The Kindly Ones

The Russians had moved farther on. In the lane a little elephant came trotting toward me, followed by three chimpanzees and an ocelot. They went around the bodies and over the bridge without slowing down, leaving me alone. I was feverish, my mind was coming apart. But I still remember perfectly the two bodies lying on top of each other in the puddles, on the footbridge, and the animals moving off. I was sad but didn’t really know why. I felt all at once the entire weight of the past, of the pain of life and of inalterable memory, I remained alone with the dying hippopotamus, a few ostriches, and the corpses, alone with time and grief and the sorrow of remembering, the cruelty of my existence and of my death still to come. The Kindly Ones were on to me.

Appendices

GLOSSARY

AA (Auswärtiges Amt, “Department of the Exterior”): Foreign Office, headed by Joachim von Ribbentrop.

ABWEHR: Military intelligence service. Its full name was Amt Ausland/Abwehr im Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, “Foreign Office/Defense for the Armed Forces High Command.”

AMT: Office.

ARBEITSEINSATZ (“work operation”): Department in charge of organizing forced labor of inmates in concentration camps.

AOK (Armeeoberkommando): The headquarters of an army, which controlled a certain number of divisions. At all levels (Army, Division, Regiment, etc.), the organization of military headquarters included, among other things, a Chief of Staff; a Ia (pronounced “One-a,” “Eins-a,” in German), the general officer in charge of operations; a Ib (Eins-b) or quartermaster in charge of supplies; and a Ic/AO (Eins-c/AO), the officer in charge of military intelligence, or Abwehroffizier.

BERÜCK: Commander of the rear zone of an Army Group.

EINSATZ: Action, operation.

EINSATZGRUPPE (“action group” of the SP and SD): Deployed for the first time in 1938, for the Anschluss and the occupation of Czechoslovakia, these SS groups were in charge of dealing with the most urgent security tasks until permanent police Stelle (“offices”) could be set up. The system was formalized for Poland in September 1939. For the invasion of the USSR, following a formal agreement between the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and the Wehrmacht, an Einsatzgruppe was posted to each Army Group (with a fourth, Einsatzgruppe D, attached directly to the Eleventh Army for the Crimea and the Romanian occupation zone). Each Einsatzgruppe was made up of a Gruppenstab, or general staff, and several Einsatzkommandos (Ek) or Sonderkommandos (Sk). Each Kommando was in turn subdivided into a general staff (the Kommandostab), with support personnel (drivers, interpreters, etc.) and several Teilkommandos. The general staffs of the Groups and the Kommandos reproduced the organization of the RSHA: thus there was a Leiter I or Verwaltungsführer (personnel and administration), a Leiter II (Supply), a Leiter III (SD), IV (Gestapo), and V (Kripo). One of them, usually the Leiter III or IV, also served as Chief of Staff.

GAULEITER: Nazi Germany was divided into administrative regions called Gaue. Each Gau was supervised by a Gauleiter, a member of the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) appointed by Hitler, to whom he reported.

GESTAPO (Geheime Staatspolizei, “Secret State Police”): Directed by SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, from 1939 till the end of the war. See RSHA.

GOLDFASANEN (“Golden Pheasants”): Pejorative term for civil servants in the Ostministerium, because of their yellowish-brown uniforms, and for other Nazi functionaries.

GFP (Geheime Feldpolizei, “Secret Military Police”): Branch of the Wehrmacht in charge of military security in the theater of operations, especially in the fight against partisans. Most of the officers in the GFP had been recruited from the German police and so belonged to the Security Police (SP) or else the SS; still, this service of military security remained distinct from the services of the RSHA.

HÄFTLING (plural Häftlinge): Inmate.

HIWI (Hilfswillige, “voluntary workers”): Native auxiliaries of the Wehrmacht, usually recruited from prisoners’ camps, and employed in the rear for transport, supplies, hard labor, etc.

HONVÉD: The Hungarian army.