A Man Without Breath (35 page)

‘Yes, I can see how that might be awkward.’

‘And it certainly hasn’t helped things that someone in Berlin let out that these men were the same men who had been kept by the Soviets in two camps: Starobelsk and Kozelsk. Twelve thousand of them. Now I’m pretty certain that give or take a few hundred, there are only four thousand men
buried in Katyn Wood. There’s not a single man we’ve found who was at Starobelsk.’

Von Gersdorff shook his head. ‘Yes, I heard about that from Professor Buhtz.’

‘That man’s full of good news. He’s yet to find a single Polish officer who was shot with a Russian weapon.’

‘There’s more bad news, I’m afraid. I got a teletype from the Tirpitzufer, in Berlin. The Abwehr has warned me that we can expect a visitor at Katyn Wood tomorrow, although I must say he’s hardly a distinguished one. Anything but.’

‘Oh? Who’s that?’

‘You won’t like this one bit.’

‘You know something, colonel? I’m getting used to that.’

Thursday, April 8th 1943

During the late summer of 1941 I’d heard a strong rumour around the Alex about an atrocity that a police battalion was supposed to have committed at a place called Babi Yar, near Kiev. But it was only a rumour and – at the time – easily discounted, because even then being a policeman was supposed to mean that you weren’t a criminal. It’s odd how quickly these things change. By the spring of 1943 I had enough experience of the Nazis to know that with them the worse a rumour sounded the more likely it was to be true. Besides, I’d already seen something of what had happened in Minsk, and that was bad enough – I was still haunted by the memory of what I’d witnessed there – but no one in Berlin ever employed the same hushed tones of horror to talk about Minsk as they used when they mentioned Babi Yar. All I knew for sure was that as many as thirty-five thousand Jewish men, women and children had been shot in a ravine during the course of one September weekend, and that the officer commanding that operation – Colonel Paul Blobel – was now standing beside me in Katyn Wood.

I guessed Blobel was about fifty, although he looked much
older. The shadows under his eyes were full of a darkness that was much more than skin-deep. He was bald, with a narrow thin mouth and a long nose. It was probably my imagination, but there was something of the night about Blobel, and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the fingers and nails of the hands he held tightly behind his back had been as long as the legs of his black boots. He wore his black SD coat buttoned up to the neck like a bus conductor in winter, but he looked for all the world as if he’d been a visitor from the very pit next to which we were standing.

‘You must be Captain Gunther,’ he said to me, in an accent that might have been from Berlin and which reminded me that among the many things a man can have for breakfast, a few of them come out of a tall bottle.

I nodded.

‘Here is a letter of introduction,’ he said with a lisping, rodent-like earnestness, showing me a neatly typed letter. ‘I would ask you to pay particular attention to the signature at the bottom of the page.’

I glanced over the contents, which were headed ‘Operation 1005’ and requested that ‘every cooperation should be afforded the bearer in the execution of his top-secret orders’. I also noted the signature; it was hard not to look at it several times, just to make sure, and then to fold it very carefully indeed before handing it back, gingerly, almost as if the paper was impregnated with sulphur and might burst into flame at any moment. The letter had been signed by the Gestapo chief himself, Heinrich Müller.

‘Like I was sitting at the front of the class,’ I said.

‘Gruppenführer Müller has entrusted me with a most delicate task,’ he said.

‘Well, that makes a change.’

‘Yes.’ He smiled thinly. ‘It does, doesn’t it?’

I certainly had no inclination to spend any time in the company of such a man as this. The easy thing would have been to have told him to get lost; and after all, Blobel’s being there – and, moreover, wearing his SD colonel’s uniform – was contrary to everything I had agreed to with Reich minister Goebbels. But because I wanted this man gone from Katyn Wood as soon as possible I was resolved to answer his questions and cooperate with his mission – in so far as I was able. The last thing I wanted was Blobel causing trouble at Gestapo headquarters and Blobel bringing the full authority of Müller down on our heads because I or someone else had obstructed him, and, worst of all, Blobel still there the next day when the Polish delegation arrived in Smolensk.

He seemed to relax a little after my poor joke, and out of his pocket came a corrugated steel hip flask that was almost as big as a soldier’s gas-mask can. He unscrewed the cap and offered the flask to me. As a homicide detective, I’d made it a rule never to drink with my clients, but it had been a long time since I’d been able to keep up that standard. Besides it was good schnapps, and a large bite helped to dull the effect on my spirits of the company I was keeping, not to mention the business of exhuming four thousand murder victims. The stink of human decay was ever present, and I was never near the main grave for very long before I lit a cigarette or covered my nose and mouth with a cologne-soaked handkerchief.

‘How can I be of assistance to you, colonel?’

‘May I speak frankly?’

I glanced back at the scene in front of us: dozens of Russian POWS were busy digging in what was now known as ‘Grave Number One’ – an L-shaped trench that was twenty-eight metres long and sixteen wide. About two hundred and fifty
bodies lay on the top row, but we’d estimated that as many as a thousand more corpses lay immediately underneath these. Now that the ground had thawed, the digging was easy enough; the hard part was to remove the bodies in one piece, and great care had to be taken when transferring a corpse from the grave to a stretcher, with as many as four men at once having to do the lifting.

‘I don’t think they’ll mind,’ I said.

‘No, perhaps not. Well then, as you probably know, about eighteen months ago – as part of Operation Barbarossa – certain police actions occurred throughout the Ukraine and Western Russia. Thousands of indigenous Jews were – shall we say, permanently resettled?’

‘Why not say “murdered”?’ I shrugged. ‘That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’

‘Very well. Let’s say they were murdered. It really makes no difference to me how we describe it, captain. In spite of what you may have heard, this kind of thing was nothing to do with me. And of greater importance now is what we do about it.’

‘I would think it’s a little late for regrets, don’t you?’

‘You mistake me.’ Blobel took another swig from his flask of schnapps. ‘I’m not here to justify what happened. Personally, I was unable to participate in these dreadful actions for all the obvious humanitarian reasons and was obliged to return home from the front. For which I was roundly abused by General Heydrich and accused of being a sissy and fit only for manufacturing porcelain. Those were his very words.’

‘Heydrich always did have a certain turn of phrase,’ I said.

‘He was most unsympathetic to me. And after all I had achieved for the security squadron.’

I hesitated to take another verbal crack at him. Was it
possible I had misjudged Paul Blobel? That he wasn’t quite the murdering war criminal that the rumours held him to be? That he and I had something in common, perhaps? Hearing Blobel’s account of his treatment the previous year at the hands of Heydrich, it wasn’t hard to feel that in comparison with him I’d enjoyed something of a charmed life. Or was he just a shameless liar? It was always difficult to tell with my colleagues in the RSHA.

‘My operational role here is simply one of public health,’ he said. ‘I’m not talking about the kind of metaphorical public health you hear talked about in those stupid propaganda films – you know, the ones that equate Jews with vermin? No, I’m talking about real environmental health issues. You see, many of the mass graves that were left behind after those special police actions are threatening to cause serious health problems in land that it’s hoped will eventually be farmed by German emigrants. Some of the graves have become a very palpable environmental hazard and now threaten ecological disaster for their surrounding areas. What I mean to say is that leakage from some of the bodies has entered the water table and now endangers local wells and drinking water. Consequently, I have been tasked by General Müller to exhume some of those bodies and dispose of them more efficiently. And my reason for being here, in Katyn Wood, is to see if we can learn anything from the Soviets about the disposal of large numbers of dead people.’

I lit a cigarette. It wasn’t just the smell of the exhumation that the tobacco smoke helped to deal with, but the flies, too; these were already becoming unbearable, and it was still only April. Dyakov had told me that he believed the worst month for flies in Smolensk was May. Buhtz had given up trying to prevent smoking at the site. No one had reckoned on the
persistence of the flies, and smoking was about the only thing that kept them off. Almost all of the Russian POWS worked in grave number one with a cigarette permanently in their mouths, which for some, was payment enough for the unpleasant task that was required of them.

‘It’s as you can see,’ I said. ‘All of the victims so far have been shot in exactly the same way. And I do mean exactly – to within a few centimetres, from very close range, and at the same protrusion at the base of the skull. Nearly all of the exit wounds are between the nose and the hair-line. Undoubtedly, the NKVD men who carried out this particular special action had done this many times before. Indeed they’d done it so many times that they had even perfected where and how the bodies would fall into the grave. In fact you can say with absolute certitude that no one was allowed just to fall in like a dead dog. There are maybe twelve layers of bodies in this grave. The heads of those in each row seem to be resting on the feet of the men below, and there was nothing about this that was not subject to thought and planning. When all of the men were dead, or at least shot, tons of sand were bulldozed on top, which helped to compress the bodies into one large mummified cake. Even the decomposition process appears to have been perfected by the NKVD. The fluids leaking from the bodies seem to have formed a kind of airtight seal around the cake. Finally, birch trees were replanted on top of the grave. It’s really very methodical, and our biggest problem as far as exhumation is concerned has been the surface water – from melted snow – that has flooded the graves and which is why things now smell so bad. A few weeks ago you could have stood here and noticed a girl’s perfume from thirty metres away. Now, as you can no doubt judge for yourself, it smells like the deepest pit in hell.’

Blobel nodded, but the smell didn’t seem to bother him in the least.

‘Yes, it does look extremely well-organized down there,’ he admitted. ‘I used to be an architect and I’ve seen foundation works that weren’t made as well as this grave. Surprising really. One wonders how something so neat was ever discovered.’ He paused. ‘As a matter of fact, how was it discovered?’

‘It would seem that a hungry wolf dug up a thigh bone,’ I said.

‘D’you really believe that?’

I shrugged. ‘It hadn’t occurred to me to believe anything else. Besides, there are plenty of wolves in these woods.’

‘Seen one?’

‘No, but I’ve heard a few. Why? Have you an alternative theory, sir?’

‘Yes. Looters. Local Ivans hunting for something of value. A watch or a wedding band – even a gold tooth. In my experience Slavs will steal anything, even if that means digging up a few dead bodies to do it. I’ve seen it before, in Kiev. But there’s nothing new about that, of course. People have been robbing graves since the time of the Pharaohs.’

‘Well, they’d have been wasting their time here. We’ve not found much in the way of burial treasure for the afterlife on these poor fellows. I’d say the NKVD relieved them of anything valuable.’

‘That’s standard practice with the communists, isn’t it? Redistribution of wealth.’

Blobel smiled at his own little joke. It was better than mine had been, but I wasn’t much in the mood for smiling – not with my stomach feeling the way it did.

‘Tell me, Captain Gunther, are you going to burn the corpses?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘The politics of the situation are very delicate and would seem to rule that out. That’s what I’ve been told by the ministry. So we’ve decided to leave that particular decision to the Poles themselves. They’re due here tomorrow. More than likely it seems that they’re going to have to be reburied. For now, anyway.’

‘All of them?’

I shrugged. ‘Not my decision, thank God. I’m just a policeman.’

‘I’ve heard that before.’ Blobel smiled. ‘Still,’ he added, ‘burning them isn’t so easy, either. Especially when the corpses are damp. Believe me, I know. And of course it’s such a waste of precious gasoline and firewood. But even when you’ve burned them down to almost nothing, there’s still the ash to dispose of. That has to be covered up, too. And, what’s more, there’s so little time to do things properly.’

‘Oh? Why’s that?’

‘The Russians are coming, of course. In less than six months this whole area will be overrun. And you can bet your last mark that if you don’t burn these fucking bodies down to a layer of cinders the Russians will do their damnedest to prove that we murdered them all.’

‘You’ve got a point there.’ I spat; it was that or retch. The smell was really getting to me now – that and the conversation. ‘Seen enough?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, I think so. You’ve been most helpful.’

‘That is a comfort.’

Blobel smiled again. ‘Well, I can’t stay here chatting, I have to catch a plane.’

‘Leaving so soon?’

He nodded. ‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Need a lift to the airport?’ I was anxious to make sure I was rid of him before the arrival of the Polish delegation.

‘That’s very kind of you.’

‘It’s not a problem. Where are you going to now?’

‘Kiev. Then Riga. And then back to Kulmhof. Or Chelmno, as the locals call it.’