Erika is sent to be killed

Erika is sent to be killed after a progressive inherited illness has left her profoundly impaired. The narrator recounts her birth, deterioration, and death to Hana Hanáková in the Glass Room, disclosing a history he had concealed: Erika was taken to a clinic at Hartheim Castle when she was four and killed by injection. His explanation that this was for the best does not resolve the loss; it leads instead to the further revelation that Hedda died by suicide days later, and leaves the narrator exposed to Hana’s knowledge and compassion.

The concealed child

The account begins when the narrator corrects his earlier claim that there had been no child. He and Hedda had a daughter, Erika, born from a love some people considered to have crossed forbidden boundaries. For a time, he remembers her as beautiful and perfect; Hedda, who had not expected motherhood to bring such fulfilment, found in the child something beyond music. The narrator tells Hana this history in the Glass Room, where his confession is prompted not by an impersonal inquiry but by the intimacy of their encounter and his sense that his defences have given way.

The loss unfolds first as a change in the child. Erika developed normally for six months: she smiled, laughed, recognized her parents, and reached for them. Then the abilities she had gained began to disappear. The narrator compares the change to a piano going out of tune, and demonstrates a chord in the Glass Room as he explains that its corresponding notes remain exact. Against that image of precision, Erika’s development runs backward: she stops smiling and responding, and can no longer grasp her toys.

Illness and reversal

The narrator gives the medical name as infantile amaurotic congenital idiocy, explaining that blindness was one symptom, not the whole condition. Signs appeared in Erika’s retina; she gradually lost control of her head, hearing, and responsiveness. After beginning to crawl, she lost that capacity too. Spasms and convulsions followed. The sequence is described as an unlearning of what she had acquired, until the once-responsive child became entirely unresponsive.

The prognosis offers no recovery. The narrator says that the condition would ultimately take Erika’s bodily functions and kill her, usually by the age of four or five. He describes the underlying cause as an inborn error of metabolism: a substance accumulates in the brain and disables nerve cells. The mutation was recessive, present within his own body, and required a corresponding inheritance from each parent for the disease to occur. This explanation gives the tragedy a biological mechanism, but not a remedy or a way out.

The journey to Hartheim

Erika did not die in the manner the narrator has just described as typical. At four years old, she was taken from Munich to a castle in Upper Austria. The journey took place in winter, over difficult roads, and the family arrived to find snow covering the grounds. They parked outside the main gate and carried Erika to the entrance. An orderly answered almost immediately, as if the family’s arrival had already been expected.

The narrator calls the destination a kind of clinic. Forms had been prepared; staff mainly needed to confirm the parents’ identities. Afterward, they were placed in a waiting room and given a few minutes. By then, he says, they had already said goodbye to Erika months earlier, as her abilities disappeared. A nurse came after five minutes and took the child away. The scene’s administrative efficiency makes the purpose of the visit unmistakable only when the narrator states it plainly: Erika was taken there to be killed.

Death and its aftermath

The narrator says that Erika was killed quickly with an injection of morphia and scopolamine, which he believes was meant to spare her further suffering. He cannot offer Hana an easy moral answer. His statement that he thinks it was for the best sits beside the fact that he and Hedda had to bring their four-year-old daughter to the castle and leave without her. The account preserves that unresolved distance between a decision presented as merciful and a death that remains devastating.

A few days later, Hedda returned early from the conservatory, ran a bath, and cut open her veins with one of the narrator’s razors. Her suicide follows the death of Erika, but the account does not reduce it to a single stated motive. It makes the consequences of the child’s illness and death inseparable from the family’s grief, while leaving the precise limits of what either parent could bear unclaimed.

Confession in the Glass Room

The revelation changes the encounter between the narrator and Hana. He resents the pity he sees in her expression, though he recognizes her compassion, and wonders why he has entrusted her with something he has never told anyone else. What he has disclosed gives Hana knowledge of both his fear and his private history. The narrator’s confidence in science as the route to answers persists, yet Erika’s death and Hedda’s suicide expose the boundary of that confidence: an explanation of the mutation can describe what happened without making the loss intelligible or restoring what was lost.