The Kindly Ones

In Lemberg, chaos reigned. None of the soldiers questioned at the checkpoints could tell us where the HQ of the Sicherheitspolizei and the SD was; although the city had been captured two days before, no one seemed to have gone to the trouble of putting up tactical signs. We followed a large street almost at random; it ended up in a long boulevard divided in two by a mall and bordered with pastel-tinted façades prettily decorated with white moldings. The streets were swarming with people. Between the German military vehicles, cars and open trucks circulated, decorated with streamers and blue-and-yellow flags, teeming with men in civilian outfits or sometimes in scraps of uniforms, and armed with rifles and pistols; they shouted, sang, fired their guns in the air; on the sidewalks and in the park, other men, armed or not, cheered them, mixed in with impassive German soldiers. A Leutnant from the Luftwaffe was finally able to point me toward a divisional HQ; from there, we were sent to AOK 17. Officers ran up and down the stairways, came in, went out of offices, slamming doors; scattered, trampled Soviet files cluttered the hallways; in the lobby a group of men were standing with blue-and-yellow armbands on their civilian outfits, carrying rifles; they were talking animatedly in Ukrainian or Polish, I didn’t know which, with some German soldiers wearing badges embossed with a nightingale. I grabbed hold of a young Major from the Abwehr: “Einsatzgruppe B?”—“They got here yesterday. They moved into the NKVD offices.”—“And where are they?” He stared at me with an exhausted look: “I have no idea.” He finally found a subaltern who had been there and told him to help me.

On the boulevard, the traffic crawled along at a snail’s pace, then a crowd blocked everything. I got out of the Opel to see what was happening. The people were yelling at the top of their lungs and applauding; some had taken chairs from a café or some crates and were standing on top of them to get a better look; others were carrying their children on their shoulders. I made my way through the press with difficulty. In the center of the crowd, in a large cleared circle, a few men were strutting about in costumes stolen from a theater or a museum—extravagant outfits, a Regency wig with a hussar’s jacket from 1812, a magistrate’s gown bordered with ermine, Mongolian armor and Scottish tartans, a half-Roman, half-Renaissance operetta costume, with a ruff; one man was wearing Budye