In Poltava, Blobel sent me to the delousing station as soon as he set eyes on me. Then he filled me in on the situation. “The Vorkommando finally entered Kharkov on the twenty-fourth, with the Fifty-fifth Army Corps. They’ve set up offices already.” But Callsen was sorely lacking in men and urgently asking for reinforcements. For now, though, the roads were blocked by the rains and the mud. The train didn’t run any farther, since the tracks had to be restored and widened, and that too could be done only when travel became possible again. “As soon as it freezes you’ll go to Kharkov with some other officers and troops; the Kommandostab will join you a little later on. The entire Kommando will take its winter quarters in Kharkov.”
Hanika soon turned out to be a much better orderly than Popp. Every morning, I found my boots polished and my uniform cleaned, dried, and ironed; at breakfast, he often produced something to improve the ordinary fare. He was very young; he had been drafted directly from the Hitlerjugend to the Waffen-SS, and from there had been posted to the Sonderkommando; but he wasn’t lacking in qualities. I taught him our file classification system, so he could sort or find documents for me. Ries had overlooked a pearclass="underline" the boy was friendly and obliging; you just had to know how to take him. At night, for a little, he would have slept across my doorway, like a dog or a servant in a Russian novel. Better nourished, and well rested, with his face rounded out, he was in fact a handsome boy despite his teenage acne.
As for Blobel, he was growing more and more moody; he drank and flew into hysterical rages, on the slightest pretext. He would pick out a scapegoat from among the officers and pursue him for days on end, without respite, harassing him on every aspect of his work. At the same time he was a good organizer, he had a well-developed sense of priorities and practical constraints. Fortunately, he hadn’t yet had an occasion to test his new Saurer; the truck had stayed stuck in Kiev, and he was impatiently waiting for it to be delivered. The very idea of the thing made my blood run cold, and I hoped to be long gone by the time he received it. I continued to suffer from sudden retchings, accompanied sometimes by painful and exhausting up-wellings of gas; but I kept that to myself. Nor did I speak about my dreams to anyone. Almost every night now, I rode in a metro, each time different but always skewed, strange, unpredictable, haunting me with an endless circulation of trains coming and going, escalators or elevators rising and falling from one level to another, doors opening and closing at the wrong moment, signals changing from green to red without the trains stopping, lines crossing without any shunting, and terminus stops where the passengers waited in vain, a broken-down, noisy, immense, interminable network traveled by incessant and insane traffic. When I was young I loved the Metro; I had discovered it when I was seventeen and went up to Paris, and at the slightest occasion I took it simply for the pleasure of movement, of looking at people, at the stations going by. The CMP, the previous year, had taken over the north-south line, and for the price of a single ticket I could cross the city from one end to the other. Soon I got to know the underground geography of Paris better than its surface. With other boarding students from my prépa, I slipped out at night, thanks to a copy of a key the students passed on from one generation to the next, and, armed with little flashlights, we waited on a platform for the last train so we could then climb into the tunnels and walk on the tracks from station to station. We had quickly discovered numerous tunnels and shafts closed to the public, which came in handy when railroad men, disturbed in their nighttime work, tried to chase us. This underground activity still leaves a trace of strong emotion in my memory, a friendly feeling of security and warmth, with probably a distant erotic overtone too. Back then, metros already filled my dreams, but now they bore with them a translucent, nearly acid anguish; I could never arrive where I had to be, I missed my connections, the doors to the cars slammed in my face, I traveled without a ticket, in horror of the inspectors, and I often awoke filled with a cold, abrupt panic, that left me feeling utterly lost.
Finally the first frosts seized the roads, and I could leave. The cold had settled in suddenly, overnight; in the morning, the vapor of our breath, the windows white with frost, were a joyous sight. Before leaving, I put on all my sweaters; Hanika had managed to find an otterskin shapka for me for a few reichsmarks; in Kharkov, we would quickly have to find some warm clothes. On the road, the sky was pure and blue; clouds of sparrows whirled before the woods; near the villages, peasants were reaping frozen pond rushes to cover their isbas. The road itself was treacherous: the frost, in places, had seized the chaotic ridges of the mud, raised by the passage of tanks and trucks, and these hardened crests made the vehicles skid, tore the tires, sometimes even caused cars to flip over when a driver took a curve badly and lost control of his vehicle. Elsewhere, beneath a fine crust that crumbled under the wheels, the mud remained viscous, insidious. All around stretched the empty steppe, the harvested fields, some forests. It’s about 120 kilometers from Poltava to Kharkov: the trip took a full day. We entered the city through devastated suburbs with charred, ruined, overturned walls, among which, hastily cleared away, lay piled in little stacks the twisted and burned wrecks of the fighting equipment wasted on the futile defense of the city. The Vorkommando had set itself up in the Hotel International, which sat at the side of an immense central square dominated, at the rear, by the constructivist pile of the Dom Gosprom, cubical buildings, arranged in a semicircle, with two tall square arches and a pair of skyscrapers—a surprising construction for this large lazy city with its wooden houses and old czarist churches. The House of the Plan, burned during the battles, raised its massive façades and columns of gutted windows nearby, over to the left; in the center of the square, an imposing bronze Lenin turned his back to the two blocks and, indifferent to the cars and German tanks lined up at his feet, welcomed the passersby with a large gesture. In the hotel, confusion reigned; most of the rooms had broken windows, and bitter cold swept in. I requisitioned a small suite that was more or less inhabitable, left Hanika to see to the windows and the heating, and went back down to find Callsen. “The battles for the city were very violent,” he summarized for me, “there was a lot of destruction, as you saw; it will be hard to find quarters for the whole Sonderkommando.” The Vorkommando had nonetheless started its SP work and was interrogating suspects; in addition, at the Sixth Army’s request, they had taken a number of hostages to discourage sabotage, as in Kiev. Callsen had already formed his political analysis: “The population of the city is mostly Russian, so the delicate problems stemming from our relations with the Ukrainians will be less acute here. There’s also a large Jewish population, although a lot of them fled with the Bolsheviks.” Blobel had given him the order to summon the Jewish leaders and shoot them: “For the others, we’ll see later on.”