The Kindly Ones

Finally the first frosts seized the roads, and I could leave. The cold had settled in suddenly, overnight; in the morning, the vapor of our breath, the windows white with frost, were a joyous sight. Before leaving, I put on all my sweaters; Hanika had managed to find an otterskin shapka for me for a few reichsmarks; in Kharkov, we would quickly have to find some warm clothes. On the road, the sky was pure and blue; clouds of sparrows whirled before the woods; near the villages, peasants were reaping frozen pond rushes to cover their isbas. The road itself was treacherous: the frost, in places, had seized the chaotic ridges of the mud, raised by the passage of tanks and trucks, and these hardened crests made the vehicles skid, tore the tires, sometimes even caused cars to flip over when a driver took a curve badly and lost control of his vehicle. Elsewhere, beneath a fine crust that crumbled under the wheels, the mud remained viscous, insidious. All around stretched the empty steppe, the harvested fields, some forests. It’s about 120 kilometers from Poltava to Kharkov: the trip took a full day. We entered the city through devastated suburbs with charred, ruined, overturned walls, among which, hastily cleared away, lay piled in little stacks the twisted and burned wrecks of the fighting equipment wasted on the futile defense of the city. The Vorkommando had set itself up in the Hotel International, which sat at the side of an immense central square dominated, at the rear, by the constructivist pile of the Dom Gosprom, cubical buildings, arranged in a semicircle, with two tall square arches and a pair of skyscrapers—a surprising construction for this large lazy city with its wooden houses and old czarist churches. The House of the Plan, burned during the battles, raised its massive façades and columns of gutted windows nearby, over to the left; in the center of the square, an imposing bronze Lenin turned his back to the two blocks and, indifferent to the cars and German tanks lined up at his feet, welcomed the passersby with a large gesture. In the hotel, confusion reigned; most of the rooms had broken windows, and bitter cold swept in. I requisitioned a small suite that was more or less inhabitable, left Hanika to see to the windows and the heating, and went back down to find Callsen. “The battles for the city were very violent,” he summarized for me, “there was a lot of destruction, as you saw; it will be hard to find quarters for the whole Sonderkommando.” The Vorkommando had nonetheless started its SP work and was interrogating suspects; in addition, at the Sixth Army’s request, they had taken a number of hostages to discourage sabotage, as in Kiev. Callsen had already formed his political analysis: “The population of the city is mostly Russian, so the delicate problems stemming from our relations with the Ukrainians will be less acute here. There’s also a large Jewish population, although a lot of them fled with the Bolsheviks.” Blobel had given him the order to summon the Jewish leaders and shoot them: “For the others, we’ll see later on.”