The Woman from Hamburg Read Online Free PDF Page A

at his door. Someone he knew, a clerk from the regiment’s staff, came in.
    He said, “I was in a restaurant. The Gebietskommissar is giving a dinner for the SS men from the
Aktion
. The big, fat one is sitting next to him. I heard what he said. He said that they’re going from town to town like this. The local authorities prepare everything, the trucks, the cordon, the pit, and then they drive in and kill. He said that he himself has already killed thirty thousand Jews. He said that he was promoted to commander for this … Are you listening to me?”
    “I’m listening,” Axel von dem B. said. “Go to sleep.”
    The clerk left. Axel von dem B. heard the old wooden stairs creaking under his footsteps.
    An hour later the stairs creaked again and the clerk knocked at his door.
    “Forgive me if I’m bothering you, but I did a couple of arithmetical calculations. If there are eight of them, and if each one kills thirty thousand people, then they can—over how long a period? three months? four?—they can kill A MILLION. Are you listening to me?”
    “Go to sleep,” said Axel von dem B.
    In November, the Gebietskommissar again gave a dinner, this time on the occasion of All Saints’ Day. He invited Ernst Utsch, but the commander declined and sent Axel von dem B.
    He was seated next to a woman whose husband was a farmer in the Ukraine. He asked her if she knew about the action. She knew. She also knew that soon there would be no more shooting. There would be trucks that would take care of everything with fumes.
    “It’s so the methods will be more humanitarian,” the woman added.
    Axel von dem B. did not ask for whom the methods were to be more humanitarian—the SS or the Jews. He assumed it was for the SS, because the killing tired them out.
    He told the regimental commander about everything.
    “So, Adolf Hitler has taken away our honor, too,” said Ernst Utsch.
    Axel von dem B. did not ask what had taken away the regimental commander’s honor. He understood that after everything they had learned, they would continue to live, normally, just as they had up till then. They would sleep, eat, digest, and breathe. They would pretend thatthey don’t know. Knowing everything, they would not know.
    Three months later Axel von dem B. decided to kill Adolf Hitler.
10
    The ghetto in Dubno was organized in April 1942, during the Passover holidays. It was located on Sholem Aleichem Street and adjoining streets alongside the Ikwa River. During the liquidation of the ghetto, people threw themselves into the river, which was deep and fast. Chaja Fajnblit from Rybny Lane, who had been unable to bear children for fourteen years after her wedding and had given birth to her first child during the war, drowned the child and swallowed poison herself. Drs. Ortmanowa and Kagan took poison. Lejzer Wajzbaum hanged himself. Some people tried to hide in the thickets beside the Ikwa, but every so often the Germans set fire to the rushes.
    On Yom Kippur, the Jews who were still alive gathered in the house of old Sykuler. The house was next to the Ikwa. The prayers were led by Cantor Pinchas, the
shochet
. After the prayers people came up to him and said, “Reb Pinchas, may we see you in health a year from today.”
    The remaining Dubno Jews were murdered in October, on Simchat Torah—the Day of Rejoicing in the Torah.
11
    Three months later he decided to kill …
    A decision to kill the Führer of the Reich must take a little time. Especially when one is twenty-three years old. Especially when one is an officer who has sworn loyalty to the Führer.
    He felt no hatred. His thinking was cold and simple. Hitler is the incarnation of a myth. The myth has to be destroyed in order to defeat the crime.
    He told a friend about his decision. He was Fritz von der Schulenberg. As a university student he had been interested in Marxism; later, he associated with the national socialists; later still, he joined the opposition movement of Claus von