Europe Central by William T. Vollmann

Author:William T. Vollmann
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-07-17T01:49:23+00:00

10

To his friend Helmut Franz he once said in his typically didactic fashion: The times leave me no choice but to seek knife-edge paths and live dangerously.—That was in the golden summer of ’41, when we were rushing deeper and deeper into Russia, and, following closely behind our soldiers, the colleagues of Kurt Gerstein were marching Jews on a one-way trip out of town. Gerstein didn’t yet know anything apodictically; he hadn’t been invited to Belzec. But he was an-man; he was on the knife-edge path. Futurity became a black tomb with an iron ring.

So now he’d pulled the iron ring; the pleasure wasn’t his.37 He dreamed that its blackness came off on his hands, and then . . .

He went home, to his father’s house. His wife was waiting for him. She offered her waxen cheek to be kissed. His father came slowly downstairs, greeting him with a sleepy Heil Hitler. The children were long in bed. There was dinner, a good dinner under the circumstances; Elfriede had done the best she could; and he wondered what the poor thing would have thought of him had she known that he’d turned down all that Jewish butter.

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