It rained for three days straight. The sanatoriums were filling up with wounded, brought from Malgobek and Sagopchi, where our renewed offensive on Groznyi was being run into the ground by the fierce resistance. Korsemann came to distribute medals to the Finnish volunteers of the Wiking, handsome, somewhat distraught blond boys decimated by the gunfire encountered in the Zhuruk Valley, below Nizhni Kurp. The new military administration of the Caucasus was being set in place. At the beginning of October, by decree of Generalquartiermeister Wagner, six Cossack raions, with 160,000 inhabitants, were accorded the new status of “self-government”; the Karachai autonomy would officially be announced during a big celebration in Kislovodsk. With the other leading officers of the SS in the region I was again summoned to Voroshilovsk by Korsemann and Bierkamp. Korsemann was worried about the limitation of SS police power in the self-governed districts, but wanted to pursue a reinforced policy of cooperation with the Wehrmacht. Bierkamp was furious; he called the Ostpolitiker “czarists” and “Baltic barons”: “This famous Ostpolitik is nothing but a resurrection of the spirit of Tauroggen,” he protested. In private, Leetsch gave me to understand in veiled words that Bierkamp was worried stiff because of the number of executions carried out by the Kommandos, which didn’t exceed a few dozen a week: the Jews in the occupied regions had all been liquidated, aside from a few artisans preserved by the Wehrmacht to serve as leatherworkers and tailors; we didn’t catch many partisans or Communists; as for the national minorities and the Cossacks, the majority of the population, they were now almost untouchable. I found Bierkamp’s state of mind quite narrow, but I could understand it: in Berlin, the effectiveness of an Einsatzgruppe was judged based on its tallies, and a lessening of activity could be interpreted as a lack of energy on the part of the Kommandant. But the Group wasn’t remaining inactive. In Elista, at the confines of the Kalmuk Steppe, Sk Astrakhan was being formed ahead of the fall of that city; in the region of Krasnodar, having carried out all the other priority tasks, Sk 10a was liquidating the asylums for the retarded, the hydrocephalics, and the insane, mostly using a gas truck. In Maikop, the Seventeenth Army was relaunching its offensive toward Tuapse, and Sk 11 was taking part in the repression of an intense guerilla warfare in the mountains, in very rough terrain made even more difficult by the persistent rain. On October 10, I celebrated my birthday at the restaurant with Voss, but without telling him about it; the next day, we went with most of the AOK to Kislovodsk to celebrate the Uraza Bairam, the breaking of the fast that ends the month of Ramadan. This was a kind of triumph. In a large field outside the city, the imam of the Karachai, a wrinkled old man with a firm, clear voice, led a long collective prayer; facing the nearby hills, hundreds of caps, skullcaps, felt or fur hats, in dense rows, bowed to the ground and stood up in time to his threnody. Afterward, on a platform decorated with German and Muslim flags, Köstring and Bräutigam, their voices amplified by a PK loudspeaker, proclaimed the establishment of the Autonomous Karachai District. Cheers and gunshots punctuated each phrase. Voss, his hands behind his back, translated Bräutigam’s speech; Köstring read his directly in Russian, and was then thrown into the air, several times, by young enthusiasts. Bräutigam had presented the qadi Bairamukov, an anti-Soviet peasant, as the new head of the district: the old man, wearing a cherkesska and a beshmet, with an enormous white woollen papakha on his head, solemnly thanked Germany for having delivered the Karachai from the Russian yoke. A young child led a superb white Kabarda horse up to the platform, its back covered in a bright-colored Daghestani sumak. The horse snorted, the old man explained that it was a present from the Karachai people to the leader of the Germans, Adolf Hitler; Köstring thanked him and assured him the horse would be conveyed to the Führer, in Vinnitsa in the Ukraine. Then some young natives in traditional garb carried Köstring and Bräutigam on their shoulders to the cheers of the men, the ululations of the women, and the redoubled salvos of the rifles. Voss, red with pleasure, looked on all this with delight. We followed the crowd: at the end of the field, a small army of women were loading foodstuffs onto long tables beneath some awnings. Incredible quantities of lamb, which they served with broth, were simmering in large cast-iron pots; there was also boiled chicken, wild garlic, caviar, and manti, a kind of Caucasian ravioli; the Karachai women, many of them beautiful and laughing, kept pushing more dishes in front of the guests; the young men stayed packed together at the side, whispering busily, while their seated fathers ate. Köstring and Bräutigam were sitting beneath a canopy with the elders, in front of the Kabarda horse, which they seemed to have forgotten and which, dragging its leash, was sniffing at the dishes to the laughter of the spectators. Some mountain musicians were singing long laments accompanied by small high-pitched stringed instruments; later on, they were joined by percussionists and the music became frantic, frenzied; a large circle formed and the young men, led by a master of ceremonies, danced the lesghinka, noble, splendid, virile, then some other dances with knives, of an astounding virtuosity. No alcohol was served, but most of the German guests, heated up by the meats and the dances, seemed drunk, bright-red, sweating, overexcited. The Karachai saluted the best dance movements with gunshots and that contributed even more to the frenzy. My heart was beating wildly; along with Voss, I tapped with my feet and clapped my hands, shouted like a madman in the circle of spectators. At nightfall they brought torches and it went on; when you felt too tired, you went over to the tables to drink some tea and eat a little. “The Ostpolitiker have certainly pulled it off!” I shouted to Voss. “This would convince anyone.”

But the news from the front wasn’t good. In Stalingrad, despite the military bulletins that daily announced a decisive breakthrough, the Sixth Army, according to the Abwehr, had gotten completely bogged down in the center of town. The officers who came back from Vinnitsa affirmed that a deplorable atmosphere reigned at GHQ, and that the Führer had almost stopped talking to Generals Keitel and Jodl, whom he had banished from his table. Sinister rumors were rampant in military circles, which Voss reported to me sometimes: the Führer was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, he regularly flew into mad rages and was making contradictory, incoherent decisions; the generals were starting to lose confidence. It was certainly exaggerated, but I found the fact that such rumors were spreading in the army worrisome, and I mentioned it in the section of my report on the Morale of the Wehrmacht. Hohenegg was back, but his conference was taking place in Kislovodsk, and I hadn’t seen him yet; after a few days he sent me a note inviting me to dinner. Voss had gone to join the Third Panzer Corps in Prokhladny; von Kleist was preparing another offensive toward Nalchik and Ordzhonikidze, and he wanted to be right behind the first units to protect the libraries and institutes.

That same morning, Leutnant Reuter, an adjunct of Gilsa’s, came to my office: “We have a strange case that you should see. An old man, who presented himself here on his own. He’s talking about strange things and he says he’s Jewish. The Oberst suggested you interrogate him.”—“If he’s a Jew, he should be sent to the Kommando.”—“Maybe. But don’t you want to see him? I can assure you he’s surprising.” An orderly led the man in. He was a tall old man with a long white beard, still visibly vigorous; he wore a black cherkesska, a Caucasian peasant’s soft leather ankle boots tucked into rubber galoshes, and a handsome embroidered skullcap, purple, blue, and gold. I motioned to him to take a seat and, a little annoyed, asked the orderly: “He only speaks Russian, I suppose? Where is the Dolmetscher?” The old man looked at me with piercing eyes and said to me in strangely accented but understandable classical Greek: “You are an educated man, I see. You must know Greek.” Taken aback, I dismissed the orderly and replied: “Yes, I know Greek. And you? How do you come to speak this language?” He ignored my question. “My name is Nahum ben Ibrahim, from Magaramkend in the gubernatorya of Derbent. For the Russians, I took the name of Shamilyev, in honor of the great Shamil with whom my father fought. And you, what is your name?”—“My name is Maximilien. I come from Germany.”—“And who was your father?” I smiled: “Why does my father interest you, old man?”—“How am I supposed to know who I’m talking to if I don’t know who your father is?” His Greek, I heard now, contained unusual turns of phrase, but I managed to understand it. I told him my father’s name and he seemed satisfied. Then I questioned him: “If your father fought with Shamil, you must be very old.”—“My father died gloriously in Dargo after killing dozens of Russians. He was a very pious man, and Shamil respected his religion. He said that we, the Dagh Chufuti, believe in God better than the Muslims do. I remember the day he declared that in front of his murid, at the mosque in Vedeno.”—“That’s impossible! You couldn’t have known Shamil yourself. Show me your passport.” He held out a document to me and I quickly leafed through it. “See for yourself! It’s written here that you were born in 1866. Shamil was already a prisoner of the Russians then, in Kaluga.” He took the passport calmly from my hands and slipped it into an inner pocket. His eyes seemed to be sparkling with humor and mischief. “How do you think a poor chinovnik”—he used the Russian term—“from Derbent, a man who never even finished elementary school, could know when I was born? He guessed I was seventy when he wrote up this paper, without asking me anything. But I am much older. I was born before Shamil roused the tribes. I was already a man when my father died in Dargo, killed by those Russian dogs. I could have taken his place by Shamil’s side, but I was already studying the law, and Shamil told me that he had enough warriors, but that he needed scholars too.” I had absolutely no idea what to think: he would have had to be at least 120 years old. “And Greek?” I asked again. “Where did you learn that?”—“Daghestan isn’t Russia, young officer. Before the Russians killed them without mercy, the greatest scholars in the world lived in Daghestan, Muslims and Jews. People came from Arabia, from Turkestan, and even from China to consult them. And the Dagh Chufuti are not the filthy Jews from Russia. My mother’s language is Farsi, and everyone speaks Turkish. I learned Russian to do business, for as Rabbi Eliezer said, the thought of God does not fill the belly. Arabic I studied with the imams of the madrasas of Daghestan, and Greek, as well as Hebrew, from books. I never learned the language of the Jews of Poland, which is nothing but German, a language of Nyemtsi.”—“So you are truly a scholar.”—“Don’t make fun of me, meirakion. I too have read your Plato and your Aristotle. But I have read them along with Moses de Leon, which makes a big difference.” For some time I had been staring at his beard, square-cut, and especially his bare top lip. Something fascinated me: beneath his nose, his lip was smooth, without the usual hollow in the center, the philtrum. “How is it that your lip is like that? I’ve never seen that.” He rubbed his lip: “That? When I was born, the angel didn’t seal my lips. So I remember everything that happened before.”—“I don’t understand.”—“But you are well educated. It’s all written in the Book of the Creation of the Child, in the Lesser Midrashim. In the beginning, the man’s parents mate. That creates a drop into which God introduces the man’s spirit. Then the angel takes the drop in the morning to Paradise and at night to Hell, then he shows it where it will live on Earth and where it will be buried when God recalls the spirit he has sent. Then this is what is written. Excuse me if I recite badly, but I have to translate from the Hebrew, which you don’t know: But the angel always brings the drop back into the body of its mother and The Holy One, blessed be his name, closes the doors and bolts behind it. And The Holy One, blessed be his name, says to it: You will go up to there, and no further. And the child remains in his mother’s womb for nine months. Then it is written: The child eats everything the mother eats, drinks everything the mother drinks and does not eliminate any excrement, for if he did, it would make the mother die. And then it is written: And when the time comes when he must come into the world, the angel presents itself before him and says to him: Leave, for the time has come for your appearance in the world. And the spirit of the child replies: I have already said in front of the One who was there that I am satisfied with the world in which I have lived. And the angel replies: The world to which I am taking you is beautiful. And then: Despite yourself, you have been formed in the body of your mother, and despite yourself, you have been born to come into the world. Immediately the child begins to cry. And why does he cry? Because of the world in which he had lived and which he is forced to leave. And as soon as he has left, the angel gives him a blow on the nose and extinguishes the light above his head, he makes the child leave in spite of himself and the child forgets all he has seen. And as soon as he leaves, he begins to cry. This blow on the nose the book talks about is this: the angel seals the lips of the child and this seal leaves a mark. But the child does not forget right away. When my son was three years old, a long time ago, I surprised him one night near his little sister’s cradle: ‘Tell me about God,’ he was saying. ‘I’m beginning to forget.’ That is why man must relearn everything about God through study, and that is why men become mean and kill each other. But the angel had me come out without sealing my lips, as you see, and I remember everything.”—“So you remember the place where you will be buried?” I asked. He smiled wide: “That is why I came here to see you.”—“And is it far from here?”—“No. I can show you, if you like.” I got up and took my cap: “Let’s go.”