened to determine the cause of death. Dr. Pick again said: “If you had only seen it!” There were strong pleural adhesions in the chest cavity that pressed on the organs. No wonder that the stomach couldn't receive anything anymore!
After some time, our doctor was also taken to another hospital. He bid us farewell warmly and sent us beautiful flowers for our ward. Before he left, he entrusted his little kingdom to his friend Dr. Flusser, who had already previously had ward III and now also took on ward I. “I especially draw your attention to the ward diary. It is in perfect order; Sister Edita maintained it.” He started it himself but often forgot to make entries. Therefore, he very much welcomed it when I took over writing the histories of the patients.
I had known Dr. Flusser only by sight and hearsay before; I did not have a good impression based on that. However, during our collaboration, I found no reason to complain. He was good to the patients and could not be criticized towards us either.
On the typhus ward, “Sister Edita” worked for three months. As the work there gradually decreased, she asked the head nurse to transfer her elsewhere. She then served in a small operating room at the cadet school. The head of the ward was a Czech surgeon, very capable and conscientious. He worked with him a German, or rather Austrian doctor, Dr. Scharf. He once asked Sister Edita why she interrupted her philosophical studies. “I explained to him that all my colleagues were at the front, and I did not understand why I should be better off than them.”
The character of the hospital also gradually changed. Since the arrival of a large transport involving a thousand wounded, the wounded here gained superiority over patients with infectious diseases. Edith was further transferred to barrack 6, where in two rooms lay 50 lightly wounded; she was responsible for one of the rooms. Soon after, she returned to the I. surgical ward, where she had already helped before. Here lay the most severe cases. Her superior was again that Czech surgeon – “Mr. Primář,” the station doctor was a young Czech – “good to the soldiers and not exactly unfriendly towards us. However, he had the unpleasant habit of speaking to people in Czech without translating his orders for us.”
The hardest month for her then was August 1915 when she took care of patients with complicated fractures and four patients requiring special care. “I was on my feet all day long, that by evening I could hardly stand.” In addition, she suffered from insomnia. “It was clear to me that it was high time to allow myself a rest that I had refused two months earlier as unnecessary. But the decision to leave came only after great internal struggles. In my reflections, something other than nervous exhaustion also played a role. I often returned to the thought of whether it was unwise to interrupt scientific work for so long when there were so many workers available for care. On the other hand, I pondered whether it was not a selfish inclination. I greatly suffered from the fact that Susi Mugdan was precisely on vacation. With her, I could have talked about my doubts… I asked the head nurse if she could let me go home by September 1. She was immediately willing and did not want to give me leave for even two weeks, but left it up to me whether and when I would like to return. I asked her to call me as soon as she considered my help necessary.
Sister Edita therefore did not consider her farewell to Hranice to be definitive, but expected to be called back. She used the leave to take exams as a nursing assistant; a prerequisite for that was a half-year practice as a nurse. And she began to study Greek again. Already in October, she took a supplementary exam at the humanities gymnasium, necessary for university studies in Göttingen.
However, she did not return to Hranice. Instead, during October of that year 1915, she learned that the hospital had been closed. After the liberation of Galicia from the Russians, the Hranice cadet school was to serve its original purpose again. Edith Stein offered herself again to the Red Cross, but she was no longer called for the care of the wounded and the sick.
(Edith Stein's Works VII, Editions Nauwelaerts – Louvain 1965, pp. 244–262, abridged.
Selected and translated by Sister Petra of the Risen One, OCD.)
