The thin woman was among them, her chest racked by tuberculosis. She knew where she was going-they all did-but like the rest she stumbled with resigned obedience to the rear of the van. She was too weak to get up, for the tailboard was high off the ground, so she turned to me for help. We stood and looked at each other in stunned amazement.
I heard somebody approach behind me, and the other Kapos at the tailboard straightened to attention, scraping their caps off.
Realizing it must be an SS officer, I did the same. The woman just stared at me, unblinking. The man behind me came forward. It was Captain Roschmann. He nodded to the other Kapos to carry on, and stared at me with those pale blue eyes. I thought he could only mean I would be flogged that evening for being slow to take my cap off.
“What’s your name?” he asked softly.
“Tauber, Herr Kapitan,” I said, still ramrod at attention.
“Well, Tauber, you seem to be a little slow. Do you think we ought to liven you up a little this evening?
There was no point in saying anything. The sentence was passed.
Roschmann’s eyes flickered to the woman and narrowed as if he were suspecting something; then his slow, wolfish smile spread across his face.
“Do you know this woman?” he asked.
“Yes, Herr Kapitan,” he answered.
“Who is she?” he asked. I could not reply. My mouth was gummed together as if by glue “Is she your wife?” he went on.
I nodded dumbly.
He grinned even more widely. “Well, now, my dear Tauber, where are your manners? Help the lady up into the van.
I still stood there, unable to move. He put his face closer to mine and whispered, “You have ten seconds to pack her in, or you will go yourself.” Slowly I held out my arm and Esther leaned upon it. With this assistance she climbed into the van. The other Kapos waited to slam the doors shut.
When she was up, she looked down at me, and two tears came, one from each eye, and rolled down her cheeks. She did not say anything to me; we never spoke throughout. Then the doors were slammed shut and the van rolled away. The last thing I saw was her eyes looking at me.
I have spent twenty years trying to understand the look in her eyes. Was it love or hatred, contempt or pity, bewilderment or understanding? I shall never know.
When the van had gone, Roschmann turned to me, still grinning. “You may go on living until it suits us to finish you off, Tauber,” he said. “But you are dead as of now.” And he was right. That was the day my soul died inside me. It was August 29, 1942.
After August that year I became a robot. Nothing mattered any more. There was no feeling of cold or of pain, no sensation of any kind at all. I watched the brutalities of Roschmann and his fellow SS men without batting an eyelid. I was inured to everything that can touch the human spirit and most things that can touch the body. I just noted everything, each tiny detail, filing them away in my mind or pricking the dates into the skin of my legs. The transports came, their occupants marched to Execution Hill or to the vans, died, and were buried.
Sometimes I looked into their eyes as they went, walking beside them to the gates of the ghetto with my armband and club. It reminded me of a poem I had once read by an English poet, which described how an ancient mariner, condemned to live, had looked into the eyes of his crewmates as they died of thirst, and read the curse in them. But for me there was no curse, for I was immune even to the feeling of guilt.
That was to come years later. There was only the emptiness of a dead man still walking upright…
Peter Miller read on late into the night. The effect of the narration of the atrocities on him was at once monotonous and mesmerizing. Several times he sat back in his chair and breathed deeply for a few minutes to regain his calm. Then he read on.
Once, close to midnight, he laid the book down and made more coffee.
He stood at the window before drawing the curtains, looking down into the street. Farther down the road the brilliant neon light of the Cafe Cherie blazed across the Steindamm, and he saw one of the part-time girls who frequent it to supplement their incomes emerge on the arm of a businessman. They disappeared into a pension a little farther down, where the businessman would be relieved of 100 marks for half an hour of copulation.
Miller pulled the curtains across, finished his coffee, and returned to Salomon Tauber’s diary.
In the autumn of 1943 the order came through from Berlin to dig up the tens of thousands of corpses in the High Forest and destroy them more permanently, with either fire or quicklime. The job was easier said than done, with winter coming on and the ground about to freeze hard. It put Roschmann in a foul temper for days, but the administrative details of carrying out the order kept him busy enough to stay away from us.
Day after day the newly formed labor squads were seen marching up the hill into the forest with their pickaxes and shovels, and day after day the columns of black smoke rose above the forest. For fuel they used the pines of the forest, but largely decomposed bodies do not burn easily, so the job was slow.
Eventually they switched to quicklime, covered each layer of corpses with it, and in the spring of 1944, when the earth softened, filled them in. The gangs who did the work were not from the ghetto. They were totally isolated from all other human contact. They were Jewish, but were kept imprisoned in one of the worst camps in the neighborhood, Salas Pils, where they were later exterminated by being given no food at all until they died of starvation, despite the cannibalism to which many resorted. The work was more or less completed in the spring of 1944.
This procedure badly burned the corpses but did not destroy the bones.
The Russians later uncovered these 80,000 skeletons. was finally liquidated. Most of its 30,000 inhabitants were marched toward the forest to become the last victims that pinewood was destined to receive. About 5000 of us were transferred to the camp of Raiservald, while behind us the ghetto was fired and then the ashes were bulldozed. Of what had once been there, nothing was left but an area of flattened ashes covering hundreds of acres.
[For a further twenty pages of typescript Tauber’s diary described the struggle to survive in Kaiserwald concentration camp against the onslaught of starvation, disease, overwork, and the brutality of the camp’s guards. During this time no sign was seen of SS Captain Eduard Roschmann. But apparently he was still in Riga. Tauber described how in early October of 1944 the SS officers, by now panic-stricken at the thought they might be taken alive by the vengeful Russians, prepared for a desperate evacuation of Riga by sea, taking along a handful of the last surviving prisoners as their passage ticket back to the Reich in the west. This became fairly common practice for the SS staff of the concentration camps.
The Russian spring offensive of 1944 carried the tide of war so far westward that the Soviet troops pushed south of the Baltic States and through to the Baltic Sea to the west of them. This cut off the whole of Ostand from the Reich and led to a blazing quarrel between Hitler and his generals. They had seen it coming and had pleaded with Hitler to pull back the forty-five divisions inside the enclave. He had refused, reiterating his parrot-cry, “Death or Victory.” All he offered those 500,000 soldiers inside the enclave was death. Cut off from resupply, they fought with dwindling ammunition to delay a certain fate, and eventually surrendered. Of the majority, made prisoners and transported in the winter of 1944-1945 to Russia, few returned ten years later to Germany. The advance swept on. So long as they could still claim they had a task to perform, important to the Reich, they could continue to outrank the Wehrmacht and avoid the terrible prospect of being required to face Stalin’s divisions in combat. This “task,” which they allotted to themselves, was the escorting back into the still safe heart of Germany of the few remaining wretches from the camps they had run. Sometimes the charade became ridiculous, as when the SS guards outnumbered their tottering charges by as many as ten to one.]