After Tsviahel the landscape changed completely. Now it was the Ukrainian steppe, an immense undulating prairie, intensively cultivated. In the fields of grain the poppies had just died, but the rye and barley were ripening, and for kilometers on end, the sunflowers, raised toward the sky, tracked the wave of the sun. Here and there, as if thrown haphazardly, a line of isbas in the shade of acacia trees or little groves of oak, maple, and ash broke the dazzling perspectives. The country paths were bordered with lindens, the rivers with aspen and willow; in the towns they had planted chestnut trees along the boulevards. Our maps turned out to be completely inadequate: roads marked did not exist or had disappeared; yet sometimes where an empty steppe was indicated, our patrols discovered kolkhozes and vast fields of cotton, melons, beets; and tiny municipalities had become developed industrial centers. On the other hand, whereas Galicia had fallen almost intact into our hands, here, the Red Army had applied on its retreat a policy of systematic destruction. Villages, fields were burning; we found the wells dynamited or filled in, the roads mined, the buildings booby-trapped; in the kolkhozes there were still livestock, poultry, and women, but the men and the horses had left; in Zhitomir, they had burned everything they could: fortunately, a number of houses remained standing among the smoking ruins. The city was still under Hungarian control, and Callsen was furious: “Their officers treat the Jews like friends, they have dinner with the Jews!” Bohr, another officer, went on: “Apparently some of the officers are Jewish themselves. Can you imagine? Allies of Germany! I don’t even dare shake their hands anymore.” The inhabitants had received us well, but complained about the Honvéd advance into Ukrainian territory: “The Germans are our historic friends,” they said. “The Magyars just want to annex us.” These tensions broke out daily in countless incidents. A company of sappers had killed two Hungarians; one of our generals had to go apologize. For their part, the Honvéd were blocking the work of our local policemen, and the Vorkommando was forced to lodge a complaint, via the Gruppenstab, with the HQ of the Army Group, the OKHG South. Finally, on July 15, the Hungarians were relieved and AOK 6 took over Zhitomir, followed soon after by our Kommando as well as Gruppenstab C. In the meantime, I had been sent back to Tsviahel as a liaison officer. The Teilkommandos under Callsen, Hans and Janssen, had each been assigned a sector, radiating out almost up to the front, blocked in front of Kiev; to the south, our zone reached that of Ek 5, so operations had to be coordinated, since each Teilkommando functioned autonomously. This is how I found myself with Janssen in the region between Tsviahel and Rovno, on the border with Galicia. The brief summer storms were turning more and more often into showers, transforming the loess dust, fine as flour, into a sticky mud, thick and black, that the soldiers called buna. Endless stretches of swamp formed then, where the corpses and carcasses of horses scattered by the fighting slowly decomposed. Men were succumbing to endless diarrhea, and lice were making their appearance; even the trucks were getting stuck, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to move around. To help the Kommandos, we were recruiting many Ukrainian auxiliaries, nicknamed “Askaris” by the old Africa hands; they were financed by the local municipalities using confiscated Jewish funds. Many of them were Bulbovitsi, those Volhynian extremists Oberländer talked about (they took their name from Taras Bulba): after the liquidation of the OUN-B, they had been given the choice between a German uniform or the camps; most had melted back into the population, but some had come to sign up. Farther up north, on the other hand, between Pinsk, Mozyr, and Olevsk, the Wehrmacht had allowed a “Ukrainian Republic of Polesia” to be established, headed by a certain Taras Borovets, erstwhile proprietor of a quarry in Kostopol nationalized by the Bolsheviks; he hunted down isolated units of the Red Army and Polish partisans, and that freed more troops for us, so in exchange we tolerated him; but the Einsatzgruppe worried that he was protecting hostile elements of the OUN-B, the ones whom people jokingly called “OUN (Bolshevik)” in contrast to the “Mensheviks” of Melnyk. We also recruited the Volksdeutschen we found in the communities, to serve as mayors or policemen. The Jews, almost everywhere, had been conscripted into forced labor; and we were beginning systematically to shoot the ones who didn’t work. But on the Ukrainian side of the Sbrutch, our actions were often frustrated by the apathy of the local population, which did not inform on the movements of the Jews: the Jews took advantage of this to move around illegally, hiding in the forests to the North. Our Brigadeführer, Rasch, gave the order then to have the Jews parade in public before executions, in order to destroy in the eyes of the Ukrainian peasants the myth of Jewish political power. But such measures didn’t seem to have much effect.
One morning, Janssen suggested I come witness an action. That had to happen sooner or later, I knew it and had thought about it. I can in all honesty say that I had doubts about our methods: I had trouble grasping their logic. I had talked with Jewish prisoners; they told me that for them, bad things had always come from the East, and good ones, from the West; in 1918 they had welcomed our troops as liberators, saviors; those troops had behaved very humanely; after their departure, Petliura’s Ukrainians had returned to massacre them. As for Bolshevik power, it starved the people. Now, we were killing them. And undeniably, we were killing a lot of people. That seemed atrocious to me, even if it was inevitable and necessary. But one has to confront atrocity; one must always be ready to look inevitability and necessity in the face, and accept the consequences that result from them; closing your eyes is never an answer. I accepted Janssen’s offer. The action was commanded by Untersturmführer Nagel, his adjunct; I left Tsviahel with him. It had rained the night before but the road was still good; we traveled slowly between two high walls of green streaming with light, which hid the fields from us. The village, I’ve forgotten its name, was on the edge of a wide river, a few miles beyond the old Soviet border; it was a mixed hamlet, the Galician peasants lived to one side, the Jews to the other. At our arrival I found the cordons already deployed. Nagel had pointed to a wood behind the hamlet: “That’s where it happens.” He seemed nervous, hesitant; he too had probably never killed anyone yet. On the main square, our Askaris were gathering the Jews, men of advanced age, adolescents; they took them in little groups from the Jewish alleyways, sometimes striking them, then they forced them to crouch down, guarded by a few Orpos. Some Germans were accompanying them too; one of them, Gnauk, was lashing the Jews with a horsewhip to push them on. But apart from the shouting everything seemed relatively calm, well ordered. There weren’t any spectators; from time to time, a child appeared in the corner of the square, looked at the squatting Jews, then went away. “We need another half hour, I think,” Nagel said.—“Can I look round?” I asked him.—“Yes, of course. But take your orderly with you.” That’s what he called Popp, who ever since Lemberg was always with me and prepared my quarters and my coffee, polished my boots, and washed my uniforms; not that I had asked him for anything. I headed toward the little Galician farms, in the direction of the river, with Popp following a few steps behind, rifle on his shoulder. The houses were long and low; the doors remained obstinately closed; I didn’t see anyone at the windows. In front of a wooden gate coarsely painted pale blue, about thirty geese were noisily cackling, waiting to go back in. I went past the last houses and down to the river, but the bank grew swampy, I climbed back up a little; farther on, I caught sight of the woods. The air resounded with the throbbing, obsessive croaking of frogs mating. Farther up, threading their way between soaked fields where pools of water reflected the sun, a dozen white geese were walking in a line, fat and proud, followed by a frightened calf. I had already had a chance to visit some villages in the Ukraine: they seemed much poorer and more miserable than this one; Oberländer would be disappointed to see his theories demolished. I turned back. In front of the blue gate, the geese were still waiting, watching a weeping cow, its eyes swarming with clusters of flies. In the square, the Askaris were making the Jews get into trucks, shouting and whipping them, though the Jews were not resisting. Two Ukrainians, in front of me, were dragging an old man with a wooden leg; his prosthesis came off and they threw him unceremoniously into the truck. Nagel had walked away; I caught hold of one of the Askaris and pointed to the wooden leg: “Put that with him in the truck.” The Ukrainian shrugged, picked up the leg, and tossed it in after the old man. About thirty Jews could be crammed into each truck; there must have been 150 in all, but we only had three trucks, so it would take two trips. When the trucks were full, Nagel motioned me to get into the Opel and headed toward the wood, followed by the trucks. At the edge, the cordon was already in place. The trucks were unloaded, then Nagel gave the order to pick the Jews who would go and dig; the others would wait there. A Hauptscharführer made the selection, and shovels were handed out; Nagel formed an escort and the group disappeared into the wood. The trucks had already left. I looked at the Jews: the ones closest to me looked pale, but calm. Nagel approached and bawled at me sharply, pointing to the Jews: “It’s necessary, you understand? Human suffering mustn’t count for anything in all this.”—“Yes, but still it does count for something.” This was what I couldn’t manage to grasp: the yawning gap, the absolute contradiction between the ease with which one can kill and the huge difficulty there must be in dying. For us, it was another dirty day’s work; for them, the end of everything.
Shouts were coming from the wood. “What is it?” Nagel asked.—“I don’t know, Untersturmführer,” a noncom said, “I’ll go see.” He went into the wood. Some Jews were shuffling back and forth, dragging their feet, their eyes fixed on the ground, in the sullen silence of dull men waiting for death. A teenager, crouching on his heels, was humming a nursery rhyme and looking at me with curiosity; he put two fingers to his lips; I gave him a cigarette and some matches: he thanked me with a smile. The noncom reappeared at the entrance to the woods and called out: “They found a mass grave, Untersturmführer.”—“What? A mass grave?” Nagel headed toward the wood and I followed him. Under the trees, the Hauptscharführer was slapping one of the Jews, shouting: “You knew, you bastard! Why didn’t you tell us?”—“What’s going on?” Nagel asked. The Hauptscharführer stopped slapping the Jew and answered: “Look, Untersturmführer. We’ve discovered a Bolshevik grave.” I approached the trench dug by the Jews; at the bottom, you could make out moldy, shriveled, almost mummified bodies. “They must have been shot in the winter,” I observed. “That’s why they haven’t decomposed.” A soldier in the bottom of the trench stood up. “It looks like they were killed with a bullet in the neck, Untersturmführer. NKVD work for sure.” Nagel summoned the Dolmetscher: “Ask him what happened.” The interpreter translated as the Jew spoke. “He says the Bolsheviks arrested a lot of men in the village. But he says they didn’t know that they were buried here.”—“These scum didn’t know!” the Hauptscharführer exploded. “They killed them themselves, you mean!”—“Hauptscharführer, calm down. Have this grave filled in again and go dig somewhere else. But mark the place, in case we have to come back for an investigation.” We returned to the cordon; the trucks were arriving with the remaining Jews. Twenty minutes later the Hauptscharführer, beet red, joined us. “We’ve come across more bodies, Untersturmführer. It’s not possible, they’ve filled the forest.” Nagel called a little meeting. “There aren’t many clearings in this wood,” a noncom suggested, “that’s why we’re digging in the same places as they did.” While they talked, I gradually noticed long splinters of very fine wood stuck in my fingers, right under the nails; feeling around, I discovered that they went down to the knuckle, just beneath the skin. This was strange. How had they gotten there? I hadn’t felt anything. I began to pull them out delicately, one by one, trying to avoid drawing blood. Fortunately they slipped out easily enough. Nagel seemed to have reached a decision: “There’s another part of the wood, over there, it’s lower down. We’ll go try on that side.”—“I’ll wait for you here,” I said. “Fine, Obersturmführer. I’ll send someone to get you.” Absorbed, I flexed my fingers several times: everything seemed in order. I walked away from the cordon along a gentle incline, through tall weeds and flowers, already almost dry. Farther down began a wheat field, guarded by a crow crucified by its feet, its wings spread out. I lay down in the grass and looked at the sky; my soul spread calm and flat over the field, gently lazing out to the rim of the woods. I closed my eyes.