before they become petrified with cold. It is not just the rats that eat human flesh in this place, however. Sometimes bodies disappear and are cooked and eaten. The cannibals among us are easily spotted by their healthier pallor and shunned by the rest of us. Otherwise, the morning always starts with bodies dragged out of the building where we sleep and, to ensure that death has not been feigned, the Popovs drive a metal spike into the skull of each corpse with a hammer. The clothes are then stripped off the body, any gold fillings removed with pliers and (for several months, until the ground unfroze) the bodies laid out on the styena — which is what the Popovs call the wall they have built from the naked corpses of our dead comrades. Our guards are not soldiers, all of them are needed for the front, but the zakone, common criminals who were serving sentences in other labor camps and whose brutality and depravity know no limit. I believed that I had witnessed all of the evil that men were capable of inflicting upon one another during the battle for Stalingrad. That was before I came to Camp 108. By the end of May, those of us who still remained alive at Beketovka were put to work rebuilding-first the camp itself, and then the local railway station. Winter had been bad, and many of us who survived it assumed that summer could only improve our lot-at least we would be warm. But with the summer came a heat that was no less intolerable than the cold. Worst of all were the mosquitoes. Whereas before I saw men stripped naked and forced to stand in the snow until they died (this is called oontar paydkant — “winter punishment”), now I see men bound naked to a tree and left to the mosquitoes until they screamed to be shot (this is called samap paydkant, “summer punishment”); sometimes they were shot, but mostly the mosquitoes were left to do their ghastly work, for a bullet is wasted on a German, say the zaks. In truth, however, I have seen my comrades die in all manner of revolting ways. A corporal from my own platoon was thrown into a cesspit and left to drown in excrement. His crime? He asked a zak for some water. A friend of mine, Helmut von Dorff, a lieutenant from the 6th Panzer Army, was executed for going to the assistance of a comrade who had fallen at work under the weight of the railway sleeper he was obliged to carry on his shrunken shoulder. The zaks tied von Dorff to a telegraph pole and rolled it down a steep hill into the river Volga, where, presumably, he drowned. Punishments other than death are rare indeed, but those that do exist are unusually cruel and often fatal anyway to men severely weakened by starvation, overwork, and dysentery. One man, so emaciated from lack of food his buttocks had virtually disappeared, was beaten on the bones of his behind until they were through the skin and flesh, and he died soon afterward from infection; but for the most part, beatings are so routine they hardly count as punishment, and the zaks like to devise new ways of enforcing their idea of discipline. This was the way they punished a Luftwaffe sergeant from the 9th Flak Division: they locked him inside a coffin-shaped box in which thousands of lice had been allowed to multiply and left him there for twenty-four hours; when they removed the lid, his body had swollen up so much from his bites that they could not pry him from the box and had to break off one side of it, much to the amusement of the zaks. Here is another: a staff officer from the 371st Infantry Division-I do not remember his name-they put a long piece of rope in his mouth, like a bridle, pulled the ends over his shoulders and tied them to his wrists and ankles; they left him on his stomach like that for a whole day, without water, and he has never walked since. Morality has no meaning in a place like this. It is a word that does not exist in Beketovka, perhaps nowhere in all of Russia. Even so, there are times when I cannot help but think that we brought these misfortunes on ourselves by invading this country. Our leaders took us here and then abandoned us. And yet I am still proud to be a German and proud of the way we have conducted ourselves. I love my Fatherland but I fear what is to come, for if the Red Army were ever to conquer Germany, who knows what sufferings might be inflicted on our kith and kin? It does not bear thinking about. There were 50,000 of us who marched from Stalingrad to Beketovka-since then as many as 45,000 have died. I have learned from Germans transferred from other camps that in these, too, it is the same story. Those who died were the best of us for, strange as it might seem, often the strongest died first. For myself, I will not survive another winter; already I am sick. There is a rumor that I am to be sent to another camp-perhaps Camp 93 at Tyumen, in Omsk Province, or Oransky Number 74 in Gorky Province; but I don’t think I will live to complete the journey. I would write more but cannot as I fear discovery; but there is no end to what could be written about this dreadful place. To whoever is reading this, I ask you, when the opportunity presents itself, please say a prayer for those like me whose deaths in this place will go unnoticed; and for those less fortunate souls who remain alive. God bless you, dear reader. And God bless the Fatherland. I ask forgiveness of all those I have wronged. They know who they are. I do not know the date, but I think it must be late September 1943. Heinrich Zahler
Lieutenant
76th Infantry,
Camp Number 108
Beketovka.
I went to the hotel balcony and put my face in the sun just to remind myself I was still alive. Between the jumbled rooftops and the minarets, elegantly tall palm trees swayed in the warm breeze that swept off the Nile. In the street below, the Cairo traffic was going about its reassuringly argumentative business. I took a deep breath of air and tasted gasoline, sweat, Turkish coffee, horse dung, and cigarettes. It tasted good. Beketovka seemed like a million miles away, on another planet. I couldn’t think of a better antidote to Camp 108 than Cairo, with its smelly drains and its dirty postcards.
The smart thing to have done would have been to leave it alone. Not to get personally involved. Except that I was involved. So instead of doing the smart thing and lying to Reichleitner-telling him I had given the file to FDR-I decided that I had to talk to someone about what I had read. And I could think of no one better than the major himself. But first I went down to the Long Bar and asked the head barman if they had a bottle of Korn. He said they had several because there was no demand for German liquor among the British. It wasn’t that the English didn’t like the taste, just that they didn’t know such a thing even existed. I gave the man a couple of pounds and told him to bring me a bottle and two small glasses. Then I put it inside my briefcase and had Coogan drive me back to Grey Pillars.
Major Reichleitner was at work on the ciphers. He looked a little tired. But his eyes widened when he saw the bottle.
“My God, Furst Bismarck,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”
I produced the two glasses, placed them on the table, and filled each to the brim. We toasted each other silently and then drained the glass. The German mixed-grain liquor slipped into my body as if it had been something that belonged there, like my own heart and my lungs. I sat down on the bed and lit us both a cigarette.
“I owe you an apology, Major.”
“Oh? How’s that?”
“Earlier on, when I told you I’d read the Beketovka File, that was a lie. I hadn’t read it at all. But I’ve read it now.”
“I see,” said Reichleitner. He looked a little uncertain of where this conversation was now headed. I wasn’t sure myself. I refilled his glass. This time he sniffed it carefully, several times, before emptying the spirits down his throat.
I produced the Beketovka File from my briefcase and laid it on the table next to the bottle of Korn.
“My father is a German Jew,” I told him. “Born in Berlin, but brought up and educated in the United States. My mother comes from an old German family. Her father was the Baron von Dorff, who also went to live in the United States, to seek his fortune. Or at least to make another. He left behind a sister and two brothers. One of them had a son, my mother’s cousin. Friedrich von Dorff. We all spent one Christmas together in Berlin. Many years ago.
“When the war started, Friedrich’s son, Helmut, joined the cavalry. The Sixth Panzer Army, Sixteenth Division. With General Hube. The battering ram of the Panzer Corps. In August 1942 they crossed the Don, heading for Stalingrad. I thought he had been killed there. Until this afternoon, that is, when I read Heinrich Zahler’s account of life in Camp Number 108, at Beketovka. If you can call it life.”
I picked up the relevant page and read from it aloud.
“Your mother’s cousin’s son,” said Reichleitner.
I nodded. “I know a second cousin doesn’t sound like very much of a reason to be affected. But we were a close family. And I remember Helmut von Dorff extremely well. He was just a boy when I knew him. Not more than ten or twelve years old, I suppose. A beautiful boy. Gentle, well read, thoughtful, interested in philosophy.” I shrugged. “As I said, I had thought he was dead already. So it seems strange to read about him now. And horrible, of course, to learn the mean and degrading circumstances of his death.”
“Then we are enemies no more,” said Reichleitner.
