Читаем Soldaten полностью

WOLF: Dead?

QUEISSER: Yes. They had thrown some fellow down in the road. Oh, I shouldn’t like to go through that Jewish quarter again. It was awful. The first time I was there I saw some nice looking children running about with the Jewish star on them—pretty girls among them. The soldiers did some lively bargaining with the Jews. There were Jews working out by the aerodrome, too, they used to bring us gold goods and we gave them bread in return, only so that they could have something to eat.²³⁹

Especially significant here is Queisser’s use of the phrase “lively bargaining” to describe Jews swapping gold for bread. Even if the narrator found it unpleasant to travel through the “Jewish quarter” (i.e., ghetto), he could not pass up the opportunity to engage in such a lucrative transaction himself. This excerpt provides further evidence of the structure of temporary opportunities that opened themselves up to Wehrmacht soldiers in the course of German persecution and extermination of Jews.

Another story revolves around the role of so-called capos in a forced labor camp. It is one of the few dialogues in which a listener expresses doubt as to what the narrator, in this case a pilot, is telling him:²⁴⁰