Ukraine and Jidy, the Jews. I walked by a great fine church, obviously Catholic; it was closed and no one answered when I knocked. From an open door farther down the street came sounds of broken glass, blows, shouts; a little farther on lay the corpse of a Jew, his nose in the gutter. Little groups of armed men wearing blue-and-yellow armbands were conversing with civilians; from time to time they went into a house and there were more noises, sometimes gunshots. Right before me, on the second floor, a man suddenly flew through a closed window and came crashing down almost at my feet in the midst of a rain of glass shards; I had to jump backward to avoid the splinters; I distinctly heard the brittle snap of his neck when he hit the pavement. A man in shirtsleeves and an officer’s cap leaned out of the broken window; seeing me, he joyfully shouted in broken German: “Excuse me, Herr deutschen Offizier! I didn’t see you.” My anguish increased; I passed around the corpse and continued on in silence. A little farther, a bearded man in a priest’s robe appeared from a portal, at the foot of a tall ancient belfry; when he saw me, he veered toward me: “Herr Offizier! Herr Offizier! Come, please come.” His German was better than that of the man at the window, but he had a strange accent. He pulled me almost by force toward the gate. I heard cries, wild shouts; in the courtyard of the church, a group of men were cruelly beating some Jews lying on the ground, with clubs or iron rods. Some of the bodies had stopped moving beneath the blows; others were still twitching. “Herr Offizier!” the priest shouted, “do something, please! It is a church, here.” I remained by the gate, unsure; the priest tried to pull me by the arm. I don’t know what I was thinking. One of the Ukrainians saw me and said something to his comrades, shaking his head in my direction; they hesitated, stopped their blows; the priest shouted a torrent of words at them that I didn’t understand, then turned toward me: “I told them that you were ordering them to stop. I told them that churches are sacred and that they were pigs, and that churches were under the protection of the Wehrmacht and that if they didn’t leave they’d be arrested.”—“I’m all alone,” I said.—“That’s not important,” the priest retorted. He shouted some more sentences in Ukrainian. Slowly, the men lowered their clubs. One of them addressed a passionate tirade at me: I understood only the words Stalin, Galicia, and Jews. Another one spat on the bodies. There was a long moment of uncertain wavering; the priest shouted a few words more; at last the men abandoned the Jews and headed toward the gate, then disappeared into the street, without saying a word. “Thank you,” the priest said to me, “thank you.” He ran over to examine the Jews. The courtyard sloped slightly, ending with a fine shaded colonnade roofed in green copper, built against the church wall. “Help me,” the priest said. “This one is still alive.” He lifted him up by the armpits and I took his feet; I saw that he was a young man, with hardly any beard. His head fell back, a stream of blood ran down his side curls and left a line of big shiny drops on the flagstones. My heart was beating very hard: I had never carried a dying man like this. We had to go around the church; the priest shuffled backward, moaning in German: “First the Bolsheviks, now the crazy Ukrainians. Why doesn’t your army do anything?” In the back, a wide archway opened onto another courtyard and then the door to the church. I helped the priest carry the Jew into the vestibule and put him on a bench. The priest called out; two other men, dark and bearded like him, but in suits, emerged from the nave. He spoke to them in a strange language that sounded nothing like Ukrainian, Russian, or Polish. I followed the three men as they went out together, into the courtyard; one of them turned into a back alleyway as the other two walked back toward the Jews. “I sent him to look for a doctor,” the priest said.—“What is this, here?” I asked him. He paused and stared at me: “It’s the Armenian cathedral.”—“So there are Armenians in Lemberg?” I said with surprise. He shrugged: “A lot longer than the Germans or the Austrians.” He and his friend lifted up another Jew, who was quietly moaning. The blood from the Jews flowed slowly along the flagstones of the sloping courtyard and down toward the colonnade. Under the arches I could see tombstones sealed into the wall or set in the ground, covered with inscriptions in mysterious glyphs, Armenian no doubt. I went closer: blood filled the characters cut into the flat stones. I quickly turned away. I felt oppressed, at a loss; I lit a cigarette. It was cool under the colonnade. In the courtyard, the sun shone on the puddles of fresh blood and the limestone paving, on the heavy bodies of the Jews, on their suits of coarse cloth, black or brown, soaked with blood. Flies were buzzing around their heads and landing on the wounds. The priest returned near them. “What about the dead?” he asked me. “We can’t leave them there.” But I had no intention of helping him; the idea of touching one of those inert bodies filled me with revulsion. I headed for the gate, skirting round them, and went out into the street. It was empty; I turned left, more or less at random. A little farther on, the street came to a dead end; but to the right I ended up in a square overlooked by an imposing baroque church decorated with rococo ornaments and a tall columned gate, and crowned with a copper dome. I climbed the steps and went in. The vast vault above the nave rested lightly on thin cabled columns; daylight poured in through the stained-glass windows, shimmered on the wooden sculptures covered in gold leaf; the dark, polished pews stretched to the back, empty. In a little whitewashed side hall I noticed a low door of ancient wood set with brass fittings: I pushed it; a few stone steps led to a wide, low hallway lit by casement windows. Glassed-in shelves occupied the opposite wall, filled with religious objects; some of them looked ancient, wonderfully wrought. To my surprise one of the cases exhibited Jewish objects: scrolls in Hebrew, prayer shawls, old etchings showing Jews in synagogue. Books in Hebrew bore printers’ marks in German: LWOW, 1884; LUBLIN, 1853, BEI SCHMUEL BERENSTEIN. I heard footsteps and raised my head: a tonsured monk was walking toward me. He wore the white habit of the Dominicans. When he reached me, he stopped: “Hello,” he said in German. “Can I help you?”—“What is this, here?”—“You are in a monastery.” I pointed to the shelves: “No, I mean all this.”—“That? It’s our museum of religions. All the objects come from the region. Look, if you like. Normally, we ask for a little donation, but today it’s free.” He went on his way and disappeared silently through the brass-fitted door. Farther on, where he had appeared, the hallway turned at a right angle; I realized I was in fact inside a cloister, closed in by a low wall, with windows set between the columns. A long horizontal display case caught my attention. A little lamp attached to the wall lit up the interior of the case; I leaned over: two skeletons were lying there intertwined, half emerging from a layer of dirt. The larger one, the man probably, despite the large brass earrings resting against his skull, was lying on his back; the other, visibly a woman, was curled up on her side, nestled in his arms, her legs over one of his. It was magnificent, I had never seen anything like it. I tried in vain to make out the label. How many centuries had they been lying there, intertwined with each other? These bodies must have been very old, they must have gone back to the most remote eras; the woman had probably been sacrificed and laid out in the tomb with her dead chief; I knew such practices had existed in primitive times. But this knowledge didn’t change anything; despite everything, it was the position of rest after love, overcome, filled with tenderness. I thought of my sister and my throat tightened: she would have cried if she’d seen that. I left the monastery without meeting anyone; outside I headed straight, toward the other end of the square. Beyond that another vast square opened up, with a large building in the center, next to a tower, surrounded by trees. Narrow houses were squeezed around this square, fabulously decorated, each in a different style. Behind the main building an animated crowd was gathering. I avoided it and turned left, then went round a large cathedral, below a stone cross lovingly held in the arms of an angel, flanked by a languid Moses with his tablets and a pensive saint dressed in rags, raised over a skull and crossbones, almost the same emblem as the one sewn on my cap. Behind, in a little alleyway, stood a few tables and chairs. I was hot and tired, the café seemed empty, I sat down. A girl came out and spoke to me in Ukrainian. “Do you have beer? Beer?” I said in German. She shook her head: “Piva nyetou.” That I understood. “Some coffee? Kava?”—“Da.”—“Voda?”—“Da.” She went back into the room and returned with a glass of water that I drank in one gulp. Then she brought me a coffee. It was already sweetened and I didn’t drink it. I lit a cigarette. The girl reappeared and saw the coffee: “Coffee? Not good?” she asked in broken German. “Sugar. Niet.”—“Oh.” She smiled, took the coffee away, and brought me another. It was strong, without any sugar; I drank it while I smoked. To my right, at the foot of the cathedral, a chapel covered in bas-reliefs arranged in dark bands hid my view of the main square. A man in German uniform was walking round it, examining the intertwined sculptures. He noticed me and headed toward me; I saw his epaulettes, got up quickly, and saluted. He returned my salute: “Hello! So, you’re German?”—“Yes, Herr Hauptmann.” He got out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. “Oh good. Do you mind if I sit down?”—“Of course not, Herr Hauptmann.” The girl reappeared. “Do you take your coffee with or without sugar? It’s all they have.”—“With, please.” I made the girl understand we wanted two more coffees, with sugar on the side. Then I sat down with the Hauptmann. He held out his hand: “Hans Koch. I’m with the Abwehr.” I introduced myself. “Oh, you’re from the SD? That’s right, I hadn’t noticed your badge. Very good, very good.” This Hauptmann seemed mild and friendly: he must have been just past fifty, wore round glasses and was a little paunchy. He spoke with a southern accent, not quite Viennese. “You are Austrian, Herr Hauptmann?”—“Yes, from Styria. And you?”—“My father is from Pomerania, originally. But I was born in Alsace. Then we lived here and there.”—“Of course, of course. Are you out for a walk?”—“Sort of, yes.” He nodded: “I’m here for a meeting. Over there, next door, in a little while.”—“A meeting, Herr Hauptmann?”—“See, when they invited us, they explained that it would be a cultural meeting, but I think it’s going to be a political meeting.” He leaned toward me as if to tell me a secret: “I was picked because I’m supposed to be an expert on Ukrainian national questions.”—“And are you?” He flung himself back: “Not at all! I’m a professor of theology. I know a thing or two about the Uniate question, but that’s it. They probably appointed me because I served in the Imperial army, I was a Leutnant during the Great War, so they must have thought that I knew something about the national question; but I was on the Italian front at the time, and in the Supply Corps too. It’s true that I had some Croatian colleagues…”—“You speak Ukrainian?”—“Not a single word. But I have a translator with me. He’s drinking now with the OUN guys, in the square.”—“The OUN?”—“Yes. You didn’t know they took over, this morning? At least, they took over the radio. And they’ve delivered a proclamation, on the revival of the Ukrainian state if I understood right. That’s why I have to go to this meeting now. The Metropolitan, I heard, has blessed the new State. It seems we’re the ones who asked him to do so, but I’m not sure.”—“What Metropolitan?”—“The Uniate, of course. The Orthodox hate us. They hate Stalin too, but they hate us even more.” I was about to ask another question but was suddenly interrupted: a rather plump woman, almost naked, her stockings torn, emerged suddenly with a cry from behind the cathedral; she plowed into the tables, stumbled, knocked one over, and fell at our feet squealing. Her white skin was marbled with contusions, but she wasn’t bleeding much. Two strapping youths with armbands were calmly following her. One of them spoke to us in bad German: “Excuse, Officers. Kein problem.” The other dragged the woman up by her hair and punched her in the stomach. She hiccupped and fell silent, saliva on her lips. The first one kicked her in the buttocks and she started running again. They trotted after her, laughing, and disappeared behind the chapel. Koch took off his cap and wiped his forehead again while I picked up the overturned table. “They’re real savages here,” I remarked.—“Oh yes, I agree with you on that one. But I thought you were encouraging them?”—“That would surprise me, Herr Hauptmann. But I’ve just arrived, I haven’t been filled in.” Koch went on: “At the AOK, I heard that the Sicherheitsdienst had posters printed and was encouraging these people. Aktion Petliura, they called it. You know, the Ukrainian leader? It was a Jew that assassinated him, I think. In ’twenty-six or ’twenty-seven.”—“You see, you are a specialist after all.”—“Oh, I’ve just read a few reports.” The girl had emerged from the café. She smiled and showed me that the coffee was free. In any case I didn’t have any local money. I looked at my watch: “Excuse me, Herr Hauptmann. I have to go.”—“Of course.” He shook my hand: “Good luck.”