The Russians had moved farther on. In the lane a little elephant came trotting toward me, followed by three chimpanzees and an ocelot. They went around the bodies and over the bridge without slowing down, leaving me alone. I was feverish, my mind was coming apart. But I still remember perfectly the two bodies lying on top of each other in the puddles, on the footbridge, and the animals moving off. I was sad but didn’t really know why. I felt all at once the entire weight of the past, of the pain of life and of inalterable memory, I remained alone with the dying hippopotamus, a few ostriches, and the corpses, alone with time and grief and the sorrow of remembering, the cruelty of my existence and of my death still to come. The Kindly Ones were on to me.
Appendices
GLOSSARY
AA (Auswärtiges Amt, “Department of the Exterior”): Foreign Office, headed by Joachim von Ribbentrop.
ABWEHR: Military intelligence service. Its full name was Amt Ausland/Abwehr im Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, “Foreign Office/Defense for the Armed Forces High Command.”
AMT: Office.
ARBEITSEINSATZ (“work operation”): Department in charge of organizing forced labor of inmates in concentration camps.
AOK (Armeeoberkommando): The headquarters of an army, which controlled a certain number of divisions. At all levels (Army, Division, Regiment, etc.), the organization of military headquarters included, among other things, a Chief of Staff; a Ia (pronounced “One-a,” “Eins-a,” in German), the general officer in charge of operations; a Ib (Eins-b) or quartermaster in charge of supplies; and a Ic/AO (Eins-c/AO), the officer in charge of military intelligence, or Abwehroffizier.
BERÜCK: Commander of the rear zone of an Army Group.
EINSATZ: Action, operation.
EINSATZGRUPPE (“action group” of the SP and SD): Deployed for the first time in 1938, for the Anschluss and the occupation of Czechoslovakia, these SS groups were in charge of dealing with the most urgent security tasks until permanent police Stelle (“offices”) could be set up. The system was formalized for Poland in September 1939. For the invasion of the USSR, following a formal agreement between the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and the Wehrmacht, an Einsatzgruppe was posted to each Army Group (with a fourth, Einsatzgruppe D, attached directly to the Eleventh Army for the Crimea and the Romanian occupation zone). Each Einsatzgruppe was made up of a Gruppenstab, or general staff, and several Einsatzkommandos (Ek) or Sonderkommandos (Sk). Each Kommando was in turn subdivided into a general staff (the Kommandostab), with support personnel (drivers, interpreters, etc.) and several Teilkommandos. The general staffs of the Groups and the Kommandos reproduced the organization of the RSHA: thus there was a Leiter I or Verwaltungsführer (personnel and administration), a Leiter II (Supply), a Leiter III (SD), IV (Gestapo), and V (Kripo). One of them, usually the Leiter III or IV, also served as Chief of Staff.
GAULEITER: Nazi Germany was divided into administrative regions called Gaue. Each Gau was supervised by a Gauleiter, a member of the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) appointed by Hitler, to whom he reported.
GESTAPO (Geheime Staatspolizei, “Secret State Police”): Directed by SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, from 1939 till the end of the war. See RSHA.
GOLDFASANEN (“Golden Pheasants”): Pejorative term for civil servants in the Ostministerium, because of their yellowish-brown uniforms, and for other Nazi functionaries.
GFP (Geheime Feldpolizei, “Secret Military Police”): Branch of the Wehrmacht in charge of military security in the theater of operations, especially in the fight against partisans. Most of the officers in the GFP had been recruited from the German police and so belonged to the Security Police (SP) or else the SS; still, this service of military security remained distinct from the services of the RSHA.
HÄFTLING (plural Häftlinge): Inmate.
HIWI (Hilfswillige, “voluntary workers”): Native auxiliaries of the Wehrmacht, usually recruited from prisoners’ camps, and employed in the rear for transport, supplies, hard labor, etc.
HONVÉD: The Hungarian army.
HSSPF (Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer, “Supreme Head of the SS and the Police”): To ensure coordination of all SS offices or suboffices at the regional level, in 1937 Himmler established the HSSPFs, who, in principle, had all SS groups in their zone under their orders. In Germany, the Reichsführer-SS appointed one of them for each Wehrkreis (“defense region,” defined by the Wehrmacht), and, later on, one for each occupied country, who sometimes had under his orders, as in occupied Poland (the “Generalgouvernement”), several SSPFs. In Soviet Russia, during the invasion of 1941, Himmler appointed an HSSPF for each of the three Army Groups, North, Center, and South.
IKL (Inspektion der Konzentrationslager, “Inspectorate for Concentration Camps”): The first concentration camp, the one in Dachau, was created on March 20, 1933, followed by many others. In June 1934, following “the Röhm putsch” and the elimination of leaders of the SA, the camps were placed under the direct control of the SS, which then created the IKL, based in Oranienburg, under the command of SS-Obergruppenführer Theodor Eicke, the commander of Dachau, to whom Himmler gave the mission of reorganizing all the camps. The “Eicke system,” which was put in place in 1934 and which lasted until the first years of the war, aimed at the psychological, and sometimes physical, destruction of opponents of the regime; forced labor, at the time, was used only as torture. But in the beginning of 1942, when Germany was intensifying its war effort following the stalemate of the offensive in the USSR, Himmler decided that this system was not adapted to the new situation, which required a maximum use of the inmates’ labor force; in March 1942, the IKL was made subordinate to the Economy and Administration Main Office (WVHA) as Amtsgruppe D, with four departments: D I, central office; D II, the Arbeitseinsatz, in charge of forced labor; D III, sanitary and medical department; and D IV, department in charge of administration and finance. This reorganization had limited success: Pohl, the head of the WVHA, never managed fully to reform the IKL or to renew its managerial staff, and the tension between the political-police function and the economic function of the camps, aggravated by the extermination function assigned to two camps under the control of the WVHA (KL Auschwitz and KL Lublin, better known as Maidanek), existed until the collapse of the Nazi regime.