I am working my third and final night shift of the week. I start the shift off feeling a bit groggy, still shaking off my daytime nap.

“You’ll like this patient, Rachel. He’s interesting. Super interesting. He loves history, he’ll talk your ear off.”

I am getting this report from Lenny, who used to work with me on nights. He just turned 60, and recently made the switch to day shift to free up time to spend with his adult daughters and his grandkids.

He fills in the details of an 81-year-old gentleman named Rupert admitted with cellulitis, a skin infection, in both his legs. He is diabetic, with a plethora of medical issues and comorbidities.

“Make sure you wear an isolation gown, he has that nasty bacteria MRSA festering in that wound in the foot.”

I ask Lenny about his new granddaughter, how things are going at his other job. I miss working with him, passing the nights talking politics, history, and just shooting the breeze.

I round on my five patients, making Rupert my last stop. This is a common nursing strategy when you know you have a patient who will hold you up chatting. Settle everyone else in before getting stuck in one room.

I enter his room and launch into my usual spiel I’ve given a thousand times before. “Good evening! I’m Rachel, I’ll be your nurse till 7am. Use this button to call me if you need anything.” I bustle around the room, organizing the pile of things on his bedside table. I’m putting my name on the board when I hear Rupert introduce himself.

“Good evening! How are you? So nice to meet you!”

Something about this man makes me curious. “Do I detect an accent? Where are you from?” I love getting to know my patients’ stories.

“I’m from Germany, the land of the Nazis and all that.” His German accent seems thicker for the last bit.

I feel a jolt in my body. A squirmy discomfort washes over me from head to toe. It’s a weird way to introduce oneself, for sure. Strange indeed.

My response pours out of me before I can think it through. My tone is flippant, casual almost. “Oh. Ha. I wouldn’t know anything about that. My grandparents just survived Auschwitz.” My thoughts quicken. Was that inappropriate? I hear a voice inside me say. I can visualize the inside of the HR rep’s office. Another voice inside me retorts, Maybe. But he started it.

An awkward pause follows. I think Rupert and I both know we just hit a trip wire. Perhaps we are also realizing we share a macabre sense of humour and a lightness in how we approach serious topics.

I tactfully shift gears. “Are you experiencing any pain right now? Is there anything I can get you? Do you need more ice water?” I’m good at my job, tending to my patients’ needs is safe territory.

After that, Rupert and I fall into easy conversation. Lenny was right, this guy does love history. He launches into a fascinating account and analysis of the First and Second World Wars. He seems to know everything on the topic and is thrilled to share it with me. I feel my body relax a bit. His self-taught historian style reminds me so much of my father. He always said that if life circumstances had been different, he would have become a history professor. My childhood memories include a tome by Sir Martin Gilbert or Paul Johnson sitting on my dad’s nightstand.

The shift passes like any other. I tend to my five patients, catch up with my coworkers at the nurse’s station, and find myself fighting that exhaustion that usually descends between 2 and 4 i the morning. But Rupert is on my mind the entire time. That comment he made when we met about being from the land of the Nazis keeps percolating.

As the first rays of sunlight gently beam through the windows, I head to Rupert’s room to check his IV and change his dressings. I put on a crinkly blue disposable gown and gloves to protect myself from that tenacious bacteria festering in his leg. The smell of decomposing flesh hits my nostrils as I enter the room. He’s sleeping fitfully up in the recliner, his swollen legs protruding like decaying tree stumps. His eyes open gently when he sees me. “Rachel!” I can hear the affection in his voice. “How’s your shift going?”

The history lesson I am expecting materializes. Right around the time Rupert is explaining why the United States finally joined the war, his storytelling turns personal.

Of course, I had done the math. I always do when I have an elderly German patient. My mind goes there – Where were you during the war? What was your family up to when mine was being butchered and gassed? It’s morbid, sure, but I think it’s natural for anyone whose family has been impacted by genocide.

If my childhood was a movie, the Holocaust was the background music. The stories my grandparents shared with us were a constant reminder to be grateful for the comfortable North American life we lived. The ghosts of deceased relatives were everywhere, in photographs on the walls of my grandparents’ dining room, in our rituals, at bar mitzvahs, in the little synagogue we prayed at that smelled like old people and overcooked potato kugel.

“I was a little boy during the war, about six when it began” Rupert shares. “They sent me to the countryside. They wanted to keep me safe.”

There is a pause. I let him continue. He begins to choke up at the next bit. “My grandfather was an SS officer.” Another pause. “My father and all my uncles were SS officers... It hurts to even think about what they were doing during that time.”

I don’t know how to respond. I don’t have to. A runaway tear rolls down Rupert’s cheek.

He looks helpless sitting there, swallowed up by the large recliner he’s sitting in. His shoulders have shifted forward, and his hands reach under his glasses to squeeze his eyes, as if to force that tear back to where it came from.

“I’ve lived with this guilt my entire life. Everywhere I go, this shame is there, a burden on my shoulders. I loved these men, I looked up to them. But it kills me when I think of what they did, the darkness that was in their souls.”

His ancestors slaughtered my ancestors.

I feel a pressure in my chest. My hands tremble slightly. I am having conflicting feelings of distress and empathy. It’s my job to take care of this man, but I’m fighting an urge to flee the building and never return.

I picture my Oma, tears glistening on her eyes. Her stooped figure worn from arthritis in her hips leaning on the large kitchen table as she lights a memorial candle for her parents and brother who were taken from her. She would say to me in her thick German accent - “I don’t know ven zey died. Ven they vent to ze gas chambers. I just pick a day and remember zem on zat day. I don’t know ze yartzeit (anniversary of death).”

This man before me comes from a family of SS officers. Actual Nazis. But here we are, two human beings having a conversation in a hospital room. Just two people trying to wrap our heads around the greatest atrocity committed in history.

My mind flashes to a story I read recently about a German-Nigerian woman who discovers in her 30s that her grandfather was Amon Goethe, the notorious Nazi depicted by Ralph Fiennes in the movie Schindler’s List. In her book, she speaks about the unbearable guilt she felt learning that she descended from Nazis. And the horror she experienced knowing that if her grandfather had met her in the street, he would have shot her in the head.

I pause at Rupert’s revelation, choosing my words more carefully this time.

He wants my absolution. We both know it is not mine to give, and yet he wants it anyway. And so, I find it within me to give it to him.

“It’s hard to comprehend.” I feel my voice catch in my throat. “The world had gone mad. And Rupert, none of us choose our circumstances. We are not responsible for the actions of others. It’s not my place to issue forgiveness, but I can’t help thinking that if my Oma was here now, that’s exactly what she would do.”

He looks up and I can see his eyes glistening with tears in the dimly lit room.

“You have no idea what that means to me.”

His shoulders drop and a sigh leaves his body as he covers his face with his large hands and sobs.

I never saw Rupert again after that night, but I think of him often. I know that meeting was divinely orchestrated. Rupert spent a lifetime with that guilt festering inside of him. It’s like he waited his whole life to meet me and hear those words.

I don’t always know what I’m walking into when I step through a patient’s door. But this is what I know: the real work is almost never what’s in the chart.

xoRachel

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