Life And Fate

altogether that made 783… A pity he hadn't kept separate totals for men, women and children… Women burn more easily. An experienced brenner arranges the bodies so that the bony old men who make a lot of ash are lying next to the women. Any minute now they'd be ordered to turn off the road; these people – the people they'd been digging up from pits and dragging out with great hooks on the end of ropes – had received the same order only a year ago. An experienced brenner could look at a mound and immediately estimate how many bodies there were inside-50,100, 200,600,1000… Scharfuhrer Elf insisted that the bodies should be referred to as items – 100 items, 200 items – but Rozenberg called them people: a man who had been killed, a child who had been put to death, an old man who had been put to death. He used these words only to himself – otherwise the Scharfiihrer would have emptied nine grams of metal into him – but he continued obstinately muttering: 'So now you're coming out of the grave, old chap… There's no need to clutch your mother like that, my child, you won't be separated from her now…' 'What are you muttering about over there? Me? Nothing. You must have imagined it.' And he carried on muttering; that was his little struggle… The day before yesterday there had been a pit with only eight men in it. The Scharfiihrer had spluttered: 'It's ridiculous; how can you have twenty brentiers burning eight items?' The Scharfiihrer was right, but what could you do if there were only two Jewish families in a whole village? Orders were orders – all graves were to be dug up and all bodies burnt… Now they had turned off the road, they were walking along the grass – and there, for the hundred and fifteenth time, was the grey mound of a grave in the middle of a clearing. Eight men dug; four men felled oak trees and sawed them into logs the length of a human body; two men split these logs with axes and wedges; two men went back to the road to fetch old dry planks, kindling and petrol cans; four prepared the bonfire site and dug a ditch for the ash-pit – yes, they'd have to work out which way the wind was blowing.

The smell of damp and mould immediately vanished; the guards began laughing, cursing and holding their noses; the Scharfiihrer walked off to the edge of the clearing. The brenners threw down their spades, tied old rags round their mouths and noses and picked up their hooks again… 'Good day, grandad! So you're seeing the sun again! My! You are heavy…!' A mother who who had been killed with her three children – two boys, one of them already at school, and a girl born in 1939 who'd had rickets, but never mind, she's cured of that now… 'Don't clutch your mother like that, my child, she won't leave you now…' 'How many items?' shouted the Scharfiihrer from the edge of the clearing. 'Nineteen,' – and then, very quietly, to himself -'dead people.' Everyone cursed; they'd wasted half the day. But then last week they'd dug up a grave with two hundred young women in it. When they'd taken off the top layer of earth, a cloud of grey steam had risen from the grave. The guards had laughed: 'These women really are hot stuff!'

First they laid dry wood over the ventilation-ditches, then a layer of oak logs – they burned well – then women who'd been killed, then more wood, then men who'd been killed, then more wood, then the bits of human bodies that were left over, then a can of petrol, and then, right in the middle, an incendiary bomb. Then the Scharfuhrer gave the order; the guards were already smiling as the brenners shouted out: 'It's alight!' Finally, the ash was shovelled back into the grave. And it was quiet again. It had been quiet before and it was quiet again.

Then they had been taken further into the forest. This time there was no mound in the middle of the green clearing and the Scharfuhrer ordered them to dig a pit four metres long by three metres wide. They had understood at once: they had completed their task… 89 villages, 18 shtetl, 4 settlements, 2 district towns, 3 State farms – 2 arable and one dairy. Altogether that was 116 localities, 116 mounds they had dug… Rozenberg the accountant was still counting as he helped dig the pit for himself and the other brenners: 783 last week, and 4,826 during the thirty days before – that made 5,609 bodies they had cremated. He counted and counted and time slipped imperceptibly by; he was working out the average number of items – no, human bodies -in each grave: 5,809 divided by 116, the number of graves – that made 48.35 bodies in each communal grave, 48 in round numbers. If 20 brenners had been working for 37 days, then each brenner.. . 'Fall in!' shouted the chief guard. 'In die Grube marsch!' bellowed the Scharfuhrer.

But he didn't want to be buried. He started to run, he fell down, he started running again. He ran slowly – he didn't know how to – but they didn't get him. Now he was lying down on the grass, surrounded by the silence of the forest. He wasn't thinking about the sky above, nor was he thinking about Golda who had been killed in her sixth month of pregnancy; he was counting, trying-to finish the calculations he had been doing in the pit: 20 brenners, 37 days… So, first, the total of brenner days; second, how much wood per man; third, how many hours each item took to burn, how many…

A week later he'd been caught by the police and taken to the ghetto.

And here he was in the cattle-wagon, still muttering away, counting, dividing, multiplying. The accounts for the year! He would have to hand them in to Bukhman, the chief accountant at the State Bank. And then suddenly, while he was dreaming, his tears had come gushing out, burning him, breaking through the crust that had formed over his brain and his heart.

'Golda! Golda!' he cried out.

45

The window of her room looked out onto the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the ghetto. Musya Borisovna the librarian woke up during the night, lifted the hem of the curtain and saw two soldiers dragging a machine-gun. There were blue patches on its polished body and the spectacles of the officer walking in front were glittering in the moonlight. She heard the quiet hum of motors. Cars and lorries with dimmed headlights were approaching the ghetto. The heavy, silvery dust swirled around their wheels; they were like gods floating through the clouds.

Musya Borisovna watched as sub-units of the SS and SD, detachments of Ukrainian police, auxiliary units and a column of cars belonging to the Gestapo drew up at the gates of the sleeping ghetto. In these few minutes of moonlight she took the measure of the history of our age.

The moonlight, the slow majestic movement of the armoured units, the powerful black trucks, the timid ticking of the pendulum clock on the wall, the stockings, bra and blouse that seemed to have frozen on the chair – everything most incongruous had fused together.

46

Natasha, the daughter of Karasik, an old doctor who had been arrested and executed in 1937, tried now and then to sing in the cattle-wagon. No one seemed to mind even when she began singing during the night.

She was very shy. She always looked down at the ground when she spoke and her voice was barely audible. She had never visited anyone except her close relatives and she was astonished at the boldness of girls who danced at parties.

She had not been included in the small number of craftsmen and doctors whose lives were considered useful enough to be preserved… A policeman had pushed her towards a dusty mound in the marketplace where three drunken men were standing. She had known one of these men before the war: he had been in charge of some railway depot; now he was the Chief of Police. Before she had even understood that these three men were the arbiters of life and death, the policeman had given her another shove; she had joined the buzzing crowd of men, women and children who had been pronounced useless.

Then they had walked towards the airfield in the stifling heat of their last August day. As they walked past the dusty apple trees by the roadside, they had prayed, torn their clothes and uttered their last piercing cries. Natasha herself had remained quite silent.

She would never have thought that blood could be so strikingly red. When there was a momentary silence amid the shooting, screaming and groaning, she heard the murmur of flowing blood; it was like a stream, flowing over white bodies instead of white stones.

The quiet crackle of machine-gun fire and the gentle, exhausted face of the executioner – he had waited patiently as she walked timidly to the edge of the pit – had hardly seemed frightening at all… Later, during the