The Kindly Ones

When we reached Yagotin, I was so coated in mud that the noncom in charge of the station didn’t recognize my rank and greeted me with a torrent of abuse because I was tracking mud into his waiting room. I put my kit down on a bench and retorted harshly: “I am an officer and you are not to speak to me like that.” I went back out to join Hanika, who helped me wash up a little at a hand pump. The noncom apologized profusely when he saw my insignia, which were still those of an Obersturmführer; he invited me to take a bath and have dinner. I gave him the letter for Thomas, which would leave with the mail. He put me up in a small room for officers; Hanika slept on a bench in the waiting room, with some men on leave waiting for the train to Kiev. The station chief woke me up in the middle of the night: “There’s a train in twenty minutes. Come.” I quickly got dressed and went out. The rain had stopped but everything was still dripping, the tracks were gleaming under the bleak station lights. Hanika had joined me with our kit. Then the train arrived, its brakes squealing for a long time, in spurts, before it stopped. Like all the trains nearing the front, it was half empty; we had our choice of compartments. I lay down and fell asleep. If Hanika ground his teeth, I didn’t hear him.

When I woke up we hadn’t even passed Lubny. The train stopped often, because of alerts or to let priority convoys pass. Near the toilets, I met a Major from the Luftwaffe who was returning from leave to join his squadron in Poltava. It had been five days since he left Germany. He talked to me about the morale of the civilians of the Reich, who remained confident even though victory was slow in coming; very amiably he offered us a little bread and sausage. At the station stops too we sometimes found something to snack on. The train kept its own time, I didn’t feel hurried. At the stops I lazily contemplated the sadness of the Russian stations. The facilities, barely built, already took on a dilapidated look; brambles and weeds invaded the railways; here and there, even in this season, one could see the burst of color of a stubborn flower, lost among gravel soaked with black oil. The cows that placidly wandered onto the tracks seemed surprised each time the roaring whistle of a train came to disturb their meditation. The dull gray of mud and dust covered everything. On the paths alongside the tracks, a filthy kid pushed a ramshackle bicycle, or else an old peasant hobbled along to the station to try to sell us some of her moldy vegetables. Slowly I let this endless ramification grow in me, this vast system of tracks, of switches controlled by idiotic, alcoholic laborers. At the marshalling yards, I watched interminable lines of dirty, oily, muddy freight cars waiting, full of wheat, coal, iron, gasoline, livestock, all the wealth of occupied Ukraine seized to be sent to Germany, all the things men need, moved from one place to another according to a grandiose, mysterious plan of circulation. Was that the reason why we were waging war, why men were dying? But even in everyday life that’s the way it is. Somewhere a man wastes away his life, covered with coal dust, in the stifling depths of a mine; elsewhere, another man rests warmly, clothed in alpaca, buried in a good book in an armchair, without ever thinking whence or how this armchair, this book, this alpaca, this warmth reach him. National Socialism wanted every German, in the future, to be able to have his modest share of the good things of life; but within the limitations of the Reich, that had turned out to be impossible; so now we were taking these things from others. Was that fair? So long as we had the strength and the power, yes, since as far as justice is concerned, there is no absolute authority, and each people defines its own truth and justice. But if ever our strength weakened, if our power gave out, then we would have to endure the justice of others, terrible as it might be. And that too would be fair.

In Poltava, Blobel sent me to the delousing station as soon as he set eyes on me. Then he filled me in on the situation. “The Vorkommando finally entered Kharkov on the twenty-fourth, with the Fifty-fifth Army Corps. They’ve set up offices already.” But Callsen was sorely lacking in men and urgently asking for reinforcements. For now, though, the roads were blocked by the rains and the mud. The train didn’t run any farther, since the tracks had to be restored and widened, and that too could be done only when travel became possible again. “As soon as it freezes you’ll go to Kharkov with some other officers and troops; the Kommandostab will join you a little later on. The entire Kommando will take its winter quarters in Kharkov.”