The Odessa File

Miller had sat through the tirade mute, observing with bewilderment and rising disgust the man who paced the carpet in front of him, seeking to convert him to the old ideology. He had wanted to say a hundred, a thousand things, about the people he knew and the millions beyond them who did not want or see the necessity of purchasing glory at the price of slaughtering millions of other human beings. But the words did not come. They never do, when one needs them. So he just sat and stared, until Roschmann had finished.

After some seconds of silence Miller asked, ‘Have you ever heard of a man called Tauber?’

‘Who?’

‘Salomon Tauber. He was a German too. Jewish. He was in Riga from the beginning to the end.’

Roschmann shrugged.

‘I can’t remember him. It was a long time ago. Who was he?’

‘Sit down,’ said Miller. ‘And this time stay seated.’

Roschmann shrugged impatiently and went back to the armchair. With his rising conviction that Miller would not shoot, his mind was concerned with the problem of trapping him before he could get away, rather than with an obscure and long-dead Jew.

‘Tauber died in Hamburg on November 22nd last year. He gassed himself. Are you listening?’

‘Yes. If I must.’

‘He left behind a diary. It was an account of his story, what happened to him, what you and others did to him, in Riga and elsewhere. But mainly in Riga. But he survived, he came back to Hamburg, and he lived there for eighteen years before he died, because he was convinced you were alive and would never stand trial. I got hold of his diary. It was my starting point in finding you, today, here, under your new name.’

‘The diary of a dead man’s not evidence,’ growled Roschmann.

‘Not for a court, but enough for me.’

‘And you really came here to confront me over the diary of a dead Jew?’

‘No, not at all. There’s a page of that diary I want you to read.’

Miller opened the diary at a certain page and pushed it into Roschmann’s lap.

‘Pick it up,’ he ordered, ‘and read it – aloud.’

Roschmann unfolded the sheet and began to read it. It was the passage in which Tauber described the murder by Roschmann of an unnamed German Army officer wearing the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaf cluster.

Roschmann reached the end of the passage and looked up.

‘So what?’ he said, puzzled. ‘The man struck me. He disobeyed orders. I had the right to commandeer that ship to bring the prisoners back.’

Miller tossed a photograph on to Roschmann’s lap.

‘Is that the man you killed?’

Roschmann looked at it and shrugged.

‘How should I know? It was twenty years ago.’

There was a slow ker-lick as Miller thumbed the hammer back and pointed the gun at Roschmann’s face.

‘Was that the man?’

Roschmann looked at the photograph again.

‘All right. So that was the man. So what?’

‘That was my father,’ said Miller.

The colour drained out of Roschmann’s face as if a plug had been pulled. His mouth dropped open, his gaze dropped to the gun barrel two feet from his face and the steady hand behind it.