“I was, of course, not the only agent sent in. I believe I was the only one to survive the war.
“I know of one who broke. He had to witness the extermination of a hundred Jews in a village in the Ukraine, and he seized one of the Spandaus and turned it against the other machine-gunners and the officers. They say he killed more than a dozen SS before they shot him down. Perhaps he was an idiot, perhaps a hero; in any case it is impossible not to understand what forced him to do this. At the time I thought him a fool. I felt sorry for him—his lack of strength. Since the war I have realized how wrong I was to feel that way. But you must see how, at that time, it was necessary for me to feel that way. It was the only way I could do what I’d been assigned to do.*
“I had a miniature camera. The assignment was to secure photographic and documentary proof of the Nazi atrocities. This then could be released to the world. In our naïveté we believed that the world could not continue to ignore the facts once we had presented such irrefutable evidence.” *
“I arrived in Poltava in December of nineteen forty-two. The area was the headquarters of Standartenführer Krausser’s Einsatzgruppe, but as I have said I never encountered Krausser face-to-face. I did meet two or three Scharführeren and a completely insane Haputscharführer [respectively, SS sergeants and a master-sergeant] who were under Krausser’s command. Later, sometime in nineteen forty-three, I was to meet a man from my brother’s village whom I took into my confidence. In the end I assisted him to escape from the Germans and the Russians and brought him back to Palestine with me. His name was Lev Zalmanson, if it matters. He was a man of volatile emotions and extremely quick intelligence. I felt he would be a valuable addition to our small force. In Palestine over a space of some weeks I had an opportunity to learn from him almost all the details of the story I’m about to tell you. Unhappily he began to brood on the events, he became terribly depressed—pathologically so—and then he suddenly turned violent and had to be confined in an institution. Not long after that, he committed suicide.
“Now I shall tell you about my brother and Heinz Krausser. You will understand that my information comes from Lev Zalmanson, and from things told to me by the three SS sergeants I have mentioned.”
“My brother had become very religious. Have I told you that? After he returned from Siberia. He worked for some years as clerk to an apothecary in a shtetl near Poltava, and then around nineteen thirty he moved to a poultry farm outside the village. He had married—I never met his wife—and there were three children. He took a job as director of the workers on this farm; I believe I’ve mentioned Maxim’s extraordinary leadership qualities.
“He was still a young man but the community regarded him almost as an elder, because of his wisdom and leadership. He wrote me that he would like to have taken up formal rabbinical studies. But this was not allowed under the Soviet regime. Still, one could almost say that my brother became a rabbi, although an unordained one.
“The Soviets had boarded up the synagogue and there was no rabbi nearer than forty or fifty kilometers away. As a result, the poultry farm became a sort of informal community center. When the Red Army began to fall back through the village and it was obvious that the Germans would be upon them at any moment—this was in August or the beginning of September, in nineteen forty-two—the people gathered at the poultry farm.
“The people knew the Germans would be upon them in a matter of days—possibly hours. They didn’t know what they should do. They had heard of the atrocities of course; the village harbored a number of refugee survivors of the Nazi murders to the west.
“There were partisan bands in the hills. Fighting both the Germans and the Reds. It was suggested the people desert the village and join the partisans.
“Many people rejected this idea because their wives and children and the old people couldn’t possibly survive winter encampment in the open with the partisans. Besides, the partisans were not Jews and would not welcome them except perhaps at gunpoint.
“Some others suggested they form their own partisan band—not to fight but to stay out of the hands of the Germans. It was then suggested that perhaps the village should retreat eastward, en masse—into those areas which were far beyond the German advance.
“Zalmanson told me this idea [that the entire village retreat toward the Caucasus] was the most popular one until one of the Ukrainian refugees pointed out that no one had the necessary internal passports, and that in the Ukraine he’d known of a case where a shtetl tried to flee en masse and had been machine-gunned off the road by a retreating Red Army battalion, because they were in the way.
“And then as always there was the question whether the children and the old people could survive such a march.
“The people prevailed upon Maxim for his opinion. Maxim had witnessed the winter retreat across Siberia with Kolchak and he knew too well what flight would mean to these people. None of them was equipped for survival under such circumstances. These were not soldiers, not nomads, not outdoor people in any way. They were villagers and a few farmers.
“He told them they must stay. Stay here and pray that the Nazis did not come to the village.
“If you have seen the German army move at night you do not forget it. The heavy measured tramp of their boots, growing louder. The soldiers’ faces blackened with burnt cork, the ribbons of light stabbing through the slits of the blackout headlights on the vehicles. The silhouette of an officer up in the turret of the thirty-seven-millimeter gun of a Panzerwagen, talking into a radio, calling down artillery on some suspected shadow ahead—first the rushing approach of an HE shell, then the ground shuddering.
“At my brother’s village the infantry stopped just short of the town. A scout company went among the houses to make sure it was secure, but the main body encamped outside the shtetl. The soldiers unfolded their shelter-halves and dug holes while the villagers watched. Whenever a German patrol came close, the villagers would put their hands in the air to indicate their noncombatant status. Many of them went around with white handkerchiefs displayed at all times.
“These Germans did not arrest them. They hardly paid attention to them at all. Civilians were of no interest to the Wehrmacht as long as they stayed out of the way. The soldiers were too tired for sadistic sport.
“Zalmanson said they all trembled in terror that whole night, but there were no incidents and the next day the Germans folded up their shelter-halves and moved on past the village, leaving only a small squad to secure it.
“The sound of the guns dissolved to the southeast. The German squad kept to themselves, having commandeered a farmhouse on a small height overlooking the village.
“The lines of battle had veered away to the south, and there were no heavy movements of Germans through the area; the rear echelons and reinforcements had gone past to the south, on their road eastward to the fighting. For a few days it appeared there was room for hope that the Germans had forgotten their existence in the little valley.
“Finally, of course, some sort of minor official of the German Occupation arrived in the village in the sidecar of a motorcycle, and that was that.”
“It was in September that this Heinz Krausser came on the scene. The shtetl was only one of several on his list.
“He arrived in one of those open armored cars and he was carrying a Schmeisser machine pistol in one hand. His headquarters platoon was with him—fifty or sixty men. They went through the village tacking up posters on the walls, ordering all Jews to present themselves at eight o’clock the next morning in a field at the edge of town, for what was called “registration and resettlement.” At the bottom in very large letters it said Bei Fluchtversuch Wird Geschossen’—anyone who tries to escape will be shot. I have seen these posters in other villages.