The military doctor, a rather chubby, almost bald Viennese named Hohenegg, turned out to be a very pleasant travel companion. He was a professor, holder of an important chair in Vienna, who had been named as the Sixth Army’s chief pathologist. Even when he was expressing the most serious opinions, his soft, almost oiled voice seemed to betray a trace of irony. Medicine had given him his philosophical views: we discussed them at some length while the train crossed the steppe beyond Zaporozhie, as empty of life as the high seas. “The advantage of forensic pathology,” he explained to me, “is that after you’ve opened up corpses of all ages and sexes, you have the impression that death loses its horror, is reduced to a physical phenomenon as ordinary and banal as the natural functions of the body. I can manage very calmly to imagine myself on a dissection table, under the hands of my successor, who would grimace slightly as he observed the state of my liver.”—“Ah, but that’s because you have the luck to get them when they’re already dead. It’s a very different thing when, as so often happens here, especially when you work in the SD, you’re present at the step beyond itself.”—“And are even contributing to it.”—“Exactly. Whatever his attitude or his ideology, the spectator can never fully grasp the experience of the deceased.” Hohenegg reflected: “I see what you mean. But this gap exists only for the person who watches. For he alone can see both sides. The man dying will only experience something confused, more or less brief, more or less brutal, but something in any case that will always escape his awareness. Do you know Bossuet?”—“In French, even,” I replied, smiling, in that language. “Excellent. I see that your education was a little broader than that of the average lawyer.” He declaimed the sentences in a rather thick, choppy French: “This final instant, which in one single stroke will erase your whole life, will itself be lost, with all the rest, in that great abyss of nothingness. No trace of what we are will remain on earth: the flesh will change its nature; the body will take on another name; even that of corpse will not long remain. ‘It will become,’ said Tertullian, ‘a strange something that no longer has a name in any language.’”—“That,” I said, “is fine for the dead man, I’ve often thought that way. The problem is only one for the living.”—“Until their own death,” he retorted, winking. I laughed gently and he did too; the other passengers in the compartment, who were discussing girls or sausages, looked at us with surprise.
In Simferopol, the terminus, they loaded us into trucks or ambulances for a convoy to Yalta. Hohenegg, who had come to visit the doctors of AOK 11, stayed in Simferopol; I parted from him regretfully. Our convoy took a mountain road, to the east, via Alushta, since Bakhchisaray was still in the zone of operations of the siege of Sebastopol. I was put up in a sanatorium west of Yalta, high over the road to Livadia, its back to the steep snow-covered mountains overlooking the city, a former royal palace converted into a Kurort for Soviet workers; it had been damaged a bit by the fighting but quickly patched up and repainted. I had a nice little bedroom on the third floor, with a bathroom and a small balcony: the furniture left something to be desired, but at my feet, beyond a few cypress trees, stretched the Black Sea, smooth, gray, calm. I couldn’t get enough of looking at it. Though it was still a little cold, the air was much softer than in the Ukraine, and I could go out to smoke on the balcony; otherwise, lying on the sofa facing the French doors, I spent long tranquil hours reading. I didn’t lack reading materiaclass="underline" I had my own books, and the sanatorium too had a library, made up mostly of books abandoned by previous patients, very eclectic, even including, next to the unreadable Myth of the Twentieth Century, some German translations of Chekhov that I discovered with great pleasure. I didn’t have any medical obligations. At my arrival a doctor had examined me and had me describe my symptoms. “It’s nothing,” he concluded after reading Dr. Sperath’s note. “Nervous fatigue. Rest, baths, no excitement, as little alcohol as possible, and beware of Ukrainian girls. It will pass on its own. Have a nice stay.”
A joyful atmosphere reigned in this sanatorium: most of the patients and convalescents were a mix of young subalterns from all branches, whose bawdy humor was sharpened, at night, by the Crimean wine served with the meals and by the scarcity of females. That might have contributed to the surprising freedom of tone during discussions: the most cutting jokes were circulating about the Wehrmacht, about Party dignitaries; one officer, showing me his medal for the winter campaign, asked me ironically, “And what about you in the SS—you haven’t received the Order of the Frozen Meat yet?” The fact that they were in the presence of an officer from the SD didn’t bother these young men at all; they seemed to think it went without saying that I shared their wildest ideas. The most critical of them were the officers from Army Group Center; whereas in the Ukraine, people thought that the transfer south of Guderian’s Second Panzer Army, at the beginning of August, had been a stroke of genius that, by taking the Russians from the rear, had pried open the blocked Southern Front, and had led to the taking of Kiev and, in the end, the advance all the way to the Donets, the men from the Center thought it was a mad idea of the Führer’s, a mistake that some even described as criminal. Without that, they argued vehemently, instead of loitering for two months around Smolensk, we could have taken Moscow in October, the war would have been over or almost over, and the men could have been spared a winter in snow holes, a detail that the gentlemen in OKH of course couldn’t care less about, since who has ever seen a general get his feet frozen? History, since then, has certainly proven them right, as most experts would agree; yet the perspectives weren’t the same then; words like that smacked of defeatism, even insubordination. But we were on vacation, it didn’t matter, I wasn’t offended. What’s more, all this liveliness, so many handsome, cheerful young men made feelings and desires resurge that I hadn’t experienced in many months. And it didn’t seem impossible for me to satisfy them: it all depended on making the right choice. I often took my meals in the company of a young Leutnant of the Waffen-SS named Willi Partenau. Thin, with a fine bearing, his hair almost black, he was recovering from a chest wound received near Rostov. At night, while the others were playing cards or billiards, singing, or drinking at the bar, we sometimes stayed talking, sitting at a table in front of one of the bay windows of the dining room. Partenau came from a Catholic lower-middle-class family in the Rhineland. He had had a difficult childhood. Even before the 1929 crisis, his family was teetering on the brink of proletarianization; his father, an undersized but tyrannical military man, was obsessed with the question of his social status, and swallowed up their meager resources to keep up appearances: they would eat potatoes and cabbage every day, but at school the boys would wear suits with starched collars and polished shoes. Partenau had been raised in strict religiosity; for the slightest mistake, his father forced him to kneel on the cold tile floor and recite prayers; he had soon lost his faith, or rather had replaced it with National Socialism. The Hitlerjugend, then the SS, had finally allowed him to flee this stifling environment. He was still in training during the campaigns in Greece and Yugoslavia, and was disconsolate to have missed them; his joy knew no bounds when he was posted to the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler for the invasion of Russia. One night, he confessed to me that he was horrified by his first experience of the radical methods used by the Wehrmacht and the SS to combat the partisans; but his profound conviction that only a barbarous, completely inhuman enemy could necessitate such extreme measures had in the end been reinforced. “In the SD, you must have seen some atrocious things,” he added; I assured him I had, but preferred not to elaborate. Instead I told him a little about my life, especially my childhood. I had been a fragile child. My sister and I were just a year old when our father left for the war. Milk and food were rare; I grew up thin, pale, nervous. I loved playing in the forest near our house; we lived in Alsace, there were big forests there, I would go out to gaze at insects or wet my feet in the streams. One incident remained clearly in my memory: in a meadow or a field, I found an abandoned puppy, looking forlorn, and my heart was filled with pity for it, I wanted to bring it home; but when I approached to pick it up, the little dog, frightened, ran away. I tried to speak to it gently, to cajole it so it would follow me, but without success. It didn’t run away, it always stayed a few meters away from me, but it didn’t let me approach. Finally I sat down in the grass and burst out crying, broken with pity for this puppy that didn’t want to let me help it. I begged it: “Please, puppy, come with me!” Finally it gave in. My mother was horrified when she saw it yapping in our garden, tied to the fence, and after a long argument convinced me to take it to the SPCA where, I’ve always thought, they must have killed it as soon as I turned my back. But maybe this incident took place after the war and my father’s definitive return, maybe it took place in Kiel, where we had moved after the French reoccupied Alsace. My father, finally back among us, spoke little, and seemed somber, full of bitterness. Thanks to his diplomas, he soon landed a good job in a large company; at home, he often stayed by himself in his library, where, when he wasn’t around, I would sneak in to play with his butterfly collection, some of them as big as a grown-up’s hand; I took them out of their boxes and turned them around on their long needles like a pinwheel, until one day when he surprised me and punished me. Around that time, I began pinching things from our neighbor—no doubt, as I understood later, to attract his attention: I stole toy pistols, flashlights, other toys, which I buried in a hiding place in the back of our garden; even my sister didn’t know; finally the whole thing came out. My mother thought I stole for the pure pleasure of doing evil; my father patiently explained the Law to me, then gave me a spanking. This happened not in Kiel but on the island of Sylt, where we spent our summer vacations. To get there, you took the train that runs along the Hindenburg Dam: at high tide, the tracks are surrounded by water, and from the train you have the impression of traveling on the sea, with the waves rising up to the wheels, beating against the hubs. At night, over my bed, electric trains burst through the starry sky of my dreams.
Very early, it seems to me, I greedily sought the love of everyone I met. This instinct, with adults at least, was generally repaid in kind, since I was both handsome and very intelligent as a boy. But at school, I found myself confronted with cruel, aggressive children, many of whom had lost their fathers in the war, or were beaten and neglected by fathers who had returned from the trenches brutalized and half mad. They avenged themselves, at school, for this lack of love at home by turning viciously against other children who were frailer and more sensitive. They hit me, and I had few friends; in sports, when teams were being formed, no one ever picked me. Then, instead of begging for their affection, I sought their attention. I also tried to impress the teachers, who were fairer than the boys my age; since I was intelligent, this was easy: but then the others called me a teacher’s pet and beat me up even more. Of course, I never mentioned any of this to my father.