The Odessa File

The two men looked at each other, then at the seventy-year-old Home Guard. He looked back, embarrassed. Then he said something he must have learned in the First World War. He said:

‘Hello, Tommy.’

The officer looked back at him, looked again round the courtyard, and said quite clearly in English, ‘You fucking Kraut pig.’

And suddenly I began to cry …

*

I do not really know how I made it back to Hamburg, but I did. I think I wanted to see if there was anything left of the old life. There wasn’t. The streets where I was born and grew up had vanished in the great Fire Storm of the Allied bombing raids, the office where I had worked was gone, my flat, everything.

The English put me in hospital in Magdeburg for a while, but I left of my own accord and hitch-hiked back home. But when I got there and saw there was nothing left, I finally, belatedly, collapsed completely. I spent a year in hospital as a patient, along with others who had come out of a place called Bergen-Belsen, and then another year working in the hospital as an orderly, looking after those who were worse than I had been.

When I left there I went to find a room in Hamburg, the place of my birth, to spend the rest of my days …

The book ended with a further two clean, white sheets of paper, evidently recently typed, which formed the epilogue.

I have lived in this little room in Altona since 1947. Shortly after I came out of hospital I began to write the story of what happened to me and to the others at Riga.

But long before I had finished it, it became perfectly clear that others had survived also, others better informed and better able than I to bear witness to what was done. Hundreds of books have now appeared to describe the holocaust, so nobody would be interested in mine. I never took it to anyone else to read.

Looking back it was all a waste of time and energy, the battle to survive and to be able to write down the evidence, when others have already done it so much better. I wish now I had died in Riga with Esther.

Even the last wish, to see Eduard Roschmann stand before a court, and to give evidence to that court about what he did, will never be fulfilled. I know this now.

I walk through the streets sometimes and remember the old days here, but it can never be the same. The children laugh at me and run away when I try to be friends. Once I got talking to a little girl who did not run away, but her mother came up screaming and dragged her away. So I do not talk to many people.

Once a woman came to see me. She said she was from the Reparations Office and that I was entitled to money. I said I did not want any money. She was very put out, insisting that it was my right to be recompensed for what was done. I kept on refusing. They sent someone else to see me, and I refused again. He said it was very irregular to refuse to be recompensed. I sensed he meant it would upset their books. But I only take from them what is due to me.

When I was in the British hospital one of their doctors asked me why I did not emigrate to Israel, which was soon to have its independence. How could I explain to him? I could not tell him that I can never go up to the Land, not after what I did to Esther, my wife. I think about it often and dream about what it must be like, but I am not worthy to go.

But if ever these lines should be read in the land of Israel, which I shall never see, will someone there please say khaddish for me?

SALOMON TAUBER,

Altona, Hamburg

21st November 1963

Peter Miller put the diary down and lay back in his chair for a long time, staring at the ceiling and smoking. Just before five in the morning he heard the flat door open and Sigi came in from work. She was startled to find him still awake.

‘What are you doing up so late?’ she asked.

‘Been reading,’ said Miller.

Later they lay in bed as the first glint of dawn picked out the spire of St Michaelis, Sigi drowsy and contented like a young woman who has just been loved, Miller staring up at the ceiling silent and preoccupied.

‘Penny for them,’ said Sigi after a while.

‘Just thinking.’

‘I know. I can tell that. What about?’

‘The next story I’m going to cover.’

She shifted and looked across at him.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked. Miller leaned over and stubbed out his cigarette.