In the meantime, I still had work to do. I ran a string of spies in the ghetto and one of them, a light-fingered young thief called Mishkin, had come to me two days earlier with letters he’d discovered, written anonymously from someone in Maly Trostinets. They must have been passed by hand, via a labour detail, to someone in the ghetto. They described the guard routines at the camp – sentry shift-times, patrol details, everything – invaluable information for the partisans who were surely intended to be its eventual recipients.

  Jews were forbidden from corresponding in any way at all with anyone outside their camp or ghetto – aside, of course, from the postcards written from the railhead upon their arrival here. The penalty for anyone found writing a letter was death.

  I went to the camp that morning with a couple of men and my driver. On my arrival I found the commandant, explained the situation and told him that I wanted all the Jews working at the camp to be rounded up and assembled in the central square. He objected, pointing out that some of them were out ploughing the fields, while the others were distributed among the various workshops at the camp. I replied that I was very sorry to disturb the busy schedule at his camp, but this was an urgent security matter, and if he had any doubts about its importance he was welcome to discuss the matter with Lieutenant-Colonel Strauch. He grudgingly offered me his cooperation and told a squad of his men to assist us in gathering and herding the Jews into place.

  I was walking towards the square when I came across a Jew in mechanic’s overalls. I ordered him to come with me and pointed my gun at him to emphasize the point. Then about a hundred metres further on we bumped into that gutless filing clerk Kaul.

  ‘Hello, Heuser. What are you doing here?’ he asked.

  I was feeling playful – perhaps because of Hannah’s arrival in my life, perhaps because it was such a beautiful day. So I twirled the gun on my finger, cowboy-style, just to unnerve him and said, ‘Tracking down an offender. You?’

  ‘The employee payslips at the camp do not tally with the monies paid out. I’m dealing with the discrepancy.’

  ‘Then that makes two of us. I too have a discrepancy to sort out.’

  We made our farewells and I carried on to the square. ‘Join the rest of them,’ I said to the mechanic, and he made his way to the other Jews, around two hundred of them, gathered in the square, all seated on the ground. While my men and those from the camp covered me with their guns, I stood before the Jews and held the letters up.

  ‘You all know the rules on writing letters and the penalty for disobeying them. Yet here I have letters, clearly sent from this camp, recovered in the Special Ghetto at Minsk. I’m not interested in conducting a general investigation, nor do I wish to mount mass reprisals. I simply want to know who wrote these letters and deal with that person alone, so that those who are innocent can be left unharmed. However, if the guilty party does not step forward, I’ll be obliged to kill inmates at random until the culprit either makes his confession or is named by someone else.

  ‘You all know me. I am a stickler for the rules. I would much rather that only one of you were punished. But you also know that I do not make idle threats. I’ll order the shootings to begin if no one comes forward. You have two minutes to decide, starting now.’

  It took ninety seconds. Then a man stood up, gave his name as Yakov Loeb and said that he was the writer.

  ‘Come here Loeb,’ I said.

  He stepped forward, a small, wiry man with close-cropped receding hair and a short grey beard. I must say I admired the forthright way he approached me with his head up and not a trace of fear.

  ‘If you wrote these letters, you’ll be able to tell me their contents. So … ?’

  ‘They describe the dispositions of the guards at the Maly Trostinets camp,’ he said, looking me right in the eye. ‘And if you think I only sent one copy, then you’re more of a fool than I took you for.’

  ‘I see. Well, thank you for being so frank, Loeb.’ I summoned the nearest of my men. ‘Shoot him.’

  Loeb stood straight and made no attempt whatever to beg for mercy or escape his fate. My man fired a single shot with his rifle, and then another when Loeb was on the ground, just to make sure.

  I addressed the Jews, feeling the silent hatred rising from their ranks and facing it down, just as Loeb had done to me. ‘Go back to your work,’ I said. ‘Remember what happens to those who break the rules. And just to concentrate your minds, there will be no food ration today.’

  It was 11.30 and the pots of gruel were already cooking in the camp kitchen. I told my men to kick them over and watched as the weak, tasteless liquid seeped into the kitchen’s bare earth floor.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to drive your people a little harder this afternoon, since there is even less food in their bellies than usual,’ I told the commandant when I got back to his office.

  ‘Maybe they should just eat Loeb,’ he replied.

  I gave him a tight smile in acknowledgement of his witticism, then went on: ‘The rules are there for a reason. There’s no harm in reminding them of that from time to time.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘By the way,’ I said, ‘I need to get some provisions from the stores. Has the baggage from the last transport been sorted yet?’

  ‘Of course – by all means help yourself.’

  ‘How much gold did we get this time?’

  The commandant smiled. ‘Plenty. Those Vienna Jews can afford the best and most expensive dentistry. Lots of married couples with nice gold rings, too.’

  I went to the storeroom and helped myself to my standard share of the gold, various tins of meat and fish, a couple of jars of pickles, and a decent bottle of Riesling. I let the men take a bottle of brandy each, and they returned to Minsk in a fine mood.

  Back at the Lenin House I bumped into Kaul again.

  ‘Did you deal with your problem?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh yes, it was easy,’ I replied. I made a little gun out of my first two fingers, placed it against Kaul’s skull and said: ‘Bang! And it was over.’

  Kaul looked appalled. I laughed. And then, having had a man killed, deprived his starving companions of their meagre rations and appropriated foodstuffs stolen from people I had then helped to murder, I went back to my quarters hoping to persuade a captive woman that I was quite a nice fellow, really, once you got to know me. I was, of course, unable to see the hopeless tangle of contradictions and misperceptions I had become. But then, among the many lessons I learned in Minsk was that one can become all but totally deranged while still functioning very efficiently at work and remaining confident that one’s personal behaviour is perfectly normal, one’s thoughts completely rational. Or to put it another way, one of the symptoms of madness is the conviction that one is sane.

  45

  My work for the day was completed by about 20.00. I went down to the cellar where the Langs had been installed. They had no beds, just thin straw mattresses laid directly on the stone floor. Their baggage, however, must have included blankets, for the mattresses were all covered. By Jewish standards this was luxury. Hannah was there with the other two. ‘Put your coat on,’ I said. ‘You’re coming with me.’

  Lisl gasped and looked at Hannah with anxious, fearful eyes. ‘There’s no cause to be alarmed,’ I reassured her. ‘Your sister will be back soon, safe and sound.’

  We walked the short distance to my quarters making stilted conversation. ‘I hope your living quarters are satisfactory?’

  ‘Yes, quite comfortable, thank you.’

  ‘Good’ … and so on.

  I let her in through the back door and up the servants’ staircase. From the living room came the sound of someone playing the Radetzky March on the piano very loudly and very badly, accompanied by the voices of my fellow officers drunkenly singing along as they clapped and stamped their feet. Hannah stopped on the stairs when she realized what the music was. ‘It reminds me of home,’ she said. ‘The last dance of the night at the New Year Concert …’

  I thought of her in her favourite party dress at a Viennese ball, dancing to Strauss without a care in the world, and wondered if there would ever again come a time when people could possess such simple, unfettered contentment. I’d never known it in my life. Perhaps I never would.

  We got to my room. Frau Aranski had laid a table for us with a clean white cloth and a feast of food and wine. I thought of my first dinner with Biene in Berlin. The circumstances now were very different, but perhaps, just possibly, I might be able to recreate some of the magic of that night.

  ‘Would you like a glass of wine?’

  She said, ‘Yes,’ but there was a nervous edge to her voice and I saw her cast a glance at the bed just beyond the table.

  ‘Please, sit down. And help yourself to whatever you’d like to eat.’

  She must have been starving. There would have been very little food on the train and she’d only been on Jew rations since her arrival in Minsk. Yet she made no attempt to eat. She just sat silently, watching me suspiciously, waiting to see what I would do next. This was not at all how I’d hoped we’d start the evening.

  I tried again to make conversation. ‘So, why didn’t you come here at the same time as your parents?’

  She shrugged. ‘The people in Vienna had the same problem as you. They couldn’t decide whether we were Jews.’

  ‘Oh, I see …’

  I could think of nothing further to say. Hannah glanced around the room, taking it all in: the carefully prepared dinner; my family picture on the mantelpiece above the fireplace; a selection of favourite books on a shelf. Then she focused directly on me and said, ‘So this is where you’re going to rape me.’

  That took me completely by surprise. I was baffled by how she could possibly have got such an idea. ‘Rape you? What on earth do you mean?’

  She gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Oh please, Dr Heuser, I’m not completely naïve. You get my body and we stay alive. That’s the deal, isn’t it?’

  When she put it like that, I realized that she was half right. That was the deal, when put at its crudest. But I’d never thought of it in those terms before. I tried to explain: ‘I would never force you. I … I …’

  Hannah had been glaring at me in tight-mouthed defiance, but now her mouth literally dropped open. ‘God in heaven! You can’t possibly think … But you do, don’t you? You want to make me say yes. You want my consent!’

  That was precisely what I’d been hoping for, even dreaming of, but her voice was rising and her eyes were filled with disgust. ‘Are you out of your mind? I’d rather you raped me than made me betray myself. Anything but that.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. How could her vision of me be so different from mine of her?

  ‘But I saved your life!’ I pleaded. ‘I saw you get down from that train and I couldn’t bear the idea that you were going to die. So I saved you. Doesn’t that count for anything? This city is full of young women looking for a man. But I haven’t gone with any of them. I’ve risked my career, my reputation, maybe even my life, to save you! I’ve fought with my commanding officer for the right to keep you alive. I’ve argued with my closest friend over you. Does that sound as if I’m a rapist?’

  ‘Why not? You’re a murderer aren’t you?’

  I could have had her killed for calling me a murderer. But I was in no state to enjoy that irony. Forget her yellow star or my uniform. I was just another man trying to explain himself to a woman who wouldn’t have him. And I didn’t make a very good job of it. ‘No, no, I’m not,’ I insisted. ‘I take no pleasure in any of this … Yes I have killed people. From the moment we set foot in this shitting country, no one has done anything but kill. But I’ve never killed anyone that I wasn’t ordered to kill.’

  Hannah laughed in my face at that. ‘Listen to yourself! Did you hear what you just said?’

  Now I felt as though I, not she, were the one pleading for their life. ‘I know what a real murderer is like. I’ve looked into the eyes of a man who loved death so much it made him come in his pants. I’m not like him. You have to believe that … I am not like him …’

  For the first time I held out some hope that Hannah might be able to see the man I was, not the system I represented. She leaned back, letting herself calm down a little.

  ‘I think I’ll have some wine now, please,’ she said.

  I poured some into her glass. She drank it in one and then held her glass out again to be refilled. This time she sipped with more restraint and I let her be, not saying anything, just waiting for her to make the next move. She put her glass down on the table and played with the stem, pushing it around in small circles on the tablecloth. Then she spoke once again.

  ‘All right then, you say you kill but you do not murder. So tell me how my parents died. How did you kill, but not murder them?’

  My spirits fell: not that, please, anything but that. What chance could I possibly have with her once she knew what happened in the woods of Blagovshchina?

  ‘No, I can’t do that. It’s … it’s a matter of operational security.’

  She practically sneered at me: ‘Oh come on … “Operational security”? That’s the most pathetic thing you’ve said all night. Tell me how they died.’

  Whatever tiny shred of hope I had of persuading her that I wasn’t the base animal she imagined depended on my being honest with her now.

  ‘You say they arrived here about a month ago?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then that would have been Da 225 from Vienna.’

  ‘What do you mean, “Da 225”?’

  ‘Every transport taking Jews from one part of the Reich to another is numbered. The Reichsbahn people planned them all, months in advance. They’re very proud of it.’

  ‘So there are hundreds of trains like the ones we were on?’ She asked the question with a note of disbelief. Anyone in the Reich would have sounded the same if they were confronted with the sheer scale of the operation.

  ‘Yes, many hundreds.’

  ‘Taking people to die?’

  ‘Not always. Some of the people are used as workers.’

  Hannah’s face lit up. ‘So maybe my parents are alive!’

  ‘No. We only keep the youngest, strongest men and those with special skills.’

  ‘But my father has a skill. He’s a surgeon – a brilliant one.’

  ‘I mean a manual skill,’ I said. ‘A surgeon is considered an intellectual and thus too dangerous to survive. A dentist we might keep, but not a surgeon.’

  Her face fell. ‘I see …’ She swallowed a mouthful of wine, perhaps hoping that it might be some kind of anaesthetic. ‘So what happened to Da 225?’

  I paused, trying to gather my memories. ‘Well, that was the September 4th transport, and it would have arrived in the early morning, just as yours did. That way we have the most time to process everyone.’

  ‘“Process”?’

  ‘That’s the approved term, yes.’ If she was going to know the truth about how we killed people, she might as well know how we tried to hide it too. ‘It was hot that morning, I remember it very well, one of the last really baking days of summer. There is a place called Blagovshchina where we dig pits that …’ I stopped, trying to find any words to soften the truth. But there were no words to sweeten the stench of Blagovshchina. ‘Pits that are used as mass graves. I was the officer in charge down there that day, so … You know, I swear this has only just occurred to me, but it’s true: I wasn’t shooting that day. So I couldn’t possibly have shot them … Oh, thank God for that at least …’

  Hannah wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in how I felt. She simply asked: ‘They’re all shot, then. Is that what you mean by processing?’

  ‘On that day, yes.’

  ‘Tell me what it was like, this shooting. Tell me about my mother and father’s last minutes on this earth. And tell me all of it, every detail. I want to know it all.’

  ‘No really, please, you don’t …’

  ‘Tell me it all!’

  So I told her everything. I recounted how her parents were driven from the railhead down into the woods then stripped and searched for gold teeth and fillings. I watched Hannah’s mounting distress as she began to understand the degradation they had suffered. She brought her hand to her mouth when I described the search for gold and whispered: ‘Papa!’

  I told her how those waiting to die stood in a line, stark naked, and watched the ones ahead of them being shot and falling into the pit before they themselves took their turn before the guns. And as I talked I felt something inside me give way. Maybe this is what Catholics feel in the confessional, this release that comes with admitting one’s sins. But suddenly there were tears streaming down my face as well as hers and I had to get the words out between sobs.

  I finished and for a second the only sounds were our noses sniffing and breaths being caught at the back of our throats. And then Hannah howled, a screaming wail of agony and rage too deep for any words, and she jumped out of her chair and threw herself at me with her hands out in front of her like claws, aiming straight for my face. I put up my arms to defend myself and though I caught one of her wrists the other got through my defences and I had to close my eyes as her fingernails tore at the skin of my temple and cheek. The shock of pain sent a surge of energy through me, blowing away my maudlin self-pity. I roared like a wounded lion and grabbed that other wrist too. Forcing her arms up and away from me I struggled to my feet as she lunged at me with her teeth, kicked at my legs and then when I was upright aimed a kneecap at my groin.

  I shoved her away and she crashed backwards into the table, sending it to the floor in an explosion of breaking plates, bottles and glasses. I pushed her again, sending her further across the floor.

  All the while, Hannah was screaming obscenities at me, calling me every foul name in the dictionary, saying how much she hated me. Then her legs hit the bed and she fell back on to it and my momentum carried me onwards, on top of her, and we were lying half on and half off the mattress and my face was directly above hers. I wanted to make her stop screaming such terrible things so I placed my lips on hers and kissed her, just to shut her up, forcing my tongue between her teeth and driving it deep into her mouth.