Philip Kerr - A Man Without Breath

‘Good theory,’ I said. ‘Did you ask them about it?’

‘No one tells us very much about anything,’ said Hodt. ‘They’re still afraid of the NKVD.’

‘I shall want to speak to some of these locals of yours,’ I said.

‘We get on pretty well with our Hiwis,’ said Ahrens. ‘It didn’t seem worth upsetting the saucer of milk by accusing anyone of lying.’

‘All the same,’ I said. ‘I shall still want to speak to them.’

‘Then you’d better speak to the Susanins,’ said Ahrens. ‘They’re the couple who we have most to do with. They look after the hives and tell the Russian staff what to do in the castle.’

‘Who else is there?’

‘Let’s see: there’s Tsanava and Abakumov – they look after our chickens; Moskalenko who chops wood for us; the laundry is done by Olga and Irina. Our cooks are Tanya and Rudolfovich. Marusya, the kitchen maid. But look here, I don’t want you bullying them, Captain Gunther. There’s a status quo here I wouldn’t want to be disturbed.’

‘Colonel Ahrens,’ I said. ‘If this does turn out to be a grave full of dead Polish officers, then it’s probably already too late for that.’

Ahrens swore under his breath.

‘That is unless you yourselves shot some Polish officers,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps the SS. I can more or less guarantee that no one back in Berlin is interested in uncovering any evidence of that.’

‘We haven’t shot any Poles,’ sighed Ahrens. ‘Here, or anywhere else.’

‘What about Ivans? You must have captured a lot of Red Army after the battle of Smolensk. Did you shoot any of them, perhaps?’

‘We captured about seventy thousand men, many of whom are now held in Camp 126, about twenty-five kilometres to the west of Smolensk. And there’s another camp in Vitebsk. You are welcome to go and take a look at them for yourself, Captain Gunther.’ He bit his lip for a moment before continuing: ‘I’m told that conditions there have improved, but in the beginning there were so many Russian POWs that conditions in the Ivan camps were extremely harsh.’

‘So what you’re saying is that there was probably no need to shoot them when they could just as easily be starved to death.’

‘This is a signals regiment, damn it,’ said Ahrens. ‘The welfare of Russian POWs is not my department.’

‘No, of course not. I wasn’t suggesting that it was. I’m merely trying to establish the facts here. In wartime people have a habit of forgetting where they’ve left them. Don’t you agree, colonel?’

‘Perhaps,’ he said stiffly.

‘Your predecessor, Colonel Bedenck. What about him? Did he shoot anyone in this wood, perhaps?’

‘No,’ insisted Ahrens.

‘How can you be sure of that? You weren’t here.’

‘I was here, sir,’ said Lieutenant Hodt. ‘When Colonel Bedenck was in command of the five hundred and thirty-seventh. And you have my word that no one has been shot in this wood by us. No Russians and no Poles.’

‘Good enough,’ I said. ‘All right then, what about the SS? Special Action Group B was stationed in Smolensk for a while. Is it possible the SS left a few thousand calling cards down there?’

‘We’ve been at this castle since the beginning,’ said Hodt. ‘The SS were active elsewhere. And before you ask, I’m certain of that because this is a signals regiment. I myself set up their SS command post with telephone and teletype. And the local Gestapo. All of their communications with Group HQ would have come through us. Telephone and teletype. And all their other traffic with Berlin. If any Poles had been shot by the SS, I’m certain I would have known about it.’

‘Then you might also know if any Jews had been shot around here.’

Hodt looked awkward for a moment. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I would.’

‘And were there?’

Hodt hesitated.

‘Come now, lieutenant,’ I said. ‘There’s no need to be coy about this. We both know the SS have been murdering Jews in Russia since the first day of Operation Barbarossa. I’ve heard tell that as many as half a million people were butchered in the first six months alone.’ I shrugged. ‘Look, all I’m trying to do is establish a perimeter of safe inquiry. A pale beyond which it’s not wise for me to go walking in my size forty-six policeman’s boots. Because the last thing any of us wants to do is to lift the lid of their hive.’ I glanced at Ahrens. ‘That’s right, isn’t it? Bees? They don’t like it when you open their hive, right?’

‘Um, no, you’re right,’ he said. ‘They don’t particularly like it.’ He nodded. ‘And let me answer that question. About the SS. And what they’ve been up to around here.’

He led me a short distance away from the others. We walked carefully as the ground was icy and uneven under the snow. To me the Katyn Wood felt like a dismal place in a country that was full of equally dismal places. Cold air hung damp around us like a fine curtain, while elsewhere pockets of mist rolled into hollows in the ground like the smoke from invisible artillery. Crows growled their contempt for my inquiries in the tops of the trees, and overhead a barrage balloon was moored to prevent overflights by enemy aircraft. Ahrens lit another cigarette and yawned a steamy plume.

‘It’s hard to believe, but we prefer it here in winter,’ he said. ‘In just a few weeks from now this whole wood will be full of mosquitoes. They drive you mad. Just one of many things that drive you mad out here.’ He shook his head. ‘Look, Captain Gunther, none of us in this regiment is very political. Most of us just want to win this war quickly and go home – if such a thing is still possible after Stalingrad. When that happened, we all listened to the radio, to hear what Goebbels would say about it. Did you hear the speech? From the Sportspalast?’

‘I heard it.’ I shrugged. ‘I live in Berlin. It was so loud I could hear every word Joey said without even having to turn on the fucking radio.’

‘Then you recall how he asked the German people if they wanted a war more radical than anything ever imagined. Total war, he called it.’

‘He has quite a turn of phrase, does our Mahatma Propagandi.’

‘Yes. Only it seems to me – to all of us at the castle – that total war is what we’ve had on this front since day one, and I don’t recall anyone asking any of us if this is what we wanted.’ Ahrens nodded at a line of new trees. ‘Over there is the road to Vitebsk. Vitebsk is less than a hundred kilometres west of here. Before the war there were fifty thousand Jews living there. As soon as the Wehrmacht took over the city, the Jews living there started to suffer. In July of 1941 a ghetto was established on the right bank of the Zapadnaya Dvina River and most of the Jews who hadn’t run away and joined the partisans or just emigrated east were rounded up and forced to live in it: about sixteen thousand people. A wooden stockade was built around the ghetto, and inside this conditions were very hard: forced labour, starvation rations. Probably as many as ten thousand died of hunger and disease. Meanwhile, at least two thousand of them were murdered on some pretext or another at a place called Mazurino. Then the orders came for the liquidation of the ghetto. I myself saw those orders on the teletype – orders from the Reichsfuhrer SS in Berlin. The pretext was that there was typhoid in the ghetto. Maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t. I myself delivered a copy of those orders for Field Marshal von Kluge informing him of what was happening in his area. Later on I learned that about five thousand of the Jews who remained alive in the ghetto were driven out into the remote countryside, where they were all shot. That’s the trouble with being part of a signals regiment, captain. It’s very hard not to know what’s going on, but God knows I really wish I didn’t. So, to answer your question specifically – about that beehive you were referring to: halfway to Vitebsk is a town called Rudnya, and if I were you I should confine my inquiries to anywhere east of there. Understand?’