A Man Without Breath

The spring thaw in Smolensk still looked to be a long way off. A fresh layer of snow covered the broken cobbles and twisted tramlines of Gefangnisstrasse, a fairly typical-looking street in the south of the city – typical only by the standards of the Spanish Peninsular War that is: in Smolensk there were times when I found myself looking around for Goya and his sketchbook. In the turret of a burnt-out tank on the corner of Friedhofstrasse was the blackened corpse of a dead Ivan made more macabre by the sign in German he was holding in a skeletal hand directing traffic north, to Commandant’s Square. A horse was dragging a sled laden with an impossible quantity of logs while its one-armed owner, swaddled in quilted rags and with a length of string for a belt, walked slowly alongside smoking a pungent pipe. A babushka wearing several headscarves had set up a stall by the prison door and was selling kittens and puppies, but not as pets; on her feet were waterproof shoes made from old car tyres. Beside her, a bearded man was carrying a yoke with a pail of milk on each end and holding a tin mug in his hand; I bought a mugful and drank the best milk I’d tasted in a long time – cold and delicious. The man himself looked just like Tolstoy – even the dogs in Smolensk looked like Tolstoy.

‘Jews are your eternal enemies!’ proclaimed the poster on the noticeboard by the front door of the prison. ‘Stalin and Jews belong to the same gang of criminals’.

As if to make sure you understood the message there was a large drawing of a Jew’s head against the background of a star of David. The Jew was winking in a sly, dishonest way and, as if to remind everyone that this race was not to be trusted, the poster listed the names of thirty or forty Jews who had been convicted of various offences. Their fates were not mentioned, but you didn’t need to be Hanussen the clairvoyant to divine what this would have been: in Smolensk there was only one punishment for anything if you were a Russian.

The prison was an assemblage of five ancient buildings from the time of the Tsars, all grouped around a central courtyard, although two were little better than ruins. The high brick wall of the courtyard had a large shell-hole in it that had been covered with a screen of barbed wire and the whole area was observed by a guard in a watchtower with a machine gun and a searchlight. As I crossed the courtyard and headed into the main prison building, I heard the sound of a woman weeping. And if all of that wasn’t depressing enough, there was the simple window-frame gallows they were erecting in the prison yard. It wasn’t tall enough to guarantee the mercy of a broken neck, and whoever the gallows was meant for faced death by strangulation, which is about as depressing as it gets.

In spite of the hole in the prison-yard wall, security was tight: once you were through the hellish main door there was a floor-to-ceiling turnstile to negotiate and then a couple of steel doors that, when they closed behind you, made you think you were Doctor Faustus. I shivered a little just to be in the place, especially when a tall, skinny guard walked me down a circular flight of iron stairs into the depths of the prison and along a beige-tiled corridor that smelt strongly of misery, which, as anyone will tell you, is a subtle mixture of hope, despair, rancid cooking fat and men’s piss.

I was visiting the local prison to take the witness statements of two German NCOs accused of rape and murder. They were both from a division of panzer grenadiers: the Third. I met the two NCOs one after the other in a cage with a table and two chairs and a bare light bulb. The floor was covered in a grit or sand that cracked under my shoes like spilled sugar.

The first NCO they brought to me had a jaw the size of the Crimea and bags under his eyes as if he hadn’t slept in a while. That was understandable, given his situation, which was serious. There were red marks on his neck and chest as if someone had stubbed out several cigarettes on his body.

‘Corporal Hermichen?’

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘And why am I still in here?’

‘My name is Captain Gunther and I’m from the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, which ought to give you a clue why I am here.’

‘Is that some kind of a cop?’

‘I used to be a cop. A detective. At the Alex.’

‘I haven’t committed any war crime,’ he protested.

‘I’m afraid the priest says different, which is why you were arrested.’

‘Priest.’ The corporal’s tone was scathing.

‘The one you left for dead.’

‘Rasputin, more like. Have you seen him? That so-called priest? Black devil.’

I offered him a cigarette and as he took it, I lit this and explained that his commanding officer, Field Marshal von Kluge, had asked me to come to the prison and determine if there were indeed grounds for a court martial.

The corporal grunted his thanks for the cigarette and studied the hot end for a moment as if comparing it with his own situation.