The Kindly Ones

After crossing the Styr, Höfler turned off onto the road leading south. Signs marked the way; judging from the map, we had a few hours ahead of us. It was a fine Monday morning, calm, peaceful. The sleeping villages seemed scarcely affected by the war; the checkpoints let us pass without difficulty. To our left, already, the sky was growing paler. A little later the sun, still reddish, appeared through the trees. Thin clumps of mist stuck to the ground; between the villages, large flat fields stretched out interminably, interspersed with copses and hills covered with dense, low foliage. The sky slowly turned blue. “The land must be good here,” Popp commented. I didn’t answer and he was silent. In Radziechow we stopped to eat. Once again, the roadsides and ditches were strewn with wrecked tanks, and burned isbas disfigured the villages. The traffic got thicker; we crossed long columns of trucks loaded with soldiers and supplies. A little before Lemberg, a roadblock forced us to pull aside to let some Panzers pass. The road trembled; whirlwinds of dust obscured our windows and slipped in through the cracks. Höfler offered Popp and me a cigarette. He made a face as he lit his own: “These Sportnixes really stink.”—“They’re all right,” I said, “don’t be so fussy.” After the tanks had passed, a Feldgendarm approached and motioned us not to start up: “There’s another column coming,” he shouted. I finished my cigarette and threw the butt out the door. “Popp is right,” Höfler suddenly said. “It’s a beautiful countryside. A man could settle down here, after the war.”—“You’d come settle here?” I asked him with a smile. He shrugged: “It depends.”—“On what?”—“On the bureaucrats. If they’re like the ones back home, it’s not worth it.”—“And what would you do?”—“If I could do anything, Obersturmführer? I’d open a business, like at home. A nice little cigarette shop, with a bar too, and maybe a fruit and vegetable stand, possibly.”—“And you’d rather do that here than at home?” He banged the steering wheel sharply: “Well, I had to close the store at home. In ’thirty-eight already.”—“Why?”—“Because of those bastards from the cartels, from Reemtsma. They decided we had to make at least five thousand a year, to carry their products. In my village, there are maybe sixty families, so, before you could sell five thousand reichsmarks’ worth of cigarettes…. There was nothing for it, they were the only suppliers. I had the only cigarette store in the village, so our Parteiführer supported me, he wrote letters to the Gauleiter for me, we tried everything, but there was nothing to be done. It ended up in the commercial court and I lost, so I had to close up shop. Vegetables weren’t enough. And then I got drafted.”—“So there’s no cigarette shop in your village now?” Popp said in his muffled voice.—“Well, no, that’s what I said.”—“In my town there never was one.” The second column of Panzers arrived and everything started trembling again. One of the Admiral’s windows had come loose and rattled wildly in its frame. I pointed it out to Höfler and he nodded. The column filed by, endless: the front must still be advancing at full speed. Finally the Feldgendarm signaled to us that the road was clear.

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.