“A girl like you is like a heavenly body,” he joked. “They only show one side. I’d like to understand you. But first you have to understand me.”
He was treating her like a servant. And she felt like one. She would imagine that she was tidying up a room. She would accept that all employers had their whims. That brought her closer to the Obersturmführer without her realizing it. She could not know that he had just judged her young, healthy and generally fit – maybe not the best material, but in the circumstances and considering where they were, better than nothing.
“As a rule I get on well with a girl like you.”
He was filled with a sense of superiority. He knew there was no harm in working on a girl, especially one as young as this one, with words first, before it came to hands and body. He could afford to take his time. He blamed himself for not feeling at ease with himself, as he would have liked. Why was he sweating? Was he too close to the stove?
With no-one else had she been so aware, right from the first moment, that she was Jewish. She wrapped herself in caution. She could not compare him to Captain Hentschel. She would have to remain careful.
He searched her face. Surely she must realize that his eyes were boring into her? Perhaps she was telling the truth. She was not that old and all Jews, with rare exceptions, had vanished from the region. Was she blushing? Perhaps he was imagining it. He was convinced that Jews did not blush. It was a matter of the quality of blood. He could not recall now where he had heard that. To be on the safe side, crossing with dark-haired, dark-eyed partners would be forbidden in his family. That would be his legacy to future generations. Nor anyone below army regulation height, or with doubtful background. That was if he ever had a real family. So far his immediate and wider family were the Einsatzgruppen. Rankers, NCOs and commanders, including the supreme Führer. The Nazi Party. The élite, the only ones with whom he felt an equal among equals.
He regarded it as a lucky accident that the initials of his name were S.S. Stefan Sarazin. He always introduced himself as “Stefan Sarazin, Obersturmführer in the Waffen-SS,” stressing the sibilants.
“You were blushing?” he asked.
“I’m not blushing.”
“I should hope not. Do you know how to recognize a non-Aryan reliably? He hasn’t enough blood in him to blush.”
She was unable to guess the colour of his eyes. They were like the openings of two empty beer bottles. Poorly-blown glass. He reminded her of a girl she’d known with cataracts.
“The Lebensborn organization used this place,” he said. “I was invited here for a week. Together with my colleagues I impregnated my quota. We were a dozen chosen men under 25 from the Waffen-SS, without an iota of Jewish blood. The master race. Vigorous individuals who could trace their family tree as far back as 1775. Thirty-year-old German women who haven’t found a husband are reporting for the Lebensborn. The state takes care of them and ensures that they become mothers.”
He was drawing her into his world. She tried to guess his age. Not more than 25 or 26. She was afraid he might show her photographs. He was shorter than she was. It was a good thing that Captain Hentschel had not come again. Still, the previous night she had slept in his green pullover.
He fixed his milky eyes on her mouth, then they slid down, but not all the way to her boots.
“You have small breasts. We’ll see more when you take your clothes off.”
“I don’t know. Yes, I have small breasts.”
“And a small bottom.”
“I can’t see my back.”
“Is everything you have small?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should know. You’re new, aren’t you?”
“I’ve been here a fortnight.”
“Do you get enough to eat?”
“Yes,” she said quickly.
“You’re keen on food?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Perhaps you should be,” said the Obersturmführer.
“I only give the best, the very best, if you know what I mean.”
She didn’t say that she did not know.
“I’d know if you lied to me.” He gave a brief smile. “We’ll see.”
She was afraid of the ambiguity of his remarks. She looked for something in what he left unsaid.
He decided to play with her a while longer. She had a nice little oblong face. He felt the heat coming from the flue and from the cast-iron barrel of the stove. A few red-hot cinders were dropping through the grate. He found it agreeable to stand in the warmth and look out of the window at the blizzard. So far it had not abated. He hoped it wouldn’t bury his car. He looked again at his prostitute. Her colour had come back, but the general impression was still one of pallor. Was she perspiring too, or did it merely seem so to him? And was she half-closing her eyes, perhaps looking at his pistol?
“Are you afraid to die?”
“Why?”
“Are you questioning me or am I questioning you?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“In a while I shall know more about you than you do yourself.”
He didn’t know yet if he would reward or punish her. Was she undernourished? Compared to her, his own features were bursting with health. He thought of Pomeranian Jewesses. They were dark-haired, though some of them had ginger hair like the girl before him. The Einsatzgruppen had used them as targets for their machine gunners.
“You might think I’m obsessed with the Jews,” he said. “But it’s handed down from generation to generation. It gives me self-confidence, as if I were drinking life-giving water.”
After a pause the Obersturmführer said, “We don’t have anything to regret, wasn’t it the Jews who claimed that a good lawyer was better than the truth?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
She tried to answer politely, with humility rather than rebelliousness.
“How come you speak German?”
“I learnt it.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Did they tell you I liked redheads?”
“No.”
“Girls with long legs and your complexion? What did they tell you about me?”
“Only that you would come.”
His eyes seemed to her like a well without water. Or a puddle which had dried up after a shower. She thought of the muddy bank of the Harmanze lake. She resisted speculating who the Oberführer was; it was enough to know what he had come for. What he would want. There was brutality in his eyes, and a moment later also sickness and fastidiousness. At once determination and confusion, a kind of uncertainty which was confirmed by his words. Why had he asked her if she was afraid of death?
He had chosen Skinny because Ginger had failed him the last time. So ein Luder! She had been given a flogging. For a third complaint she would go to Festung Breslau. He had stayed to watch the Madam flog her. After the third lash on her bare bottom she had kissed his boots. And Long-Legs was too big for him. How much did a girl like that eat? And how much, it occurred to him, did a thin girl like this one, get into her stomach? Maybe she had threadworm, like he had had as a child. It amazed him, the number of superfluous and useless stomachs Germany was nourishing. Weren’t the simple soldiers, the workers and the peasants and the teachers, right when they said that he who does not work, neither shall he eat? The Nazis had widened this to include the unhealthy, the incurably sick, the feeble-minded, the ailing. One had to have the courage to cut into one’s own flesh. Cut out all tumours, large and small. Perhaps he should tell this little whore how they brought up their children in ancient Sparta, how the king erected a small rail over an abyss and if an infant lost its grip and fell into the abyss he would congratulate its mother for having spared Sparta a weakling. The Nazis would transform Germany into a modern Sparta.
“I distinguish between a well-intentioned inferior race and an ill-intentioned superior race, which includes also Germans. You’re not one of them.”
“No,” Skinny said.
“No
t even partially? Some of your tribe got as far as Berlin.”
She heard familiar voices from the neighbouring cubicles. The girls were hard at work. Sometimes a soldier cried out, sometimes a girl. They were ridiculous, animal sounds, and she tried to shut them out. Maria-from-Poznan had learnt to fake a whole scale of cries and moans, from ecstasy to gradually abating satisfaction. Some soldiers gave free rein to what they could not permit themselves elsewhere, either because they weren’t allowed to or because they felt ashamed. Sometimes the soldier and girl would laugh together. Skinny could imagine what seemed laughable. In addition to the brutal and wild element, something childlike would come back to them – something that was receding from her.
She would not have to be with anyone else today. The Frog had let them sleep last night from 8.30 p.m. to almost 4 a.m. They had been cold, wearing their pullovers under their blankets and coats. Madam Kulikowa kept reminding them that they were a lot better off at No. 232 Ost than in prison, where she had been prior to a concentration camp. The prostitute with whom she had shared a cell had given birth to a boy. They had beheaded the woman for high treason against the Greater German Reich.
“You haven’t told me much about yourself,” he said.
“I don’t know what you want to hear.”
She was being careful, but in a different way to when she had been with Captain Hentschel. Since then she had six days’ more experience. Yesterday one of her soldiers had wanted her to sing. They all wanted something she couldn’t provide. The soldier had wanted her to dance for him. He wanted to feel as ifhe was in Morocco, he’d said.
The Obersturmführer stamped his hobnailed boots to shake off the remnants of the snow. He took off his cap. For the first time she saw the scar on his forehead, just under his hairline.
Stefan Sarazin had joined the Hitlerjugend at sixteen. His first service had been with the Verfügungsgruppen from which later developed the special units for the extermination of the racially inferior east of the Oder. They included the Sipo and the SD, the Sicherheitspolizei and the Sicherheitsdienst, the security service of the SS. Now he was serving in a disciplinary unit made up of six Waffen-S S members under punishment. It was their chance to atone for their offences and to win new spurs.
After the Anschluss he had been present when the Verfügungsgruppen destroyed the synagogue Hitler hated, just as he hated all Vienna, that nest of Jewish, Czech, Hungarian and Balkan rabble. Before they set fire to the synagogue they attached three bundles of hand grenades under the huge olive-wood crown, as large as a horse’s behind. They celebrated with a march, complete with music – fifes, flutes, drums and bells. The pavement had echoed with their steps and every third man in each rank carried a burning torch.
“Have you had a good sleep?”
“I slept.”
“Good. I gave orders that they should let you rest. You have me to thank for that.”
“Thank you.”
“That’s right. Richtig. Very good.”
This whore was a little ashamed. Shame and fear were all right in a prostitute. It was merely a case of mixing the correct dose, as the old German alchemists knew! He stood with his back to the stove and gave her a lecture, to make sure she knew in advance that it was an honour to be with him. His Einsatzgruppen were uprooting the world where people were living in luxury at the expense of others. She could be sure of one thing: the key word was Endlösung, the Final Solution. It was a breathtaking concept. The end. Ruination. After this end nothing would follow. He had more pity for a worm than for a child that would grow into a Jewish vampire.
“The end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. It’s like a poem. Or like a mathematical equation. The interplay of numbers. Do you understand?”
Should she say she understood? She didn’t understand at all.
“With a few exceptions there won’t be any circumcised in this neighbourhood any longer.” He could take the credit for that.
“I know that,” she said.
“They’re breathing their last. We no longer send them to camps. Their Endlösung is my Jagdkommando. Even if only every sixth man kills one Jew, we’ll exterminate them. If you calculate how many there are of us and how many of them, you get the result. The numbers speak for us. We rely on ourselves, and we don’t betray collaborators. We are the guarantee of success. The fewer there are of them, the more marked are the traces they leave behind. The locals are protecting them. The fact that Jewish women can’t read doesn’t mean they’re not cunning. There’s treason all round. Nothing is innocent. A well. A room. A cellar. We’ve searched Russia, the Ukraine and Poland with a fine-tooth comb, like the lice-infested head of a giant. Their world has collapsed like a house of cards. The more they deny themselves the more they unveil themselves. I couldn’t tell you why. It’s in their eyes. Inferiority against our superiority. Fear against our courage. It’s in their features, in their eyes.”
Why was he saying all this to her? What did he want her to say to him?
“The more you deny yourself the more you reveal yourself,” the Obersturmführer continued. “You speak just by moving your eyes.”
“That other redhead you have here does not give what she should give. That’s why she got a flogging. I broke her in. For someone else, not for myself. I hardly ever have a woman twice. For that she’d have to be quite something. But I don’t rule out the possibility of exceptions.”
Skinny repeated what she had told herself on the very first day. You’ve become a whore. So do what whores do. In return you’ll take what you need. Just do what Estelle kept telling her to do: make it possible for them to get what they wanted.
She reflected on what he was right about. People were not born equal, they were born different, but to her this did not suggest lice, although she could see herself as a louse. Some people were born with hard-working hands, others with a hard-working head. Some, like her uncles, with both. Some were good by nature, others less so – like her uncles again. She knew of distinctions of which The Frog would not want to hear. Of the line between justice and injustice. If people were born equal she would not be here with Obersturmführer Stefan Sarazin, or earlier with Captain Hentschel, or with so many soldiers that she was ashamed to count them. It was enough that they were counted and recorded by Madam Kulikowa.
“I do what I have to do. That is my unshakeable principle,” he said.
It was obvious that he enjoyed the sound of his own voice. He enjoyed the warmth, his words – she had not encountered this before. His world was incomprehensible to her, a place that she could never share, nor would wish to. He had seen things she had not seen.
The puddle of melted snow around his jackboots had spread as far as the fuel box. She would have to mop it up. Should she ask him to move? She didn’t want to interrupt him.
“The east is almost cleansed of Jews. Not brutality at all. Absolute necessity.”
He was dreaming. He bent his head, proud at his greatness.
“The Jews are like cats, they have nine lives. Either we crush them or they’ll crush us. A pity we aren’t allowed to keep diaries, in which a person could feel free to reveal more than he would otherwise. In summer we hang them in cherry orchards. In winter we let them freeze to death. Of course they scream. Especially the women when it is the turn of their brats.” He laughed.
“They hang from the trees like dirty stockings.”
They could hear a train. The Ostbahn, the eastern railway. He knew all the main stations and railheads. She’d not believe how many camps he’d served in, how many he’d visited in an official capacity. He was warmed through now. He started whistling. Sweat appeared on his rather low forehead, or was it melted snow? His scar glistened on his forehead. It reminded her of what a corporal had told her about the Maginot Line winding along the frontier until the Germans passed through it like a knife through butter.
“Hatred changes to joy in me, to a special kind of joy, perhaps to Schadenfreude,” he said. “I couldn’t live wit
hout hatred any more. To deprive me of hatred would be like depriving me of oxygen. Like pulling the ground away under my feet. Like walking on one leg, like fighting with one arm. While I hate, I am. While you hate, you are.”
He wanted to know what she hated.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m afraid to hate.”
“You’re making a mistake. Once you’ve learned to hate you’ll realize what you’ve missed.”
“Perhaps,” she said, avoiding his gaze.
“You should look at me.”
He waited for her to ask why, so he could tell her she would find out, but she didn’t ask. People who could not hate were like a rag for wiping the floor.
The Obersturmführer unbuckled his belt, took his pistol from its holster. He stepped over to the window. He had quite a job opening it; it was frozen to the frame by snow and ice. No-one had opened it since the autumn. The storm swept into the cubicle. The Obersturmführer drew the chair up to the window and climbed onto it. He looked out into the twilight. In the blizzard, as though behind a curtain of mist, wolves were moving. He released the safety catch, aimed and waited before firing.
“Not too bad for the first shot!” He was pleased.
“Last time I got a she-wolf. I stepped on her lower jaw and tore her mouth apart till she bled to death. You should know what that means.”
He realized that she wouldn’t understand if she hadn’t been taught the Teutonic legends.
“Victory goes to the strongest, the fastest, the best prepared,” he said.
He took a deep breath and continued.
“The best thing you can do is what you do just like that, without reason. That’s what amazes those we overcome. They don’t understand.”
Two minutes later he fired again. Sharp, frosty air filled the cubicle. She was standing by the bed, in the draught, feeling cold. She wasn’t sure whether she dared put on her coat. He emptied his magazine.
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