The Kindly Ones Read online

  I was already working night and day, and snatching two hours of sleep when I could; but to tell the truth, I didn’t really contribute to the planning: the officers of the Teilkommandos, who weren’t yet entirely snowed under (they were shooting politruki unmasked by Vogt’s interrogators and a few suspects picked up more or less at random, but no more than that), took charge of it. The meetings with the Sixth Army and the HSSPF resumed the next day. The Sonderkommando proposed a site: west of the city, in the Syrets neighborhood, near the Jewish cemetery but still outside the inhabited zones, there were some wide ravines that would do well. “There’s also a freight depot there,” Blobel added. “That will let the Jews think we’re sending them away to settle somewhere else.” The Wehrmacht sent some surveyors to plot the land: based on their report, Jeckeln and Blobel decided on the ravine known as the Grandmother or the Old Lady, at the bottom of which ran a little stream. Blobel called together all his officers: “The Jews to be executed are antisocials, without any value, useless for Germany. We will also include asylum patients, Gypsies, and any other useless mouths to feed. But we’ll start with the Jews.” We studied the maps attentively; we had to position the cordons, arrange the routes, and plan the transports; reducing the number of trucks and the distances would save gasoline; it was also necessary to consider the munitions and food supplies for the troops; everything had to be calculated. For that we also had to decide on the method of execution: Blobel finally settled on a variation of the Sardinenpackung. For the shooters and the escorts of the condemned, Jeckeln insisted we use his two Orpo battalions, which visibly upset Blobel. There were also Grafhort’s Waffen-SS and Hauptmann Krumme’s Orpos. For the cordons, the Sixth Army placed several companies at our disposal, and they would supply the trucks. Häfner set up a depot for sorting the valuables, between the Lukyanovskoe and the Jewish cemeteries, a hundred and fifty meters from the ravine: Eberhard insisted the apartment keys be recovered and labeled, since the fires had thrown twenty-five thousand civilians out on the street, and the Wehrmacht wanted to rehouse them as soon as possible. The Sixth Army delivered one hundred thousand cartridges to us and printed up posters, in German, Russian, and Ukrainian, on cheap gray wrapping paper. Blobel, when he wasn’t immersed in his maps, somehow found time for other activities; that afternoon, with the help of the engineers, he had the Cathedral of the Dormition dynamited, a superb little eleventh-century Orthodox church in the middle of the lavra: “The Ukrainians have to pay a little too,” he explained to us later on with satisfaction. I discussed this in passing with Vogt, since I didn’t understand the sense of this action at all; according to him, it was definitely not an initiative of Blobel’s, but he had no idea who could have authorized or ordered it. “The Obergruppenführer, probably. It’s his style.” In any case it wasn’t Dr. Rasch, whom we saw hardly at all anymore. When I met Thomas in a hallway I asked him furtively: “What’s happening with the Brigadeführer? He doesn’t look right.”—“He’s been arguing with Jeckeln. And also with Koch.” Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia, had been named Reichskommissar of the Ukraine a month before. “What about?” I asked.—“I’ll tell you later. Anyway he won’t be around much longer. One question, though: the Jews in the Dnieper, is that you guys?” The night before, all the Jews who had gone to synagogue for Shabbat had disappeared; their bodies had been found in the morning, floating in the river. “The army has filed a complaint,” he went on. “They say that actions like that disturb the civilian population. It’s not gemütlich.”—“And what we’re planning is gemütlich? I think the civilian population will soon have other things to worry about.”—“It’s not the same. On the contrary, they’ll be delighted to be rid of their Jews.” I shrugged: “No, it wasn’t us. As far as I know. We’re a little busy, right now, we have other things to see to. And also those are not really our methods.”

  On Sunday we put the posters up all over the city. The Jews were asked to gather the next morning in front of their cemetery on the Melnikova, each with fifty kilograms of luggage, to be relocated as settlers in various regions of the Ukraine. I had my doubts as to the success of this ploy: this wasn’t Lutsk anymore, and I knew that rumors had seeped through the front lines about the fate that awaited the Jews; the farther east we got, the fewer Jews we were finding; they were fleeing before us now with the Red Army, whereas in the beginning they had waited for us trustingly. On the other hand, as Hennicke pointed out to me, the Bolsheviks were keeping remarkably silent about our executions: in their radio broadcasts, they accused us of monstrous, exaggerated atrocities, but without ever mentioning the Jews; maybe, according to our experts, they were afraid of weakening the sacred unity of the Soviet people. We knew, through our informants, that many Jews were designated for evacuation to the rear, but they seemed to be selected according to the same criteria as the Ukrainians and the Russians, as engineers, doctors, members of the Party, specialized workers; most of the Jews who fled left on their own. “It’s hard to understand,” Hennicke added. “If the Jews really dominate the Communist Party, they should have made more effort to save their brethren.”—“They’re clever,” Dr. von Scheven, another officer from the Group, suggested. “They don’t want to lay themselves open to our propaganda by too obviously favoring their own people. Stalin must also be counting on Great Russian nationalism. To keep power, they sacrifice their poor cousins.”—“You’re probably right,” Hennicke said. I smiled to myself, but bitterly: as in the Middle Ages, we were reasoning with syllogisms that proved each other. And these proofs led us down the path of no return.

  The Grosse Aktion began on Monday, September 29, on the morning of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Blobel had let us know this the day before: “They will atone, they will atone.” I had stayed in my offices in the palace to write a report. Callsen appeared on the threshold: “You aren’t coming? You know very well that the Brigadeführer gave the order that all officers should be present.”—“I know. I’ll finish this and then I’ll come.”—“As you like.” He disappeared and I went on working. An hour later I got up, picked up my cap and gloves, and went to find my driver. Outside it was cold; I thought about going back in for a sweater, but decided not to. The sky was overcast; fall was advancing; soon it would be winter. I passed by the still-smoking ruins on Kreshchatik, then went up Shevchenko Boulevard. The Jews were marching west in long columns, in family groups, calmly, carrying bundles or backpacks. Most of them looked very poor, probably refugees; the men and boys all wore Soviet worker’s caps, but here and there you could also make out a soft hat. Some were coming in carts drawn by bony horses, loaded with old people and suitcases. I had my driver make a detour, since I wanted to see more; he turned left and went past the university, then veered off toward the station by Saksaganskaya Street. Jews were coming out with their things from the houses and mingling with the stream of people flowing by in a peaceful murmur. Almost no German soldiers could be seen. On the streetcorners these human streams merged, grew larger, and went on; there was no agitation. I drove back up the hill away from the station and rejoined the boulevard at the corner of the great botanical garden. A group of soldiers was standing there with some Ukrainian auxiliaries and were roasting a whole pig on an enormous spit. It smelled very good, the Jews passing by contemplated the pig with yearning, and the soldiers were laughing and making fun of them. I stopped and got out of the car. People were pouring out of all the side streets and coming to join the main flow, streams merging into a river. Periodically, the interminable column stopped, then started up again with a jolt. In front of me, old women with garlands of onions around their necks were holding the hands of kids with runny noses; I noticed a little girl standing between jars of preserves piled up higher than she. There seemed to me to be mostly old people and children, but it was hard to judge: the able-bodied men must have joined the Red Army, or else fled. To the right, in front of the botanical garden, a corpse lay in the gutter, one arm folded over its face; the people filed by alongside it wi
thout looking at it. I went up to the soldiers gathered around the pig: “What happened?” A Feldwebel saluted and replied: “An agitator, Herr Obersturmführer. He was shouting, exciting the crowd and telling lies about the Wehrmacht. We told him to be quiet, but he kept shouting.” I looked at the crowd again: the people seemed calm, a little nervous maybe, but passive. Through my network of informers, I had contributed to spreading some rumors: the Jews were going to Palestine, they were going to a ghetto, to Germany to work. The local authorities put in place by the Wehrmacht had also done their part to avert panic. I knew that rumors of a massacre had also spread, but all these rumors canceled one another out; people must not have known what to think anymore, and so we could count on their memories of the German occupation of 1918, on their trust in Germany, and on hope too, vile hope.

  I left. I hadn’t given any directions to my driver, but he followed the flow of Jews, toward Melnikova Street. Still almost no German soldiers were visible; just a few checkpoints at the crossroads, such as at the corner of the botanical garden, or another one where Artyoma joins Melnikova. There, I witnessed my first incident of the day: Feldgendarmen were beating some bearded Jews with long curly sidelocks in front of their ears, rabbis possibly, dressed only in shirts. They were red with blood, their shirts were soaked, women were screaming, ripples ran through the crowd. Then the Feldgendarmen seized hold of the rabbis and took them away. I studied the people: they knew that these men were going to die, that was obvious from their anguished looks; but they were still hoping that it would just be the rabbis, the pious.

  At the end of Melnikova, in front of the Jewish cemetery, some antitank barriers and barbed wire made the roadway narrower, guarded by soldiers from the Wehrmacht and some Ukrainian Polizei. The cordon started there; after this bottleneck, the Jews could no longer turn back. The sorting zone was a little farther on, to the left, in an empty lot in front of the immense Christian cemetery of Lukyanovskoe. A long red-brick wall, rather low, surrounded the necropolis; behind, some tall trees barred the sky, half bare or else still red and yellow. On the other side of Degtiarovska Street, a row of tables had been set up in front of which the Jews were made to line up. There I found some of our officers: “So, it’s already begun?” Häfner motioned his head to the north: “Yes, it started hours ago. Where have you been? The Standartenführer is furious.” Behind every table was a noncom from the Kommando, flanked by an interpreter and some soldiers; first the Jews had to hand over their papers, then their money, their valuables and jewelry, then the keys to their apartments, legibly labeled, and finally their clothes and shoes. They must have suspected something, but they didn’t say anything; in any case, the zone was sealed behind the cordon. Some Jews tried to argue with the Polizei, but the Ukrainians shouted, struck them, sent them back into the line. A stinging wind was blowing; I was cold and regretted not having brought my sweater; from time to time, when the wind rose, a faint crackling noise could be heard; most of the Jews didn’t seem to notice it. Behind the row of tables, our Askaris were bundling the confiscated clothing into trucks; the vehicles set off for the city, where we had set up a sorting center. I went to examine the pile of papers, thrown in a heap in the middle of the lot to be burned later on. There were torn passports, workbooks, union or ration cards, family photos; the wind was carrying away the lighter papers, the square was littered with them. I gazed at some of the photographs: snapshots, studio portraits, of men, women, and children, grandparents and chubby-faced babies; sometimes a shot of vacation scenery, of the happiness and normality of their lives before all this. It reminded me of a photograph I kept in my drawer, next to my bed, in high school. It was the portrait of a Prussian family from before the Great War, three young Junkers in cadet uniforms and probably their sister. I don’t remember where I found it, maybe during one of our rare outings, in a thrift store or a postcard shop. At that time I was very unhappy, I had been placed by force in that horrible boarding school after a major transgression (this all took place in France, where we had gone a few years after my father’s disappearance). At night, I would examine this photo for hours on end, by moonlight or beneath the covers with a little pocket flashlight. Why, I wondered, couldn’t I have grown up in a perfect family like that one, rather than in this polluted hell? The Jewish families in the scattered photos seemed happy too; hell, for them, was here, now, and they could only lament the vanished past. Beyond the tables, the Jews in underclothing were trembling with cold; the Ukrainian Polizei separated the men and boys from the women and little children; the women, children, and old people were loaded into Wehrmacht trucks to be transported to the ravine; the others had to go on foot. Häfner had joined me. “The Standartenführer is looking for you. Watch out, he’s really in a rage.”—“Why?”—“He’s mad at the Obergruppenführer for imposing his two police battalions on him. He thinks the Obergruppenführer wants to take all the credit for the Aktion.”—“But that’s idiotic.” Blobel arrived, he had been drinking and his face was glistening. As soon as he saw me he began railing at me rudely: “What the hell have you been up to? We’ve been waiting for you for hours.” I saluted him: “Standartenführer! The SD has its own tasks. I was examining the arrangements, to prevent any incidents.” He calmed down a little: “So?” he grumbled. —“Everything seems in order, Standartenführer.”—“Good. Go up there. The Brigadeführer wants to see all the officers.”

  I got back into my car and followed the trucks; at the end of the road, the Polizei unloaded the women and children, who rejoined the men arriving on foot. A number of Jews, as they walked, were singing religious songs; few tried to run away; the ones who did were soon stopped by the cordon or shot down. From the top, you could hear the gun bursts clearly, and the women especially were starting to panic. But there was nothing they could do. The condemned were divided into little groups and a noncom sitting at a table counted them; then our Askaris took them and led them over the brink of the ravine. After each volley, another group left, it went very quickly. I walked around the ravine by the west to join the other officers, who had taken up positions above the north slope. From there, the ravine stretched out in front of me: it must have been some fifty meters wide and maybe thirty meters deep, and went on for several kilometers; the little stream at the bottom ran into the Syrets, which gave its name to the neighborhood. Boards had been placed over this stream so the Jews and their shooters could cross easily; beyond, scattered pretty much everywhere on the bare sides of the ravine, the little white clusters were multiplying. The Ukrainian “packers” dragged their charges to these piles and forced them to lie down over them or next to them; the men from the firing squad then advanced and passed along the rows of people lying down almost naked, shooting each one with a submachine bullet in the neck; there were three firing squads in all. Between the executions some officers inspected the bodies and finished them off with a pistol. To one side, on a hill overlooking the scene, stood groups of officers from the SS and the Wehrmacht. Jeckeln was there with his entourage, flanked by Dr. Rasch; I also recognized some high-ranking officers of the Sixth Army. I saw Thomas, who noticed me but didn’t return my greeting. On the other side, the little groups tumbled down the flank of the ravine and joined the clusters of bodies that stretched farther and farther out. The cold was becoming biting, but some rum was being passed around, and I drank a little. Blobel emerged suddenly from a car on our side of the ravine, he must have driven around it; he was drinking from a little flask and shouting, complaining that things weren’t going fast enough. But the pace of the operations had been stepped up as much as possible. The shooters were relieved every hour, and those who weren’t shooting supplied them with rum and reloaded the clips. The officers weren’t talking much; some were trying to hide their distress. The Ortskommandantur had set up a field kitchen, and a military pastor was preparing some tea to warm up the Orpos and the members of the Sonderkommando. At lunchtime, the superior officers returned to the city, but the subalterns stayed to eat with the men. S
ince the executions had to continue without pause, the canteen had been set up farther down, in a hollow from which you couldn’t see the ravine. The Group was responsible for the food supplies; when the cases were broken open, the men, seeing rations of blood pudding, started raging and shouting violently. Häfner, who had just spent an hour administering deathshots, was yelling and throwing the open cans onto the ground: “What the hell is this shit?” Behind me, a Waffen-SS was noisily vomiting. I myself was livid, the sight of the pudding made my stomach turn. I went up to Hartl, the Group’s Verwaltungsführer, and asked him how he could have done that. But Hartl, standing there in his ridiculously wide riding breeches, remained indifferent. Then I shouted at him that it was a disgrace: “In this situation, we can do without such food!” Hartl turned his back to me and walked away; Häfner threw the cans into a box while another officer, the young Nagel, tried to calm me down: “Come now, Obersturmführer…”—“No, it’s not normal, you have to think about things like that. It’s his responsibility.”—“Absolutely,” Häfner growled. “I’m going to go look for something else.” Someone poured me a glass of rum that I swallowed in one draught; it burned, and did me good. Hartl had returned and was pointing a finger at me: “Obersturmführer, you don’t have to talk to me like that.”—“And you didn’t have to…to…to…,” I stammered, pointing to the overturned crates.—“Meine Herren!” Vogt barked. “Let’s end this, shall we?” Everyone was visibly on edge. I drew away and ate a little bread and a raw onion; behind me, the officers were arguing animatedly. A little later, the superior officers had returned, and Hartl must have made a report, because Blobel came to see me and reprimanded me in the name of Dr. Rasch: “In these circumstances, we must behave like officers.” He gave me the order, when Janssen had come back up from the ravine, to replace him. “You have your weapon? Yes? No sissies in my Kommando, you understand?” He was spluttering, he was completely drunk and almost out of control. A little later on I saw Janssen climb back up. He threw me a dour look: “Your turn.” The side of the ravine, where I stood, was too steep for me to climb down, I had to walk back around and come in from the rear. Around the bodies, the sandy earth was soaked with blackish blood; the stream too was black with blood. The horrible smell of excrement was stronger than that of blood, a lot of people defecated as they died; fortunately there was a brisk wind that blew away some of the stench. Seen close up, things were proceeding much less calmly: the Jews who arrived at the top of the ravine, driven by the Askaris and the Orpos, screamed with terror when they saw the scene and struggled, the “packers” hit them with iron rods or metal cables to force them to go and lie down, even on the ground they kept yelling and trying to stand up, and the children clung to life as much as the adults, they’d leap up and start running until a “packer” caught them and knocked them out, often the shots missed their mark and people were only wounded, but the shooters didn’t pay any attention and already moved on to the next victim, the wounded rolled over, writhed, groaned in pain, others, silent and in shock, remained paralyzed, their eyes wide open. Men came and went, they shot round after round, almost without stopping. I was petrified, I didn’t know what to do. Grafhorst came over and shook me by the arm: “Obersturmführer!” He pointed his gun at the bodies. “Try to finish off the wounded.” I took out my pistol and headed for a group: a very young man was sobbing in pain, I aimed my gun at his head and squeezed the trigger, but it didn’t go off, I had forgotten to lift the safety catch, I lifted it and shot him in the forehead, he twitched and was suddenly still. To reach some of the wounded, you had to walk over bodies, it was terribly slippery, the limp white flesh rolled under my boots, bones snapped treacherously and made me stumble, I sank up to my ankles in mud and blood. It was horrible and it filled me with a rending feeling of disgust, like that night in Spain, in the outhouse with the cockroaches, I was still young, my father-in-law had treated us to a vacation in Catalonia, we were sleeping in a village, and one night I got diarrhea, I ran to the outhouse at the back of the garden, lighting my way with a pocket flashlight, and the pit, clean during the day, was swarming with giant brown cockroaches, they filled me with horror, I tried to hold it in and go back to sleep, but the cramps were too strong, there was no chamber pot, I put on my big rain boots and went back to the outhouse, telling myself that I could chase the roaches away with my foot and be quick about my business, I put my head through the door as I lit up the ground, then I noticed a shimmer on the wall, I pointed my flashlight at it, the wall too was swarming with cockroaches, all the walls, the ceiling too, and above the door, I slowly turned my head and they were there on the lintel too, a black swarming mass, then I slowly withdrew my head, very slowly, and went back to my room and held it in till morning. Walking on the bodies of the Jews gave me the same feeling, I fired almost haphazardly, at anything I saw wriggling, then I pulled myself together and tried to pay attention, but in any case I could only finish off the most recent ones, underneath them already lay other wounded, not yet dead, but soon to be. I wasn’t the only one to lose my composure, some of the shooters also were shaking and drinking between batches. I noticed a young Waffen-SS, I didn’t know his name: he was beginning to shoot any which way, his submachine gun at his hip, he was laughing insanely and emptying his cartridge clip at random, first shooting from left to right, then two shots and then three, like a child following the cracks in the pavement according to some mysterious internal topography. I went up to him and shook him but he kept on laughing and shooting right in front of me, I took away his submachine gun and slapped him, then sent him over to the men who were reloading the magazines; Grafhorst sent me another man in his place and I threw him the submachine gun, shouting, “And do it right, understand?!” Nearby, another group was being brought up: my gaze met that of a beautiful young woman, almost naked but very elegant, calm, her eyes full of an immense sadness. I moved away. When I came back she was still alive, half turned onto her back, a bullet had come out beneath her breast and she was gasping, petrified, her pretty lips trembled and seemed to want to form a word, she stared at me with her large surprised incredulous eyes, the eyes of a wounded bird, and that look stuck into me, split open my stomach and let a flood of sawdust pour out, I was a rag doll and didn’t feel anything, and at the same time I wanted with all my heart to bend over and brush the dirt and sweat off her forehead, caress her cheek and tell her that it was going to be all right, that everything would be fine, but instead I convulsively shot a bullet into her head, which after all came down to the same thing, for her in any case if not for me, since at the thought of this senseless human waste I was filled with an immense, boundless rage, I kept shooting at her and her head exploded like a fruit, then my arm detached itself from me and went off all by itself down the ravine, shooting left and right, I ran after it, waving at it to wait with my other arm, but it didn’t want to, it mocked me and shot at the wounded all by itself, without me; finally, out of breath, I stopped and started to cry. Now, I thought, it’s over, my arm will never come back, but to my great surprise it was there again, in its place, solidly attached to my shoulder, and Häfner was coming up to me and saying, “That’s enough, Obersturmführer. I’ll take over for you.”