Thanks for letting me be Casper.
Live well, H.
_ _ _
When I meet up with Grünfeldt, Haber and Semjon again outside the Kubepalast – the car packed and ready, permissions and permits signed by the Generalkommissar, who has arranged a three-motorcycle escort – I rummage in my briefcase and find a topographic map marked with a route, dates noted at various locations on the Einsatzgruppe’s passage of death. Steiner’s trace of slime through Belorussia in ’41 and ’42. Haber stares stiffly out of the window as I study the map. Grünfeldt is absorbed in some detail of his white gloves. Haber must have put it there. Grünfeldt is an idiot. Has he been through my notes as well? His payment will have to wait. What will he want in return?
Stalags
We take the lower-ranking prison camps first, the stalags. Haber drives, Grünfeldt sleeps, mouth open, while Semjon smokes my cigarettes in the back as we proceed through the sandy, uneven landscape due west of Minsk, passing silent peasants, mangy cattle, bald fields tended by no one, burnt-out vehicles in mid-terrain, rusting since ’41 amid swaying poppies. But there are more recent wrecks too: pushed off the road into the ditches, the bodies of the hanged lining the way, a woman, chin at her chest, sweater pulled up over a branch, one shoe missing, the warning signs, We are partisans, we shot at German soldiers, in German and Russian around their necks – heavy, dangling peasant corpses. Machine-gun posts and fortified villages, more signs. The machine gunner in the sidecar next to us loads his weapon. Danger, bandits! Closed for single vehicles 15:00 – 06:00 … Keep weapons at ready … Never drive alone. More peasant women with scarves and downturned eyes, and then, a short distance away, at the fringe of the woods, a fire – a thick belt of smoke. We cross the border of Weissruthenien and enter the Rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet: here neither Kube nor Manfred has a say, this is the domain of Heeresgruppe Mitte, Wehrmacht. On the third day of the Battle of Kursk we reach Mogilev and Dnepr. I read the bulletin of the day, handed to me by a captain of the Wehrmacht at a guarded bridge on the city’s southern outskirts. Progress, progress, but nothing decisive; the loudest roar of steel and blood, Germany’s fate concentrated in this bump at the front, this pulsating tumour. Everyone here is on edge, testy, 400 kilometres behind the main line.
An hour later I show my ID and the permit from Kube to the guard at Stalag 341.
A sergeant appears, a slice of buttered rye bread in his right hand, examines my identity card, wipes some onion and jellied stock from his mouth with his sleeve:
‘Go ahead!’
We drive in through the barbed wire. The place is nothing but a field, like in ’41 when we simply fenced them in and threw them items of food, and stood back to watch; hundreds of thousands scrabbling for a calf liver, a side of beef, a bucket of turnips, heads in the grass, they ate mud and beetles, their mouths full of soil. They had nothing, no huts, no wells, nothing, and they melted into the ground, began to eat each other, uniforms absorbed into the mud to rot. In the spring of ’42 they came for those who were left, a couple of thousand at most, divided them among the camps, imported them into the Reich, shot them, experimented with the gas, offered them the chance to become Hiwis, and now there are three thousand here, pale shadows, labouring in this great workshop, repairing the Tiger tanks.
Problem: We have killed too many. How to find a witness who has seen our zek with the cockerel on his shoulder?
Haber sets up a chair and a small table on the assembly area in the middle of the camp and sits down. An SS guard announces roll call and prisoners appear from their work and fall into line. Grünfeldt opens a suitcase and places jars of pickled cucumber and tins of pâté on the table. Anyone who knows anything gets one.
The guard tightens his jaw, steps forward and thrusts the butt of his rifle against the skull of a prisoner who lunges for a tin.
Two hours: nothing. Three hours: nothing. Four hours: nothing.
No one has seen a zek with strange tattoos.
No one has any idea what we are talking about.
The ghosts reel away, the sun on their backs, streaks against grey soil.
_ _ _
Next afternoon. Stalag 373, on the outskirts of Bobruisk, a former fortress.
I sit in the shade, in the splay of an embrasure, and look out over the flat land, doodling patterns on the topographic map while we wait for the roll call and for those in the sub-camps to come back. Steiner passed through more than seventy-five places: towns, villages, hamlets, holes in the ground, shtetls. Jews everywhere, any number could have a reason for vengeance, hidden from sight in the bushes, watching it all, the executions, the plundering. Is this a blind alley?
The assembly area in the inner yard, early evening.
This camp is smaller, maybe a thousand prisoners, many of them Asian. I toss a tin of peaches into the throng from the top of the wall – Made in the USA, spoils from a downed Dakota. A fight breaks out. A man snatches it, twists free of his pursuers and runs, arm aloft, prize held high. He turns and dances backwards, jigging, yelling, whooping like a lunatic, a Red Indian, a Yankee plucking a baseball from the air. Two towers open fire from each end of the yard, savage ploughshares of steel. His sallow frame is ripped apart, the tin continues its flight. No one bothers with the corpse. Semjon steps down to the yard and collects the tin in the dirt, wipes the blood off on his trouser leg and stashes it in his cartridge pouch.
We are getting nowhere.
_ _ _
Two days later,
