The Odessa File

by Frederick Forsyth

  I bear no hatred nor bitterness towards the German people, for they are a good people. Peoples are not evil; only individuals are evil. The English philosopher Burke was right when he said, ‘I do not know the means for drawing up the indictment of an entire nation.’ There is no collective guilt, for the Bible relates how the Lord wished to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for the evil of the men who lived in them, with their women and their children, but how there was living among them one righteous man, and because he was righteous he was spared. Therefore guilt is individual like salvation.

  When I came out of the concentration camps of Riga and Stutthof, when I survived the Death March to Magdeburg, when the British soldiers liberated my body there in April 1945, leaving only my soul in chains, I hated the world. I hated the people, and the trees and the rocks, for they had conspired against me and made me suffer. And above all I hated the Germans. I asked then as I had asked many times over the previous four years why the Lord did not strike them down, every last man, woman and child, destroying their cities and their houses for ever from the face of the earth. And when He did not, I hated Him too, crying that He had deserted me and my people, whom He had led to believe were His chosen people, and even saying that He did not exist.

  But with the passing of the years I have learned again to love; to love the rocks and the trees, the sky above and the river flowing past the city, the stray dogs and the cats, the weeds growing between the cobble stones, and the children who run away from me in the street because I am so ugly. They are not to blame. There is a French adage, ‘To understand everything is to forgive everything.’ When one can understand the people, their gullibility and their fear, their greed and their lust for power, their ignorance and their docility to the man who shouts the loudest, one can forgive. Yes, one can forgive even what they did. But one can never forget.

  There are some men whose crimes surpass comprehension and therefore forgiveness, and here is the real failure. For they are still among us, walking through the cities, working in the offices, lunching in the canteens, smiling and shaking hands and calling decent men Kamerad. That they should live on, not as outcasts but as cherished citizens, to smear a whole nation in perpetuity with their individual evil, this is the true failure. And in this we have failed, you and I, we have all failed, and failed miserably.

  Lastly, as time passed, I came again to love the Lord, and to ask His forgiveness for the things I had done against His Laws, and they are many.

  SHEMA YISROEL, ADONAI ELOHENU, ADONAI EHAD …

  The diary began with twenty pages during which Tauber described his birth and boyhood in Hamburg, his working-class war-hero father and the death of his parents shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933. By the late thirties he was married to a girl called Esther, working as an architect, and was spared being rounded up before 1941 due to the intervention of his employer. Finally he was taken in Berlin, on a journey to see a client. After a period in a transit camp he was packed with other Jews into a box-car on a cattle train bound for the east.

  I cannot really remember the date the train finally rumbled to a halt in a railway station. I think it was six days and seven nights after we were shut up in the truck in Berlin. Suddenly the train was stationary, the slits of white light told me it was daytime outside, and my head reeled and swam from exhaustion and the stench.

  There were shouts outside, the sound of bolts being drawn back and the doors were flung open. It was just as well I could not see myself, who had once been dressed in a white shirt and well-pressed trousers. (The tie and jacket had long since been dropped to the floor.) The sight of the others was bad enough.

  As brilliant daylight rushed into the car men threw arms over their eyes and screamed with the pain. Seeing the doors opening I had squeezed my eyes shut to protect them. Under the pressure of bodies half the truck emptied itself on to the platform in a tumbling mass of stinking humanity. As I had been standing at the rear of the car to one side of the centrally placed doors, I avoided this and risking a half-open eye despite the glare I stepped down upright to the platform.

  The SS guards who had opened the gates, mean-faced brutal men who jabbered and roared in a language I could not understand, stood back with expressions of disgust. Inside the box-car thirty-one men lay huddled and trampled on the floor. They would never get up again. The remainder, starved, half-blind, steaming and reeking from head to foot in their rags, struggled upright on the platform. From thirst our tongues were gummed to the roof of the mouth, blackened and swollen, and our lips were split and parched.

  Down the platform forty other carriages from Berlin and eighteen from Vienna were disgorging their occupants, about half of them women and children. Many of the women and most of the children were naked, smeared with excrement and in much as bad shape as we were. Some women carried the lifeless bodies of their children in their arms as they stumbled out into the light.

  The guards ran up and down the platform, clubbing the deportees into a sort of column, prior to marching us away into the town. But what town? And what was the language these men were speaking? Later I was to discover this town was Riga and the SS guards were locally recruited Latvians, as fiercely anti-Semitic as the SS from Germany, but of a much lower intelligence, virtually animals in human form.

  Standing behind the guards was a cowed group in soiled shirts and slacks, each bearing a black square patch with a big J on the chest and back. This was a special commando from the ghetto, brought down to empty the cattle cars of the dead and bury them outside the town. They too were guarded by half a dozen men who also had the J on their chests and backs, but who wore an armband and carried a pickaxe handle. These were Jewish Kapos, who got better food than the other internees for doing the job they did.

  There were a few German SS officers standing in the shade of the station awning, distinguishable only when my eyes were accustomed to the light. One stood aloof on a packing crate, surveying the several thousand human skeletons who emptied themselves from the train with a thin but satisfied smile. He tapped a black riding quirt of plaited leather against one jackboot. He wore the green uniform with black and silver flashes of the SS as if it were designed for him and carried the twin-lightning strikes of the Waffen SS on the right collar lapel. On the left his rank was indicated as captain.

  He was tall and lanky, with pale blond hair and washed-out blue eyes. Later I was to learn he was a dedicated sadist, already known by the name that the Allies would also later use for him – The Butcher of Riga. It was my first sight of SS-Captain Eduard Roschmann …

  At 5 a.m. on the morning of June 22nd, 1941, Hitler’s 130 divisions divided into three army groups, had rolled across the border to invade Russia. Behind each army group came the swarms of SS extermination squads, charged by Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich with wiping out the Communist commissars and the rural-dwelling Jewish communities of the vast tracts of land the army overran, and penning the large urban, Jewish communities into the ghettos of each major town for later ‘special treatment’.

  The army took Riga, capital of Latvia, on July 1st, 1941, and in the middle of that month the first SS commandos moved in. The first on-site unit of the SD and SP sections of the SS established themselves in Riga on August 1st, 1941, and began the extermination programme that would make Ostland (as the three occupied Baltic states were renamed) Jew-free.

  Then it was decided in Berlin to use Riga as the transit camp to death for the Jews of Germany and Austria. In 1938 there were 320,000 German Jews and 180,000 Austrians, a round half million. By July 1941 tens of thousands had been dealt with, mainly in the concentration camps within Germany and Austria, notably Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, Ravens-bruck, Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen and Theresienstadt in Bohemia. But they were getting over-crowded, and the obscure lands of the east seemed an excellent place to finish off the rest. Work was begun to expand or begin the six extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno and Maidanek. Until they were ready, however, a place had
to be found to exterminate as many as possible and ‘store’ the rest. Riga was chosen.

  Between August 1st, 1941, and October 14th, 1944, almost 200,000 exclusively German and Austrian Jews were shipped to Riga. Eighty thousand stayed there dead, 120,000 were shipped onwards to the six extermination camps of southern Poland, mentioned above, and 400 came out alive, half of them to die at Stutthof or on the Death March back to Magdeburg. Tauber’s transport was the first into Riga from Reich Germany, and reached there at 3.45 in the afternoon of August 18th, 1941.

  The Riga ghetto was an integral part of the city and had formerly been the home of the Jews of Riga, of whom only a few hundred existed by the time I got there. In less than three weeks Roschmann and his deputy, Krause, had overseen the extermination of most of them as per orders.

  The ghetto lay at the northern edge of the city, with open countryside to the north. There was a wall along the south face, the other three were sealed off with rows of barbed wire. There was one gate, on the northern face, through which all exits and entries had to pass. It was guarded by two watch-towers manned by Latvian SS. From this gate running clear down the centre of the ghetto to the south wall was Mase Kalnu Iela, or Little Hill Street. To the right-hand side of this (looking from south to north towards the main gate) was the Blech Platz, or Tin Square, where selections for execution took place, along with roll-call, selection of slave-labour parties, floggings and hangings. The gallows with its eight steel hooks and permanent nooses swinging in the wind stood in the centre of this. It was occupied every night by at least six unfortunates and frequently several shifts had to be effected by the eight hanging hooks before Roschmann was satisfied with his day’s work.

  The whole ghetto must have been just under two square miles, a township that had once housed 12,000 to 15,000 people. Before our arrival the Riga Jews, at least the 2000 of them left, had done the bricking-off work, so the area left to our transport of just over 5000 men, women and children, was spacious. But after we arrived transports continued to come day after day until the population of our part of the ghetto soared to 30,000 to 40,000 and with the arrival of each new transport a number of existing inhabitants equal to the number of the surviving new arrivals had to be executed to make room for the newcomers. Otherwise the overcrowding would have become a menace to the health of the workers among us, and that Roschmann would not have.

  So on that first evening we settled ourselves in, taking the best-constructed houses, one room per person, using curtains and coats for blankets and sleeping on real beds. After drinking his fill from a water-butt, my room neighbour remarked that perhaps it would not be too bad after all. We had not yet met Roschmann …

  As summer merged into autumn and autumn into winter the conditions in the ghetto grew worse. Each morning the entire population, mainly men, for the women and children were exterminated on arrival in far greater percentages than the work-fit males, was assembled on Tin Square, pushed and shoved by the rifle-butts of the Latvians and roll-call took place. No names were called, we were counted and divided into work groups. Almost the whole population, men, women and children, left the ghetto each day in columns to work twelve hours at forced labour in the growing host of workshops nearby.

  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.