Ostland by David Thomas

Author:David Thomas [Thomas, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2013-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

28

Riga and Minsk, Reich Commissariat Ostland: October 1941 – February 1942

In October 1941 I reported to Sonderkommando 1b in Riga. My new commander, Ehrlinger, and his men had undertaken a number of what they called ‘actions’ on their march into Russia and the Baltic states, but I knew almost nothing about these events, for my new comrades were oddly unwilling to talk about their experiences to date. I therefore had no idea what I was letting myself in for. It took an accidental encounter to give me a hint of what was to come.

One night I was walking down a narrow side street in the old part of Riga, not far from the cathedral, when I heard someone call my name from the far side of the street. It was Frank Baum. He’d been given a 48-hour leave from Einsatzkommando 9 and was hell-bent on spending every minute of it blind drunk.

I have to admit, I didn’t at first recognize my old murder squad colleague. The last time I’d seen Baum, he was still a cheerful soul who could bring a smile to my face on the gloomiest of days. Now he was a stumbling, ill-kempt wreck, and it was apparent from his hollow eyes and drawn face that his condition was more than just a matter of a few too many drinks. But what the real problem was, I did not immediately discover.

Only when we had found a restaurant whose sole available dinner dish was a tasteless horse-meat stew, washed down by vinegary red wine and vodka, did Baum slowly begin to open up, though his story was so rambling and his speech so indistinct that I found it hard to keep track of what he was trying to say. I managed to establish that something had happened at a place called Ponary in Lithuania. Baum said the site had been chosen because the Russians had been planning a military airfield there and had dug a series of huge holes in the ground, where they planned to put aviation fuel storage tanks: ‘Saved my men from having to dig pits of our own.’

I tried to get Baum to explain what kind of pits he meant and describe what had happened there, but words failed him. He struggled, he stammered, but nothing came out. I don’t think that alcohol was the problem. It was more that he was still in a state of shock. Eventually he reached into his uniform jacket and with some difficulty pulled out a tatty envelope, grimy with drink stains and oily fingerprints.

Baum’s hands were shaking like a man with the palsy, so it took him a while to remove the half-dozen black-and-white photographs the envelope contained and hand them over to me. At first it was hard to make sense of the images: men cradling guns while behind them twenty or more women undressed in the open air; two men at the edge of one of the holes he’d described, pointing guns at a shapeless

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