The Kindly Ones

I climbed back out and they gave me some tea; the warmth of the liquid comforted me a little. The moon, three-quarters full, had risen and hung in the gray sky, pale and scarcely visible. A little hut had been put up for the officers. I went in and sat down on a bench in the back, to smoke and drink my tea. There were three other men in this hut but no one talked. Down below, the salvos continued to crackle: tireless, methodical, the giant system we had set in motion went on destroying people. It seemed it would never stop. Ever since the beginnings of human history, war has always been regarded as the ultimate evil. But we had invented something compared to which war had come to seem clean and pure, something from which many were already trying to escape by taking refuge in the elementary certainties of war and the front. Even the insane butcheries of the Great War, which our fathers or some of our older officers had lived through, seemed almost clean and righteous compared to what we had brought into the world. I found this extraordinary. It seemed to me that there was something crucial in this, and that if I could understand it then I’d understand everything and could finally rest. But I couldn’t think, my thoughts clashed with each other, reverberating in my head like the roar of Metro cars rushing through stations one after another, going in different directions on different levels. In any case no one cared about what I might think. Our system, our State couldn’t care less about the thoughts of its servants. It was all the same to the State whether you killed Jews because you hated them or because you wanted to advance your career or even, in some cases, because you took pleasure in it. It did not mind, either, if you did not hate the Jews and the Gypsies and the Russians you were killing, and if you took absolutely no pleasure in eliminating them, no pleasure at all. It did not even mind, in the end, if you refused to kill, no disciplinary action would be taken, since it was well aware that the pool of available killers was bottomless, it could fish new men out at will, and you could just as easily be put to some other use more in keeping with your talents. Schulz, for example, the Kommandant of Ek 5 who had asked to be replaced after receiving the Vernichtungsbefehl, had finally been relieved, and it was said that he had landed a cushy job in Berlin, at the Staatspolizei. I too could have asked to leave, I would probably even have gotten a positive recommendation from Blobel or Dr. Rasch. So why then didn’t I? Probably because I hadn’t yet understood what I wanted to understand. Would I ever understand it? Nothing was less certain. A sentence of Chesterton’s ran through my head: I never said it was always wrong to enter fairyland. I only said it was always dangerous. Is that what war was, then, a perverted fairyland, the playground of a demented child who breaks his toys and shouts with laughter, gleefully tossing the dishes out the window?

A little before six o’clock, the sun set and Blobel ordered a break for the night: the shooters couldn’t see anymore in any case. He held a quick meeting, standing behind the ravine among his officers, to discuss the problems. Thousands of Jews were still waiting in the square and on Melnikova Street; according to calculations, almost twenty thousand had already been shot. Several officers complained about the condemned being sent over the edge of the ravine: when they saw the scene at their feet, they panicked and became difficult to control. After some discussion, Blobel decided to have engineers from the Ortskommandantur dig entrances into the small ravines that led to the main one, and to have the Jews come in that way; then they wouldn’t see the bodies until the last minute. He also ordered the dead to be covered over with quicklime. We returned to our quarters. On the square in front of Lukyanovskoe, hundreds of families were waiting, sitting on their suitcases or on the ground. Some had made fires and were preparing their food. In the street it was the same thing: the line stretched back to the city, guarded by a thin cordon. The next morning, at dawn, it began again. But I don’t think it is necessary to continue the description.