The Odessa File

I had said early on that I was a carpenter, which was not true, but as an architect I had seen carpenters at work and knew enough to get by. I guessed, correctly, that there would always be a need for carpenters, and I was sent to work in a nearby lumber mill where the local pines were sawn up and made into prefabricated hutments for the troops.

The work was back-breaking, enough to ruin the constitution of a healthy man, for we worked summer and winter mainly outside in the cold and damp of the low-lying regions near the coast of Latvia …

Our food rations were a half-litre of so-called soup, mainly tinted water, sometimes with a knob of potato in it, before marching to work in the mornings, and another half-litre, with a slice of black bread and a mouldy potato on return to the ghetto at night.

Bringing food into the ghetto was punishable by immediate hanging before the assembled population at evening roll-call on Tin Square. Nevertheless, to take that risk was the only way to stay alive.

As the columns trudged back through the main gate each evening, Roschmann and a few of his cronies used to stand by the entrance, doing spot checks on those passing through. They would call to a man or a woman or a child at random, ordering the person out of the column to strip by the side of the gate. If a potato or a piece of bread was found the person would wait behind while the others marched through towards Tin Square for evening roll-call.

When they were all assembled Roschmann would stalk down the road, followed by the other SS guards and the dozen or so condemned people. The males among them would mount the gallows platform and wait with the ropes round their necks while roll-call was completed. Then Roschmann would walk along the line, grinning up at the faces above him and kicking the chairs out from under, one by one. He liked to do this from the front, so the person about to die would see him. Sometimes he would pretend to kick the chair away, only to pull his foot back in time. He would laugh uproariously to see the man on the chair tremble, thinking he was already swinging at the rope’s end, only to realise the chair was still beneath him.

Sometimes the condemned men would pray to the Lord, sometimes they would cry for mercy. Roschmann liked to hear this. He would pretend he was slightly deaf, cocking an ear and asking, ‘Can you speak up a little. What was that you said?’

When he had kicked the chair away – it was more like a wooden box, really – he would turn to his cronies and say, ‘Dear me, I really must get a hearing aid.’ …

Within a few months Eduard Roschmann had become the Devil incarnate to us prisoners. There was little that he did not succeed in devising.

When a woman was caught bringing food into the camp she was made to watch the hangings of the men first, especially if one was her husband or brother. Then Roschmann made her kneel in front of the rest of us, drawn up round three sides of the square, while the camp barber shaved her bald.

After roll-call she would be taken to the cemetery outside the wire, made to dig a shallow grave, then kneel beside it while Roschmann or one of the others fired a bullet from his Lüger point-blank into the base of the skull. No one was allowed to watch these executions, but word seeped through from the Latvian guards that he would often fire past the ear of the woman to make her fall into the grave with shock, then climb out again and kneel in the same position. Other times he would fire on an empty chamber, so there was just a click when the woman thought she was about to die. The Latvians were brutes, but Roschmann managed to amaze them for all that …

There was one certain girl at Riga who helped the prisoners at her own risk. She was Olli Adler, from Munich I believe. Her sister Gerda had already been shot in the cemetery for bringing in food. Olli was a girl of surpassing beauty, and took Roschmann’s fancy. He made her his concubine – the official term was housemaid, because relations between an SS man and a Jewess were banned. She used to smuggle medicines into the ghetto when she was allowed to visit it, having stolen them from the SS stores. This, of course, was punishable by death. The last I saw of her was when we boarded the ship at Riga docks …

By the end of that first winter I was certain I could not survive much longer. The hunger, the cold, the damp, the overwork and the constant brutalities had whittled my formerly strong frame down to a mass of skin and bones. Looking in the mirror, what I saw staring back at me was a haggard, stubbled old man with red-rimmed eyes and hollow cheeks. I was just turned thirty-five and I looked double that. But so did everyone else.

I had witnessed the departure of tens of thousands to the forest of the mass graves, the deaths of hundreds from cold, exposure and overwork, and of scores from hanging, shooting, flogging and clubbing. Even after surviving five months I had outlived my time. The will to live that I had begun to show in the train had dissipated, leaving nothing but a mechanical rout

ine of going on living that sooner or later had to break. And then something happened in March that gave me another year of willpower.

I remember the date even now. It was 3rd March, 1942, the day of the second Dunamunde convoy. About a month earlier we had seen for the first time the arrival of a strange van. It was about the size of a long single-decker bus, painted steel grey and yet without windows. It parked just outside the ghetto gates, and at morning roll-call Roschmann said he had an announcement to make. He said there was a new fish-pickling factory just started at the town of Dunamunde, situated on the river Duna, about eighty miles from Riga. It involved light work, he said, good food and good living conditions. Because the work was so light the opportunity was open only to old men and women, the frail, the sick and the small children.

Naturally, many were eager to go to such a comfortable kind of labour. Roschmann walked down the lines selecting those to go, and this time, instead of the old and sick hiding themselves at the back to be dragged screaming and protesting forward to join the forced marches to execution hill, they seemed eager to show themselves. Finally over a hundred were selected, and all climbed into the van. Then the doors were slammed shut, and the watchers noticed how tight they fitted together. The van rolled away, emitting no exhaust fumes. Later word filtered back what the van was. There was no fish-pickling factory at Dunamunde; the van was a gassing van. In the parlance of the ghetto the expression ‘Dunamunde Convoy’ henceforward came to mean death by gassing.

On 3rd March the whisper went round the ghetto that there was to be another Dunamunde convoy, and sure enough, at morning roll-call Roschmann announced it. But there was no pressing forward to volunteer, so with a wide grin Roschmann began to stroll along the ranks, tapping on the chest with his quirt those who were to go. Astutely, he started at the fourth and rear rank, where he expected to find the weak, the old and the unfit for work.

There was one old woman who had foreseen this and stood in the front rank. She must have been close to sixty-five, but in an effort to stay alive she had put on high-heeled shoes, a pair of black silk stockings, a short skirt even above her knees and a saucy hat. She had rouged her cheeks, powdered her face and painted her lips carmine. In fact she would have stood out among any group of ghetto prisoners, but she thought she might be able to pass for a young girl.

Reaching her as he walked by, Roschmann stopped, stared and looked again. Then a grin of joy spread over his face.

‘Well, what have we here!’ he cried, pointing to her with his quirt to draw the attention of his comrades in the centre of the square, guarding the hundred already chosen. ‘Don’t you want a little ride to Dunamunde, young lady?’

Trembling with fear, the old woman whispered, ‘No, sir.’

‘And how old are you then?’ boomed Roschmann as his SS friends began to giggle. ‘Seventeen, twenty?’

The old woman’s knobbly knees began to tremble.

‘Yes, sir,’ she whispered.

‘How marvellous,’ cried Roschmann. ‘Well, I always like a pretty girl. Come out into the centre so we can all admire your youth and beauty.’

So saying he grabbed her by the arm and hustled her towards the centre of Tin Square. Once there, he stood her out in the open and said, ‘Well now, little lady, since you’re so young and pretty, perhaps you’d like to dance for us, eh?’

She stood there, shivering in the bitter wind, shaking with fear as well. She whispered something we could not hear.

‘What’s that?’ shouted Roschmann. ‘You can’t dance? Oh, I’m sure a nice young thing like you can dance, can’t you?’

His cronies of the German SS were laughing fit to bust. The Latvians could not understand, but started to grin. The old woman shook her head. Roschmann’s smile vanished.