Lutsk was still burning when we arrived. A liaison officer from the Wehrmacht took charge of us to guide us to our quarters; we had to skirt the old city and the fort, the path was a complicated one. Kuno Callsen had requisitioned the Academy of Music, near the main square, at the foot of the castle: a fine, simple, seventeenth-century building—a former monastery that had also served as a prison, in the previous century. Callsen was waiting for us on the steps with some men. “It’s a practical place,” he explained to me as our equipment and our things were being unloaded. “There are still some cells in the basement, we just have to retool the locks, I’ve already started.” For my part I preferred libraries to jails, but all the books were in Russian or Ukrainian. Von Radetzky was also walking around with his bulbous nose and his vague eyes, examining the decorative moldings; when he passed near me, I remarked to him that there weren’t any Polish books. “It’s curious, Sturmbannführer. Not so long ago, this was Poland.” Von Radetzky shrugged: “The Stalinists got rid of everything, as you can well imagine.”—“In two years?”—“Two years is enough. Especially for an academy of music.”

The Vorkommando was already overworked. The Wehrmacht had arrested hundreds of Jews and looters and wanted us to take care of them. The fires were still burning and it seemed that saboteurs were keeping them up. And then there was the problem of the old fort. When he was putting his files in order, Dr. Kehrig had found his Baedeker and had held it out to me over the torn-open crates to show me the entry: “Castle Lubart. Look, a Lithuanian prince built it.” The central courtyard was overflowing with corpses, prisoners shot by the NKVD before their retreat, apparently. Kehrig asked me to go have a look. This castle had immense brick walls built on earthen ramparts, surmounted by three square towers; sentinels from the Wehrmacht guarded the gate, and an officer from the Abwehr had to intervene so I could enter. “Sorry. The Generalfeldmarschall ordered us to secure the place.”—“Of course, I understand.” An abominable stench assaulted my nose as soon as I went through the gate. I didn’t have a handkerchief and held one of my gloves over my nose to try to breathe. “Take this,” the Hauptmann from the Abwehr suggested, handing me a wet cloth, “it helps a little.” It did help a little, but not enough; even though I breathed through my mouth, the smell filled my nostrils, sweet, heavy, nauseating. I swallowed convulsively to keep from vomiting. “Your first time?” the Hauptman gently asked. I nodded. “You’ll get used to it,” he went on, “but maybe never completely.” He himself was livid, but didn’t cover his mouth. We had passed through a long vaulted corridor, then a little quadrangle. “It’s that way.”

The corpses were piled up in a big paved courtyard, in disordered mounds, scattered here and there. An immense, haunting buzzing filled the air: thousands of heavy blue flies were hovering over the bodies, the pools of blood, the fecal matter. My boots stuck to the pavement. The dead were already swelling up, I gazed at their green and yellowish skin, their faces gone shapeless, as if they’d been beaten to death. The smell was vile; and this smell, I knew, was the beginning and the end of everything, the very signification of our existence. This thought filled me with dismay. Little groups of soldiers from the Wehrmacht equipped with gas masks were trying to disentangle the piles and line up the bodies; one of them tugged on an arm, which came off and stayed in his hand; he tossed it with a weary gesture onto another pile. “There are more than a thousand of them,” the Abwehr officer said to me, almost whispering. “All the Ukrainians and Poles they’d been keeping in prison since their invasion. We found women, even children.” I wanted to close my eyes, or put my hand over my eyes, and at the same time I wanted to look, to look as much as I could, and by looking, try to understand, this incomprehensible thing, there, in front of me, this void for human thought. At a loss, I turned to the officer from the Abwehr: “Have you read Plato?” He looked at me, taken aback: “What?”—“No, it’s nothing.” I did an about-face and left the place. In the back of the first small courtyard, a door opened on the left; it led to some steps. In the upper floors, I wandered haphazardly through empty hallways, then noticed a spiral staircase, in one of the towers; at the top, one could access a wooden footbridge attached to the walls. From there, I could smell the odor from the fires in the city; it was far better, and I breathed deeply, then took a cigarette out of my case and lit it. I had the impression that the stench from the putrefied corpses was still stuck to the insides of my nose, I tried to chase it away by exhaling the smoke through my nostrils, but managed only to make myself cough convulsively. I looked at the view. Toward the back of the fort lay some gardens, little vegetable gardens with a few fruit trees; beyond the wall I saw the city and the loop of the Styr; on that side there wasn’t any smoke, and the sun shone on the countryside. I smoked quietly. Then I went down again and returned to the main courtyard. The officer from the Abwehr was still there. He stared at me inquisitively but without irony: “Feeling better?”—“Yes, thanks.” I tried to take an official tone: “You have an exact count? It’s for my report.”—“Not yet. Tomorrow, I think.”—“And the nationalities?”—“I told you, Ukrainians, Poles probably. It’s hard to say, most of them don’t have any papers. They were shot in groups, you can see they did it in a hurry.”—“Any Jews?” He looked at me with surprise: “Of course not. It’s the Jews who did this.” I grimaced: “Oh yes, of course.” He turned back to the corpses and didn’t say anything for a while. “What a mess,” he finally mumbled. I saluted him. Outside, some kids were gawking; one of them asked me a question, but I didn’t understand his language, I passed by without saying anything and returned to the Academy of Music to report to Kehrig.

The next day, the Sonderkommando set to work in earnest. One squad, under Callsen and Kurt Hans, shot three hundred Jews and twenty looters in the castle garden. In the company of Dr. Kehrig and Sturmbannführer Vogt, I spent my day in planning meetings with the military intelligence chief of the Sixth Army, the Ic/AO Niemeyer, along with several colleagues of his, including Hauptmann Luley, whom I had met the day before at the fort and who was in charge of counterespionage. Blobel thought that we were short on men and wanted the Wehrmacht to lend us some; but Niemeyer was categorical: it was up to the Generalfeldmarschall and his Chief of Staff, Oberst Heim, to decide that sort of question. During another meeting, in the afternoon, Luley announced to us in a strained voice that they had found ten German soldiers among the dead in the castle, horribly mutilated. “They were tied up and their noses, ears, tongues, and genitals were cut off.” Vogt went up to the castle with him and returned with a waxen face: “Yes, it’s true, it’s horrible, they’re monsters.” This news created a stir; Blobel ranted through the hallways and then went back to see Heim. That night he announced to us: “The Generalfeldmarschall wants to take punitive action. Strike a strong blow, discourage those bastards.” Callsen gave us a report on the day’s executions. They had gone off without any snags, but the method imposed by von Reichenau, with just two guns per condemned man, had its disadvantages: if you wanted to be sure of your shot, you had to aim at the head rather than the chest, which caused splattering, the men got blood and brains in their faces, they were complaining. That led to a heated argument. Häfner shouted, “You’ll see that it’ll end up with a bullet in the back of the neck, like the Bolsheviks.” Blobel reddened and pounded on the table: “Gentlemen! Such language is inadmissible! We are not Bolsheviks!…We are German soldiers. In the service of our Volk and our Führer!” He turned to Callsen: “If your men are too sensitive, we’ll have schnapps served to them.” Then to Häfner: “In any case there’s no question of bullets in the neck. I don’t want the men to have a feeling of personal responsibility. Executions will take place according to military method, and that’s final.”