On a Religious Patient

Dr. Bloch knew the woman would receive the bad news with fortitude. He knew her deeply religious belief would not even allow her to question what she felt was God’s will for her life. Sure enough, when Block told Klara about her bad prognosis, that the breast cancer was going to kill her sooner than later, Klara took the news with complete resignation and acceptance.

Six children and her husband had been Klara’s life. However, tragedy had already struck the family deeply. The husband had died some years earlier, and only two of the six children would live to see adulthood. Yet, through it all, Klara’s faith remained strong. She saw her suffering–the losing of the spouse, the loss of her other children to disease and then, finally, the cruel blow of the terminal cancer–as making her suffer like her beloved Jesus had suffered. During all her sickness, when she could, she never forsook attending the Catholic church in Linz, Austria, where she and the children had moved after her husband’s death.

They had moved to a small apartment where they could manage to survive on the small government pension the husband’s death had provided. Dr. Bloch assured the family that the cost for the cancer treatment would not be more than they could bear. This was a great relief to Klara and the family. Surgery was scheduled for a double mastectomy. Sadly, the surgeon found that the cancer had metastasized far beyond what his scalpel could reach. Klara’s oldest surviving son, only a teenager, begged the doctor to try something, anything, to save his beloved mother. So, Dr. Bloch suggested a new type of treatment as a last resort. This treatment, an early form of chemotherapy, called for direct contact of the chemicals with the infected tissue.

The pain caused by the therapy was almost unbearable. Yet, through it all, Klara’s unfailing faith kept her from grief. God’s will, she told her son, was the most important thing. This attitude of Klara’s would have an impact on him to the point that he eventually gave up on any faith at all. What kind of God would allow such a wonderful, loving mother to suffer as she did? Bloch noted the close, almost psychic bond the mother and son shared, and he watched as the son grieved so deeply as anyone he had ever witnessed when his mother finally succumbed to the cancer.

Dr. Eduard Bloch had a long career in Austria. Years later, and being Jewish, he watched with understandable concern as Adolf Hitler annexed Austria in 1938. He knew the Nazi pre-occupation with what Hitler called “the Jewish Problem” in the greater German Reich. And, so, he made plans to try to emigrate to the United States to escape the oncoming Holocaust. He sent a request to Berlin to be allowed to join his daughter who had gone to New York City some years earlier. Surprisingly, not only did Hitler allow Bloch to go, but he also ordered his private secretary, Martin Bormann, to take personal charge of the paperwork. Bloch went to New York and lived for the remainder of his life there. But he never forgot the deeply religious woman who faced her cancer fight so bravely. And he never forgot the son who grieved so deeply for his mother.

It was the same Adolf Hitler.

On a Dog’s Love

It’s not terrible being loved by my master. While that doesn’t sound positive, I purposely put it that way because he’s been under a tremendous amount of stress recently. It is as if the weight of the world is on his shoulders.

A lot of people are coming and going all the time. He alternates between bouts of severe depression and yelling at them.

But, he never yells at me.

Ever.

In fact, when he has time, he loves on me and give me treats and even lets me sleep in his bed when his girlfriend is not around. She doesn’t like me very much, even though she has two dogs of her own. I can’t tell if she’s jealous or not, but, the fact remains, that she has no kind words to say about me or to me.

But that doesn’t stop the love that my master and I share. Even though I have only been with him for four years, our bond is a special one. I can even tell that it is his footsteps in the hallway when he’s coming to see me.

In private, he will rub my head and tell me about another dog he had almost 30 years ago, a dog that he loved almost as much as he loves me. That was another stressful time for him, because he was fighting in a war at that point. He tells me he rescued the dog and took care of it in the trenches. It broke his heart when he lost the dog a year later. He talks about that dog and smiles at me with moist eyes.

I think, of all the creatures around him, both the men and the women, I love him the most, and I know he loves me. But I’m worried about him. I sense that something terrible is about to happen.

Until then, I’m happiest when the Führer scratches my ears and whispers, “Ich liebe dich, süßes Mädchen Blondi.”

On a Possessive Uncle

Maria adored her father. As a little girl, the pair were inseparable. She was definitely a daddy‘s girl. Sadly, Maria‘s dad died when she was very young, and her mother, who been a housewife, had to find work outside the home to support the two of them.

As often happens with close families, Maria‘s uncle agreed to have his sister and his niece come live with him and the sister act as a sort of housekeeper because he was a bachelor. By that time, Maria was a teenager, and the uncle agreed to help her get into a good school in the town where he lived.

Everything seem to be good for all involved—but only for a short time. Soon, Maria‘s uncle began to take an unusual interest in her activities. He began to closely scrutinize her friends, questioning where she was going, and becoming unusually overprotective. As Maria got older, she went behind her uncle’s back and dated one of the employees who worked for her uncle. The uncle fired the young man and forbade Maria from ever seeing the young man again. Maria was heartbroken.

By the time she was in her early 20s, Maria was practically a prisoner in her uncle’s house. The gossip was that he was secretly in love with her, obsessed with her every move, and forcing her only interactions to be with her mother or with him.

Well, it’s fairly obvious what the end result of the situation would be. When she was 23, Maria took her uncle’s pistol and shot herself. Later family gossip said that the uncle himself killed her or that Maria was pregnant by him and preferred to end her life rather than live and bear his child. We will never know for sure. The uncle was powerful enough to have the whole situation swept under the rug and a very private police investigation ruled it a suicide beyond a shadow of a doubt. Interestingly, the uncle didn’t even show up to attend Maria’s small funeral.

In later life, Adolf Hitler would confess to close friends that his niece Maria “Geli” Raubal was the only woman he ever truly loved.