The Barbarians at the Gates

By Richard Bankowsky

The explosive novel of a decent man's journey into Evil. In 1942 a quiet apolitical university professor finds himself a reluctant SS officer in the remote marshlands of occupied Poland. When a trainload of Jews bound for the death camps at Belzec is detained at his depot, what follows is a shattering confrontation of good and evil that ends in riot, madness, massacre―and a miracle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Bankowsky
• Release date: Nov 14, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452432854

Richard Bankowsky

California State University Emeritus Professor of literature and creative writing. Yale and Columbia degrees. National Institute of Arts and Letters and Rockefeller grants in literature.

Book preview

Glossary

Brigadeführer: brigadier general

Einsatzkommando: action group, a special SS execution team responsible for the liquidation ofJews and others proscribed by Nazi racial and Political policies

Gruppenleiter: group leader

Hauptsturmführer: captain of SS

Obersturmführer: first lieutenant

Oberscharführer: technical sergeant

0KW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht): Armed Forces High Command (Headquarters)

SA (Sturmabteilung): Storm Troops, brown-shirted militia of the Nazi party

Scharführer: staff sergeant

Schütze: private

Sicherheitspolizei: SS Security Police

Sonderkommando: Special Command

SS (Schutzstaffel): protection squad, all-inclusive designation for components of a complex organization headed by Heinrich Himmler

Sturmmann: corporal

Sturmbahnführer: major

Totenkopfwachtsturmbanne: designation for Death’s Head Guard battalions of the Waffen SS which guarded concentration and extermination camps during the war

Untersturmführer: 2nd lieutenant

Volksdeutsche: Poles of German descent

Waffen SS: the military branch of the Nazi Elite Guard

Prologue

Paintless wooden domes and cupolas bleach gray under the autumn sun. Old bronze bells hang limp in towers. Pigeons doze amid eaves and rafters. Mosaic saints and Madonnas gleam on limestone walls. Nothing stirs. Neither breeze nor bird song disturbs the repose of the Uniat monastery of St. Procula, high in the southern uplands of eastern Poland.

A short distance down the rutted road, however, where a rocky cliff juts up out of the surrounding trees, a crowd of Ruthenian goatherds and their families are gathered in a small clearing. Kneeling before a high spiked iron fence hung with crutches and canes and ikons, they cross themselves as a broken-down one-horse droshky with automobile tires circling its spoked wheels emerges from the shade of the forest. It is followed by a procession of hairy, bearded monks in black robes and hats with veils trailing down their backs. They carry planks and ladders, spades and tools of various sorts. In the droshky their Igumen sits under a red parasol, mechanically dispensing airy signs of the cross over the bowed heads of his parishioners with the wrong end of a flashlight.

When the droshky reaches the spiked fence, the brother at the reins dismounts and unfastens the padlocked gate with a great iron key hanging from his cincture. Leading the horse through, he halts the procession at the foot of the cliff before a great rooted boulder. After helping the aging Igumen down, he lifts a basket and a long-handled baker’s shovel out of the droshky bed. In the basket is a loaf of brown bread and a small water jar. Placing the basket on the baker’s shovel, he slides it up to the elbow into a small barred window cut into the cliff wall beside the boulder. He turns his face away and screws up his nose under his whiskers. After a few moments he withdraws the shovel again and shows the Igumen that the bread and water jar are still in the basket. Then as the brothers cross themselves and kneel in the dust, their shoulders still burdened with the planks and ladders and tools, the Igumen takes a deep breath, and leaning into the window shouts, Father Szesc. This is Igumen Nakrasov. Can you hear me?

The only sound is the raucous chirpings and flutterings of birds amid the nearby trees. A hush has fallen over the crowd kneeling at the gate.

If you do not give a sign, Father, we shall have to roll away the stone.

There is no sound now. Even the birds have ceased.

After a long silence, the Igumen motions to the kneeling brothers. They rise, crossing themselves, and begin immediately to dig holes under one side of the boulder and to fashion levers of planks and nearby stones to fit under it. Then after the horse is unhitched from the droshky and the ladders tilted against the cliff, the brothers fasten the harness to some iron hooks protruding from the top of the boulder.

When all seems ready and the brothers have taken their places along the lengths of the levers, the Igumen nods. There is a slap of reins, and only the creaking of the levers and the heaves and grunts of the brothers and the straining of the horse against the harness disturb the miraculous silence of the morning.

The stone has not been moved in almost thirty years. Not since All Souls’ morning in 1942, when the Igumen retrieved the bullet-riddled corpse of his prodigal Brother Szesc from the German authorities and had it hastily sealed into the dark hermitage in the middle of one of the worst snowstorms in a decade. He had hoped thus to discourage rumors of miracles, of the corpse’s not having shed a single drop of blood, of its having remained standing like a monument over the fallen long after the massacre at Moczary was over.

But rumors of miracles not only persisted, they flourished. When food left at the site of the tomb began regularly to disappear into it, even the Igumen was moved to concede that his martyred brother had apparently not died of his wounds as he had perhaps too hastily imagined that morning after the massacre, that he had instead undergone an incredible if not miraculous recovery in the depths of his tomb. Nevertheless, all through the years, to this very day, the rumor persisted among his parishioners that their miracle-making saint and martyr, like Lazarus, or even Christ Himself, had been resurrected from the dead.

For a while it looks as though the stone may be immovable. But slowly, as the ball of noon begins its almost imperceptible descent of the sky, it begins to roll, revealing a cleft in the face of the cliff behind. When the opening is finally fully exposed, the Igumen hands his parasol to a brother. And with his hat held up to his nose, the flashlight at arm’s length before him like a sword, he stoops into the darkness within.

The noon sun does not follow him. It hesitates under the massive shadow of the rock and fails to penetrate at all into the deep recesses of the sharply biased window. Only the artificial beam of the flashlight traverses the black ceiling and walls. Like a spotlight on a darkened stage it falls first upon a massive wooden crucifix suspended from a dripping wall. Then on a huge sealed wooden coffin in a niche under it. Below that, on the bare dirt floor, it settles on a ratty straw pallet. A dark robed, white whiskered, baldheaded, barefooted, shrunken, emaciated corpse lies there with its bony fingers folded on its breast. At the foot of the pallet is a bundle of neatly rolled dust-covered clothing. A pair of jackboots. A cartridge belt and empty holster. And tilting on its kickstand against the wall, a rusted old web-spoked motorcycle emblazoned with the fading death’s-head insignia of the Totenkopfwachtsturmbanne Waffen SS.

Book One

1

Through the calibrated lens of the Zeiss 7 X 50 military field glasses, the distant motorcycle trailing a cloud of dust on the sandy road along the main watercourse to the river San seemed as silent as the rest of the Valley of the Swan, a vast sub -Carpathian marshland some eighty or ninety kilometers south of the monastery of St. Procula.

From his second-story orderly room window, Waffen SS Hauptsturmführer Christian Jan Romansky commanded a view of the entire valley, a region so fiat, so desperately monotonous, that in any direction more than a kilometer or two from the marsh village of Moczary the eye saw nothing but interminable water, marsh and sky. Around the village, however, the waters of the canals reflected the cows grazing along their banks, the enormous stacks of marsh grass topped with wooden crucifixes, and the cones and gyres of the hooped fishnets strung out on poles to dry; and since it was Harvest Day, the fiat-bottomed skiffs of the peasant families poling their livestock and produce to market.

Even on market day, even with all the activity in and around the village, an immense silence hovered as always over the valley, a silence disturbed only by an occasional military launch patrolling the marshes, or a motorized vehicle entering or leaving the supply depot. Or as now, by the train on the military railroad linking Nisko on the west bank of the San with the Lwow-Lublin line in the east. And so when the motorcycle, trailing its cloud of dust down the sandy road along the canal, converged with the train streaming down the track on the opposite bank, the shaveheaded children in the peasants’ skiffs covered their ears with their hands. The shawled women, leaning on their poles or sitting on kitchen chairs or baskets of produce nursing infants, shook their fists. And the farmers and fishermen in their sheepskin hats and vests and cloth leg-wrappings desperately hung on to their livestock as horses bolted overboard into the shallow canal and dashed for shore towing their skiffs behind.

A competition was obviously in progress. Waving his field cap wildly, a transport officer hung by one hand and a leg from a ladder on the steaming engine, and the goggled cyclist used his riding crop on the flank of his machine like a jockey in the home stretch. As they approached the village, however, the road and the track diverged. And as the braking engine moved off behind the village toward the depot marshaling yard, the cyclist barreled across the pontoon bridge and roared straight up the village street.

Some villagers with iron hooks had just pulled a burning thatch of reed and marsh grass down off the roof of one of the rough-hewn log houses lining the street, and were beating at the flames with long-handled twig brushes which, like the iron hooks, lay along the outside walls of all the houses for just such emergencies. The cyclist roared down on them, tearing through the flaming brush like a circus daredevil, bathing the villagers in a wake of smoke and hot cinders. And without looking back he ripped up the kilometer-long street and plunged headlong into the almost impassable maze of the village market.

Not only was it Harvest Day. It was the week of All Saints and All Souls as well. And since early the previous evening the peasants had been arriving from every part of the marsh, from the remotest outlying futori. Many of them had slept in their boats and wagons overnight and by reveille this morning the market area was already congested. Wagons full of firewood and lumber — birch logs, sawed planks, shingles, fence posts, pickets, twigs for baskets, wooden wares — and hayracks piled high with marsh grass and reeds and rye were lined up in front of the church ready for the official weigher. Wagonloads of geese and ducks with their feet tied together; chickens housed in wire coops; calves and large black-and-white hogs restlessly circling their stakes; live sheep carried about on the backs of their owners; fruit- and vegetable- and fish stalls filled with carrots, turnips, cabbages, potatoes, gourds, apples, pears, grapes, plums, eggs, wicker baskets of mushrooms, strings of fish — these and the laden boats beached on the waterfront so congested the market area that access to the guard shack and main gate of the 501st Waffen SS Engineer Company (Supply Depot) by any vehicle larger than a cycle seemed virtually impossible.

Even the cycle seemed to be having a time of it, even under the gloved, expert hands of Waffen SS Obersturmführer Nikolaus Hermann Thiele. Through his field glasses, Christian could see the grinning handsome face of his young Executive Officer under the rakish panzer beret and tank goggles as he wove and skidded his machine at full speed around the wood and hay wagons and smack into a sea of frantic livestock, and, leaving in his wake a number of overturned coops and stalls, erupted into the cleared area before the depot gate.

Gunning his motor and returning the crisp salutes of the gate guards with his riding crop, he roared straight down the company street toward number three loading platform, where his detachment of green-uniformed Ukrainian militiamen were hastily trying to form a column of twos before their commander reached them. At attention, not one of them moved a muscle under the shower of gravel accompanying Thiele’s skidding halt. Christian couldn’t help smiling at Thiele’s show of long-suffering patience, as he sat there on his bike with his gloves in his belt and his riding crop under his arm, cleaning his fingernails with a pearl-handled stiletto he carried sheathed in the calf of his cavalry boot, as the engine with the two cattle cars and the caboose made its way slowly through the marshaling yard gates at the far end of the depot.

The depot was a typical Engineer compound surrounded by seven-foot barbed-wire fences. The area’s only two-story structure was the orderly room in the center of the company street. It overlooked two corrugated-iron barracks, a motor pool, the bachelor officers’ quarters, a recreation hall, a combination noncommissioned officer and enlisted men’s canteen, a messhall, a guardhouse, and, at the far northeastern end of the compound, warehouses, loading platforms, the marshaling yard, and three water towers that supplied the trains on the main track skirting the depot on its way to the Eastern Front.

The field glasses now hanging round his neck, Christian removed a bottle of cognac from an open desk drawer, poured a little into his coffee, took a sip and leaned back in his chair. On his desk was a framed triptych of photographs of a marvelously beautiful blond woman in her early thirties, flanked by two equally handsome blond children, a boy of nine or ten and a girl around eight. A fine-looking blond youth in the brown shirt and armband of the Jungvolk stared gravely out of a lone photo on the opposite end of the desk.

Christian took up his field glasses again and trained them on a densely forested area three or four kilometers southeast of the village, where with some searching he could just make out a gable of the manorhouse he and his family had lived in since their arrival in the valley. He supposed it must be either the bathroom or the nursery dormer. Sighing, he rubbed his eyes under his spectacles and continued to sip his coffee. There was no hurry. Even without his field glasses he could see that Obersturmführer Thiele and his detachment of Ukrainians were prepared as usual to take full command of the unloading of the new shipment, just as soon as the officer up on the huffing engine could line the cars up adjacent to number three loading platform.

When the young Obersturmführer arrived in the valley last June with the first resettlement shipment to be foisted on Christian’s command, Christian could tell almost immediately that he was a fine officer. His Ukrainians jumped when he spoke, in a fashion that was really quite military for Ukrainians. Thiele exacted discipline with the zeal of a man who not only resented all non-German personnel in the corps, but one who perhaps feared that beneath his saber-sharp black panzer uniform beat a heart as much disposed to disorder as any Ukrainian’s. As much as Christian’s own perhaps. The only difference was that Christian was almost fifteen years older than Thiele and no longer feared so much to admit to his failings, his weaknesses, to hide behind a façade of exaggerated manliness feelings he feared might seem otherwise.

A lot of water had gone over the dam in the five months since that first resettlement shipment and Thiele had arrived in the valley. Christian had stood in the marshaling yard that first morning, in a misty drizzle that hung like breath in the air steaming up around the loading platform and rolling along the sodden ground like smoke over brown water, like Charon, it occurred to him, on the bank of Styx, watching as the deportees lined up at the command of the young Obersturmführer and his detachment of fallen angels, like shades on a desolate shore.

He had protested his depot’s being used as a holding area for Jews. He had schedules to meet. Germans were dying in Russia for lack of proper equipment and supplies. Competition with the deportation authorities for trains and track had been bad enough. But ever since last June, despite his protests, his supply depot like other military stations along the track to the east had had deportees — on their way to the mining and agricultural colonies of Krivoi Rog and Pinskland in western Russia— foisted on them: for short periods, admittedly.

Sturmbahnführer Wirth, the transport specialist for the Lublinland Reserve since early last spring, had explained it to him over the field phone that first afternoon. There had been a breakdown in the processing procedures at the Belzec transfer station causing shipping delays and consequent overcrowding to the point where new shipments simply could not be accommodated. The deportees would be rerouted to emergency holding areas like Christian’s supply depot until the failure was remedied.

Typhus or food and shelter problems were not expected, Wirth assured him. Despite the lack of proper delousing facilities in temporary holding areas like his own, it was, after all, summer and the Przemyl ghetto from which the deportees came was less than a hundred kilometers away. Besides, they were Reich Jews and therefore very clean. And they had had their breakfasts in the ghetto that morning. Many of them could be counted on to carry knapsacks of salamis and bread and other emergency provisions concealed like their jewels and money among the baskets and bundles of extra clothes and bedding they carried on their backs.

Since the deportees would only be required to remain at the depot for a day or two at the very most, there would be no need even to set up field kitchens or to requisition extra supplies in excess of those for Thiele and his Ukrainians. The Obersturmführer and his detachment would be carried TDY from Belzec on the company morning report so long as the emergency lasted. Thiele had plenty of experience with deportees and would handle everything. It would not be necessary for Christian to offer any more assistance than would be required to provide an unsheltered enclosed area for the deportees and only the barest segregated accommodations for the Ukrainians. Thiele would be in charge of all resettlement operations. The normal supply operations of the depot would not be interfered with.

As it turned out, Christian’s indignation over the inconvenience of the shipments was soon dissipated, as was his sentimentality over the exploitation of the so-called Jewish enemies of the State. These so-called defilers of the race endured their systematic deportations with such philosophic calm, that subsequent shipments became a simple matter of routine like any other duty. Especially since Thiele and his Ukrainians were so efficient.

Not only were normal supply operations not interfered with when the sty, as Thiele called the Jewish enclosure, was full. When it was empty, which was most of the time, since there had only been five or six subsequent shipments before today’s and except for the St. John’s Eve shipment they had only stayed a day or two at most, just as Wirth had promised. Thiele worked his Ukrainians in the warehouses and the yard. He worked them at such a pace, in fact, that though he might not have earned love with the respect his Ukrainians showed him, he earned the love as well as the respect of most supply personnel. All of their jobs had become just that much easier and pleasanter since Thiele’s arrival. For Thiele always volunteered his Ukrainians for any and all so-called Scheisse details.

He was also admired for his hell-for-leather style and his esprit de corps. Thiele was a soldier. Though he was permanently stationed at Belzec, he had been transferred there from the Russian front. Unlike Belzec’s Totenkopfwachtsturmbanne policemen, Thiele realized that winning the war in Russia, the holy war as Thiele called it, against Bolshevism and subhumanity was more important than resettling a handful of Jews. Though he had been at Belzec for many months before coming to Moczary, he continued to wear the black uniform, cavalry boots, beret and tank goggles of his old unit, the 2nd SS Panzerdivision Das Reich, rather than the field gray of Belzec’s policemen. And he had mentioned more than once that it was one thing to fail to die in battle, merely to be wounded and sent back to reserve field units where there was at least hope of seeing battle again; but to be ordered to Belzec to play policeman was another matter entirely. Even TDY in the Engineers was an improvement.

Nevertheless, despite Thiele’s insistence that he disliked the role of a policeman, he was obviously suited to it. Christian thought it miraculous the way Thiele handled the deportees. He was firm. No question of that. He had learned his lessons well at the Junkerschule. Any show of pity for enemies of the State would be regarded by them as weakness and immediately exploited. On the other hand Thiele was extremely, sometimes even saccharinely, polite in his firmness. And all through the summer and into the fall, except for some ill will in the community which could not be avoided, Thiele managed the shipments without serious incident and without interfering in the slightest with supply operations. So Christian could afford to sit back and finish his cognac and coffee before taking his cap and descending the steps from the orderly room porch into the yard. There was no reason at all to suppose that this latest shipment of deportees would be any different from the rest.

Thiele was already mounted on number three loading platform by the time Christian made his way back to the marshaling yard. As usual he stood there smoking, all polished and glittering. The dust of the cycle trip from Nisko, where he had met the shipment, had miraculously disappeared from his shining boots and his uniform. As usual he wore his tank goggles hiked up on his beret and snapped his riding crop impatiently against his booted calf as one of his Ukrainians signaled the steaming engine to a halt before the ramp. As usual with closed vehicles there was a great deal of pounding and rattling and cries for water and air from inside, and even a certain amount of rocking of the cars. And as usual Thiele threw away his cigarette and, picking up the portable loudspeaker, signaled a Ukrainian manning a stationary machine gun on the platform to send a few bursts over the train. As usual this quieted them down inside and put an end to the rocking. Then as usual some unarmed Ukrainians cracked the seals and slid the doors open.

The military rule stipulated that a freight car might carry eight horses or forty soldiers. But there were so many alternately hysterical and somnambulistic Jews, men, women and children of all ages, sizes and shapes crammed into each car, buried under luggage, trunks, suitcases, packages and bundles of every size and description, that like a reel in an old comedy film where a seemingly endless string of people come tumbling out of a midget automobile, the Jews tumbled out on to the ramp breathing like fish out of water, winking and blinking up at the bright sky. And the stench poured out into the compound like a wave.

This was not like the Przemyl or Rzeszów or Debicia or any of the previous shipments of Reich Jews. According to the bill of lading, the Piotrkow ghetto from which these came was over five hundred kilometers away by rail. And because of competition for track with troop and supply trains they had been traveling for three days, shunted off the main track on to rail spurs from time to time, to wait out delays in sealed cars without food or water and with the barest minimum of air.

Thiele, however, was in complete command. He did not even act surprised. He made it all seem absolutely routine, shouting over the portable loudspeaker just as he had with all previous shipments, Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen. Please! Please! There has been a short delay at the processing station and you must stay with us overnight. In the morning, you will be on your way to Belzec. And by noon tomorrow, God willing, all your trials and tribulations will be ended. Please show some good will. Would you rather be locked in the cars overnight?

It always amazed Christian to see how they responded to Thiele’s commands. With eagerness and in some cases even with delight. Many of them moved down the ramp into the enclosure actually smiling and looking hopeful. This time, however, Thiele held a handkerchief to his nose as he poked his head into each of the empty cars and, shaking it with disgust, ordered his Scharführer to separate several able bodied Jews from the crowd to hose out the cars. And this time when the cleaning detail emerged from the cars they carried in addition to shovels full of filth and excrement a squashed naked baby with a huge head and a blown-up belly, the body of a woman (apparently the mother of the child since no one claimed the remains), and two very old men who could not be revived. Klaus had the Jewish detail immediately strip the corpses naked and wrap them in blankets torn by his Ukrainians from the random bundles carried by the Jews.

Usually he shouted politely over the loudspeaker for the Jews to make themselves as comfortable as possible and to eat whatever provisions they had brought with them. There were no mess facilities for them on the compound and they would therefore have to wait until they arrived at Belzec the following morning to be fed. This time he shouted just as politely.

"Everyone will please undress. Completely. Everything, to the skin. Please place all belongings, everything, bundles, packages, food, clothing, blankets, everything on the ground exactly where you are standing.

"Do not move from the spot, please. Just place your bundles down at your feet and let your clothes fall where you stand. We are going to have a bath in the river. Be sure to look around you now and see where you are standing. After your bath you will be required to return to your spot to reclaim your belongings.

We are trying our best to undo the bungling inhuman methods of your profiteering Jewish ghetto leaders who have allowed you to be stuffed into these cars like cattle. They are determined to do their worst to hamper our best efforts to keep you clean and free from lice. Now hurry, please. Those who do not cooperate must for the good of all be shot. I am sorry. But there is no other way.

Even under the unusual circumstances Christian would probably not have been moved to interfere with Thiele’s handling of the deportees if his Ukrainians hadn’t started shoving and tearing at the clothes of women who showed any modesty, bringing their rifle butts down between the shoulders of loiterers or those who wished to change their places in the yard to be nearer to a relative perhaps or a loved one. Christian was surprised to see Thiele allow such brutality. With all of Thiele’s talk of battle and the savagery and brutality he had witnessed on the Russian front, in the five months Christian had got to know him Thiele seemed really a rather gentle sensitive soul under the swaggering military bluster and the exaggerated manliness and fear of sentimentality. But when Christian questioned him, Thiele only grinned. And walking over to the back of the two-and-a-half-ton truck into which the dead had been tossed, he removed the blanket from the corpse of one of the old men. Pointing to the peculiar eruption of red spots all over the freckled emaciated flesh, he asked, Do you know what this is, Herr Hauptsturmführer?

Lice and flea bites, of course.

Yes, I hope you are right, Thiele frowned. I hope it is not typhus.

When he asked Thiele if he had ever seen typhus, Thiele admitted he had not. However, he had been warned about it at Belzec, he said, and he knew that the body was covered with peculiar reddish spots and the disease was transmitted by lice and fleas. In any case, he was not going to take any chances.

Christian was aware that his Obersturmführer was a bit of a hypochondriac. He knew Thiele hoarded all sorts of vitamins and medical supplies in his footlocker at the BOQ and was extremely fastidious. He was constantly showering and dousing himself with all kinds of talcs and footpowders and deodorants and colognes and was continually cleaning his fingernails. The dead man was in his seventies at least and had probably expired from exhaustion or suffocation like the other old fellow and the mother and child. There was no evidence of any special severe nervous symptoms among the other Jews who were now all standing naked in the yard over their dropped clothing and belongings. And the physical exhaustion and near-prostration of so many in the group after several days in the sealed cars was to be expected. Christian, however, did not interfere. The Jews all looked so cheered at the prospect of a bath. And Thiele seemed so nervous about the possibility of typhus. He did not interfere even when one of the older Jews, a rabbi apparently, for though he was as naked as the rest he had a long beard and wore a skullcap, walked up to him saying, Please, Herr Sturmbahnführer, promoting Christian right there on the spot, please would it be all right if my people took their clothes to the river and washed them also? And would it please be possible for me to say a few words over our dead companions before . . .

Thiele simply flicked the skullcap off the rabbi’s head with his riding crop. And his Ukrainians riflebutted the old fellow back into the column of fours marching out through the gate to the beach.

Christian did not even question the riflebutting this time. He could see that the Jew had been cleverly trying to divide them. So regardless of how sensible an idea it might be for the Jews to wash their clothing as well as their bodies Christian could not very well take sides with the Jew against Thiele. He simply followed the procession to the river. There the peasants were ordered to clear away their beached boats, allowing the Jews access to the water. The Polish peasant women spat and