The hierarchy was beginning to perceive this fact and take it into consideration. As Eichmann had explained to me, new methods were being studied. A few days after his visit, a certain Dr. Widmann arrived in Kiev, come to deliver a new sort of truck to us. This truck, a Saurer, was driven by Findeisen, Heydrich’s personal driver, a taciturn man who stubbornly refused, despite numerous requests, to explain to us why he had been chosen for this journey. Dr. Widmann, who headed the chemistry department at the Criminal-Technical Institute attached to the Kripo, gave the officers a long presentation: “Gas,” he declared, “is a more elegant method.” The truck, hermetically sealed, used its own exhaust gas to asphyxiate the people locked up inside; this solution, indeed, lacked neither elegance nor economy. As Widmann explained to us, other solutions had been tried out first; he himself had conducted experiments in Minsk, on the patients of an asylum, in the company of his Amtschef, Gruppenführer Nebe; one attempt, using explosives, had given disastrous results. “Indescribable. A catastrophe.” Blobel looked enthusiastic: he liked this new toy and was eager to try it out for the first time. Häfner objected that the truck didn’t hold many people—Dr. Widmann had told us fifty, sixty at most—and didn’t work very quickly, and therefore seemed inefficient. But Blobel swept these reservations aside: “We’ll keep it for the women and children, it will be good for morale.” Dr. Widmann dined with us; afterward, around the billiard table, he told us how the thing had been invented: “Actually it’s Gruppenführer Nebe who had the idea. One night, in Berlin, he had had a little too much to drink, and he fell asleep in his car, in his garage; the engine was still running and he almost died. We were already working on a truck model, but we were planning on using bottled carbon monoxide, which isn’t at all practical in the conditions in the East. It’s the Gruppenführer, after his accident, who thought of using the gas of the truck itself. A brilliant idea.” He had heard the anecdote from his superior, Dr. Heess, who had told it to him on the U-Bahn. “Between Wittenbergplatz and Thielplatz, to be precise. I was very impressed.”

For several days already, Blobel had been sending Teilkommandos outside Kiev to clean up the little towns, Pereyaslav, Yagotin, Kozelets, Chernigov, there were a lot of them. But the Teilkommandoführers were in despair: after an action, if they returned to the town, they found still more Jews there; the ones who had hidden kept coming back after they left. They complained that it upset all their statistics. According to Blobel’s accrued totals, the Kommando had liquidated fifty-one thousand people, including fourteen thousand without outside help (meaning without Jeckeln’s Orpo battalions). A Vorkommando was being formed to enter Kharkov, and I was supposed to be part of it; in the meantime, since I had nothing to do in Kiev (the Ek 5 had taken over all our tasks), Blobel asked me to go inspect the Teilkommandos. The rains had started, and as soon as you crossed the swollen Dnieper, you sank into the mud. The trucks, the cars were dripping with black, thick mud mixed with strands of the hay that the soldiers looted from the haystacks along the road to spread in front of their cars, uselessly. It took me two days to reach Häfner in Pereyaslav, towed most of the time by the Wehrmacht’s tracked vehicles and covered in mud up to my eyes from wading around trying to push the Admiral. I spent the night in a little village with some officers from an infantry division that was moving up to the front from Zhitomir—exhausted men, who anxiously saw winter approaching and wondered what their ultimate objective was. I took care not to tell them about the Urals; we couldn’t even advance up to Kharkov. They complained about the new recruits, sent from Germany to replace the casualties, but poorly trained and with a tendency to panic under fire, at least more readily than before. The equipment was falling to pieces: the modern German general-service wagons, with their rubber tires and ball bearings, were breaking apart on the tracks; they replaced them with almost indestructible panje carts, taken from the peasants. The beautiful German, Hungarian, or Irish horses with which they had started the campaign were dying in droves; only the scrubby Russian ponies were surviving, they could eat anything at all—birch shoots, the straw from the roofs of isbas—but they were too lightweight to pull the heavier carts, and the units had to abandon tons of provisions and equipment. “Every night, the men fight with each other to find a roof or a half-dry hole. Everyone’s uniform is in rags, full of lice; we’re not receiving anything, there’s almost no more bread.” Even the officers lacked the basics: no more razors, soap, toothpaste, no more leather to repair the boots, no more needles, no more thread. It rained day and night, and they were losing many more men from illness—dysentery, jaundice, diphtheria—than from gunfire. The sick had to walk up to thirty-five kilometers a day, since there was no way to transport them, and if they stayed alone in the villages, the partisans came and killed them. The partisans now were proliferating like lice; they seemed to be everywhere, and isolated couriers and dispatch bearers were vanishing in the woods. But I had also noticed among the soldiers a number of Russians in German uniforms, with the white armband of the Hilfswillige. “The Hiwis?” replied an officer to whom I had mentioned this. “No, we’re not really allowed to. But we take them anyway, we don’t have a choice. The guys are volunteer civilians or prisoners. They do all the transport and B-echelon jobs; it works out pretty well, they’re more used to these conditions than we are. And also Headquarters couldn’t care less, they close their eyes. Anyway they must have forgotten us. By the time we reach Poltava they won’t even know who we are.”—“But aren’t you afraid the partisans will take advantage of this to infiltrate your ranks and inform the Reds of your movements?” He shrugged his shoulders in a weary, disgusted way. “If it makes them happy…. In any case, there isn’t a single Russian within a hundred kilometers. Nor a single German, either. No one. Rain and mud, that’s all.” This officer seemed completely discouraged; but he also showed me how to clean the mud off my uniform, it was useful and I didn’t want to contradict him. “First you have to dry the mud by the stove, then you scrape it with a knife, see, then with a metal brush; and only then can you wash the uniform. For the underwear, you absolutely have to have it boiled.” I watched the operation: it was disgusting, the lice came off in the boiling water in clusters, thick, swollen. I understood better Häfner’s suppressed anger when I finally reached Pereyaslav. He had three Untersturmführers with him—Ott, Ries, and Dammann—who weren’t getting much done, since they could hardly leave the town any longer, the roads were so impassable. “We would need tanks!” Häfner exclaimed when he saw me. “Soon we won’t even be able to get back to Kiev. Here,” he added before he abruptly turned away, “this is for you. All my congratulations.” It was a teletype from Blobel, confirming my promotion; I had also received the War Merit Cross, Second Class. I followed Häfner into the school the Teilkommando was occupying and looked for a place to put my things. Everyone, soldiers and officers, was sleeping in the gymnasium; the classrooms served as offices. I changed and went to find Häfner, who gave me a report on the tribulations of his adjuncts: “You see this village, Zolotonosha? Apparently there are more than four hundred Jews there. Dammann tried three times to get there; three times he had to turn back, and even then, the last time, he nearly didn’t make it here. The men are getting difficult.” At night, there was soup and the awful black Wehrmacht Kommissbrot, and we went to bed early. I slept poorly. One of the Waffen-SS, a few meters away from my bedding, ground his teeth, an atrocious sound that raised my hackles; every time I began to doze off, he woke me up; it was driving me out of my mind. I wasn’t the only one: some men shouted at him, I heard some blows and saw they were hitting him, but it didn’t do any good, the infuriating sound went on, or else stopped only to start again a few moments later. “It’s like that every night,” grumbled Ries, who was sleeping next to me. “I’m going crazy. I’m going to strangle him one of these days.” Finally I dozed off and had a strange, striking dream. Now I was a great Squid God, and I was ruling over a beautiful walled city of water and white stone. The center, especially, was all water, and tall buildings rose up all around. My city was peopled with humans who worshipped me. I had delegated part of my power and authority to one of them, my Servant. But one day I decided I wanted all these humans out of my city, at least for a while. The order went out, propagated by my Servant, and immediately droves of humans started fleeing out the gates of the city, to wait in hovels and shantytowns out in the desert beyond the walls. But they didn’t leave fast enough to my liking, and I began to thrash violently, churning up the water of the center with my tentacles, then coiling them back and bearing down on swarms of terrified humans, lashing out and roaring with my terrible voice: “Out! Out! Out!” My Servant ran frantically about, commanded, guided, prompted the sluggish, and in this way the city emptied out. But in the buildings closest to the walls and farthest from the water where I was giving vent to my divine rage, some groups of humans were not heeding my commands. These were foreigners, not really aware of my existence, of my power over this city. They had heard the evacuation orders, but thought them ridiculous and were ignoring them. My Servant had to go see these groups one after another, to convince them diplomatically to leave: such as this conference of Finnish officers, who protested that they had rented the hotel and conference room and paid in advance, and wouldn’t leave just like that. With them, my Servant had to lie skillfully, explaining for instance that there was an alert, a grave security problem, and that they had to evacuate for their own safety. I found this deeply humiliating, since the real reason was my Will; they were supposed to leave just because I wanted it, not because they were coaxed. My rage increased, I thrashed about and roared more violently than ever, sending great waves crashing through the city. When I woke up the rain was still streaming down the windows. At breakfast they served us some Kommissbrot, some coal-based margarine from the Ruhr, quite tasty, synthetic honey made from pine resin, and the frightful ersatz Schlüter tea, the identical packets of which never contained the same ingredients. The men ate in silence. Ries, glum, pointed to a soldier leaning over his tea: “That’s him.”—“Who?” Ries imitated a jaw grinding. I looked again: he was almost a teenager, he had a hollow face spotted with acne, and eyes lost in dark bags. His comrades were rough on him, sending him off on chores and insulting him, slapping him if he didn’t go fast enough. The boy didn’t say anything. “Everyone is hoping he’ll get himself killed by the partisans,” Ries whispered to me. “We’ve tried everything, everything, we’ve even gagged him. No use.”