A Family Madness (10 page)

An afternoon meeting at SS headquarters, Natural History Museum, Bryanska Street. Otto Ohlendorf, a really impressive doctor of jurisprudence and economic expert, presently commander of SS Special Action Group D, in the chair. Rank: Brigadeführer. Very young—thirty-three years or so. Story is he fell out with Reich Security Central Office and has been sent to Belorussia to be taught a lesson. Others present were Mayor Kuzich, local SS and SD officers, my division chiefs, and the chief of police of Gomel, from whom we are borrowing personnel for the next two days. Also there, he says as an observer, Dr. Kappeler of the Political Section in Kaunas.

We Belorussians under test. Kappeler is the examiner, there's no doubt about that. All Lithuania and Belorussia presently labeled Ostland. If we hope to have our nation labeled by its correct and desired name, we have to get on right side of men like Kappeler.

The charming Oberführer Ganz, our Kommissar here in Staroviche, so visible at dinner tables, did not attend meeting. Sent an aide instead. It is clear Ganz will be happier when Special Action Group D packs up and rolls on to another city, and when Kappeler returns to the Ostministerium in Kaunas. Ganz's absence noted with a few significant remarks by Ohlendorf. Ohlendorf concerned about other actions carried out using Belorussian police and marked by drunkenness and sexual assaults. (I wonder why he thinks I didn't bother inviting my alcoholic deputy Beluvich.)

In tomorrow's action, a quarter liter of vodka is to be the maximum ration per man. I put forward proposal for two shifts of men—3:30
A.M.
to noon, noon to 8:30
P.M.
, and for a liquor ration to be issued at beginning and end of each shift. No one quarreled with the idea that the men involved in the action required
some
fortifying.

Mayor Kuzich and Dr. Ohlendorf, the latter having already had some experience in these matters, have chosen an area three miles west of the city on the Gomel road. Kuzich made tedious speech about the potential influence of mass graves on municipal water supply—how his experience as an engineer had helped him obviate it.

Made my speech then. Used the term “Jewish Bolsheviks” a great deal, since it is one much favored by the Reich Security Central Office. Said that Belorussian patriots had never seen a place for such people in the yearned-for Belorussian Republic, but that our cooperation with Special Action Group D was to be seen not only as a gesture of fraternity, based on common beliefs, but that it should also be seen as yet another element qualifying us for self-government. Speech well received by both Ohlendorf and Dr. Kappeler. As of course by all Belorussians present.

Got home to find Oberführer Ganz has organized a picnic for tomorrow, in Brudezh woods north of the city. Intended to send Danielle and children on picnic with Kuzich family tomorrow anyhow, but Ganz has horned in. Cannot help feel the charming Ganz very vain—wants the Belorussians to remember him as a beloved and wise occupier. In fact once the Germans permit us our Republic he won't get too many mentions.

Would have thought his place tomorrow would be, if not out on the Gomel road, at least at his desk in town. There are historical imperatives in operation which no man can evade, even if he can send the children on a picnic. But to go on a picnic himself indicates he does not understand this swine of a century at all. The fact you can't get anything done anymore unless you get mud on your boots.

There is also the matter of the Kommissar's Jewish driver. Am broad-minded about personal morality. Hope Ganz's superiors at the Reichkommissariat headquarters in Minsk and way up in Riga are equally well disposed to him.

Also waiting for me, home, with only half hour before guests arrive, Sergeant Jasper, the young Wehrmacht sergeant attached to my office. Seemed distraught, and agreed with uncustomary quickness that he needed a drink. That afternoon he'd visited the ghetto down by the river—he was not supposed to, but some of the Wehrmacht did because there were so many Jewish artisans. Jasper had gone there to collect his shoes from a cobbler who had been resoling them. (Black market leather, of course, as I pointed out to Jasper, but with a smile, hoping to settle him down.) The cobbler had been in a state. Said there was rumor that SS had asked city authorities, Mayor Kuzich, myself, to assist in the roundup and execution of Jewish population of Staroviche, and that the city authorities had agreed. Jewish deputation had been to see Kuzich that morning (Kuzich had told me of this meeting). Though Kuzich had reassured them and told them he would emphasize to the Germans the good work the Jewish Council had done in levying taxes among Jewish population, a lot of concern among the Jews. Some of the Gentile townspeople Jasper spoke to before coming to see me had also heard the rumors. A greengrocer told Jasper, “Everyone ought to wait till the Russians are finished off, because those Jews have powerful political friends!”

Jasper looked at me steadily across the desk. “Herr Kabbelski,” he said, “tell me if it's true.”

Told him calmly that it was. Observers here from all over Ostland. It would be a model action. Could see him swallowing, trying to deal with his outrage, the same outrage which he had the grace to recognize I felt on many levels as well. Told him there would be exemptions for a small number still considered essential workers. Lest he think of the cobbler, I said, “Oberführer Ganz's driver for example.”

“But, sir,” he said. “It isn't possible in the technical sense to finish so many people in a day.”

Told him that after some study and on the advice of his own people, especially Brigadeführer Ohlendorf of Special Action Group D, I now knew it to be possible—that it had already been done in Bialystok, Vilna, Pinsk, and Brest-Litovsk—places where the technique had been developed. It had not always worked as well, one could say as
properly
, as it would tomorrow. Some operations further north where Belorussian policemen, stoked with too much liquor, behaved like barbarians, molesting women, sodomizing children. Even not all Jasper's people behaved well, though they'd been in training for this sort of operation for a long time.

“They
are not my people,” he said, choking with grief.

I felt both pity and anger for him. “Then who
are
your people, Sergeant Jasper? I know who mine are!” And I gave him a short history lesson, nothing he wouldn't already have known as a European scholar, but something to soothe him. If Germans thought they had a Jewish problem, what about we Belorussians? The tsars cramming Jews into these western provinces, forbidding them to live or move outside them, forbidding them to live even in the countryside! The result? Minsk 41 percent Jewish, Rovno 56 percent, Pinsk 64 percent, Brest-Litovsk 44 percent, Gomel 44 percent, Bobruisk 40 percent, Staroviche 31 percent. And were they good Belorussian nationalists? They couldn't give a damn. Stayed put and did business no matter who came to town. Anti-German by sentiment, anti-Belorussian because they considered our hoped-for nation a pale of barbarous peasants. No question that there were partisan cells among them, and that if the slightest thing went wrong with the German offensive against Moscow, those cells would become dangerously active. An alien mass in the midst of the endeavor of our two races, German and Belorussian. Taken as read by us nationalists that there could be no Belorussian Republic while this unreduced mass remained. Reminded him further that we followers of Ostrowsky had always made ourselves clear on that point to the Reich Security Central Office—we were in this whole affair for the sake of Belorussian independence. So I knew who my people were. Was sorry if he was having temporary trouble identifying his.

Mentioned too that I could understand his natural instinct to rush down to the ghetto and spread the word through his cobbler. Two possible results: the cobbler still unable to believe it, and—strangely for such an artful race—the Jews have always found it hard to believe the worst of the Gentile world; second, the cobbler spreads the word and causes a riot. Truckloads of Belorussian police, German Field Police, Special Action people and a few Wehrmacht units waiting by in the alleys off Bryanska Street to guard against exactly such a disturbance. So whole thing would be done whichever way—either brutally and frontally as a result of an indiscretion by Sergeant Jasper, or mercifully and professionally tomorrow.

Finally told him not to be self-indulgent. How did he think I felt? At ease? With the supreme test of my soul, my manhood, due to begin at 3:00
A.M.
the following morning? Ganz and my wife and children, together with Kuzich's family, to leave very early, at first light, for a picnic in the other direction. If he thought he would have a problem tomorrow, he ought to join them.

Very angry with him when he did not appear at the dinner table but later turned up in the hallway after all the senior officers had gone off to their beds. Apologized and said he had stayed on in my office, as I'd suggested (though I didn't mean for the whole damned dinner), and fortified himself with liquor. Promised he would be at his desk at police headquarters the next morning.

Now 11:30. Will go into tomorrow on two and a half hours' sleep. Suppose that's true of all history, that it's achieved on inadequate rest.

12

R
ADISLAW
K
ABBEL'S
H
ISTORY OF THE
K
ABBELSKI
F
AMILY

Staroviche was a city and oblast, or province, sitting southeast of Minsk in a bend of the Pripet River. However hackneyed the sentiment, I can say that there I spent the three happiest years of my childhood. We lived in a solid and ornate villa. It stood in its own garden and, whatever was happening beyond its brick walls, was its own adequate planet. Only in the summer of 1942 did my mother and sister and I leave it to holiday near Riga on the Baltic. Even though increasing anarchy in the streets of Staroviche would reduce its usefulness to us, we enjoyed too the expensive Hoetsch automobile which went with my father's status as police chief of the city and region, and a chauffeur named Yuri, who wore the blue uniform of the Belorussian police. Since children do not watch the calendar, the summers of the garden in Drozdy Street seemed longer than whole decades now, and the winters with their early darkness hardly shorter.

Our best friend in the three years our family lived in Staroviche was Oberführer Willi Ganz. Ganz was Kommissar of the oblast, or (as the Germans said) the
Bezirk
, of Staroviche, the same region of which my father was Belorussian police chief. My mother and I became very attached to him, more than to any of the other official guests who came to our place. He was the most sincere of all those German officers and functionaries who liked her landscapes. My sister and I began to call him Onkel Willi, without being asked to, without any embarrassment, practically from the first visit he made to our house.

I remember once when my mother was praising Oberführer Ganz for the sincere interest he showed in us children that my father said, “Perhaps he laughs too easily.” But he himself laughed when he said it. When I think of poor Ganz after all this time I remember not a set of features but his laughter, which wasn't maniacal on the one hand or careful and mannered on the other. It was like the laughter of a man who doesn't have an enemy in the world. And this from an SS Oberführer, member of a legion of which the world has ever since made a bogey.

He was of medium height, athletically built, and beginning to lose his black hair from a rounded, expansive skull. He was the sort of adult who liked to produce little presents from his pocket at times when bedtime is close and a child thinks the main delights of the evening are over. My sister and I became infatuated with Ganz, as far as I can remember, late in the summer of my parents' return to Belorussia. (To us children it seemed like a return too, though we had never been there before.) The Soviet Union was about to fall—everyone knew that and was excited by the idea, and the atmosphere of cosmic carnival the news created was universal. The Soviet Army had been decimated. We had visible proof of that—two great mounds beside the Staroviche-Baranovichi road under which, as even my sister and I knew, though our parents were not the type to bring such brutal facts to our attention, lay the two Russian brigades who had tried to fight the Germans for Staroviche. Everyone was quoting the saying that the Russian defeat was so absolute that all the Germans had had to do was kick in the door and the whole rotten structure had tumbled in. News that Stalin had been killed by his own people in besieged Moscow was expected daily.

It was safe at that stage for a German official to accompany the wives of the newly installed mayor and police chief of Staroviche, together with the children of both women, on a picnic to the Brudezh forest north of the city. The mayor by the way was Franz Kuzich, one of those whose families had holidayed with us at Puck. Kuzich came from a Germanophile family, and his three children also carried German names—Ruta, Bernhardt, Kirsten. They were all knowing adolescents. Bernhardt did not share even the same jokes as I did, would not have been seen dead laughing at them. Kirsten was a year older than my sister Genia and used that margin as an excuse for cutting her dead.

Ganz's picnic was a triumph for us because the Oberführer wouldn't allow any of the Kuzich children's air of higher wisdom and knowledge to prevail. If they wanted to play with Ganz, Ganz wanted to play like a child. Therefore
they
had to consent to become children again. I remember still how I loved the man for delivering us like that, for making us fashionable with the Kuzich children, who might be unfashionably overweight like their mother but whose opinions meant everything to Genia and me. Ganz wanted hiding games and chasing games; and as I ran, the woods blurred, a delightful deep-green haze; and when I hid, I caressed the bark of the larch trees and the birch; and as Ganz's pursuing laughter bounced from branch to branch, I thought,
This
is Belorussia,
this
is why we had to come back, to make childhood possible.