Erika

Erika is the daughter of Hedda and Rainer von Abt, a child whose brief, seemingly healthy infancy gives way to an inherited degenerative illness and an early death. Her story emerges years later as Rainer confides to Hana Hanáková that he had concealed her existence. Erika’s fate joins intimate family grief to the institutional killing of disabled children under Nazi rule: at four, she is taken to Hartheim Castle and killed by injection, an outcome her parents describe as a clinic procedure.

Identity and Family

Rainer tells Hana that he had once said there was no child, but that this was untrue: he and Hedda had a daughter, whom they named Erika. He describes her birth as the result of a love some people regarded as crossing forbidden boundaries. This disclosure corrects the account he had previously given and makes Erika’s existence itself part of the family’s concealed history.

At first Erika appears to her parents to be a healthy, exceptionally lovely baby. Rainer remembers Hedda finding in motherhood a fulfilment she had not expected. The recollection is framed by the loss that follows: the ideal of a perfect child is not merely an image of parental affection, but the beginning of a contrast between early promise and irreversible decline.

Illness and Loss of Abilities

For approximately six months Erika develops and responds as expected. She smiles, laughs, recognizes her parents, reaches toward them from her cot, and grasps toys and rattles. Rainer later compares her condition to a piano going out of tune. In the Glass Room, he demonstrates the analogy by pressing a combination of keys on the piano: the C-sharp-minor chord sounds in exact correspondence, while Erika’s development, once harmonious to her parents, begins to come apart.

Rainer names her diagnosis as infantile amaurotic congenital idiocy, explaining that blindness was only one symptom. He recalls signs on her retina, the loss of control of her head, and her increasing inability to hear or respond. Skills she had begun to acquire—including grasping and the first stages of crawling—disappear. A once smiling and responsive child becomes unresponsive, and spasms and convulsions follow. The progression is presented as a reversal of development: Erika loses, one by one, abilities she had already learned.

Rainer explains the condition as an inborn error of metabolism involving a substance that accumulates in the brain and disables nerve cells. He says the mutation is recessive and that a child must inherit one copy from each parent. Both he and Hedda carried the same mutation, which Rainer says ran in their family and was brought together by their union. He identifies it as a disease associated with Jewish families, linking Erika’s illness to inherited vulnerability and to the wider history of antisemitic classification without making the disease itself a moral failing.

Hartheim and Erika’s Death

The usual course of the illness, as Rainer describes it, is the gradual loss of bodily functions, including the ability to swallow. Children may then die from starvation or pneumonia; he says their average lifespan is four or five years and that there is no cure. But Erika does not die in that way. Rainer’s answer redirects his account from the expected medical progression to the intervention that ended her life.

When Erika is four, her parents drive from Munich to a castle in Upper Austria. They arrive in winter, with snow covering the grounds, and carry her from the car to the entrance. The staff appear to be expecting them. Rainer describes the institution as a clinic: the family signs forms, confirms its identity, and waits while a nurse takes Erika away. His account emphasizes how efficiently the procedure is organized and how little the parents can do beyond accompany their child to the institution.

Rainer tells Hana that Erika was taken to be killed, with morphia and scopolamine administered to end her life quickly. He says he thinks it was for the best, but the statement offers no easy resolution to the conflict between parental helplessness, the severity of Erika’s illness, and the fact that an institution deliberately killed her. His later explanation that the family had, in his view, already said goodbye months earlier registers the emotional distance created by the illness, not the disappearance of their responsibility or grief.

Revelation and Narrative Significance

Erika’s history is revealed in a private conversation in the Glass Room, after Hana asks Rainer why he has been so guarded. Against the room’s associations with scientific measurement and controlled proportions, he speaks of a mutation, a condition beyond cure, and an institution that turned medical procedure into a means of killing. The contrast unsettles any confidence that scientific language or orderly administration can make suffering comprehensible or humane.

The story of Erika changes the meaning of Rainer’s earlier claim that he had no child. His confession does not simply supply missing family history: it exposes a loss he had kept from others and the moral burden attached to her death. Hana listens with compassion, while Rainer resents her pity. Erika is therefore present in the narrative both through the remembered details of her infancy and through the difficulty of telling what happened to her. Her fate connects a family’s intimate bereavement to the wider persecution and killing of disabled people, without reducing either dimension to the other.