Frederick Forsyth - The Odessa File

He did not say anything, but his face was twitching like a maniacs. Then it relaxed and he gave his quiet, wolfish smile that struck terror into everyone in the ghetto, even the Latvian SS men.

His hand moved so quickly no one could see it. I felt only a sort of thump down the left side of my face, simultaneous with a tremendous bang as if a bomb had gone off next to my eardrum. Then the quite distinct but detached feeling of my own skin splitting like rotten calico from temple to mouth. Even before it had started to bleed, Roschmann’s hand moved again, the other way this time, and his quirt ripped open the other side of my face with the same loud bang in the ear and the feeling of something tearing. It was a two foot quirt, sprung with whippy ste,el core at the handle end, the remaining foot-length being of plaited leather thongs without the core, and when drawn across and down human skin at the same time, the plaiting could split the hide like tissue paper. I had seen it done.

Within a matter of seconds I felt the trickle of warm blood beginning to flow down the front of my jacket, dripping off my chin in two little red fountains. Roschmann swung away from me, then back, pointing to the old woman still sobbing in the center of the square.

“Pick up that old hag and take her to the van,” he barked.

And so, a few minutes ahead of the arrival of the other hundred victims, I picked up the old woman and carried her down Little Hill Street to the gate and the waiting van, pouring blood onto her from my chin. I set her down in the back of the van and made to leave her there. As I did so, she gripped my wrist in withered fingers with a strength I would not have thought she still possessed. She pulled me down toward her, squatting on the floor of the death van, and with a small cambric handkerchief that must have come from better days stanched some of the still flowing blood.

She looked up at me from a face streaked with mascara, rouge, tears, and sand, but with dark eyes bright as stars.

“Jew, my son,” she whispered, “you must live. Swear to me that you will live. Swear to me you will get out of this place alive. You must live, so that you can tell them, them outside in the other world, what happened to our people here. Promise me, swear it by the Torah.” And so I swore that I would live, somehow, no matter what the cost.

Then she let me go. I stumbled back down the road into the ghetto, and halfway down I fainted.

Shortly after returning to work I made two decisions. One was to keep a secret diary, nightly tattooing words and dates with a pin and black ink into the skin of my feet and legs, so that one day I would be able to transcribe all that had happened in Riga and give precise evidence against those responsible.

The second decision was to become a Kapo, a member of the Jewish police.

The decision was hard, for these were men who herded their fellow Jews to work and back, and often to the place of execution. Moreover, they carried pickax handles and occasionally, when under the eye of a German SS officer, used them liberally to beat their fellow Jews so they would work harder.

Nevertheless, on April 1, 1942, 1 went to the chief of the Kapos and volunteered, thus becoming an outcast from the company of my fellow Jews. There was always room for an extra Kapo, for despite the better rations, living conditions, and release from slave labor, very few agreed to become Kapos.

I should here describe the method of execution of those unfit for labor, for in this manner between 70,000 and 80,000 Jews were exterminated under the orders of Eduard Roschmann at Riga. When the cattle train arrived at the station with a new consignment of prisoners, usually about 5000 strong, there were always close to a thousand already dead from the journey. Only occasionally was the number as low as a few hundred, scattered among fifty cars.

When the new arrivals were lined up in Tin Square, the selections for extermination took place, not merely among the new arrivals but among us all. That was the point of the head-count each morning and evening.

Among the new arrivals, those weak or frail, old or diseased, most of the women, and almost all the children, were singled out as being unfit for work. These were set to one side. The remainder were then counted. If they totaled 2000, then 2000 of the existing inmates were also picked out, so that 5000 had arrived and 5000 went to Execution Hill. That way there was no overcrowding. A man might survive six months of slave labor, seldom more; then, when his health was reduced to ruins, Roschmann’s quirt would tap him on the chest one day, and he would go to join the ranks of the dead.

At first these victims were marched in column to a forest outside the town. The Latvians called it Bickernicker Forest, and the Germans renamed it the Hochwald or High Forest. Here, in clearings between the pines, enormous open ditches had been dug by the Riga Jews before they died. And here the Latvian SS guards, under the eye and orders of Eduard Roschmann, mowed them down so that they fell into the ditches.

The remaining Riga Jews then filled in enough earth to cover the bodies, adding one more layer of corpses to those underneath until the ditch was full.

Then a new one was started.

From the ghetto we could hear the chattering of the machine guns when each new consignment was liquidated, and watch Roschmann riding back down the hill and through the ghetto gates in his open car when it was over.

After I became a Rapo all social contact between me and the other internees ceased. There was no point in explaining why I had done it, that one Kapo more or less would make no difference, not increasing the death toll by a single digit, but that one single surviving witness might make all the difference, not to save the Jews of Germany, but to avenge them. This at least was the argument I repeated to myself, but was it the real reason? Or was I just afraid to die? Whatever it was, fear soon ceased to be a factor, for in August that year something happened that caused my soul to die inside my body, leaving only the husk struggling to survive.

In July 1942 a big new transport of Austrian Jews came through from Vienna. Apparently they were marked without exception for “special treatment,” for the entire shipment never came to the ghetto. We did not see them, for they were all marched from the station to High Forest and machine-gunned. Later that evening, down the hill rolled four trucks full of clothes, which were brought to the Tin Square for sorting.

They made a mound as big as a house until they were sorted out into piles of shoes, socks, underpants, trousers, dresses, Jackets, shaving brushes, spectacles, dentures, wedding rings, signet rings, caps, and so forth.

Of course this was standard procedure for executed deportees. All those killed on Execution Hill were stripped at the graveside and their effects brought down later. These were then sorted and sent back to the Reich. The gold, silver, and jewelry were taken in charge by Roschmann personally.

In August 1942 there was another transport, from Theresienstadt, a camp in Bohemia where tens of thousands of German and Austrian Jews were held before being sent eastward to extermination. I was standing at one side of the Tin Square, watching Roschmann as he went around making his selections.

The new arrivals were already shaved bald, which had been done at their previous camp, and it was not easy to tell the men from the women, except for the shift dresses the woman mainly wore. There was one woman across on the other side of the square who caught my attention. There was something about her cast of features that rang a bell in my mind, although she was emaciated, thin as a rake, and coughing continuously.

Arriving opposite her, Roschmann tapped her on the chest and passed on. The Latvians following him at once seized her arms and pushed her out of line to join the others in the center of the square. There were many from that transport who were not work-fit, and the list of selections was long.