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I walk behind the whores, who are now too exhausted to complain. Next to me walk two French women who do not talk to me. They are as thin as I am but I am Polish thin and they are French thin, and anyway, we don’t know each other’s lanugages. Perhaps even our lice are now separated this way. Theirs are French fat lice and mine are Polish fat lice. Far ahead I can see SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Kuttner’s half-track swaying in the frozen mud of the snaking country road. For the moment we are safe from Kuttner, whose drunkennesss has wasted him into a kind of sitting corpse whose head wobbles and jerks with the unevenness of the road. It is mid-morning, and we have walked since four a.m. This is our third day marching.

The three of us were drunk as usual, on spirits confiscated from the executed. First there was Matthes, whom I thought of as “the poet” because he fancied himself an intellectual and this his stint in Einsatzgruppe C an adventure for a man of refined tastes. During our conversations he would jot notes in a leatherbound journal. Then there was Kohler, recently new to our drinking group, a large man who spoke rarely and was given to black moods.