For one reason or another, maybe to stay close to von Reichenau, who had his HQ there, Blobel chose to remain in Poltava, and we waited for the Kommandostab for more than a month. The Vorkommando didn’t remain inactive. As in Kiev, I set up networks of informers; it was all the more necessary given the motley population, full of immigrants from all over the USSR, among whom certainly lurked a number of spies and saboteurs; furthermore, we hadn’t found a single NKVD list or file: before retreating, they had methodically cleaned out their archives, so there was nothing left for us that might make our job easier. Working in the hotel was becoming rather difficult: while I tried to type a report or talk with a local collaborator, the screams of some man being interrogated would ring out next door, overwhelming me. One night they served us red wine at dinner: my meal was scarcely over when everything started coming back up. This had never happened to me before with such violence, and I was beginning to worry: before the war, I never vomited, when I was little I had almost never thrown up, and I wondered what the reason for it could be. Hanika, who had heard my retching through the bathroom door, suggested maybe the food was bad, or else I was suffering from an intestinal flu: I shook my head, that wasn’t it, I was sure of it, since it had started exactly like the retchings, with a cough and a feeling of heaviness or else of something blocked, except this had gone further and everything had come up all of a sudden, the scarcely digested food mixed with the wine, a frightening red mixture.

Finally Kuno Callsen obtained permission from the Ortskommandantur to set up the Sonderkommando in the premises of the NKVD, on Sovnarkomovskaya Street, the street of the Soviet People’s Commissariats. This large L-shaped building dates from the beginning of the century, and the main entrance is off a little side street, lined with trees stripped bare by winter; a plaque in Russian at the corner states that during the civil war, in May and June 1920, the famous Dzerzhinsky had his headquarters here. The officers kept living at the hotel; Hanika had found a stove for us; unfortunately, he had installed it in the little living room where he slept, and if I left the door open, his atrocious teeth-grinding ruined my sleep. I asked him to warm the two rooms well during the day, so that I could close the door when I went to sleep; but at dawn the cold would wake me, and I ended up sleeping with my clothes on, with a wool cap, until Hanika found me some duvets that I piled up so I could sleep naked, as I was used to. I continued vomiting almost every night or at least every other night, right away at the end of meals, once even before finishing—I had just drunk a cold beer with my pork chop and it came back up so quickly that the liquid was still cool, a hideous sensation. I always managed to vomit neatly, in a bathroom or a washbasin, without drawing too much attention, but it was exhausting: the huge retchings that preceded the upwelling of the food left me emptied, drained of all energy for a long time. At least the food returned so quickly that it wasn’t yet acid, digestion had scarcely begun, and it didn’t have any taste; I just had to rinse my mouth out to feel better.

The specialists from the Wehrmacht had meticulously searched all the public buildings for explosives and mines, and had defused some bombs; despite that, a few days after the first snowfall, the House of the Red Army exploded, killing the commander of the Sixtieth Division, its Chief of Staff, its Ia, and three clerks, who were found horribly mutilated. The same day there were four other explosions; the military was furious. The chief engineer of the Sixth Army, Oberst Selle, gave the order to place Jews in all the large buildings to discourage new bombings. As for von Reichenau, he wanted reprisals. The Vorkommando was not involved in this: the Wehrmacht took care of it. The Ortskommandant had prisoners hanged from all the balconies in the city. Behind our offices, two streets, Chernychevsky and Girchman, combined to form an irregular expanse, like a vague square between small buildings scattered about without any plan. Several of these buildings, from different periods and in different colors, opened onto the street at an abrupt angle, their elegant doorways topped by small balconies; soon, at each railing, one or several men were hanging like sacks. On a townhouse built before the last war, pale green with three floors, two muscular Atlases, flanking the door, supported the balcony with their white arms, bent back behind their heads: when I went by, a body was still twitching between these impassive caryatids. Each hanged man had a sign around his neck in Russian. To go to the office, I liked to walk, either under the bare linden and poplar trees of the long Karl-Liebknecht Street, or cutting across the vast Trade Unions Park with its monument to Shevchenko; it was just a few hundred meters, and during the day the streets were safe. On Liebknecht Street they were also hanging people. Under a balcony, a crowd had gathered. Several Feldgendarmen had come out the French door and were solidly attaching six ropes with slipknots. Then they went back into the dark room. After a while they reappeared, carrying a man with his arms and legs tied, his head covered with a hood. A Feldgendarm passed a slipknot around his neck, then the sign, then pulled off his hood. For an instant, I saw the man’s bulging eyes, the eyes of a bolting horse; then, as if overcome with fatigue, he closed them. Two of the Feldgendarmen lifted him and slowly let him slide from the balcony. His bound muscles convulsed with great shudders, then calmed down; he swung quietly, his neck broken cleanly, while the Feldgendarmen hanged the next one. The people watched till the end; I watched too, full of an evil fascination. I eagerly examined the faces of the hanged men, of the condemned men before they were passed over the railing: these faces, these terrified or terrifyingly resigned eyes told me nothing. Several of the dead men had their tongues sticking out, grotesque; streams of saliva ran from their mouths to the sidewalk, some of the spectators laughed. Anguish filled me like a vast tide, the noise of the drops of saliva horrified me. When I was still young, I had seen someone hanged. It had taken place in the frightful boarding school where I had been locked up; I suffered there, but I wasn’t the only one. One night, after dinner, there was a special prayer, I forget what for, and I had myself excused, because of my Lutheran origins (it was a Catholic school); that way I could return to my room. Each dormitory was organized by class and had about fifteen bunk beds. As I went up, I passed by the next room, where the premières slept (I was in seconde, I must have been fifteen); there were two boys there who had also been let off Mass: Albert, with whom I was more or less friendly, and Pierre R., a strange boy, not very well liked, who frightened the other students with his violent, frantic rages. I chatted with them for a few minutes before I went back to my room, where I lay down to read, a novel by E. R. Burroughs—such books of course were banned, like everything else in that prison. I was finishing another chapter when suddenly I heard Albert’s voice, a wild scream: “Help! Help! Come help!” I leaped out of bed, my heart beating, then a thought held me back: What if Pierre R. were killing Albert? Albert was still yelling. So I forced myself to go see; terrified, ready to flee, I went toward the door and pushed it open. Pierre R. was hanging from a beam, a red ribbon around his neck, his face already blue; Albert, screaming, was holding him by his legs and trying to lift him up. I ran out of the room and down the stairs, yelling in turn, through the yard to the chapel. Some teachers came out, hesitated, then started running toward me, followed by a crowd of students. I led them to the room, everyone tried to go in; as soon as they grasped what was happening, two teachers blocked the doorway, forcing the students back into the hallway. But I had already entered, I saw everything. Two or three teachers supported Pierre R. while another furiously struggled to cut the big ribbon with a penknife or a key. Finally Pierre R. came crashing down like a felled tree, dragging the teachers to the ground with him. Albert, huddled in a corner, was sobbing, his hands clenched in front of his face. Father Labourie, my Greek teacher, was trying to pry open Pierre R.’s jaw; he was using both hands to force apart the teeth, with all his strength, but to no avail. I distinctly remember the deep, gleaming blue of Pierre R.’s face, and his purple lips, flecked with white foam. Then they made me go out. That night I spent in the infirmary; they wanted to isolate me from the other boys, I suppose; I don’t know where they put Albert. A little later on, they sent Father Labourie to me, a gentle, patient man, rare qualities in that establishment. He wasn’t like the other priests, and I enjoyed talking with him. The next morning, all the students were gathered together in the chapel for a long sermon on the abomination of suicide. Pierre R., we were told, had survived; and we had to pray for the salvation of his sinner’s soul. We never saw him again. Since the students were quite shaken up, the good fathers decided to organize a long walk in the woods. “How stupid,” I said to Albert when I met him in the courtyard. He seemed withdrawn, tense. Father Labourie came up to me and said gently, “Come, come with us. Even if it doesn’t make a difference to you, it will do the others good.” I shrugged and joined the group. They made us walk for several hours; and it’s true, that night, everyone was calm. They let me return to my dormitory, where I was assailed by the other boys. During the walk, Albert had told me that Pierre R. had climbed onto his bed, and, after placing the slipknot around his neck, had called out, “Hey, Albert, look,” then had jumped. Over the sidewalk in Kharkov, the hanged men swung slowly. There were, I knew, Jews, Russians, Gypsies there. All these dismal, bound men hanging made me think of sleeping chrysalises patiently waiting for metamorphosis. But there still was something I couldn’t grasp. I was finally beginning to perceive that no matter how many dead people I might see, or people at the instant of their death, I would never manage to grasp death, that very moment, precisely in itself. It was one thing or the other: either you are dead, and then in any case there’s nothing else to understand, or else you are not yet dead, and in that case, even with the rifle at the back of your head or the rope around your neck, death remains incomprehensible, a pure abstraction, this absurd idea that I, the only living person in the world, could disappear. Dying, we may already be dead, but we never die, that moment never comes, or rather it never stops coming, there it is, it’s coming, and then it’s still coming, and then it’s already over, without ever having come. That’s how I was reasoning in Kharkov, very poorly no doubt, but I wasn’t doing very well.