The Kindly Ones

I spent the next four days running after the columns. I felt as if I were struggling against a mudslide: I spent hours advancing, and when I finally found an officer in charge and showed him my orders, he would apply my instructions as grudgingly as possible. Here and there I managed to organize distributions of rations (elsewhere, too, they were being distributed without my intervention); I had the blankets of the dead collected to give to the living; I was able to confiscate carts from Polish peasants and pile exhausted inmates on them. But the next day, when I found these same columns again, the officers had had shot all those who could no longer get up, and the carts were almost empty. I hardly looked at the Häftlinge

, it wasn’t their individual fate that concerned me, but their collective fate, and in any case they all looked alike, they were a gray, dirty mass, stinking despite the cold, undifferentiated, you could only grasp isolated details, the colored badges, a bare head or bare feet, a jacket different from the others; men and women could be distinguished only with difficulty. Sometimes I glimpsed their eyes, under the folds of the blanket, but they never returned a gaze, they were empty, completely eaten away by the need to walk and keep moving forward. The farther away we got from the Vistula, the colder it was and the more inmates we lost. Sometimes, to make room for the Wehrmacht, columns had to wait for hours by the side of the road, or else cut across frozen fields, struggle to cross the innumerable canals and embankments, before finding the road again. As soon as a column paused, the inmates, dying of thirst, fell to their knees to lick the snow. Each column, even the ones where I had put carts, was followed be a team of guards who, with a bullet or a blow from a rifle butt, finished off the inmates who had fallen or simply stopped; the officers left up to the municipalities the job of burying the bodies. As always in this kind of situation, the natural brutality of some was aroused, and their murderous zeal went beyond orders; their young officers, as frightened as they, controlled them with difficulty. It wasn’t just the simple soldiers who were losing all sense of limits. On the third or fourth day, I went to find Elias and Darius on the roads; they were inspecting a column from Laurahütte whose itinerary had changed because of the swiftness of the advance of the Russians, who were coming not just from the east but also from the north, almost reaching Gross Strehlitz, according to my information, a little before Blechhammer. Elias was with the column’s commander, a young, very nervous and agitated Oberscharführer; when I asked him where Darius was, he told me he had gone to the rear and was looking after the sick. I joined him to see what he was doing and found him in the process of finishing off inmates with gunshots. “What the hell are you doing?” He saluted me and replied without losing countenance: “I’m following your orders, Obersturmbannführer. I carefully picked out the sick or weak

Häftlinge

and had the ones who can still get better loaded onto carts. We’ve just liquidated the ones who are completely unfit.”—“Untersturmführer,” I spat out in an icy voice, “liquidations are not your job. Your orders are to limit them as much as possible, and certainly not to participate in them. Understood?” I also reprimanded Elias; Darius, after all, was under his responsibility.

Sometimes I found more understanding column leaders, who accepted the logic and necessity of what I explained to them. But the resources they were given were limited, and they were commanding narrow-minded, frightened men, hardened by years in the camps, incapable of changing their methods, and, with the relaxation of discipline that resulted from the chaos of the evacuation, returning to all their old failings and habits. Everyone, I imagined, had his reasons for his violent behavior; Darius had no doubt wanted to demonstrate his firmness and resolution in front of these men, most of whom were much older than he. But I had other things to do than analyze motivations, I was just seeking, with the greatest difficulty, to have my orders carried out. Most of the column leaders were simply indifferent—they just had one idea in their heads, getting away from the Russians as quickly as possible with the livestock that had been entrusted to them, without complicating their lives.