Oil and Water

Such a strange day....

It started out wonderfully with a beautiful Austrian breakfast. (And no matter how much you love the Manx, they cannot brew coffee like the Austrians.) There was fried ham, scrambled eggs, 8 kinds of bread/rolls, 3 kinds of jam, 2 kinds of yogurt, 5 kinds of cereal, soft boiled eggs, 8 kinds of cheese, and 9 kinds of prepared meats (like salami.) A dream come true after we've been subsisting largely on those cheese twists we retrieved from the Barn Dance and HOT POT Supper.

Then the big event began which we've come to Salzburg to attend, a conference called "Children and War, Past and Present." The keynote and opening address this morning was very moving--as I expect all the sessions to be--and about German children in 1941in a mental institution. These children were being systematically killed by doctors giving them drugs which caused a slow and painful death similar to pneumonia. The key and difficulty for the doctors was to make the paperwork show a death by natural cause. Anyway, the speaker told of one boy who was not mentally challenged, but was institutionalized because his father was Jewish.

So there I was imagining life for this young boy and his frantic efforts to contact help on the outside before he was drugged and killed, when a young woman came up the aisle to exit during the talk. She was about 22 and was walking with a jerky gait, and as soon as she passed us--we sat in the back--she collapsed and was caught as she fell by a young man. Everyone in the back hurried out, and the two men carrying the woman laid her on a bench. I took her head in my hands and spoke to her to see if she was conscious and when I did I saw her eyes were glazed over and unseeing. She was completely stiff. I thought she was dead. I found a pulse, so I didn't begin CPR, but I shouted for someone to call an ambulance. How slowly the world seemed to move. I could not detect breathing for over a minute, and, in hind sight, I should have begun breathing for her. But I didn't.

She did begin breathing on her own, and she regained consciousness after about twenty minutes. Still we waited for an ambulance. Several times the young woman opened her eyes and looked around, and I and an older Austrian woman gave her encouraging remarks about "being OK" and "help on the way,” but I do not believe she heard us. And she was so very thin. I just kept rubbing her thin leg and patting her. After a full 20 minutes had passed, she roused a little, and about then the rescue squad arrived. I heard her tell one of the men in a very stammering narrative that she remembered being very hot and having trouble breathing and was trying to leave the room but couldn't remember more.

She was taken to the hospital and will be fine. Something about circulation or blood sugar, and for the millionth time I wished my German were better so I could have understood more. We expect her to attend the sessions tomorrow.

After the rescue workers wheeled her away, I returned to the lecture but left again. So much to contemplate. The Austrian woman who had been so kind to the young woman saw me, and I slowly shook my head and said, "I thought she was dead." The woman nodded, and we both burst into tears. This kind woman then led me to the coffee table and poured me a cup of coffee, the universal cure-all. Such kindness.

My day continued with meeting the most interesting people from America and Europe, and hearing the most interesting papers about the real victims of war, the innocent children. I even asked 2 questions during the sessions, and they were pretty good ones, too!

This evening at a reception we had the privilege of hearing the award-winning Salzburg Boys Choir perform, and when they began singing "Down By The Riverside" with "I'm gonna lay down my sword and shield", well, I just began crying again. Such beautiful young boys, who, but for the grace of God, might have been born in the 1930s in this very city and been sent to a mental institution by the Nazis to be systematically killed.

Children and War. Kind of like Oil and Water. The two should never meet.