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Lutsk was still burning when we arrived. A liaison officer from the Wehrmacht took charge of us to guide us to our quarters; we had to skirt the old city and the fort, the path was a complicated one. Kuno Callsen had requisitioned the Academy of Music, near the main square, at the foot of the castle: a fine, simple, seventeenth-century building—a former monastery that had also served as a prison, in the previous century. Callsen was waiting for us on the steps with some men. “It’s a practical place,” he explained to me as our equipment and our things were being unloaded. “There are still some cells in the basement, we just have to retool the locks, I’ve already started.” For my part I preferred libraries to jails, but all the books were in Russian or Ukrainian. Von Radetzky was also walking around with his bulbous nose and his vague eyes, examining the decorative moldings; when he passed near me, I remarked to him that there weren’t any Polish books. “It’s curious, Sturmba
The Vorkommando was already overworked. The Wehrmacht had arrested hundreds of Jews and looters and wanted us to take care of them. The fires were still burning and it seemed that saboteurs were keeping them up. And then there was the problem of the old fort. When he was putting his files in order, Dr. Kehrig had found his Baedeker and had held it out to me over the torn-open crates to show me the entry: “Castle Lubart. Look, a Lithuanian prince built it.” The central courtyard was overflowing with corpses, prisoners shot by the NKVD before their retreat, apparently. Kehrig asked me to go have a look. This castle had immense brick walls built on earthen ramparts, surmounted by three square towers; sentinels from the Wehrmacht guarded the gate, and an officer from the Abwehr had to intervene so I could enter. “Sorry. The Generalfeldmarschall ordered us to secure the place.”—“Of course, I understand.” An abominable stench assaulted my nose as soon as I went through the gate. I didn’t have a handkerchief and held one of my gloves over my nose to try to breathe. “Take this,” the Hauptma
The corpses were piled up in a big paved courtyard, in disordered mounds, scattered here and there. An immense, haunting buzzing filled the air: thousands of heavy blue flies were hovering over the bodies, the pools of blood, the fecal matter. My boots stuck to the pavement. The dead were already swelling up, I gazed at their green and yellowish skin, their faces gone shapeless, as if they’d been beaten to death. The smell was vile; and this smell, I knew, was the begi
The next day, the Sonderkommando set to work in earnest. One squad, under Callsen and Kurt Hans, shot three hundred Jews and twenty looters in the castle garden. In the company of Dr. Kehrig and Sturmba