A Man Without Breath

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 Muller 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.