Dr. Schwarz Opens the Gas, Killing Himself and His Wife

Dr. Schwarz Opens the Gas, Killing Himself and His Wife is the remembered death of Hans Schwarz’s parents, preceded by his father’s public defiance of an antisemitic campaign outside his surgery. The juxtaposition gives the episode its force: Dr. Schwarz stands openly beside the Nazi who has come to stigmatize Jews, but the parents’ deaths follow only a few days later, leaving Hans with a wound he says has not healed.

The Notice and Dr. Schwarz’s Defiance

A Nazi was posted outside Dr. Schwarz’s surgery carrying the notice, “Germans, beware. Avoid all Jews. Whoever has anything to do with a Jew is defiled.” Dr. Schwarz answered not with words but with a visible counter-display: he put on his officer’s uniform and decorations, including the Iron Cross, First Class, and took his stand beside the Nazi. The uniform and medal made his service and public identity part of the confrontation, directly beside the message that declared association with Jews defiling.

The gathering crowd first stood silent. As it grew, mutterings gave way to aggressive jeers. Their hostility was directed at the Nazi, not at Dr. Schwarz; before long the Nazi packed up and left. He did not return, and no replacement appeared. The episode therefore records a moment in which a local antisemitic display was publicly rejected, even as the surrounding campaign against Jews remained the larger threat.

The Parents’ Deaths

A few days after the confrontation, while Hans’s mother was asleep, Dr. Schwarz turned on the gas. Hans recounts the outcome plainly: “and so they died.” The account confirms that his parents did not end in Belsen, but it does not state what prompted his father’s act or describe any further circumstances around their deaths. The brief transition from public resistance to private catastrophe preserves that silence rather than supplying a motive.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

Hans presents the deaths as a dividing line in his later life. Since then, he says, he has avoided meeting Germans as far as possible and has not opened a single German book, not even Hölderlin; he has tried to forget. His continued ability to speak German, despite his American accent, does not undo that refusal: using the language is something he dislikes, and reminders of Germany rub salt into wounds he says have not healed.

The episode thus joins an act of visible resistance to an aftermath of bereavement and estrangement without claiming that the first caused the second. In Hans’s retrospective account, the father’s uniform and decorations stand against the Nazi’s notice, while the deaths that follow explain why Germany can no longer be approached as merely a country or a literary language. The memory is not resolved by the Nazi’s departure; it persists in Hans’s efforts to avoid both Germans and German books.