Frederick Forsyth: The Odessa File

There was one certain girl at Riga who helped the prisoners at her own risk. She was Olli Adler-from Munich, I believe. Her sister Gerda had already been shot in the cemetery for bringing in food. Olli was a girl of surpassing beauty and took Roschmann’s fancy. He made her his concubine-the official term was housemaid, because relations between an SS man and a Jewish girl were banned. She used to smuggle medicines into the ghetto when she was allowed to visit it, having stolen them from the SS stores. This, of course, was punishable by death. The last I saw of her was when we boarded the ship at Riga docks.

By the end of that first winter I was certain I could not survive much longer. The hunger, the cold, the damp, the overwork, and the constant brutalities had whittled my formerly strong frame down to a mass of skin and bones. Looking in the mirror, I saw staring back at me a haggard, stubbled old man with red-rimmed eyes and hollow cheeks. I had just turned thirtyfive, and I looked double that. But so did everyone else.

I had witnessed the departure of tens of thousands to the forest of the mass graves, the deaths of hundreds from cold, exposure, and overwork, and of scores from hanging, shooting, flogging, and clubbing. Even after surviving five months, I had outlived my time.

The will to live that I had begun to show in the train had dissipated, leaving nothing but a mechanical routine of going on living that sooner or later had to break. And then something happened in March that gave me another year of will power.

I remember the date even now. It was March 3, 1942, the day of the second DilnamUnde convoy.

About a month earlier we had seen for the first time the arrival of a strange van. It was about the size of a long single-decker bus, painted steel-gray, and without windows. It parked just outside the ghetto gates, and at morning roll call Roschmann said he had an announcement to make.

He said there was a new fish-pickling factory just started at the town of DilnamUnde, situated on the Ddna River, about eighty miles from Riga. It offered light work, he said, good food, and good living conditions. Because the work was so light the opportunity was open only to old men and women, the frail, the sick, and the small children.

Naturally, many were eager to go to such a comfortable kind of labor.

Roschmann walked down the lines, selecting those to go, and this time, instead of the old and sick hiding themselves at the back to be dragged screaming and protesting forward to join the forced marches to Execution Hill, they seemed eager to show themselves. Finally more than a hundred were selected, and all climbed into the van. Then the doors were slammed shut, and the watchers noticed how tight they fitted together. The van rolled away, emitting no exhaust fumes.

Later, word filtered back what the van was. There was no fish-pickling factory at WinamUnde; the van was a gassing van. In the parlance of the ghetto the expression “DilnamUnde convoy” henceforward came to mean death by gassing.

On March 3 the whisper went around the ghetto that there was to be another DilnamUnde convoy, and sure enough, at morning roll call Roschmann announced it. But there was no pressing forward to volunteer, so with a wide grin Roschmann began to stroll along the ranks, tapping on the chest with his quirt hose who were to go.

Astutely, he started at the fourth and rear rank, where he expected to find the weak, the old, and the unfit-for-work.

There was one old woman who had foreseen this and stood in the front rank. She must have been close to sixty-five, but in an effort to stay alive she had put on high-heeled shoes, a pair of black silk stockings, a short skirt even above her knees, and a saucy hat. She had rouged her cheeks, powdered her face, and painted her lips carmine. In fact she would have stood out among any group of ghetto prisoners, but she thought she might be able to pass for a young girl.

Reaching her as he walked by, Roschmann stopped, stared, and looked again. Then a grin of joy spread over his face.

“Well, what have we here?” he cried, pointing to her with his quirt to draw the attention of his comrades in the center of the square guarding the hundred already chosen. “Don’t you want a nice little ride to DunamUnde, young lady?” Trembling with fear, the old woman whispered, “No, sir.”

“And how old are you, then?’ boomed Roschmann as his SS friends began to giggle. “Seventeen? Twenty?”

The old woman’s knobbly knees began to tremble. “Yes, sir,” she whispered.

“How marvelous,” cried Roschmann..Well, I always like a pretty girl.

Come out into the center so we can all admire your youth and beauty.”

So saying, he grabbed her by the arm and hustled her toward the center of Tin Square. Once there, he stood her out in the open and said, “Well now, little lady, since you’re so young and pretty, perhaps you’d like to dance for us, eh?. She stood there, shivering in the bitter wind, shaking with fear as well.

She whispered something we could not hear.

‘What’s that?” shouted Roschmann. “You can’t dance? Oh, I’m sure a nice young thing like you can dance, can’t you?” His cronies of the German SS were laughing to bust. The Latvians could not understand but started to grin. The old woman shook her head.

Roschmann’s smile vanished. “Dance,” he snarled.

She made a few little shuffling movements, then stopped. Roschmann drew his Luger, eased back the hammer, and fired it into the sand an inch from her feet. She jumped a foot in the air from fright.

“Dance… dance… dance for us you hideous Jewish bitch,” he shouted, firing a bullet into the sand beneath her feet each time he said, “Dance.” Smacking in one spare magazine after another until he had used up the three in his pouch, he made her dance for half an hour, leaping even higher and higher, her skirts flying round her hips with each jump, until at last she fell to the sand unable to rise whether she lived or died.

Roschmann fired his last three slugs into the sand in front of her face, blasting the sand up into her eyes.

Between the crash of each shot came the old woman’s rattling wheeze that could be heard across the parade square.

When he had no more ammunition left he shouted, “Dance,” again and slammed his jackboot into her belly. All this had happened in complete silence from us, until the man next to me started to pray. He was a Hasid, small and bearded, still wearing the rags of his long black coat; despite the cold which forced most of us to wear ear-muffs on our caps, he had the broad-brimmed hat of his seat. He began to recite the Shema, over and over again, in a quavering voice that grew steadily louder.

Knowing that Roschmann was in his most vicious mood, I too began to pray silently that the Hasid would be quiet. But he would not.

“Shema Yisroel (Hear, O Israel… ) “Shut up,” I hissed out of the corner of my mouth.

“Adonai elohenu (the Lord is our God…) “Will you be quiet! You’ll get us all killed.”

“Adonai eha-a-a-ad. ” (The Lord is One.) Like a cantor, he drew out the last syllable in the traditional way, as Rabbi Akiba had done as he died in the amphitheater at Caesarea on the orders of Tinius Rufus. It was just at that moment that Roschmann stopped screaming at the old woman. He lifted his head like an animal scenting the wind and turned toward us. As I stood a head taller than the Hasid, he looked at me.

“Who was that talking?” he screamed, striding toward me across the sand.

“You-step out of line.” There was no doubt he was pointing at me. I thought: This is the end, then. So what? It doesn’t matter; it had to happen, now or some other time. I stepped forward as he arrived in front of me.