Who was Ellen Brand? We had almost forgotten that our audience does not know her, whereas the name if quite familiar to us. Who was she? Almost nobody at first glance. A sweet young thing of nineteen – everyone called her Elly – with flax blond hair, a Danish girl, not even from Copenhagen, but from Odense on the island of Fyn, where her father owned a butter factory. She knew something about real life, had in fact spent a couple of years as a clerk in a provincial branch office of a national bank, sitting on a swivel stool, a sleeve protector on her right arm, and staring at massive tomes – and had ended up with a fever. Her case was negligible, really more suspicion than fact, even though Elly was delicate, and obviously anemic, too – but definitely a likeable girl, the sort you would have loved to pat on her flax-blond head, as the director did regularly whenever he spoke to her in the dining hall. There was an aura of Nordic coolness about her, a glasslike chasteness, a virginial, childish quality that was quite attractive, and were both the full, pure look in her blue, childlike eyes, and her pointed, refined way of speaking, in a slightly broken German with the typical mispronunciations of Danes – like “fleck” for “flesh”. There was nothing remarkable about her facial features. The chin was too small. She sat at the same table as Hermine Kleefeld, who mothered her.

This, then, was Fraülein Brand, Elly, the friendly little Danish girl, who rode a bike and used to sit on an office swivel stool – and there were things about her that no one would have even dreamed possible on first or second glance at that shining face, but began to emerge within only a few weeks of her arrival up here and that Dr. Krokowski saw as his task to uncover in all their strangeness.