The Kindly Ones Page 13

  The next day I awoke distraught, with a sad rage stuck in my head. I went to see Kehrig and closed the office door: “I’d like to talk with you, Sturmbannführer.”—“What about, Obersturmführer?”—“About the extermination order.” He raised his bird’s head and stared at me through his fine-rimmed glasses: “There is nothing to discuss, Obersturmführer. Anyhow I’m leaving.” He gestured to me to sit down. “You’re leaving? How’s that?”—“I settled it with Brigadeführer Streckenbach, with the help of a friend. I’m going back to Berlin.”—“When?”—“Soon, in a few days.”—“And your replacement?” He shrugged: “He’ll come when he comes. In the meantime, you’ll run the shop.” He stared at me again: “If you want to leave too, you know, that can be arranged. I can go see Streckenbach for you in Berlin, if you like.”—“Thank you, Sturmbannführer. But I’ll stay.”—“Why?” he asked sharply. “To end up like Häfner or Hans? To wallow in this mud?”—“You’ve stayed till now,” I said gently. He laughed dryly: “I requested my transfer at the beginning of July. In Lutsk. But you know how it is, it takes time.”—“I’ll be sorry to see you leave, Sturmbannführer.”—“Not me. What they want to do is insane. I’m not the only one who thinks so. Schulz, from Kommando Five, broke down when he learned about the Vernichtungsbefehl. He asked to leave right away, and the Obergruppenführer gave his consent.”—“You might be right. But if you leave, if Oberführer Schulz leaves, if all the honorable men leave, only the butchers will be left here, the dregs. We can’t accept that.” He made a grimace of disgust: “Because you think you can change something if you stay? You?” He shook his head. “No, Doktor, follow my advice, leave. Let the butchers take care of the butchering.” “Thank you, Sturmbannführer.” I shook his hand and left. I headed for the Gruppenstab and went to find Thomas. “Kehrig is a sissy,” he said curtly when I had reported the conversation to him. “Schulz too. We’ve had our eye on Schulz for a while now. In Lemberg, he let some condemned men go, without permission. All the better if he leaves, we don’t need men like that.” He looked at me pensively. “Of course, it’s atrocious, what they’re asking us to do. But you’ll see, we’ll get through it.” He suddenly grew even more serious. “I don’t believe it’s the right solution. It’s an emergency response, improvised because of the war. We must win this war soon; afterward, we can discuss things more calmly, and carefully think them through. More subtle opinions can be taken into account. With the war, that’s impossible.”—“Do you think it will last much longer? We were supposed to reach Moscow in five weeks. It’s been two months now and we haven’t even taken Kiev or Leningrad.”—“It’s hard to say. It’s obvious that we underestimated their industrial potential. Every time we think their reserves are exhausted, they throw fresh divisions at us. But they must be reaching the end now. And also, the Führer’s decision to send us Guderian will soon open up the front, here. As for Army Group Center, since the beginning of the month, they’ve taken four hundred thousand prisoners. And in Uman we’re also surrounding two entire armies.”

  I returned to the Kommando. In the mess, alone, Yakov, Bohr’s little Jew, was playing the piano. I sat down on a bench to listen to him. He was playing Mozart, the andante of one of the sonatas, and it brought a lump to my throat, deepening my sadness even more. When he had finished I asked him: “Yakov, do you know Rameau? Couperin?”—“No, Herr Offizier. What is it?”—“It’s French music. You should learn it. I’ll try to find some scores.”—“Is it beautiful?”—“It might be the most beautiful thing there is.” “More beautiful than Bach?” I considered the question: “Almost as beautiful as Bach,” I acknowledged. This Yakov must have been about twelve years old, and could have played in any concert hall in Europe. He came from the region of Czernowitz and had grown up in a German-speaking family; with the occupation of the Bukovina, in 1940, he’d found himself in the USSR; his father had been deported by the Soviets and his mother had died in one of our air raids. He was truly a handsome boy: a long narrow face, full lips, black hair in untamed tufts, long blue-veined fingers. Everyone here liked him; even Lübbe left him alone. “Herr Offizier?” Yakov asked. He kept his eyes on the piano. “Can I ask you a question?”—“Of course.”—“Is it true that you’re going to kill all the Jews?” I straightened up: “Who told you that?”—“Last night, I heard Herr Bohr talking with the other officers. They were shouting very loudly.”—“They were drinking. You shouldn’t have been listening.” He insisted, his eyes still lowered: “So you’ll kill me, too?”—“Of course not.” My hands were tingling, I forced myself to keep a normal, almost cheerful tone of voice: “Why would we want to kill you?”—“I’m Jewish too.”—“That’s all right, you work for us. You’re a Hiwi now.” He began hitting a key gently, a high note: “The Russians always told us that the Germans were mean. But I don’t think so. I like you.” I didn’t say anything. “Would you like me to play?”—“Play.”—“What would you like me to play?”—“Play whatever you like.”

  The mood within the Kommando was becoming execrable; the officers were nervous, they shouted at the slightest provocation. Callsen and the others went back to their Teilkommandos; everyone kept his opinions to himself, but you could see that the new tasks weighed on them. Kehrig left quickly, almost without saying goodbye. Lübbe was often sick. From the field, the Teilkommandoführers sent very negative reports on the morale of their troops: there were nervous depressions, the men often cried; according to Sperath, many were suffering from sexual impotence. There was a series of incidents with the Wehrmacht: Near Korosten, a Hauptscharführer forced some Jewish women to undress and made them run naked in front of a machine gun; he took photos, and these photos were intercepted by the AOK. In Belaya Tserkov, Häfner had a confrontation with an officer from division headquarters, who had intervened to block the execution of some Jewish orphans; Blobel had to go down there himself and the affair went all the way up to von Reichenau, who confirmed the execution and reprimanded the officer; but it created quite a few ripples, and furthermore Häfner refused to inflict that on his men, and left the dirty work to his Askaris. Other officers did the same; but as the difficulties with the OUN-B persisted, this practice in turn engendered new problems: the Ukrainians, disgusted, were deserting or even committing treason. Others, however, carried out the executions without grumbling, but they shamelessly stole from the Jews and raped the women before killing them; sometimes we had to shoot our own soldiers. Kehrig’s replacement hadn’t arrived, and I was overwhelmed with work. At the end of the month, Blobel sent me to Korosten. The “Republic of Polesia,” northeast of the city, was off-limits to us per order of the Wehrmacht, but there was still a lot of work in the region. The officer in charge was Kurt Hans. I didn’t like Hans much—he was a foul man, moody; and he didn’t like me, either. Still, we had to work together. The methods had changed, they had been rationalized, systematized according to the new demands. But these changes still didn’t make the soldiers’ work any easier. Now the condemned had to undress before execution, since their clothing was collected for the Winter Aid and the repatriates. In Zhitomir, Blobel had explained to us the new practice of Sardinenpackung developed by Jeckeln, the “sardine-packing” method that Callsen already knew. With the considerable increase in volume, in Galicia, as early as July, Jeckeln had decided that the graves were filling up too quickly; the bodies were falling any which way and got all tangled up, a lot of space was wasted, and so we were wasting too much time digging; so now the condemned, undressed, had to lie on their stomachs in the bottom of the trench, and a few shooters administered a shot in the neck at point-blank range. “I have always been against the Genickschuss,” Blobel reminded us, “but now we no longer have a choice.” After each row, an officer had to perform an inspection and make sure all the condemned were indeed dead; then they were covered with a thin layer of dirt and the next group came to lie down on top of them, head to foot; when five or six layers had accumulated this way, the trench was filled in. The Teilkommandoführer
thought the men would find this too difficult, but Blobel didn’t want to hear any objections: “In my Kommando, we will do what the Obergruppenführer says.” Kurt Hans, in any case, wasn’t too bothered; he seemed indifferent to everything. I attended several executions with him. I could now distinguish three different temperaments among my colleagues. First, there were those who, even if they tried to hide it, killed with sensual pleasure; I have already talked about them, they were criminals who revealed their true nature thanks to the war. Then there were those who were disgusted by it and who killed out of duty, overcoming their repugnance, out of a love of order. Finally, there were those who regarded the Jews as animals and killed them the way a butcher slaughters a cow—a joyful or a difficult task, according to their humor or disposition. Kurt Hans clearly belonged to this last category: for him, the only thing that counted was the precision of the gesture, the efficiency, the output. Every night, he meticulously went over his totals. And what about me? I couldn’t identify with any of these three types, but that was of little help, and if I had been pushed a little, I would have had trouble articulating an honest answer. I was still looking for one. Passion for the absolute was a part of it, as was, I realized one day with terror, curiosity: here, as in so many other things in my life, I was curious, I was trying to see what effect all this would have on me. I was always observing myself: it was as if a film camera were fixed just above me, and I was at once this camera, the man it was filming, and the man who was then studying the film. Sometimes that astonished me, and often, at night, I couldn’t sleep; I stared at the ceiling; the lens didn’t leave me in peace. But the answer to my question kept slipping through my fingers.

  With the women, the children especially, our work sometimes became very difficult, heart-wrenching. The men complained nonstop, especially the older ones, the ones who had a family. Faced with these defenseless people, these mothers who had to watch their children being killed without being able to protect them, who could only die with them, our men suffered from an extreme feeling of powerlessness; they too felt defenseless. “I just want to stay whole,” a young Sturmmann from the Waffen-SS said to me one day, and I understood this desire, but I couldn’t help him. The attitude of the Jews didn’t make things any easier. Blobel had to send back to Germany a thirty-year-old Rottenführer who had spoken with a condemned man; the Jew, who was the same age as the Rottenführer, was holding in his arms a child about two and half years old; his wife, next to him, was carrying a newborn with blue eyes; and the man had looked the Rottenführer straight in the eyes and had said to him calmly, in flawless German: “Please, mein Herr, shoot the children cleanly.”—“He came from Hamburg,” the Rottenführer explained later on to Sperath, who had then told us the story; “he was almost my neighbor, his children were the same age as mine.” Even I was losing my grip. During an execution, I watched a young boy dying in the trench: the shooter must have hesitated, the shot had hit too low, in the back. The boy was twitching, his eyes were open and glassy, and this terrifying scene blended into a scene from my childhood: with a friend, I was playing cowboys and Indians with some cap pistols. It was not long after the Great War, my father had returned, I must have been about five or six, like the boy in the trench. I had hidden behind a tree; when my friend approached, I leaped out and emptied my pistol into his stomach, shouting, “Bang! Bang!” He dropped his weapon, clutched his stomach with both hands, and fell down twisting. I picked up his pistol and handed it to him: “Come on, take it. Let’s go on playing.”—“I can’t. I’m a corpse.” I closed my eyes; in front of me, the boy was still panting. After the action, I visited the shtetl, empty now, deserted; I went into the isbas, dark, miserable dwellings, with Soviet calendars and pictures cut out of magazines on the walls, a few religious objects, coarse furniture. Certainly none of this had much to do with the internationales Finanzjudentum. In one house, I found a big bucket of water on the stove, still boiling; on the ground were pots of cold water and a washbasin. I closed the door, stripped and washed myself with this water and a piece of hard soap. I scarcely diluted the hot water: it burned, my skin turned scarlet. Then I got dressed again and went out; at the entrance to the village, the houses were already in flames. But my question wouldn’t let go of me, I returned again and again, and that’s how another time, at the edge of a grave, a little girl about four years old came up and quietly took my hand. I tried to free myself, but she kept gripping it. In front of us, they were shooting the Jews. “Gdye mama?” I asked the girl in Ukrainian. She pointed toward the trench. I caressed her hair. We stayed that way for several minutes. I was dizzy, I wanted to cry. “Come with me,” I said to her in German, “don’t be afraid, come.” I headed for the entrance of the pit; she stayed in place, holding me by the hand, then followed me. I picked her up and held her out to a Waffen-SS: “Be gentle with her,” I said to him stupidly. I felt an insane rage, but didn’t want to take it out on the girl, or on the soldier. He went down into the trench with the child in his arms and I quickly turned away and entered the forest. It was a large, sparsely wooded pine forest, well cleared and full of soft light. Behind me the salvos crackled. When I was little, I often played in forests like this, around Kiel, where I lived after the war: strange games, actually. For my birthday, my father had given me a three-volume set of Tarzan, by the American writer E. R. Burroughs, which I read and reread with passion, at the table, in the bathroom, at night with a flashlight. In the forest, like my hero, I stripped naked and slipped among the trees, between the tall ferns, I lay down on beds of pine needles, enjoying the little pricks on my skin, I squatted behind a bush or a fallen tree, above a path, to spy on the people who came walking there, the others, the humans. They weren’t explicitly erotic games; I was too young for that; I probably didn’t even get erect then; but for me, the entire forest had become an erogenous zone, a vast skin as sensitive as my naked child’s skin, bristling in the cold. Later on, I should add, these games took an even stranger turn; this was still in Kiel, but probably after my father had left; I must have been nine, ten at most: naked, I would hang myself with my belt from a tree branch, and let myself go with all my weight; my blood, thrown into a panic, made my face swell, my temples beat to the point of bursting; my breath came in wheezes; finally I would stand back up, regain my breath, and begin again. That’s what forests used to mean to me, games like that, full of keen pleasure and boundless freedom; now, the woods filled me with fear.

  I returned to Zhitomir. An intense agitation reigned at the Kommandostab: Bohr was under arrest and Lübbe in hospital. Bohr had attacked him in the middle of the mess, in front of the other officers, with a chair first and then with a knife. It had taken at least six people to control him; Strehlke, the Verwaltungsführer, had had his hand slashed, not very deeply but painfully. “He went mad,” he said to me, showing me the stitches.—“But what happened?”—“It’s because of his little Jew. The one who played the piano.” Yakov had had an accident while repairing a car with Bauer: the jack, badly set, had let go, and his hand had been crushed. Sperath had examined it and declared it had to be amputated. “Then he’s no good for anything,” Blobel decided, and he had given the order to liquidate him. “Vogt took care of it,” said Strehlke, who was telling me the story. “Bohr didn’t say anything. But at dinner, Lübbe began taunting him. You know how he is. ‘No more piano,’ he said out loud. That’s when Bohr attacked him. If you want my opinion,” he added, “Lübbe got what he deserved. But it’s too bad for Bohr: a good officer, and he’s ruined his career for a little Jew. It’s not as if there were a lack of Jews, over here.”—“What’s going to happen to Bohr?”—“That’ll depend on the Standartenführer’s report. At worst, he could go to prison. Otherwise, he’ll be stripped of his rank and sent to the Waffen-SS to redeem himself.” I left him and went up to my room to lock myself in, exhausted with disgust. I understood Bohr completely; he had been wrong, of course, but I understood him. Lübbe had no right to make fun of him, that was shameful. I too had
grown attached to little Yakov; I had discreetly written to a friend in Berlin, for him to send me some Rameau and Couperin scores; I wanted Yakov to study them to discover Le Rappel des Oiseaux, Les Trois Mains, Les Barricades Mystérieuses, and all those other wonders. Now these scores were of no use to anyone: I don’t play the piano. That night I had a strange dream. I was getting up and heading toward the door, but a woman was barring the way. She had white hair and wore glasses: “No,” she said to me. “You can’t go out. Sit down and write.” I turned to my desk: a man was sitting in my chair, hammering away at my typewriter. “Excuse me,” I ventured. The noise of the keys clacking was deafening, he didn’t hear me. Timidly, I tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around and shook his head: “No,” he said, waving toward the door. I went into my library, but someone was there too, calmly tearing the pages out of my books and tossing the gutted bindings into a corner. Well then, I said to myself, in that case I’ll go to sleep. But a young woman was lying in my bed, naked beneath the sheet. When she saw me, she dragged me down to her, covering my face with kisses, wrapping her legs around mine, trying to unfasten my belt. It was only with the greatest difficulty that I managed to fight her off; the effort left me panting. I thought of throwing myself out the window; it was jammed, painted shut. The toilet, fortunately, was empty, and I hastily locked myself in.