The Kindly Ones

So we started off with this horde of children in rags, leaving poor Piontek’s body lying there. Thomas took his submachine gun, and I picked up the bag of provisions. The group included almost seventy kids in all, including a dozen girls. Most of them, as we gradually learned, were orphan Volksdeutschen; some came from the region of Zamosc and even from Galicia and as far as Odessa. They had been roaming like this for months behind Russians lines, living on what they could find, picking up other children, pitilessly killing Russians and isolated Germans, whom they regarded as deserters. Like us, they marched at night and rested during the day, hidden in the forests. On the march they advanced in military order, with scouts out front, then the rest of the troupe, girls in the middle. Twice, we saw them massacre little groups of sleeping Russians: the first time it was easy, the soldiers, drunk, were sleeping off their vodka on a farm and had their throats cut or were hacked to pieces in their sleep; the second time, a kid shattered a guard’s skull with a rock, then the others rushed the ones snoring around a fire, near their broken-down truck. Curiously, they never took their weapons: “Our own Germans weapons are better,” the boy who commanded them and who claimed his name was Adam explained. We also saw them attack a patrol with amazing guile and savagery. The little unit had been spotted by the scouts; most of the group withdrew into the woods, and twenty or so boys advanced onto the path toward the Russians, shouting, “Russki! Davaï! Khleb, khleb!” The Russians weren’t suspicious and let them approach, some even laughed and took some bread out of their bags. When the children had surrounded them, they attacked them with their tools and their knives, it was an insane butchery, I saw a little seven-year-old boy jump onto a soldier’s back and plant a big nail in his eye. Two of the soldiers still managed to fire off a few volleys before they collapsed: three children were killed on the spot and five were wounded. After the fight, the survivors, covered in blood, brought back the wounded, who were crying and howling in pain. Adam saluted them and himself finished off, with his knife, the ones who were hit in the legs or stomach; the two others were handed over to the girls, and Thomas and I tried as well as we could to clean their wounds and bandage them with rags from shirts. Among themselves they behaved almost as brutally as with the adults. During the breaks, we had time to observe them: Adam had himself waited on by one of the older girls, then led her off into the woods; the others fought for pieces of bread or sausage, the smallest had to run to pilfer from the bags while the big ones clouted them or even hit them with shovels; then two or three boys would grab a girl by the hair, throw her on the ground, and rape her in front of the others, biting her neck like cats; some boys openly jerked off as they watched; others would hit the one on top of the little girl and shove him aside to take his place; when the girl tried to run away, they caught her and knocked her down with a kick in the stomach, all this in a racket of shouts and piercing screams; several of these barely pubescent girls looked pregnant. These scenes shattered my nerves profoundly; I found it very hard to bear this demented company. Some of the children, especially the older ones, scarcely spoke German; whereas, at least until the previous year, they all must have gone to school, no trace of their education seemed to remain, aside from the unshakeable conviction that they belonged to a superior race. They lived like a primitive tribe or a pack, cleverly cooperating to kill or find food, then viciously fighting over the booty. The authority of Adam, who was physically the tallest, seemed uncontested; I saw him strike against a tree, till it bled, the head of a boy who had been slow to obey him. Maybe, I said to myself, he has all the adults he meets killed so he can remain the oldest.