I got back into my car and followed the trucks; at the end of the road, the Polizei unloaded the women and children, who rejoined the men arriving on foot. A number of Jews, as they walked, were singing religious songs; few tried to run away; the ones who did were soon stopped by the cordon or shot down. From the top, you could hear the gun bursts clearly, and the women especially were starting to panic. But there was nothing they could do. The condemned were divided into little groups and a noncom sitting at a table counted them; then our Askaris took them and led them over the brink of the ravine. After each volley, another group left, it went very quickly. I walked around the ravine by the west to join the other officers, who had taken up positions above the north slope. From there, the ravine stretched out in front of me: it must have been some fifty meters wide and maybe thirty meters deep, and went on for several kilometers; the little stream at the bottom ran into the Syrets, which gave its name to the neighborhood. Boards had been placed over this stream so the Jews and their shooters could cross easily; beyond, scattered pretty much everywhere on the bare sides of the ravine, the little white clusters were multiplying. The Ukrainian “packers” dragged their charges to these piles and forced them to lie down over them or next to them; the men from the firing squad then advanced and passed along the rows of people lying down almost naked, shooting each one with a submachine bullet in the neck; there were three firing squads in all. Between the executions some officers inspected the bodies and finished them off with a pistol. To one side, on a hill overlooking the scene, stood groups of officers from the SS and the Wehrmacht. Jeckeln was there with his entourage, flanked by Dr. Rasch; I also recognized some high-ranking officers of the Sixth Army. I saw Thomas, who noticed me but didn’t return my greeting. On the other side, the little groups tumbled down the flank of the ravine and joined the clusters of bodies that stretched farther and farther out. The cold was becoming biting, but some rum was being passed around, and I drank a little. Blobel emerged suddenly from a car on our side of the ravine, he must have driven around it; he was drinking from a little flask and shouting, complaining that things weren’t going fast enough. But the pace of the operations had been stepped up as much as possible. The shooters were relieved every hour, and those who weren’t shooting supplied them with rum and reloaded the clips. The officers weren’t talking much; some were trying to hide their distress. The Ortskommandantur had set up a field kitchen, and a military pastor was preparing some tea to warm up the Orpos and the members of the Sonderkommando. At lunchtime, the superior officers returned to the city, but the subalterns stayed to eat with the men. Since the executions had to continue without pause, the canteen had been set up farther down, in a hollow from which you couldn’t see the ravine. The Group was responsible for the food supplies; when the cases were broken open, the men, seeing rations of blood pudding, started raging and shouting violently. Häfner, who had just spent an hour administering deathshots, was yelling and throwing the open cans onto the ground: “What the hell is this shit?” Behind me, a Waffen-SS was noisily vomiting. I myself was livid, the sight of the pudding made my stomach turn. I went up to Hartl, the Group’s Verwaltungsführer, and asked him how he could have done that. But Hartl, standing there in his ridiculously wide riding breeches, remained indifferent. Then I shouted at him that it was a disgrace: “In this situation, we can do without such food!” Hartl turned his back to me and walked away; Häfner threw the cans into a box while another officer, the young Nagel, tried to calm me down: “Come now, Obersturmführer…”—“No, it’s not normal, you have to think about things like that. It’s his responsibility.”—“Absolutely,” Häfner growled. “I’m going to go look for something else.” Someone poured me a glass of rum that I swallowed in one draught; it burned, and did me good. Hartl had returned and was pointing a finger at me: “Obersturmführer, you don’t have to talk to me like that.”—“And you didn’t have to…to…to…,” I stammered, pointing to the overturned crates.—“Meine Herren!” Vogt barked. “Let’s end this, shall we?” Everyone was visibly on edge. I drew away and ate a little bread and a raw onion; behind me, the officers were arguing animatedly. A little later, the superior officers had returned, and Hartl must have made a report, because Blobel came to see me and reprimanded me in the name of Dr. Rasch: “In these circumstances, we must behave like officers.” He gave me the order, when Janssen had come back up from the ravine, to replace him. “You have your weapon? Yes? No sissies in my Kommando, you understand?” He was spluttering, he was completely drunk and almost out of control. A little later on I saw Janssen climb back up. He threw me a dour look: “Your turn.” The side of the ravine, where I stood, was too steep for me to climb down, I had to walk back around and come in from the rear. Around the bodies, the sandy earth was soaked with blackish blood; the stream too was black with blood. The horrible smell of excrement was stronger than that of blood, a lot of people defecated as they died; fortunately there was a brisk wind that blew away some of the stench. Seen close up, things were proceeding much less calmly: the Jews who arrived at the top of the ravine, driven by the Askaris and the Orpos, screamed with terror when they saw the scene and struggled, the “packers” hit them with iron rods or metal cables to force them to go and lie down, even on the ground they kept yelling and trying to stand up, and the children clung to life as much as the adults, they’d leap up and start running until a “packer” caught them and knocked them out, often the shots missed their mark and people were only wounded, but the shooters didn’t pay any attention and already moved on to the next victim, the wounded rolled over, writhed, groaned in pain, others, silent and in shock, remained paralyzed, their eyes wide open. Men came and went, they shot round after round, almost without stopping. I was petrified, I didn’t know what to do. Grafhorst came over and shook me by the arm: “Obersturmführer!” He pointed his gun at the bodies. “Try to finish off the wounded.” I took out my pistol and headed for a group: a very young man was sobbing in pain, I aimed my gun at his head and squeezed the trigger, but it didn’t go off, I had forgotten to lift the safety catch, I lifted it and shot him in the forehead, he twitched and was suddenly still. To reach some of the wounded, you had to walk over bodies, it was terribly slippery, the limp white flesh rolled under my boots, bones snapped treacherously and made me stumble, I sank up to my ankles in mud and blood. It was horrible and it filled me with a rending feeling of disgust, like that night in Spain, in the outhouse with the cockroaches, I was still young, my father-in-law had treated us to a vacation in Catalonia, we were sleeping in a village, and one night I got diarrhea, I ran to the outhouse at the back of the garden, lighting my way with a pocket flashlight, and the pit, clean during the day, was swarming with giant brown cockroaches, they filled me with horror, I tried to hold it in and go back to sleep, but the cramps were too strong, there was no chamber pot, I put on my big rain boots and went back to the outhouse, telling myself that I could chase the roaches away with my foot and be quick about my business, I put my head through the door as I lit up the ground, then I noticed a shimmer on the wall, I pointed my flashlight at it, the wall too was swarming with cockroaches, all the walls, the ceiling too, and above the door, I slowly turned my head and they were there on the lintel too, a black swarming mass, then I slowly withdrew my head, very slowly, and went back to my room and held it in till morning. Walking on the bodies of the Jews gave me the same feeling, I fired almost haphazardly, at anything I saw wriggling, then I pulled myself together and tried to pay attention, but in any case I could only finish off the most recent ones, underneath them already lay other wounded, not yet dead, but soon to be. I wasn’t the only one to lose my composure, some of the shooters also were shaking and drinking between batches. I noticed a young Waffen-SS, I didn’t know his name: he was beginning to shoot any which way, his submachine gun at his hip, he was laughing insanely and emptying his cartridge clip at random, first shooting from left to right, then two shots and then three, like a child following the cracks in the pavement according to some mysterious internal topography. I went up to him and shook him but he kept on laughing and shooting right in front of me, I took away his submachine gun and slapped him, then sent him over to the men who were reloading the magazines; Grafhorst sent me another man in his place and I threw him the submachine gun, shouting, “And do it right, understand?!” Nearby, another group was being brought up: my gaze met that of a beautiful young woman, almost naked but very elegant, calm, her eyes full of an immense sadness. I moved away. When I came back she was still alive, half turned onto her back, a bullet had come out beneath her breast and she was gasping, petrified, her pretty lips trembled and seemed to want to form a word, she stared at me with her large surprised incredulous eyes, the eyes of a wounded bird, and that look stuck into me, split open my stomach and let a flood of sawdust pour out, I was a rag doll and didn’t feel anything, and at the same time I wanted with all my heart to bend over and brush the dirt and sweat off her forehead, caress her cheek and tell her that it was going to be all right, that everything would be fine, but instead I convulsively shot a bullet into her head, which after all came down to the same thing, for her in any case if not for me, since at the thought of this senseless human waste I was filled with an immense, boundless rage, I kept shooting at her and her head exploded like a fruit, then my arm detached itself from me and went off all by itself down the ravine, shooting left and right, I ran after it, waving at it to wait with my other arm, but it didn’t want to, it mocked me and shot at the wounded all by itself, without me; finally, out of breath, I stopped and started to cry. Now, I thought, it’s over, my arm will never come back, but to my great surprise it was there again, in its place, solidly attached to my shoulder, and Häfner was coming up to me and saying, “That’s enough, Obersturmführer. I’ll take over for you.”