by Jodi Picoult
We were a special Waffen-SS unit, part of the Kommandostab of the Reichsfuhrer-SS, and we were deployed in shooting situations against civilians. As an Untersturmfuhrer, I led one of the fifteen companies that made up the 8th SS Infantry Regiment, which fell under the umbrella of the brigade. We moved through northern Ukraine, from Dubno to Rowno to Zhytomyr. What we did was just what I had done years earlier in Poland--except there were fewer Jewish leaders and political prisoners left.
My supervisor, Hauptsturmfuhrer Voelkel, had given us our orders: round up all political undesirables, and all racial inferiors--Gypsies, for example, and all Jews--men, women, and children. We were to collect their valuables and clothes, to march them to open fields and ravines on the outskirts of towns and cities that had been conquered, and to kill them.
The Reinigungsaktionen went as such: we would require the Jews to report at a given site--school or prison or factory--and then take them to a place that had been prearranged. Some of these places were natural ravines, some were dugouts built by the prisoners themselves. After they'd given up their clothing and valuables, we would drive them into the pit and make them lie facedown. Then, as the commanding officer of the regiment, I would give the order. The NCOs and volunteers, Waffen-SS men, would lift their Karabiner 98ks and shoot the prisoners in the back of the neck. Then some soldiers would haul in a load of dirt or lime before the next group was driven into the pit.
I would walk among the bodies, find the ones that were still moving, and deliver the coup de grace with my pistol.
I did not think about what I was doing. How could I? To be stripped naked, shouted at to move faster and faster toward the pit with your children running beside you. To look down and see your friends and your relatives, dying an instant before you. To take your place between the twitching limbs of the wounded, and wait for your moment. To feel the blast of the bullet, and then the heaviness of a stranger falling on top of you. To think like this was to think that we were killing other humans, and to us, they could not be humans. Because then what did that say about us?
And so, after each Aktion, we got drunk. So incredibly drunk that we drove from our nightmares that unholy image of the ground bleeding, the red runoff swelling like a geyser after all the bodies were in the pit. We drank until we could no longer smell the shit that coated the corpses. Until we did not see, printed on the backs of our eyelids, the occasional child who clawed his way to the top of the tangle of limbs, shot but not dead, and who ran around the pit bleating for his mother or father until I put us out of our misery and killed him with a single bullet.
Some of the officers went crazy. I feared I might, too. There was another second lieutenant who had one of his men get up in the middle of the night, walk out of camp, and shoot himself in the head. The next day the second lieutenant refused--simply refused--to shoot anyone. Voelkel had him transferred to the front lines.
In July, Voelkel told us there would be an Aktion on the road between Rowno and Zhytomyr. Eight hundred Jews had been rounded up.
Although I had given the men explicit orders about how they were to conduct themselves and when to shoot, when the third group of prisoners stood naked at the edge of the pit, shaking and weeping, one of my enlisted men began to fall apart. Schultz put aside his rifle and sank to the ground.
I ordered him to stand down and picked up his weapon. "What are you waiting for?" I barked at the soldiers who were responsible for bringing the next group of prisoners forward. This time, I was the first to fire my weapon. I would set the example. I did this for the next three sets of prisoners, and as blood and gray matter sprayed onto my uniform, I set my jaw and ignored it. As for Schultz, he would be posted behind the front. The SS did not want anyone on the front lines who might not be able to shoot.
That night, my men went carousing at the local tavern. I sat outside under the stars and listened to the glorious silence. No crackerjack of bullet shots, no screams, no cries. I had a bottle of whiskey that was nearly empty after two hours of nursing it. I did not go into the tavern until my men left, staggering down the street and balanced precariously on each other like a child's wooden blocks. At this hour, I expected the tavern to be unoccupied; but instead, there were a half dozen officers gathered, and in a corner, Voelkel stood in front of one of the tables. Seated before him was Annika Belzer, the support staff who traveled with the Hauptsturmfuhrer. An executive secretary, she was much younger than either Voelkel or his wife back home. She was also an abysmal typist. Everyone in the 8th SS Infantry Regiment knew exactly why she'd been hired, and why the Hauptsturmfuhrer needed secretarial support even when his unit was mobile. Annika had hair that was an unearthly platinum blond, wore too much makeup, and was currently sobbing. As I watched, Voelkel jammed the barrel of his handgun into her mouth.
The others in the bar were not paying attention, or at least they were pretending not to, because you didn't mess with the leader of the infantry brigade.
"Well then," Voelkel said, cocking the trigger. "Can you make this come?"
"What are you doing?" I blurted out.
Voelkel looked over his shoulder. "Ah, Hartmann. So you think just because you got an enlisted man to listen to you, you can boss me around?"
"You can't get it up, so you're going to shoot her?"
He turned to me, his lips curling upward. "Why should you have all the fun?"
It was different. A Jew was one thing, but this girl, she was German. "If you pull that trigger," I said calmly, although my heart was hammering so loud I could feel it move the heavy wool of my uniform jacket, "the Obersturmbannfuhrer will hear about it."
"If the Obersturmbannfuhrer hears about it," Voelkel said, "I will know who to blame, hmm?"
He removed the gun from Annika's mouth and smacked her across the cheek with it. She fell to her knees, then scrambled upright and ran out. Voelkel strode toward a group of SS officers and began to drink shots with them.
Suddenly I had a headache. I didn't want to be here; I didn't want to be in the Ukraine at all. I was twenty-three. I wanted to be sitting at my mother's kitchen table, eating her homemade ham soup; I wanted to be watching pretty girls walk down the street in high heels; I wanted to kiss one of them in the brick alley behind the butcher's shop.
I wanted to be a young man with his life ahead of him, not a soldier who walked through death every waking day, and scraped its entrails from his uniform each night.
I staggered out of the tavern and saw a flash of something bright from the corner of my eye. It was the secretary, her hair catching the light of a streetlamp.
"My knight in shining armor," she said, holding out a cigarette.
I lit it for her. "Did he hurt you?"
"No worse than usual," she said, shrugging. As if she'd conjured it, the door to the tavern opened, and Voelkel stepped into the cold. He gripped her chin and kissed her hard on the mouth. "Come, my dear," he said, smooth and charming. "You aren't going to be angry with me the whole night, are you?"
"Never," she replied. "Just let me finish my cigarette."
His glance flickered over me, and then he disappeared back into the tavern.
"He's not a bad man," Annika insisted.
"Then why do you let him treat you that way?"
Annika looked me in the eye. "I could ask you the same," she said.
*
The next day, it was as if our altercation had never happened. By the time we had arrived in Zwiahel, we were no longer using rifles but rather machine guns for our Aktion. Soldiers funneled the Jews in an endless stream into the trenches. There were so many of them, this time. Two thousand. It took two days to kill them all.
There was no point in spreading sand between the layers of the bodies; instead, others in the regiment simply herded the Jews on top of their relatives and friends, some of whom were still in the throes of dying. I could hear them whispering against each other's necks, soothing, in the seconds before they were shot themselves.
One of the last groups ha
d a mother and a child. This was not extraordinary; I had seen thousands of them. But this mother, she carried the little girl, and told her not to look, to keep her eyes closed. She placed her toddler between two fallen bodies as if she were tucking her in for the night. And then she began to sing.
I didn't know the words, but I knew the melody. It was a lullaby that my mother had sung to my brother and me when we were little, albeit in a different language. The little girl sang, too. "Nite farhaltn," the Jewess sang. Don't stop.
I gave the command, and the machine guns chattered to life and shook the ground upon which I was standing. Only after the soldiers were finished did my ears stop ringing.
That's when I heard the little girl, still singing.
She was slick with blood and her voice was not much more than a whisper, but the notes rose like soap bubbles. I walked through the pit and pointed my gun at her. Her face was still buried in her mother's shoulder, but when she sensed me looming over her, she looked up.
I fired my weapon into her dead mother's body.
Then the crack of a pistol shot rang out and there was no more music.
Beside me, Voelkel holstered his gun. "Aim better," he said.
*
I had spent three months with the 1.SS Infantry Brigade, haunted by my nightmares. I would sit down for breakfast and see the ghost of a dead man standing across the room. I would look at my laundered uniforms, spotless, and still see the places where blood had seeped into the wool. I would drink at night so that I blacked out, because the space between wakefulness and sleep was the most dangerous one to tread.
But even after the last Jew in Zwiahel had been shot, even after Voelkel commended us on a job well done, I could still hear that toddler singing. She was long gone, buried beneath countless layers of her townsfolk, yet the breeze would draw a violin bow across the branches of a tree and I would again hear her lullaby. I would listen to the chime of coins being counted, and I would imagine her laughter. Her voice was caught in the shell of my ear, as if it were the ocean.
I started drinking early that night, skipping dinner entirely. The tavern bar was swimming in front of me, untethered; I had to imagine each shot that passed through my lips rooting me to the stool upon which I was seated. I thought maybe I could just pass out right there on the gummy tables that were never wiped clean enough.
I don't know how long I'd been sitting there when she showed up. Annika. When I opened my eyes, my cheek pressed against the wood of the table, she was sideways and staring at me. "Are you okay?" she asked, and I lifted my head, which was the size of the world, and watched her spin upright.
"Looks like you need a hand getting home," she said.
Then she was hauling me to my feet, although I didn't want to go. She was talking a million miles a minute and dragging me out of the bar, to a place where I would be alone with my memories. I struggled against her, which wasn't hard, because she was a tiny thing and I was considerably bigger. She immediately cringed, expecting to be hit.
She thought I was like Voelkel.
That, if nothing else, broke through the haze of my head. "I don't want to go home," I said.
I do not remember how we got to her quarters. There were stairs, and I was in no condition to navigate them. I have no idea whose idea it was to take off our clothes. I have no idea what happened, which let me tell you, is a great regret for me.
Here is what I do recall, with perfect clarity: waking up to the cold kiss of a pistol against my forehead, and Voelkel looming over me, telling me that my career as an officer was over.
"I have a surprise for you," Aleks said, when I wandered into the kitchen. "Sit down."
I climbed onto a stool and watched the muscles in his back flex as he opened the door to the brick oven and pulled something from inside. "Close your eyes," he said. "Don't peek."
"If it's a new recipe then I certainly hope you've still made the rest of the usual order--"
"All right," Aleks interrupted, so near that I could feel the heat of his skin close to mine. "You can look now."
I opened my eyes. Aleks was holding out his palm. In its center was a roll that looked just like the one my father used to make for me, and this alone made me feel like crying.
I could already smell the cinnamon and the chocolate. "How did you know?" I asked.
"The night I had to suture your neck. You talk a lot when you're three sheets to the wind." He grinned. "Promise me you'll eat the whole thing."
I broke it open. Steam rose between us in the shape of a secret. The crumb inside was slightly pink, warm, like flesh. "I promise," I said, and I took the first bite.
SAGE
Can you blame the creationist who doesn't believe in evolution, if he has been fed that alleged truth his whole life, and swallowed it hook, line, and sinker?
Maybe not.
Can you blame the Nazi who was born into an anti-Semitic country and given an anti-Semitic education, who then grows up and slaughters five thousand Jews?
Yes. Yes, you can.
The reason I am still sitting at Josef's kitchen table is the same reason traffic slows after a car wreck--you want to see the damage; you can't let yourself pass without that mental snapshot. We are drawn to horror even as we recoil from it.
Spread before me on the table are pictures--the photo he showed me days ago of himself as a soldier in a camp; and the photo clipped from the newspaper taken on Kristallnacht, with Josef--Reiner--grinning and eating his mother's homemade cake.
How could someone who murdered innocent people look so . . . so . . . ordinary?
"I just don't understand how you did it," I say, into the silence. "How you lived a normal life, and pretended none of this ever happened."
"It is amazing, what you can make yourself believe, when you have to," Josef says. "If you keep telling yourself you are a certain kind of person, eventually you will become that person. That's what the Final Solution was all about, really. First I convinced myself that I was of pure race, Aryan. That I deserved things others did not, simply by the accident of my birth. Think about that--that hubris, that arrogance. By comparison, convincing myself and others that I was a good man, an honest man, a humble teacher was easy."
"I don't know how you sleep at night," I reply.
"Who says that I do?" Josef answers. "Surely you see now that I did horrible things. That I deserve to die."
"Yes," I reply bluntly. "You do. But if I kill you, I'm no better than you were."
Josef considers this. "The first time you make a decision like that, a decision which rubs against all your morals, is the hardest. The second time, though, is not so hard. And that makes you feel a fraction better about the first time. And so on. But you can keep dividing and dividing and you'll never entirely get rid of the sourness in your stomach that you taste when you think back to the moment you could have said no."
"If you are trying to get me to help you die, you're doing a lousy job."
"Ah, yes, but there is a difference between what I did and what I am asking you to do. I want to die."
I think of those poor Jews, stripped and humiliated, clinging to their children as they marched into a pit filled with bodies. Maybe they wanted to die, too, at that moment. Better that, than live in a world where this sort of hell could happen.
I think of my grandmother, who--like Josef--refused to speak of this for so long. Was it because she thought that if she didn't talk about it, she wouldn't have to relive it? Or was it because even a single word of memory was like opening Pandora's box, and might let evil seep like poison into the world again?
I think, too, of the monsters she wrote about in her story. Did they hide in the shadows from others? Or from themselves?
And I think of Leo. I wonder how he subjects himself to these sorts of stories, willingly, every day. Maybe it's not so much about catching the perpetrators, after sixty-five years. Maybe it's just so that he knows someone is still listening, for the sake of the victims.
I for
ce my attention back to Josef. "So what happened? After Voelkel caught you in bed with his girlfriend?"
"He did not kill me, obviously," Josef says. "But he made sure I would not work within his regiment anymore." He hesitates. "At the time I did not know if that was a blessing or a curse."
He reaches for the photo he showed me, the one of himself in the camp, holding a pistol. "Those who did not want to do their job in a shooting brigade were not punished or forced to do it. It was still their choice. They were just transferred instead.
"After the disciplinary hearing, I was sent to the Eastern Front. A Bewahrungseinheit--a penal company. Now, I was a lieutenant under recall. I'd been demoted to sergeant and I had to prove myself or lose my rank." Josef unbuttons his shirt and shrugs his left arm from the sleeve. There is a small circular burn mark on the underarm, at the armpit. "They gave me a Blutgruppe tattoo, applied to the members of the Waffen-SS. We were all supposed to have one, although it did not always work out that way. One small letter in black ink. If I needed a blood transfusion or I was unconscious, or my Erkennungsmarke had gone missing, the doctor would know my blood type and could take care of me first. And as it turned out, that saved my life."
"There's nothing there but a scar."
"That's because I cut it away with a Swiss Army knife when I moved to Canada. Too many people knew that SS had them; they were hunting down war criminals. I did what I had to do."
"So you were shot," I say.
He nods. "We had no food and the weather was brutal, and the Red Army ambushed our platoon one night. I took a bullet meant for my commanding officer. Lost a great deal of blood and almost died. The Reich, they saw it as an act of heroism. At the time, I had only been hoping for suicide." He shakes his head. "It was enough, though, to redeem myself. I had irreparable nerve damage in my right arm; I would never hold a rifle steady again. But by now, in late 1942, they needed me somewhere else anyway. Somewhere not the front line. And you did not have to hold a gun steady against an unarmed prisoner." Josef looks up at me. "I had previous experience in the concentration camps; it was where I started my SS career. So after nine months in the hospital, I was sent back to one. This time, as the Schutzhaftlagerfuhrer of the women's camp. I was responsible for the prisoners whenever they were present. Anus Mundi, that is what the prisoners called the camp. I remember stepping off the transport and looking at those iron gates, the words twisted between the parallel lines of metal. Arbeit macht frei. Work will set you free. And then I heard someone call my name." Josef looks up at me. "It was my brother, Franz. After all that resistance to supporting the Reich, he was now a Hauptscharfuhrer--a sergeant--working at the same camp, in administrative duties."