Holocaust (22 page)

I also learned at that first shooting—after I gained my composure—that by asserting my considerable authority, acting the part of “Heydrich’s man,” I can stifle feelings of pity that might surface. For example, I noticed that there were civilians watching the executions, and that at least two men, one a soldier, were taking still photos and motion pictures. A civilian in a dusty trenchcoat was writing notes in a small book.

At once, to divert my own mind from the corpses—swarms of flies settled on them swiftly—I began to bawl out Blobel for running a public show. The civilians, he said, were Ukrainian farmers who enjoyed watching their lifelong enemies being executed. The photographers were taking pictures for their own amusement. Nothing official. The fellow in the trenchcoat was an Italian journalist.

I ordered Blobel to chase them away. There would be no picture-taking, no journalists present. To my gratification, I found that by immersing myself in these niggling duties, I could overcome any residual feelings
about the victims. They soon appeared to me as mere casualties, by-products of our campaign. The war, as Hitler said, will be unlike any other war in human history, “not fought in knightly fashion.”

A second group of Jews were now marched in. This time, they were less compliant. Several women were screaming, tearing their hair out. One threw herself at an SS guard, embraced his boots and tried to kiss his hands, his feet. He had difficulty in kicking her away from him.

“Heydrich will get a full report on this sloppy operation,” I said. By giving orders, making myself part of the chain of command, I could detach myself from the people in the ditch. Some old men, looking like bearded prophets, were intoning prayers in Hebrew. An alien, wailing noise arose. Jews have had a lot of practice in dying, in serving as sacrificial victims. They have a
routine
for it, some kind of Talmudical procedure. Eichmann has often expatiated on this. It makes it easier for them to die.

Blobel walked away from me. “Foltz!” he shouted. “Give the order!”

Once more the machine guns stuttered. They sounded to me like the cracking of the earth under the impact of a meteor.

The Jews fell again, on top of the bodies of those who had died a few minutes earlier. In the distance, a third group—naked, shiveringly quiet—were being marched toward the trench. And farther in the distance, army trucks were unloading more Jews.

By now, I was pretty much in control of myself. The sheer magnitude of the operation—and I know there are hundreds like it, from the Baltic to the Black Sea—made me overlook what might be conceived of as cruelty. These people have to be our enemies, our racial rivals, people whose progeny could destroy Germany, whose wiles and wealth and evil notions could doom Aryan civilization.

It took me some time to realize the absolute truth of Heydrich’s convictions, derived from the Führer and
from Himmler. But they
have
to be the truth. A talented, energetic, intelligent, artistic people like our Germans could not take part in such acts unless what they did was ordained, obligatory, healthful for the future of the nation.

Fortified by these realizations, I confronted Blobel. “I am submitting a critical report on you, Colonel,” I said.

“You’re
what?”

“You will clear the area of civilians. There will be no pictures taken by SS men or anyone else. Understood?”

To one side of the machine guns, some SS men, including Foltz, were picking through the clothing. One man, guffawing, was holding up an oversized pair of women’s bloomers, waving them in the air.

“And there will be
no
more of that,” I said. “Any property left by the resettled Jews belongs to the state.”

“Save that bullshit for your meetings.”

“Your language will also be reported. Heydrich ordered me to check up on the Einsatzgruppen. Yours fails miserably to meet standards that were set.”

His choleric fat face was turning scarlet. The piggish features were splotched with red. “I fail, do I? Let me tell you something, Dorf. Ohlendorf and Nebe and the rest of us have our eyes on you. We know a spy when we see one.”

“Don’t try to undercut me, Colonel. I talk to Heydrich every day.”

He sputtered something, could find no words. Just as the Jews can be made to fear, to have their wills destroyed, their spines cored, so even a Colonel Blobel can be rendered fearful—if the threat of humiliation, exposure, even death, hangs over him. Our men in the field know what kind of a man Heydrich is. He fears no one, nothing. And I, as his emissary, bask in that power.

Sergeant Foltz had marched fifty more Jews into the ditch. Below, the gunners were sipping their cognac, smoking leisurely.

This time, my lecture had its effect. Blobel ordered
the sergeant to clear out the Ukrainians, to chase the journalist, to stop the picture-taking.

The guns fired again; the Jews fell. The pile was now rather high, and I imagined that after a few more groups had been added, tractors would be used to cover the remains, work parties of Jews with shovels would be forced to bury their own dead.

Blobel suddenly reached into my black leather holster and took out my Luger, which I had fired but once, on the SS indoor range in Berlin.

“What are you doing?” I protested.

“There’s a few still moving down there,” he said. He laughed. “Go on, finish them off yourself. You know the old street tradition. You aren’t a man until you’ve killed your Jew.”

I told him to put my gun back. Instead he slammed it into my right hand. “Desk soldier. Paper captain. Fucking office boy. Go down there and shoot a few.”

“They all seem to be dead.”

“Can’t be too sure. Jews are like rubber balls. They bounce back. Go on, I see a few moving.”

What else could I do? There was no personal danger to me. The Jews surely would not hurt me. They had died like sheep, like unprotesting kittens. Heydrich’s words helped sustain me as I descended the sandy hillside toward the foul pit.
Judaism in the East is the source of Bolshevism and therefore must be wiped out in accordance with the Führer’s aims
.

“It’s like eating noodles,” Blobel yelled at me. “Once you start you can’t stop.” His underlings sniggered. “Ask my men what it’s like, Captain,” he shouted. “You shoot ten Jews, the next hundred are easier, and the next thousand are even easier than that.”

Sergeant Foltz preceded me into the pit. We threaded our way through the naked, bloodied bodies. They seemed stitched with red holes. It is astonishing how little is needed to kill a man. Dead, the Jews seemed, in a way, more natural to me than alive, standing, waiting, praying, accepting their doom.

“One there, sir,” Foltz said.

He pointed to a young woman with long brown
hair. Her eyes were pleading. The bullets had entered her shoulders, leaving bloody gouges, but had apparently not touched any vital organs.

She held one arm up to me, a long, well-formed arm—and I had a sudden vision of Marta’s smooth arms—and her half-open eyes stared at mine.

“It’s an act of kindness to end the poor bastards’ suffering, sir,” Sergeant Foltz said. “She ain’t more than twenty.”

I hesitated. Again, I saw Marta, so clearly I almost called her name. My eyes were hazed, and I saw the entire scene-the party of SS executioners above me, the silent guns, the men sipping cognac, the verdant meadow, the groves of trees, the wide bloody ditch, now giving off the metallic odor of blood, the swarms of savage flies—I saw all of this as if underwater, as if I were on some other planet, living a life that was not mine.

“Shoot, Dorf,” Blobel shouted.

The woman’s eyes sought mine. She was almost dead. Yet some stirring of life must have remained in her. She could not raise her arm again. Her eyes were dark, slanted. The long brown hair reminded me of a girl I had once known in high school. Why these random thoughts? The conviction overpowered me.
The terribleness of our acts justifies them
. One cannot do these things unless they are, in and of themselves, worthy deeds, parts of a great plan, a world-shaking idea.

I squeezed the trigger as I had been taught in that brief session at SS school. The explosion was surprisingly soft, almost like a child’s popgun. The side of her head came apart at such close range. Bone, blood and bits of brain spattered my boots. My stomach began to churn, and it was an effort to prevent my lunch from bursting through my throat.

“That’s how, sir,” Foltz said. “You get used to it, after the first few times. They don’t seem to mind. Never seen people like them.”

He had to be right. I told myself that we are almost in league with the Jews, to effect their destruction.
How else explain the ease with which we are eliminating them?

“I’ll handle the others, sir,” Foltz said. I heard him as if he were talking through a long-distance phone. I jammed my Luger back into its sheath. I did not look again at the young woman I had just killed. If the men beneath me could kill thousands, hundreds of thousands, I had the duty to kill at least
one
. In a sense Blobel was right—although I detest the man—in forcing me to act.

Applauding, grinning, Blobel was winking at his sycophants as I approached his party. “Nice work, Dorf,” he said. “Von Reichenau says two bullets is enough for a Jew. You did it with one.”

Conversation was blotted out for a moment by a burst from the guns. More Jews were dying. And I am now convinced, a believer in the correctness of it. They have no other purpose except to die.

The wall was slowly strangling life in the ghetto. Its excuse had been that it was built for health purposes, to contain the spread of typhus. Actually, it was a vast prison, where Jews were expected to die by attrition, until the final solution went into effect.

But still Jews would sneak into the “Aryan” side. Many were women seeking food for their children. One such was a nurse named Sarah Olenick, who worked for my father in the children’s ward at the hospital. Sarah had been caught and jailed.

Angered, my father called on the ghetto police chief, a Jew named Karp, who had converted to Catholicism, and had thus gained some favor with the SS.

“I want Sarah Olenick released,” my father said.

“She’s a smuggler.”

“You know better, Karp. She went outside the wall to get bread for her children.”

“She knew the rules. No smuggling.”

“Please release her. She’s needed at the hospital.”

“A bit of class snobbery, doctor? Would you be as eager to have her freed if she were a beggar, or a laborer’s wife?”

“I would.”

“Then you can appeal for all eight of them.”

“Eight?”

He led my father to a window in his office and pointed to the prison courtyard below. There were eight women of varying ages there, among them Sarah Olenick.

“What do you think I am?” Karp whined. “A monster? I get orders, I obey them, or they’ll hang me. That beggar girl—Rivka—she’s sixteen.”

“What was her crime?”

“The same. Smuggling. She went outside the wall and got milk for her bastard kid.”

My father lowered his head and tried to pray. Useless. He felt bound, constricted, imprisoned himself. “Karp, you are a Jew. Appeal to your masters—”

“I
was
a Jew. That’s how I’ve saved my neck.”

“But you know the SS. Use your influence. You can’t let them—”

Karp began to rage. “Who the hell are you to talk? You and your brother Moses, so high and mighty on that council? What do you do but take orders from the Germans? Nod your heads and do what they say? Lists of names, work details, offenders. Hollering against smugglers as much as the Nazis do. Don’t lecture me. You want to be a hero and complain to the SS? Try it.”

My father looked once more into the courtyard, tried to catch a glimpse of Sarah—she was a tall, dignified woman of great patience and kindness—then walked away.

The eight women accused of “smuggling” were shot dead a few days later. The Jewish police refused to perform the execution, so some Poles from outside were ordered to do it.

A crowd gathered outside the prison to pray, to protest.

It did little good—either the prayers or the protest.

My mother, in her old coat, once fashionable and very much in the Berlin mode, stood by my father and held his hand. He had told her she need not come, but she insisted. “I am one of them,” my mother said.

Aaron Feldman, the boy who specialized in smuggling, climbed the prison wall and shouted down to the crowd as the women were led in one by one, blindfolded, and shot dead.

They killed Rivka the beggar first. Then Sarah was shot. Then the other six women. Their crime had been to look for food for hungry children.

“Oh, Josef,” my mother wept. “Could we not have saved them?”

“Hopeless,” he said.

My Uncle Moses, that mildest of men, was not crying, but cursing. “I want revenge. I want to see some of
them
dead and covered with blood.”

Again my father tried to persuade my mother to leave, but she insisted on remaining until the last volley of shots.

A rabbi began to lead the Hebrew prayer for the dead, and my parents, who barely knew the words, tried to pray along with them. My Uncle Moses was silent, so angry he could not speak.

When the prayers had ended, the crowd, many of them weeping, some relatives of the victims clinging to the prison gate and banging at it, began to dissolve.

Eva Lubin, my informant of this period in my parents’ lives, recalls that she and Zalman, approached Moses Weiss. Anelevitz was standing nearby. His face, as usual, was meditative, as if forever focused on some goal, some future action.

“Can you come with us?” Zalman asked.

“Of course,” Moses said.

Some people were still praying at the gate. Their voices, wrenched with sorrow, hung in the cold November air.

“I’m embarrassed that I can’t pray any more,” Moses said.

Zalman shrugged. “Prayers are no help, Weiss.”

They led him to the basement of a house on Leszno Street.

In a dark room, hidden behind a false wall, were a table, books, piles of paper and a printing press.