The Odessa File

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 eastwards to extermination. I was standing to one side of the Tin Square, watching Roschmann as he went round 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 women mainly wore. There was one woman across 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 centre of the square. There were many from that transport who were not work-fit and the list of selections was long. That meant fewer of us would be selected to make up the numbers, though for me the question was academic. As a Kapo I wore an armband and carried a club, and the extra food rations had increased my strength a little. Although Roschmann had seen my face, he did not seem to remember it. He had slashed so many across the face that one more or less would not attract his attention.

Most of those selected that summer evening were formed into a column and marched to the ghetto gate by the Kapos. The column was then taken over by the Latvians for the last four miles to High Forest and death.

But as there was a gassing van standing by also at the gates, a group of about a hundred of the frailest of the selected ones was detached from the crowd. I was about to escort the other condemned men and women to the gates when SS Lieutenant Krause pointed to four or five of the Kapos. ‘You lot,’ he shouted, ‘take these to the Dunamunde convoy.’

After the others had left we five escorted the last hundred, mainly limping, crawling or coughing, to the gates where the van waited. The thin woman was among them, her chest racked by tuberculosis. She knew where she was going, they all did, but like the rest she stumbled with resigned obedience to the rear of the van. She was too weak to get up, for the tailboard was high off the ground, so she turned to me for help. We stood and looked at each other in stunned amazement.

Behind me I heard somebody approach, and the other two Kapos at the tailboard straightened to attention, scraping their caps off with one hand. Realising it must be an SS officer, I did the same. The woman just stared at me unblinking. The man behind me came forward. It was Captain Roschmann. He nodded to the other two Kapos to carry on, and stared at me with those pale blue eyes. I thought it could only mean I would be flogged that evening for being slow to take my cap off.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked softly.

‘Tauber, Herr Captain,’ I said, still ramrod at attention.

‘Well, Tauber, you seem to be a bit slow. Do you think we ought to liven you up a little this evening?’

There was no point in saying anything. The sentence was passed. Roschmann’s eyes flickered to the woman, narrowed as if suspecting something, then his slow wolfish smile spread across his face.

‘Do you know this woman?’ he asked.

‘Yes, Herr Captain,’ I answered.

‘Who is she?’ he asked. I could not reply. My mouth was gummed together as if by glue.

‘Is she your wife?’ he went on. I nodded dumbly. He grinned even wider.

‘Well, now my dear Tauber, where are your manners? Help the lady up into the van.’

I still stood there, unable to move. He put his face closer to mine and whispered, ‘You have ten seconds to pack her in. Then you go yourself.’

Slowly I held out my arm and Esther leaned upon it. With this assistance she climbed into the van. The other two Kapos waited to slam shut the doors. When she was up she looked down at me, and two tears came, one from each eye, and rolled down her cheeks. She did not say anything to me, we never spoke throughout. Then the doors were slammed shut and the van rolled away. The last thing I saw were her eyes looking at me.

I have spent twenty years trying to understand the look in her eyes. Was it love or hatred, contempt or pity, bewilderment or understanding? I shall never know.

When the van had gone Roschmann turned to me, still grinning. ‘You may go on living, until it suits us to finish you off, Tauber,’ he said, ‘but you are dead as from now.’

And he was right. That was the day my soul died inside me. It was August 29th, 1942.

After August that year I became a robot. Nothing mattered any more. There was no feeling of cold nor of pain, no sensation of any kind at all. I watched the brutalities of Roschmann and his fellow SS without batting an eyelid. I was inured to everything that can touch the human spirit and most things that can touch the body. I just noted everything, each tiny detail, filing them away in my mind or pricking the dates into the skin of my legs. The transports came, marched to execution hill or to the vans, died and were buried. Sometimes I looked into their eyes as they went, walking beside them to the gates of the ghetto with my armband and club. It reminded me of a poem I had once read by an English poet, which described how an ancient marin

er, condemned to live, had looked into the eyes of his crew-mates as they died of thirst, and read the curse in them. But for me there was no curse, for I was immune even to the feeling of guilt. That was to come years later. There was only the emptiness of a dead man still walking upright …

Peter Miller read on late into the night. The effect of the narration of the atrocities on him was at once monotonous and mesmeric. Several times he sat back in his chair and breathed deeply for a few minutes to regain his calm. Then he read on.

Once, close to midnight, he laid the book down and made more coffee. He stood at the window before drawing the curtains, looking down into the street. Further down the road the brilliant neon lights of the Café Cherie blazed across the Steindamm, and he saw one of the part-time girls who frequent it to supplement their incomes emerge on the arm of a business man. They disappeared into a pension a little further down, where the business man would be relieved of a hundred marks for half an hour of copulation.

Miller pulled the curtains across, finished his coffee and returned to Salomon Tauber’s diary.

In the autumn of 1943 the order came through from Berlin to dig up the tens of thousands of corpses in the High Forest and destroy them more permanently, either with fire or quicklime. The job was easier said than done, with winter coming on and the ground about to freeze hard. It put Roschmann in a foul temper for days, but the administrative details of carrying out the order kept him busy enough to stay away from us.

Day after day the newly formed labour squads were seen marching up the hill into the forest with their pick-axes and shovels, and day after day the columns of black smoke rose above the forest. For fuel they used the pines of the forest, but largely decomposed bodies do not burn easily, so the job was slow. Eventually they switched to quicklime, covered each layer of corpses with it and in the spring of 1944, when the earth softened, filled them in.1

The gangs who did the work were not from the ghetto. They were totally isolated from all other human contact. They were Jewish, but were kept imprisoned in one of the worst camps in the neighbourhood, Salas Pils, where they were later exterminated by being given no food at all until they died of starvation, despite the cannibalism to which many resorted …

When the work was more or less completed in the spring of 1944 the ghetto was finally liquidated. Most of its 30,000 inhabitants were marched towards the forest to become the last victims that pine wood was destined to receive. About 5000 of us were transferred to the camp of Kaiserwald while behind us the ghetto was fired, then the ashes bulldozed. Of what had once been there, nothing was left but an area of flattened ashes covering hundreds of acres …2

For a further twenty pages of typescript Tauber’s diary described the struggle to survive in Kaiserwald concentration camp against the onslaught of starvation, disease, overwork and the brutality of the camp guards. During this time no sign was seen of SS-Captain Eduard Roschmann. But apparently he was still in Riga. Tauber described how in the early October of 1944 the SS, by now panic-stricken at the thought they might be taken alive by the vengeful Russians, prepared for a desperate evacuation of Riga by sea, taking along a handful of the last surviving prisoners as their passage-ticket back to the Reich in the west.