The Kindly Ones

For one reason or another, maybe to stay close to von Reichenau, who had his HQ there, Blobel chose to remain in Poltava, and we waited for the Kommandostab for more than a month. The Vorkommando didn’t remain inactive. As in Kiev, I set up networks of informers; it was all the more necessary given the motley population, full of immigrants from all over the USSR, among whom certainly lurked a number of spies and saboteurs; furthermore, we hadn’t found a single NKVD list or file: before retreating, they had methodically cleaned out their archives, so there was nothing left for us that might make our job easier. Working in the hotel was becoming rather difficult: while I tried to type a report or talk with a local collaborator, the screams of some man being interrogated would ring out next door, overwhelming me. One night they served us red wine at di

Finally Kuno Callsen obtained permission from the Ortskommandantur to set up the Sonderkommando in the premises of the NKVD, on Sovnarkomovskaya Street, the street of the Soviet People’s Commissariats. This large L-shaped building dates from the begi

The specialists from the Wehrmacht had meticulously searched all the public buildings for explosives and mines, and had defused some bombs; despite that, a few days after the first snowfall, the House of the Red Army exploded, killing the commander of the Sixtieth Division, its Chief of Staff, its Ia, and three clerks, who were found horribly mutilated. The same day there were four other explosions; the military was furious. The chief engineer of the Sixth Army, Oberst Selle, gave the order to place Jews in all the large buildings to discourage new bombings. As for von Reichenau, he wanted reprisals. The Vorkommando was not involved in this: the Wehrmacht took care of it. The Ortskommandant had prisoners hanged from all the balconies in the city. Behind our offices, two streets, Chernychevsky and Girchman, combined to form an irregular expanse, like a vague square between small buildings scattered about without any plan. Several of these buildings, from different periods and in different colors, opened onto the street at an abrupt angle, their elegant doorways topped by small balconies; soon, at each railing, one or several men were hanging like sacks. On a townhouse built before the last war, pale green with three floors, two muscular Atlases, flanking the door, supported the balcony with their white arms, bent back behind their heads: when I went by, a body was still twitching between these impassive caryatids. Each hanged man had a sign around his neck in Russian. To go to the office, I liked to walk, either under the bare linden and poplar trees of the long Karl-Liebknecht Street, or cutting across the vast Trade Unions Park with its monument to Shevchenko; it was just a few hundred meters, and during the day the streets were safe. On Liebknecht Street they were also hanging people. Under a balcony, a crowd had gathered. Several Feldgendarmen had come out the French door and were solidly attaching six ropes with slipknots. Then they went back into the dark room. After a while they reappeared, carrying a man with his arms and legs tied, his head covered with a hood. A Feldgendarm passed a slipknot around his neck, then the sign, then pulled off his hood. For an instant, I saw the man’s bulging eyes, the eyes of a bolting horse; then, as if overcome with fatigue, he closed them. Two of the Feldgendarmen lifted him and slowly let him slide from the balcony. His bound muscles convulsed with great shudders, then calmed down; he swung quietly, his neck broken cleanly, while the Feldgendarmen hanged the next one. The people watched till the end; I watched too, full of an evil fascination. I eagerly examined the faces of the hanged men, of the condemned men before they were passed over the railing: these faces, these terrified or terrifyingly resigned eyes told me nothing. Several of the dead men had their tongues sticking out, grotesque; streams of saliva ran from their mouths to the sidewalk, some of the spectators laughed. Anguish filled me like a vast tide, the noise of the drops of saliva horrified me. When I was still young, I had seen someone hanged. It had taken place in the frightful boarding school where I had been locked up; I suffered there, but I wasn’t the only one. One night, after di