I finally set myself to my task in a more structured and rigorous way. On Christmas morning, a violent blizzard put an end to hopes of a special supply delivery; at the same time, the Russians launched an attack on the northeast sector and also on the factories, taking a few kilometers of territory back from us and killing more than twelve hundred of our men. The Croats, I saw from a report, had been violently hit, and Oberfeldwebel Nišíc was on the list of the killed. Carpe diem! I hoped he at least had had time to smoke his cigarette. I digested reports and wrote other ones. Christmas didn’t seem to affect the men’s morale too much: most of them, according to the reports or letters opened by the censors, had kept intact their faith in the Führer and in victory; nevertheless, every day we were executing deserters or men guilty of self-mutilation. Some of the divisions shot their condemned men themselves; others handed them over to us; the executions took place in a courtyard behind the Gestapostelle. They also handed over to us civilians caught looting by the Feldgendarmen, or suspected of passing messages to the Russians. A few days after Christmas, I passed two dirty, snot-nosed kids in a hallway; the Ukrainians were taking them away to shoot them after an interrogation: the kids had polished the boots of our officers at various HQ and mentally took down details; at night, they slipped through a sewer to go inform the Soviets. On one of them, they had found a Russian medal hidden: he claimed he had been decorated, but it may simply have been stolen or taken from a dead man. They must have been about twelve or thirteen, but they looked under ten, and while Zumpe, who was going to command the firing squad, was explaining the matter to me, they both stared at me with large eyes, as if I were going to save them. That made me enraged: What do you want from me? I wanted to shout at them. You’re going to die, so what? I too am probably going to die here, everyone here is going to die. That’s the deal. I took a few minutes to calm down; later on, Zumpe told me that they had wept but had also cried out: “Long live Stalin!” and
I began to meet some of my own so-called informers, who were brought to me by Ivan or another Ukrainian, or who came on their own. These women and men were in a lamentable state, foul-smelling, covered with filth and lice; lice I had already, but the smell of these people made me nauseated. They seemed to me more like beggars than agents: the information they gave me was invariably useless or unverifiable; in exchange, I had to give them an onion or a frozen potato, which I kept for this purpose in a safe, a veritable
