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.
The Wehrmacht had finally resumed its advance, and this was creating new tasks for us. Guderian was completing his breakthrough, attacking the Soviet armies in Kiev from the rear; his prey, as if paralyzed, wasn’t reacting. The Sixth Army started moving again, and crossed the Dnieper; farther south, the Seventeenth Army was also passing the Dnieper. It was hot and dry, and the troops on the move raised columns of dust as high as buildings; when the rains came, the soldiers rejoiced, then cursed the mud. No one had time to bathe and the men were gray with dust and mire. The regiments advanced like little isolated ships on the ocean of corn and ripe wheat; they saw no one for days, and the only news that reached them came from Rollbahn drivers coming back up the line; all around them, flat and wide, stretched the vast earth: Is there anyone living on this plain? sings the knight in the old Russian tale. Sometimes, when we went out on a mission, we met one of these units; the officers would invite us to eat, happy to see us. On September 16, Guderian joined forces with von Kleist’s Panzers in Lokhvitsa, 150 kilometers beyond Kiev, surrounding four Soviet armies according to the Abwehr; to the north and south, the air force and infantry began to crush them. Kiev lay wide open. In Zhitomir, since the end of August, we had stopped killing Jews, and the survivors had been regrouped in a ghetto; on September 17, Blobel left the city with his officers, two units from the Police Regiment South, and our Askaris, leaving behind only the orderlies, the cooks, and the repair gear for the vehicles. The Kommandostab was to establish itself as soon as possible in Kiev. But the next day, Blobel changed his mind, or received a counterorder: he returned to Zhitomir to liquidate the ghetto. “Their insolent attitude hasn’t changed, despite all our warnings and our special measures. We can’t leave them behind us.” He formed a Vorkommando under the leadership of Häfner and Janssen to enter Kiev with the Sixth Army. I volunteered and Blobel accepted.
That night the Vorkommando camped in a little deserted village near the city. Outside, the obsessive cawing of the crows sounded like babies crying. While I was lying on a straw-filled mattress in an isba that I was sharing with the other officers, a little bird, a sparrow perhaps, flew into the room and started careening into the walls and the closed windows; half stunned, it would lie on the floor for a few seconds, out of breath, its wings askew, before exploding again in another brief and futile frenzy. I thought it might be dying. The others were already asleep or else didn’t react. Finally I managed to trap it under a helmet and release it outside: it fled into the night as if it were awakening from a nightmare. At dawn we were already on the move. The war now was just in front of us, we were advancing very slowly. By the roadsides the insomniac dead lay scattered, their eyes open, empty. The wedding ring of a German soldier gleamed in the early morning sun; his face was red, swollen, his mouth and eyes full of flies. The dead horses lay intermingled with the men, some, wounded by bullets or shrapnel, were still dying, they neighed, struggled, rolled furiously over the other carcasses or the bodies of their riders. Near a makeshift bridge right in front of us, the current carried off three soldiers, and from the bank for a long while we could make out the sodden uniforms, the pale faces of the drowned men, slowly drifting away. In the empty villages, abandoned by their inhabitants, cows with swollen udders were lowing in pain; the geese, horrified, were cackling in the little gardens of the isbas in the midst of rabbits and chickens and chained dogs doomed to die of hunger; the houses lay wide open, the people, overwhelmed with panic, had left behind their books, their framed prints, their radios, their quilts. Then came the outer suburbs of Kiev, ravaged by destruction, and then just after, the center, almost intact. Along Shevchenko Boulevard, under the fine autumn sun, the lush lindens and chestnut trees were glowing yellow; on Kreshchatik, the main street, we had to navigate between antitank barricades that exhausted German soldiers were clearing away with difficulty. Häfner liaised with the HQ of the Twenty-ninth Army Corps, and they directed us to the premises of the NKVD, on a hill above Kreshchatik, overlooking the center. It had once been a beautiful palace from the early nineteenth century, with a long yellow façade decorated with moldings and tall columns painted white flanking the main door, under a triangular pediment; but it had been bombed and then, for good measure, burned by the NKVD. According to our informants it used to be a pension for poor young virgins; in 1918, the