Arnost Lustig - Lovely Green Eyes

“I distinguish between a well-intentioned inferior race and an ill-intentioned superior race, which includes also Germans. You’re not one of them.”

“No,” Skinny said.

“Not even partially? Some of your tribe got as far as Berlin.”

She heard familiar voices from the neighbouring cubicles. The girls were hard at work. Sometimes a soldier cried out, sometimes a girl. They were ridiculous, animal sounds, and she tried to shut them out. Maria-from-Poznan had learnt to fake a whole scale of cries and moans, from ecstasy to gradually abating satisfaction. Some soldiers gave free rein to what they could not permit themselves elsewhere, either because they weren’t allowed to or because they felt ashamed. Sometimes the soldier and girl would laugh together. Skinny could imagine what seemed laughable. In addition to the brutal and wild element, something childlike would come back to them — something that was receding from her.

She would not have to be with anyone else today. The Frog had let them sleep last night from 8.30 p.m. to almost 4 a.m. They had been cold, wearing their pullovers under their blankets and coats. Madam Kulikowa kept reminding them that they were a lot better off at No. 232 Ost than in prison, where she had been prior to a concentration camp. The prostitute with whom she had shared a cell had given birth to a boy. They had beheaded the woman for high treason against the Greater German Reich.

“You haven’t told me much about yourself,” he said.

“I don’t know what you want to hear.”

She was being careful, but in a different way to when she had been with Captain Hentschel. Since then she had six days’ more experience. Yesterday one of her soldiers had wanted her to sing. They all wanted something she couldn’t provide. The soldier had wanted her to dance for him. He wanted to feel as ifhe was in Morocco, he’d said.

The Obersturmführer stamped his hobnailed boots to shake off the remnants of the snow. He took off his cap. For the first time she saw the scar on his forehead, just under his hairline.

Stefan Sarazin had joined the Hitlerjugend at sixteen. His first service had been with the Verfügungsgruppen from which later developed the special units for the extermination of the racially inferior east of the Oder. They included the Sipo and the SD, the Sicherheitspolizei and the Sicherheitsdienst, the security service of the SS. Now he was serving in a disciplinary unit made up of six Waffen-S S members under punishment. It was their chance to atone for their offences and to win new spurs.

After the Anschluss he had been present when the Verfügungsgruppen destroyed the synagogue Hitler hated, just as he hated all Vienna, that nest of Jewish, Czech, Hungarian and Balkan rabble. Before they set fire to the synagogue they attached three bundles of hand grenades under the huge olive-wood crown, as large as a horse’s behind. They celebrated with a march, complete with music — fifes, flutes, drums and bells. The pavement had echoed with their steps and every third man in each rank carried a burning torch.

“Have you had a good sleep?”

“I slept.”

“Good. I gave orders that they should let you rest. You have me to thank for that.”

“Thank you.”

“That’s right. Richtig . Very good.”

This whore was a little ashamed. Shame and fear were all right in a prostitute. It was merely a case of mixing the correct dose, as the old German alchemists knew! He stood with his back to the stove and gave her a lecture, to make sure she knew in advance that it was an honour to be with him. His Einsatzgruppen were uprooting the world where people were living in luxury at the expense of others. She could be sure of one thing: the key word was Endlösung, the Final Solution. It was a breathtaking concept. The end. Ruination. After this end nothing would follow. He had more pity for a worm than for a child that would grow into a Jewish vampire.

“The end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. It’s like a poem. Or like a mathematical equation. The interplay of numbers. Do you understand?”

Should she say she understood? She didn’t understand at all.

“With a few exceptions there won’t be any circumcised in this neighbourhood any longer.” He could take the credit for that.

“I know that,” she said.

“They’re breathing their last. We no longer send them to camps. Their Endlösung is my Jagdkommando. Even if only every sixth man kills one Jew, we’ll exterminate them. If you calculate how many there are of us and how many of them, you get the result. The numbers speak for us. We rely on ourselves, and we don’t betray collaborators. We are the guarantee of success. The fewer there are of them, the more marked are the traces they leave behind. The locals are protecting them. The fact that Jewish women can’t read doesn’t mean they’re not cunning. There’s treason all round. Nothing is innocent. A well. A room. A cellar. We’ve searched Russia, the Ukraine and Poland with a fine-tooth comb, like the lice-infested head of a giant. Their world has collapsed like a house of cards. The more they deny themselves the more they unveil themselves. I couldn’t tell you why. It’s in their eyes. Inferiority against our superiority. Fear against our courage. It’s in their features, in their eyes.”

Why was he saying all this to her? What did he want her to say to him?

“The more you deny yourself the more you reveal yourself,” the Obersturmführer continued. “You speak just by moving your eyes.”

“That other redhead you have here does not give what she should give. That’s why she got a flogging. I broke her in. For someone else, not for myself. I hardly ever have a woman twice. For that she’d have to be quite something. But I don’t rule out the possibility of exceptions.”

Skinny repeated what she had told herself on the very first day. You’ve become a whore. So do what whores do. In return you’ll take what you need. Just do what Estelle kept telling her to do: make it possible for them to get what they wanted.

She reflected on what he was right about. People were not born equal, they were born different, but to her this did not suggest lice, although she could see herself as a louse. Some people were born with hard-working hands, others with a hard-working head. Some, like her uncles, with both. Some were good by nature, others less so — like her uncles again. She knew of distinctions of which The Frog would not want to hear. Of the line between justice and injustice. If people were born equal she would not be here with Obersturmführer Stefan Sarazin, or earlier with Captain Hentschel, or with so many soldiers that she was ashamed to count them. It was enough that they were counted and recorded by Madam Kulikowa.

“I do what I have to do. That is my unshakeable principle,” he said.

It was obvious that he enjoyed the sound of his own voice. He enjoyed the warmth, his words — she had not encountered this before. His world was incomprehensible to her, a place that she could never share, nor would wish to. He had seen things she had not seen.

The puddle of melted snow around his jackboots had spread as far as the fuel box. She would have to mop it up. Should she ask him to move? She didn’t want to interrupt him.

“The east is almost cleansed of Jews. Not brutality at all. Absolute necessity.”

He was dreaming. He bent his head, proud at his greatness.

“The Jews are like cats, they have nine lives. Either we crush them or they’ll crush us. A pity we aren’t allowed to keep diaries, in which a person could feel free to reveal more than he would otherwise. In summer we hang them in cherry orchards. In winter we let them freeze to death. Of course they scream. Especially the women when it is the turn of their brats.” He laughed.