The crew accepted the schnapps. Facing what they soon must, how could they not? But not one of them shared the sergeant major’s plain elation.
“How can you do it, Sergeant Major? How can you just…” Harz turned away in disgust.
Krueger answered, “Ask Schultz here if it is so hard. Ask him what he felt kicking the barrel out from under that coward at Giessen. It is nothing, boys, nothing. Why I remember a place called ‘Babi Yar’… in the Ukraine, by Kiev, that was…”
The setting sun illuminated the golden onion domes of the great city to the southeast. Kiev, once home to one hundred and seventy-five thousand Jews, would see that population reduced by over thirty-three thousand in the course of two days.
Little seven-year-old Manya Halef, holding her mother’s hand, turned around from time to time as they walked. The golden domes looked very pretty, very wonderful in a little girl’s eyes.
Manya wasn’t sure why she and her mother had to leave their cramped Kiev flat. But she had seen the Germans and — much like her stern-faced teacher in school — they looked like men who had to be obeyed.
Sometimes, as they walked, Manya’s mother would pull the girl to her and cover her eyes. At first Manya resisted but, once she had seen what her mother was shielding her from, she sought her mother’s shelter. The road to the Jewish cemetery at the junction of Melnikovsky and Dokhturov Streets was lined with bodies of the dead.
Manya had been along this road before, twice. The first time she didn’t remember very well. But the last time had been to bury her ancient grandmother, here in Kiev’s old Jewish cemetery.
While cleaning his machine pistol, Krueger watched the Jews being herded into the makeshift, barbed-wire-surrounded camp dispassionately. What cared he for their cries? What cared he for their miserable whining? Were they not all enemies of the Reich? Did they not all deserve to die?
Less dispassionately, he watched them strip. Though the Jews had been instructed to come well clothed and with money in their possession, as if for travel, he knew they would not need clothing or money where they were going. It was a useful little lie designed to make them easier to dispose of.
The ad hoc strip show had Krueger’s rapt attention. A few of them Jew whores are lookers, he thought. Shame we can’t get some use out of them.
Manya just didn’t understand it. Here was Mama, always so proper Mama, taking her clothes off here in the open. It was just wrong, wrong, wrong and Manya knew it.
And then — unthinkable! — Mama began tugging at Manya’s own clothing, a short, light summer dress. The little girl resisted until someone came by and hit Mama with a stick for being too slow. Then, her face leaking tears, Manya submitted.
But she still didn’t understand; she was only seven years old.
The fucking Yids have no clue yet what is going to happen to them, Krueger chortled to himself. You would think that taking away everything would have been hint enough. But no, they are still in denial, can’t believe it is happening. Stupid pieces of shit; be a blessing to the world to rid it of them.
With a click, Krueger seated a full magazine into his Schmeisser.
Manya promised the Germans that she would be a good girl. She promised! So she could not understand why they were hitting her and her mother to drive them from the camp. Nor did she understand the two lines of soldiers wielding sticks who drove them forward.
Her mother tried to protect her from the blows as best she could. Even so, sometimes the soldiers hit her. And she had promised, too. Maybe the sticks wouldn’t hurt so much if only she’d still had her clothes on.
But she didn’t and they did and she just didn’t understand it at all.
All she could do was cry.
The Jewish whore wanted to keep her brat with her, did she? Well, orders were orders and Krueger was a man who obeyed orders. The Jews were to be shot in groups of ten, not eleven. He rudely pulled the squalling naked brat out of the harridan’s arms, tossed it to the ground, and then spent a few moments to cuff and kick them both into submission.
Manya was stunned by the German’s blow as even being forced to undress in public had not stunned her. She sat naked on the bloody ground crying for her mother; a little girl’s wordless, endless, wrenching cry. The mother too wept and shrieked.
The squalling brat’s noise was irksome. Nonetheless, Krueger enjoyed the mother’s shrieks as he raised the machine pistol and, like the professional he was… smiling, squeezed the trigger.
“That will be enough, Sergeant Major,” said Hans as he placed a firm grip on Dieter’s shoulder. “The men will be sickened enough as it is. There’s no need for you to sicken them further.”
“Yes, sir,” answered Krueger, will ill-concealed contempt. “They’re just fucking Slavs, after all. It isn’t like they’re real people. I thought the boys should know that.”
“Shut up, Sergeant Major,” said Hans, eyes flashing and one hand resting on his pistol. “Just shut the fuck up.”
The combat cocoon was silent now, as was that of every Tiger along the front, of every other armored vehicle, and every infantryman’s trench or bunker. Each soldier, German or Polish or Scandinavian — or on one other front, French — was left alone with his thoughts.
Equally alone, Dieter Schultz pondered on the morrow. He had killed countless nonhumans, and as part of an execution party, one human being.
After many weeks and months of thought, Dieter still didn’t know how he felt about that. At the time it had seemed… right, somehow. Later on, he had begun to question.
Truthfully, Dieter didn’t know what was right anymore. War… twisted things, made things inconceivable become real and present. Did that poor bastard of a panzer grenadier deserve to hang? Maybe not. But had what he deserved had anything to do with anything? Again, maybe not.
What was reality? Gudrun was dead. The panzer grenadier was dead. That was reality. There was no sense in wishing that things were any different, no sense in living an illusion.
And tomorrow, Dieter knew, his last illusions would be stripped. Tomorrow he would enter the ranks of the real Nazis, the murderers.
Tiger Brünnhilde, Hanau, Germany, 2 February 2008
“Driver Johann?”
“Yes Indowy Rinteel?” Mueller was so tall that the Indowy had generally avoided him to date. Perhaps it was that he was lying on his driver’s couch, bringing his eyes down to Indowy level, that made conversation possible now. Then again, that every other member of the crew was sound asleep may have had something to do with it.