The Wehrmacht had finally resumed its advance, and this was creating new tasks for us. Guderian was completing his breakthrough, attacking the Soviet armies in Kiev from the rear; his prey, as if paralyzed, wasn’t reacting. The Sixth Army started moving again, and crossed the Dnieper; farther south, the Seventeenth Army was also passing the Dnieper. It was hot and dry, and the troops on the move raised columns of dust as high as buildings; when the rains came, the soldiers rejoiced, then cursed the mud. No one had time to bathe and the men were gray with dust and mire. The regiments advanced like little isolated ships on the ocean of corn and ripe wheat; they saw no one for days, and the only news that reached them came from Rollbahn drivers coming back up the line; all around them, flat and wide, stretched the vast earth: Is there anyone living on this plain? sings the knight in the old Russian tale. Sometimes, when we went out on a mission, we met one of these units; the officers would invite us to eat, happy to see us. On September 16, Guderian joined forces with von Kleist’s Panzers in Lokhvitsa, 150 kilometers beyond Kiev, surrounding four Soviet armies according to the Abwehr; to the north and south, the air force and infantry began to crush them. Kiev lay wide open. In Zhitomir, since the end of August, we had stopped killing Jews, and the survivors had been regrouped in a ghetto; on September 17, Blobel left the city with his officers, two units from the Police Regiment South, and our Askaris, leaving behind only the orderlies, the cooks, and the repair gear for the vehicles. The Kommandostab was to establish itself as soon as possible in Kiev. But the next day, Blobel changed his mind, or received a counterorder: he returned to Zhitomir to liquidate the ghetto. “Their insolent attitude hasn’t changed, despite all our warnings and our special measures. We can’t leave them behind us.” He formed a Vorkommando under the leadership of Häfner and Janssen to enter Kiev with the Sixth Army. I volunteered and Blobel accepted.

That night the Vorkommando camped in a little deserted village near the city. Outside, the obsessive cawing of the crows sounded like babies crying. While I was lying on a straw-filled mattress in an isba that I was sharing with the other officers, a little bird, a sparrow perhaps, flew into the room and started careening into the walls and the closed windows; half stunned, it would lie on the floor for a few seconds, out of breath, its wings askew, before exploding again in another brief and futile frenzy. I thought it might be dying. The others were already asleep or else didn’t react. Finally I managed to trap it under a helmet and release it outside: it fled into the night as if it were awakening from a nightmare. At dawn we were already on the move. The war now was just in front of us, we were advancing very slowly. By the roadsides the insomniac dead lay scattered, their eyes open, empty. The wedding ring of a German soldier gleamed in the early morning sun; his face was red, swollen, his mouth and eyes full of flies. The dead horses lay intermingled with the men, some, wounded by bullets or shrapnel, were still dying, they neighed, struggled, rolled furiously over the other carcasses or the bodies of their riders. Near a makeshift bridge right in front of us, the current carried off three soldiers, and from the bank for a long while we could make out the sodden uniforms, the pale faces of the drowned men, slowly drifting away. In the empty villages, abandoned by their inhabitants, cows with swollen udders were lowing in pain; the geese, horrified, were cackling in the little gardens of the isbas in the midst of rabbits and chickens and chained dogs doomed to die of hunger; the houses lay wide open, the people, overwhelmed with panic, had left behind their books, their framed prints, their radios, their quilts. Then came the outer suburbs of Kiev, ravaged by destruction, and then just after, the center, almost intact. Along Shevchenko Boulevard, under the fine autumn sun, the lush lindens and chestnut trees were glowing yellow; on Kreshchatik, the main street, we had to navigate between antitank barricades that exhausted German soldiers were clearing away with difficulty. Häfner liaised with the HQ of the Twenty-ninth Army Corps, and they directed us to the premises of the NKVD, on a hill above Kreshchatik, overlooking the center. It had once been a beautiful palace from the early nineteenth century, with a long yellow façade decorated with moldings and tall columns painted white flanking the main door, under a triangular pediment; but it had been bombed and then, for good measure, burned by the NKVD. According to our informants it used to be a pension for poor young virgins; in 1918, the Soviet institutions had taken over the building; since then, it had a sinister reputation, people were shot in the garden, behind the second korpus. Häfner dispatched a platoon to round up some Jews to clean and repair whatever could still be fixed; we set up our desks and equipment wherever we could, and some officers were already getting to work. I went down to army headquarters to ask for some sappers: the building had to be inspected, to make sure it wasn’t mined; they promised me some for the next day. In the palace of young virgins, the first Jews were arriving under escort and beginning to clear away the rubble; Häfner had also confiscated some mattresses and quilts, so we wouldn’t have to sleep on the bare ground. The next morning, a Saturday, I hadn’t even had time to go inquire after my sappers when a formidable explosion echoed through the center of town, knocking out the few windowpanes we had left. Quickly the news spread that the citadel of Novo-Pecherskaya had blown up, killing, among others, the commander of the artillery division and his Chief of Staff. Everyone was talking of sabotage, delayed-action detonators; the Wehrmacht remained cautious, and didn’t rule out the possibility of an accident caused by some badly stored ammunition. Häfner and Janssen started to arrest Jews, while I tried to recruit Ukrainian informants. It was difficult, we knew nothing about them: the men who presented themselves could just as easily be Russian agents. The arrested Jews were locked up in a movie theater on Kreshchatik; I was frantically cross-checking the information coming in from all over: everything seemed to indicate that the Soviets had carefully mined the city; and our sappers still hadn’t arrived. Finally, after a vigorous protest, we were sent three engineers; they left after two hours without finding anything. At night, my anxiety bled into my sleep and infected my dreams: seized with an intense need to defecate, I ran to the bathroom, the shit pouring out liquid and thick, a continuous flow that quickly filled the toilet bowl and kept rising, I kept shitting, the shit reached up to below my thighs, covered my buttocks and scrotum, my anus kept disgorging. I frantically wondered how to clean up all this shit, but I couldn’t stop it, its acrid, vile, nauseating taste filled my mouth, sickening me. I woke up suffocating, my mouth dry, doughy and bitter. Dawn was rising, and I climbed up onto the cliffs to watch the sun rise over the river, the dismembered bridges, the city, and the plain beyond. The Dnieper sprawled out at my feet, wide, sluggish, its surface covered with swirling green scum; in the middle, beneath the dynamited railroad bridge, stretched a few little islets surrounded by reeds and water lilies, with some abandoned fishing boats; a barge belonging to the Wehrmacht was crossing; farther up, to the other side, a boat was gathering rust on the beach, half aground, lying on its side. The trees hid the lavra and I could see only the golden dome of its bell tower, which dully reflected the coppery light of the rising sun. I returned to the palace: Sunday or not, we were overwhelmed with work; what’s more, the Gruppenstab Vorkommando was arriving. They presented themselves in midmorning, headed by Obersturmführer Dr. Krieger, the Leiter V; with him were Obersturmführer Breun, someone named Braun, and Krumme, a Hauptmann of the Schutzpolizei, who commanded our Orpos; Thomas had stayed behind in Zhitomir, and would arrive a few days later with Dr. Rasch. Krieger and his colleagues occupied another wing of the palace, where we had already set things somewhat in order; our Jews were working nonstop; at night, we kept them in a basement, near the former cells of the NKVD. Blobel visited us after lunch and congratulated us on our progress, then left, back to Zhitomir. He wasn’t planning to stay there since the city was already judenrein; the Kommando had emptied the ghetto the day of our arrival in Kiev and liquidated the 3,145 remaining Jews. One more number for our reports; there would soon be others. Who, I wondered, will mourn all these killed Jews, all these Jewish children buried with open eyes under the rich black earth of the Ukraine, if their sisters and mothers are killed too? If they were all killed, no one would be left to mourn them, and maybe that also was the idea. My work progressed: I had been sent some trustworthy Melnykists, they vetted my informants and even identified three Bolsheviks, including one woman, who were shot on the spot; thanks to them, I recruited some dvorniki, Soviet janitors who habitually informed for the NKVD but had no problem doing the same for us, in exchange for small privileges or for money. They soon identified officers of the Red Army disguised as civilians, as well as Commissars, Banderists, and Jewish intellectuals, whom I transferred to Häfner or Janssen after a quick interrogation. Häfner and Janssen for their part continued to fill the Goskino 5 with arrested Jews. Since the explosion of the citadel, the city was calm, the Wehrmacht was getting organized, and the food supply was improving. But the searches had been overly hasty. Wednesday morning, the twenty-fourth, another explosion ripped apart the Feldkommandantur set up in the Hotel Continental, on the corner of Kreshchatik and Proreznaya Streets. I went down to look. The street was swarming with onlookers and idle soldiers watching the building burn. Some Feldgendarmen were beginning to collar civilians to help clear the rubble; officers were evacuating the intact wing of the hotel, carrying suitcases, blankets, phonographs. Glass crunched underfoot: for several streets around, the windows had been shattered by the force of the explosion. A number of officers must have been killed, but no one knew exactly how many. Suddenly another detonation sounded, farther down, near Tolstoy Square; then another huge bomb burst in a building opposite the hotel, projecting rubble and a cloud of dust onto us. The people, panicking, ran in all directions, mothers shouted after their children; German motorcyclists swarmed up Kreshchatik between the antitank obstacles, firing submachine-gun bursts at random. Black smoke quickly enveloped the street; fires had broken out everywhere; I was suffocating. Officers from the Wehrmacht shouted contradictory orders; no one seemed to know who was in charge. Kreshchatik was now blocked with rubble and overturned vehicles; the electric lines of the trolley buses, cut, dangled in the streets; a few meters away from me, the gas tank of an Opel blew up and the car caught fire. I went back to the palace; from above, the entire street seemed to be burning, and we could hear more explosions. Blobel had just arrived, and I reported the situation to him. Then Häfner arrived and explained that the Jews detained in the movie theater near the Hotel Continental had for the most part escaped in the confusion. Blobel ordered them found; I suggested it might be more urgent to have our quarters thoroughly searched again. Janssen then divided our Orpos and Waffen-SS into little groups of three and sent them into all the entrances of our palace, with the order to knock down any locked door, and especially to search the basements and attics. Less than an hour later, one of the men discovered explosives in the cellar. A Scharführer from the Waffen-SS who had served in the engineers corps went to look: there were about sixty bottlesful of gasoline, what the Finns called “Molotov cocktails” since their Winter War, apparently just stored there, but one couldn’t be sure, we had to send for an expert. The news set off a panic. Janssen shouted and started whipping our Arbeitsjuden; Häfner, with his air of efficiency, barked out useless orders just to keep face. Blobel quickly conferred with Dr. Krieger and ordered the building evacuated. No fallback position had been planned, so no one knew where to go; while our vehicles were hastily being loaded, I hurriedly liaised with the HQ of the Army Corps; but their officers were overwhelmed, they told me to manage on my own. I returned to the palace through the fires and confusion. Wehrmacht sappers were trying to set up fire hoses, but the flames were gaining ground. Then I thought about the big Dynamo stadium; it was far away from the fires, near the lavra on the Pechersk Hills, and it wasn’t very likely that the Red Army had gone to the trouble of mining it. Blobel approved my idea and directed the loaded cars and trucks; the officers set up in the abandoned offices and in locker rooms that still stank of sweat and disinfectant, while the men occupied the bleachers, and the Jews, brought under careful guard, were made to sit down on the grass. While our files, cases, and typewriters were unloaded and arranged, and specialists were unpacking the communication equipment, Blobel went to the Army Corps; when he returned, he ordered us to pack everything again: the Wehrmacht was assigning us some quarters in a former czar’s residence, a little farther down. Everything had to be loaded up again; the whole day was wasted in moving. Only von Radetzky seemed happy at the commotion: “Krieg ist Krieg und Schnaps ist Schnaps,” he threw haughtily at whoever complained. By evening, I was finally able to begin collecting information with my Melnykist collaborators: we had to learn as much as possible about the Reds’ plan; obviously the explosions were coordinated; the saboteurs had to be arrested and their Rostopchin identified. The Abwehr had some information about a certain Friedmann, an agent of the NKVD reportedly heading a spy and sabotage network set up before the Red Army’s retreat; the sappers argued that it was just a matter of mines set in advance, with time fuses. The center of the city had become a hell. There had been more explosions, and now fires were raging all along Kreshchatik, from Duma Square to Tolstoy Square; Molotov cocktails, stored in the attics, were breaking in the heat, gelled gasoline ran down the stairways of buildings and fed the flames, which little by little were extending to the parallel streets, Pushkin Street on one side, then Mering, Karl Marx, Engels streets, all the way to the October Revolution Street, at the foot of our palace. The two TsUMs, department stores, had been stormed by the terrified population; the Feldgendarmerie was arresting many looters and wanted to hand them over to us; others had died in the flames. The entire population of the city center was fleeing, bent under bundles and pushing carts loaded with radios, rugs, and household appliances, while the babies squealed themselves hoarse in their mothers’ arms. A number of German soldiers had mixed in with them and were also fleeing in complete disorder. From time to time a roof collapsed into a building in a huge clatter of rafters. In some places I was able to breathe only with a moistened handkerchief over my mouth; I coughed convulsively, spitting out thick globs of phlegm.