Tauber survived even this, and finally the remnant of his column reached Magdeburg, west of Berlin, where the SS men finally abandoned them and sought their own safety. Tauber’s group was lodged in Magdeburg prison, in the charge of the bewildered and helpless old men of the local Home Guard.
Unable to feed their prisoners, terrified of what the advancing Allies would say when they found them, the Rome Guard permitted the fittest of them to go scrounging for food in the surrounding countryside.
The last time I had seen Eduard Roschmann was when we were being counted on Danzig quayside.
Warmly wrapped against the winter cold, he was climbing into a ear. I thought it would be my last glimpse of him, but I was to see him one last time. It was April 3, 1945.
I had been out that day toward Gardelegen, a village east of the city, and had gathered a small sackful of potatoes with three others. We were trudging back with our booty when a car came up behind us, heading west. It paused to negotiate a horse and cart on the road, and I glanced around with no particular interest to see the car pass.
Inside were four S$ officers, evidently making their escape toward the west. Sitting beside the driver, pulling on the uniform jacket of an Army corporal, was Eduard Roschmann.
He did not see me, for my head was largely covered by a hood cut from an old potato sack, a protection against the cold spring wind. But I saw him. There was no doubt about it.
All four men in the car were apparently changing their uniforms even as the vehicle headed west. As it disappeared down the road a garment was thrown from one window and fluttered into the dust. We reached the spot where it lay a few minutes later and stooped to examine it. It was the jacket of an SS officer, bearing the silver twin lightning symbols of the Waffen SS and the rank of captain. Roschmann of the SS had disappeared.
Twenty-four days after this came the liberation. We had ceased to go out at all, preferring to stay hungry in the prison than venture along the streets, where complete anarchy was loose. Then on the morning of April 27 all was quiet in the town. Toward midmorning I was in the courtyard of the prison, talking to one of the old guards, who seemed terrified and spent nearly an hour explaining that he and his colleagues had nothing to do with Adolf Hitler and certainly nothing to do with the persecution of the Jews.
I heard a vehicle drive up outside the locked gates, and there was a hammering on them. The old Home Guard man went to open them. The man who stepped through, cautiously, with a revolver in his hand, was a soldier in full battle uniform, one that I had never seen before.
He was evidently an officer, for he was accompanied by a soldier in a flat round tin hat who carried a rifle. They just stood there in silence, looking around at the courtyard of the prison. In one corner were stacked about fifty corpses, those who had died in the past two weeks and whom no one had the strength to bury. Others, half alive, lay around the walls, trying to soak up a little of the spring sunshine, their sores festering and stinking.
The two men looked at each other, then at the seventy-year-old Home Guard. He looked back, embarrassed. Then he said something he must have learned in the First World War. He said, “Hello, Tommy.”
The officer looked back at him, looked again around the courtyard, and said quite clearly in English, “You fucking Kraut pig.. And suddenly I began to cry.”
I do not really know how I made it back to Hamburg, but I did. I think I wanted to see if there was anything left of the old life. There wasn’t.
The streets where I was born and grew up had vanished in the great firestorm of the Allied bombing raids; the office where I had worked was gone, my apartment, everything.
The English put me in the hospital in Magdeburg for a while, but I left of my own accord and hitchhiked back home. But when I got there and saw there was nothing left, I finally, belatedly collapsed completely. I spent a year in the hospital as a patient, along with others, who had come out of a place called Bergen-Belsen, and then another year working in the hospital as an orderly, looking after those who were worse than I had been.
When I left there, I went to find a room in Hamburg, the place of my birth, to spend the rest of my days.
[The book ended with two more clean, white sheets of paper, evidently recently typed, which formed the epilogue.]
I have lived in this little room in Altona since 1947. Shortly after I came out of the hospital I began to write the story of what happened to me and to the others at Riga.
But long before I had finished it, it became clear that others had also survived the holocaust. My original intent—believing, as others had done elsewhere in their isolation, that I might be the only survivor—had been to bear witness, to tell the world what had happened. It is clear now that this has already been done. So I did not submit my diary for publication. I kept it and the notes in the hope that one day I might at least bear witness to what happened in the small arena of Riga. I never even let anyone else read it.
Looking back, it was all a waste of time and energy, the battle to survive and to be able to write down the evidence, when others have already done it so much better. I wish now I had died in Riga with Esther.
Even the last wish, to see Eduard Roschmann stand before a court, and to give evidence to that court about what he did, will never be fulfilled. I know this now.
I walk through the streets sometimes and remember the old days here, but it can never be the same. The children laugh at me and run away when I try to be friends. Once I got talking to a little girl who did not run away, but her mother came up screaming and dragged her away.
So I do not talk to many people.
Once a woman came to see me. She said she was from the Reparations Office and that I was entitled to money. I said I did not want any money. She was very put out, insisting that it was my right to be recompensed for what was done. I kept on refusing. They sent someone else to see me, and I refused again. He said it was very irregular to refuse to be recompensed. I sensed he meant it would upset their books. But I only take from them what is due to me.
When I was in the British hospital one of the doctors asked me why I did not emigrate to Israel, which was soon to have its independence. How could I explain to him? I could not tell him that I can never go up to the Land, not after what I did to Esther, my wife. I think about It often and dream about what it must be like, but I am not worthy to go.
But if ever these lines should be read in the Land of Israel, which I shall never see, will someone there please say Kaddish for me?
Peter Miller put the diary down and lay back in his chair for a long time, staring at the ceiling and smoking. Just before five in the morning he heard the flat door open, and Sigi came in from work. She was startled to find him still awake.
“What are you doing up so late?” she asked.
“Been reading,” said Miller.
Later they lay in bed as the first glint of dawn picked out the spire of Saint Michaelis, Sigi drowsy and contented, like a young woman who has just been loved, Miller staring up at the ceiling silent and preoccupied.
“Penny for them,” said Sigi after a while.
“Just thinking.”
“I know. I can tell that. What about?”
“The next story I’m going to cover.”
She shifted and looked across at him. “What are you going to do?” she asked.
Miller leaned over and stubbed out his cigarette. “I’m going to track a man down,” he said.