The Kindly Ones

On Sunday we put the posters up all over the city. The Jews were asked to gather the next morning in front of their cemetery on the Melnikova, each with fifty kilograms of luggage, to be relocated as settlers in various regions of the Ukraine. I had my doubts as to the success of this ploy: this wasn’t Lutsk anymore, and I knew that rumors had seeped through the front lines about the fate that awaited the Jews; the farther east we got, the fewer Jews we were finding; they were fleeing before us now with the Red Army, whereas in the beginning they had waited for us trustingly. On the other hand, as Hennicke pointed out to me, the Bolsheviks were keeping remarkably silent about our executions: in their radio broadcasts, they accused us of monstrous, exaggerated atrocities, but without ever mentioning the Jews; maybe, according to our experts, they were afraid of weakening the sacred unity of the Soviet people. We knew, through our informants, that many Jews were designated for evacuation to the rear, but they seemed to be selected according to the same criteria as the Ukrainians and the Russians, as engineers, doctors, members of the Party, specialized workers; most of the Jews who fled left on their own. “It’s hard to understand,” Hennicke added. “If the Jews really dominate the Communist Party, they should have made more effort to save their brethren.”—“They’re clever,” Dr. von Scheven, another officer from the Group, suggested. “They don’t want to lay themselves open to our propaganda by too obviously favoring their own people. Stalin must also be counting on Great Russian nationalism. To keep power, they sacrifice their poor cousins.”—“You’re probably right,” Hennicke said. I smiled to myself, but bitterly: as in the Middle Ages, we were reasoning with syllogisms that proved each other. And these proofs led us down the path of no return.