by Daša Drndic
So, for two centuries various dark forces have been kicking Latvia around. And not only Latvia. If it’s any comfort, but it’s not, that criminal Jeckeln, who fled toward Berlin, was overtaken on April 28, 1945, in Halbe by Soviet soldiers and brought to a (Soviet) military court in Riga. At the trial, Jeckeln was surprisingly calm, one could say he appeared innocent, almost modest, like a man who, after bringing his accumulated dark passions under control, after feeding the wild beast in himself, was left blank and empty, (temporarily) spent.
Those operations were part of the plan for the final solution in the aast, says Jeckeln to the soldier Tsvetaev who is hearing the case. The shootings were carried out under the direction of Colonel Dr. Lange, commander of the secret police and the Gestapo in Latvia. Karl Knecht was in charge of security at the liquidation sites.
At which sites?
At the liquidation sites. I, Friedrich Jeckeln, took part in the shootings on three occasions; the same holds for Lange, Knecht, Lohse and Lieutenant Osis, commander of the traffic police in Riga. He is not German.
Who did the shooting?
Ten or twelve German Sicherheitsdienst soldiers.
What was the procedure?
What procedure?
The killing, how was the killing organized?
All of the Jews went on foot from the ghetto in Riga to the liquidation site. Near the pits, they had to deposit their clothes, which were washed, sorted and shipped back to Germany. Jews — men, women and children — passed through police cordons on their way to the pits, where they were shot by German soldiers.
Did you report the execution of the order to Himmler?
Yes, indeed. I notified Himmler by phone that the ghetto in Riga was liquidated. And then when I was in Lötzen, East Prussia, in December 1941, I reported in person too. Himmler was satisfied with the results. He said that more Jewish convoys were due to arrive in Latvia, and these were to be liquidated by me also.
Go into more detail.
At the end of January 1942, I was at Himmler’s headquarters in Lötzen, East Prussia, to discuss organizational matters regarding the Latvian SS legions. There Himmler informed me that additional convoys were due to arrive from the Reich and from other countries. The destination point would be the Salaspils concentration camp, which lay one and a quarter miles from Riga to the southeast.
I know where Salaspils is.
Himmler said that he had not yet determined how he would have them exterminated: whether to have them shot on board their convoys or in Salaspils, or whether to chase them into the swamp somewhere.
How was the matter resolved?
It was my opinion that shooting would be the simpler and quicker death. Himmler said he would think it over and then give orders later through Heydrich.
What countries were the Jews in Salaspils brought from?
Jews were brought from Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia and from other occupied countries to the Salaspils camp. To give a precise count of the Jews in the Salaspils camp would be difficult. In any case, all the Jews from the camp were exterminated. But I would like to make an additional statement while we are on this topic.
What statement would you like to make?
I would like to say for the record that Göring shares in the guilt for the liquidation of Jewish convoys that arrived from other countries. In the first half of February 1942, I received a letter from Heydrich. In this letter he wrote that Reichsmarschall Göring had got himself involved in the Jewish question, and that Jews were now being shipped to the east for annihilation only with Göring’s approval.
This does not diminish your guilt. Describe your role in the Jewish liquidations in Salaspils.
I have already said that I discussed the extermination of Jews in Salaspils with Himmler in Lötzen. That alone makes me an accessory to this crime. Beyond that, Jews were shot in Salaspils camp by forces recruited from my Secret and Security police units. The commander of the SD secret police and Gestapo in Latvia, Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Lange, was directly in charge of the shootings. Other officers who reported to me on the shooting of Jews in the camp were the commander of the secret police and Gestapo in the Baltic States, Major-General Jost; Colonel of Police Achamer-Pifrader and Colonel of Police Fuchs.
Specifically, what did they report to you?
They reported that two to three convoys of Jews were to arrive per week, all subject to liquidation.
Then the number of Jews shot in Salaspils ought to be known too, isn’t that correct?
Yes, of course. I can give you the approximate figures. The first Jewish convoys arrived in Salaspils in November 1941. Then, in the first half of 1942, convoys arrived at regular intervals. I believe that in November 1941, no more than three convoys arrived in all, but during the next seven months, from December 1941 to June 1942, eight to twelve convoys arrived each month. Overall, in eight months, no less than fifty-five and no more than eighty-seven Jewish convoys arrived in the camp. Given that each convoy carried a thousand people, that makes a total of 55,000 to 87,000 Jews exterminated in the Salaspils camp.
That figure sounds low. Are you telling the truth?
I have no other, more exact figures. It should be added, however, that before my arrival in Riga, a significant number of Jews in the Baltic states and Belorussia were exterminated. I was informed of this fact.
By whom, specifically?
Stahlecker, Prützmann, Lange, Major-General Schröder, the SS and Police Leader in Latvia; Major-General Möller, the SS and Police Leader in Estonia; and Major-General Wysocki, the SS and Police Leader in Lithuania.
Be specific. What did they report?
Schröder reported to me that over and above those Jews who had been exterminated in the ghetto in Riga, an additional 70,000 to 100,000 Jews were exterminated in Latvia. Dr. Lange directly oversaw those shootings. Möller reported that in Estonia everything was in order as far as the Jewish question was concerned. The Estonian Jewish population was insignificant, all in all about 3,000 to 5,000 and that was reduced to nil. The greater part were exterminated in Tallinn. Wysocki reported that 100,000 to 200,000 Jews were exterminated — shot — in Lithuania, on Stahlecker’s orders. In Lithuania the Jewish exterminations were overseen by the commander of the secret police and Gestapo Lieutenant-Colonel Jäger. All told, the number of Jews exterminated in the actions in the Baltic East reached somewhere in the vicinity of 190,500 to 253,000.
In his reply to telegram no. 1331, from the Security Police of Riga, dated 6 February 1942, SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger reported the following from Kovno: Re: executions up to 1 February 1942, by the Einsatzkommando 3A: 136,421 Jews. Total: 138,272, of these, women: 55,556; children: 34,464. Do you have anything to add?
No. Jäger is a precise person.
With a few of his other cronies, Jeckeln was condemned to death and on February 3, 1946, he was hanged on Victory Square — Uzvaras laukums — in front of a crowd of some four thousand.
Now in all this madness, in the hope of finding an answer to at least one question, I am obsessed by the thought that the father of Leila Mazais, the already long-dead Bavarian-Latvian with Hitler’s medal in the bottom of a cardboard box, directly participated in the elimination of the twenty-year-old violinist Frida Landsberg, the long-lamented love of my uncle Karlo Osterman and, therefore, altogether irrationally, altogether senselessly, I no longer want to see the fat, aged ballerina Leila Mazais, because discussions on this theme are pointless.
Ada’s fridge is full of food. There are all kinds of delicacies, small and large. Pieces of first-class Parmesan, dried tomatoes, jars of pesto, various cheeses, pâté (including goose), pickled eels, olives, capers and prosciutto. On a shelf stand a tin of olive oil, a little bottle of thick, aged aceto balsamico and a dozen packets of pasta, from farfalle and “elephant trunks” to tagliatelle. All this is brought by the Italians who co
me in the summer to the upper floors of the house that is no longer ours, then Ada makes it into dinner for them and they all talk about life. Or else Ada goes to the Italians upstairs and on the terrace that was once ours gathers up her past, for a moment cheerfully. Then she stops mumbling and talks clearly, she doesn’t close her eyes like that frustrated Rosalina, who first rolls them upward as though she was fainting. They’re decent people, those Italians, with them Ada is completely herself, with them, in what is now their house, she is at home.
Well, tell her, tell her once and for all, my sister insists.
So we invited Leila, who was roaming around Rovinj like a deaf dog, summoning up drowned times, for my ratatouille and Ada’s crème caramel, our “red” Italians, Sergio and Elena, came down too, there was a gentle breeze in the garden, the swifts foretold rain, we talked about recent films, and about Thomas Bernhard and Robert Walser, then a bit about Ignaz Semmelweis, a bit about Garshin and Zweig, Elena about some psychiatric cases, because Elena is a psychiatrist and she keeps a whole galaxy of human pain, human sorrow in little bundles, some in her head, some in her chest. Her Sergio talked about the Left in Bologna, because Sergio is a left-winger from Bologna, languages intertwined, wine was poured, then I said, Leila’s father had a medal from Hitler.
Sergio smiled and concluded bitterly, That’s a nightmare, generations of the dead oppress the minds of the living. Says Marx.
Then it rained. Terrible, diluvial rain. A torrent of murky swirling water swept down the hill on Bregovita, and drunken Leila had a heart attack.
Into the garden came a large snow-white bird the size of a seagull, only it wasn’t a seagull, seagulls are greedy and they scream, this bird strolled regally into our already dark cellar, bearing on its wings light, a heavenly beauty. A caladrius. It was a male, because it had an orange beak on which a little sun flickered. It had orange legs, while the female has black legs and their beaks too are black, so what quivers on them is not the sun, but death. This caladrius had eyes like tar, out of which lightning flashed.
The caladrius raised its head toward the ceiling and — began to sing. It was a song of joy and a song of sorrow too, a strange song, disturbing and mysterious. It walked over to the numbed Leila and climbed onto her chest.
Legend has it that if the caladrius turns its head away from the sick person it approaches, the sick person will die; if it stops and looks them in the eye for a long time, the caladrius draws into itself the sick person’s weakness and carries it high above the clouds, where that weakness, that sickness disperses into a million little fragments. The sick person then recovers.
The caladrius is a bird of foreseeing, a prophet bird of unconquerable wildness. Legend also has it that song is life for the caladrius, it sings when it is sad, it sings when it is angry, it sings when it is afraid and when it loves. And when it loses its mate, its companion, its comrade, a vast sadness overwhelms the caladrius, it sings and remains forever alone. It takes others’ sins upon itself.
What to do with the lives around us, within us? How to classify them? They are and are not examined lives, monochrome canvases with blots, smudges, freckles scattered over a space made up of shackled time.
Examined lives (canvases), crisscrossed with shallow empty spaces, dappled with little bumps — hillocks — and narrow furrows, cuttings, grooves, many alike, in which slow, stagnant waters swirl. Lives with rounded edges, easily catalogued, easily connected, easily nailed onto the shelves of memory. And forgotten there.
Then, those others: lives crisscrossed, entangled, knotted with veins, scars, clefts which continue to breathe under the gravestones over the little mounds of our being, scabbed-over wounds that still bleed within. Impenetrable lives. They flicker in the darkness, sending out little sparks of light, fluorescent, like the bones of corpses.
Placed side by side, there is no current between them, because both these kinds of life collapse into themselves, silently and menacingly like rising waters.
Kaleidoscopic lives. Like the drawings of schizoid patients.
At secondary school, we developed our sexuality. At university, when there were no lectures, we played tennis. We batted balls about instead of pounding reality. The little balls came back, reality slipped away. We started digging through other people’s lives. The labyrinth became increasingly entangled, the dead-ends multiplied. What remained were photographs. Photographs smear over memory. Memory sinks into a chasm of healed pain. There it ferments and finally evaporates. Leaving only a sigh, an exhalation.
I worked as a clinical psychologist at the University Hospital in Belgrade. In the same hospital my friend Adam Kaplan was employed as a psychiatrist. When I left Belgrade I missed Adam Kaplan. The other people’s lives into which we had plunged together melted away, drained away, evaporated. Ours ossified. Imprisoned in our bodies, those strangers’ lives wandered off, that is to say I, and then Adam Kaplan too, left them to stagger away mindlessly, lost, penalized and alone. Now they come back to me, now after a quarter of a century they fly up like a species of bodiless, transparent, dumb bird, as though they were steam, they creep in through the cracks in my shack and wrap around me. I hear them, I hear them whispering, Come back, don’t let us vanish exiled like this, abandoned. Separate us. We are squashed flat, crushed, stuck together in a mass, in a ball, and we roll through time.
When I listen to them, to those voices, when they turn up and break through my shield, I breathe with increased difficulty; those lives, those voices suffocate me like my asthma, the silent strangler-murderer, whose transparent fingers I cannot detach from my lungs. That asthma used to be an enigma, not anymore. I know that she, the seducer, sometimes drags herself into the chests of the undesirable and the unwanted, and that, with time, with an increasingly loud whistling, the desire for life of those undesirable and unwanted becomes ever quieter. But, my childhood and youth were good and healthy. I was loved and I loved. I had little stars round my eyes, so what invited, what summoned this twenty-year-long nonbreathing, this suffocation, this airlessness?
Where am I? Into what, over these twenty or so years away from time that crackled, from time at a gallop that imploded, and set about flowing into me, inside, filling me with a kind of destructive energy that, like electric shocks, disorients one, swallows and drags one down, into silty innards — into what have I drained away, in what have I buried myself? In the love-hate clinch of Ameles Potamos and Mnemosyne. What do I do now?
Adam Kaplan visited me two or three times. They were good visits. I have already written about them, so there’s no need to elaborate. In my little Istrian town, where I felt until recently like the old Andreas Ban, because, although my home has fallen apart, although I am myself falling apart, in that little town I was at home, because in summer, after the country broke up, as well as Adam, the occasional other old, aging, metropolitan pal, a water polo chum, a preferans companion, a tennis or professional partner would sometimes come to my little Istrian town, and then there would be a celebration, fireworks of conjured-up adventures, an encyclopedia of names would fly open, from my life at nursery, primary school, secondary school, university, from my sporting, love, military, artistic life oh, how many shared circles in whose whirlpools we danced like spinning tops. Then that all came to an end. Little doses of decency filled containers of tolerableness, I placed them on the rubbish heap of my tiny Croatian life, and instead of that past (life), in my head, in my chest stretched a ditch where a mirage moans, light as a ghost.