There was a whole row of them. Men, women and children, naked except for a vest here or there. They were quiet, with only the children whimpering and the older men moving backward and forward mouthing prayers. Behind them was a deep ditch they had dug earlier.
The soldiers stood facing them, also in a row, with their guns at the ready. "Shoot," their sergeant yelled. There was a bang, shrieks, a rattle, a groan as bodies toppled backwards into the ditch. The soldiers slung their guns over their shoulders, their faces blank.
"Dismiss!" shouted the sergeant. The soldiers turned to go back to camp. Most of them were still a little drunk from the schnapps they had been given earlier. One of them said: "I hate all that shooting, it makes my shoulder ache."
The sergeant walked up to the ditch to assure himself of a task well done, when he noticed a body in a red dress and a light-coloured jacket on the rim of the ditch. He was on the point of pushing it into the ditch with his boot when he noticed two things: the body was that of a young woman and she blinked.
She was still alive. There was blood on her left shoulder. She was young and she had red hair.
He saw that his Einsatzgruppe were on their way to the barracks. Then he turned back to the young woman. She looked straight at him. He knelt down next to her and pulled up her dress. Then he raped her. She had said, he thought, "non," but she did not struggle. He got up, buttoned up his trousers and noticed tears running down the young woman's cheek, past her ear.
As he walked towards the barracks he thought of his wife and little son. And, very briefly, he felt ashamed.
They marched past the ditch the following day. It was the job of their replacement group to shovel the earth over the bodies before the next lot was delivered. He glanced over. No red dress. She must have rolled over into the ditch, he thought, and marched on.
But, at nightfall, she had got up. Her shoulder had stopped bleeding. She could see the bodies in the ditch and wanted to throw up. But even more, she wanted to live. She walked on, away from the barracks, on and on. She slept in the forest that night. Then she found a woman collecting firewood who took her home.
When the war came to an end, Miriam, the red-haired girl, was in a displaced person's camp in Bavaria where she gave birth to her daughter. She married a gentle Frenchman in the same camp and they went to live in Paris. She never told either her daughter or her husband the details of her experience. She had no other children. Her daughter married a Jewish artist and in 1976 they had a daughter whom they called H?l?ne. Her grandmother looked at the red-haired baby and felt that, one day, she would tell her her own story.
Fritz, the Einsatzgruppe sergeant, went back home to his village near Bremen and became a master carpenter, like his father. No one asked him about his war, best forgotten everyone said, and he told no one. He and his wife had another son. He also became a carpenter and married a pretty girl who had come from East Germany at the end of the war. They in turn had two sons. The younger one found he hated Germany and its history and settled with his girlfriend in a remote village in southwest France to work there as a carpenter.
Meanwhile, H?l?ne had studied art and moved to Toulouse with her boyfriend. She loved the region. Her aunt had a house in a small village not far away and she spent all her holidays with her. When she broke up with her boyfriend, she moved in with the aunt and got a job in the boulangerie. She was so popular that people bought more bread than they really needed. They loved her red hair. And she loved the people and the work.
The German carpenter's elder brother, on a visit from Bremen, came to this village, rather than one nearer, in order to buy bread from her. He fell in love with her. They went out one light summer evening. He let her drive his car and they laughed and chatted. Then, in a careless moment, she swerved and hit a tree. They both died.
The funerals were a week later. His was in the morning, preceded by a service in the church to which all his family had come from Germany. Then there was a procession to the cemetery a few hundred yards away. The coffin was lowered into the grave. Next to it was an empty grave for H?l?ne, whose funeral was that afternoon. There was no church service, but a rabbi had been summoned from Toulouse. The village was in mourning for them. How could this have happened to these lovely young people?
The villagers paid their last respects. It was a hot day. Just two elderly, white- haired people stayed behind - his grandfather, Fritz, and her grandmother, Miriam. They looked at each other, then looked away in grief. There was no recognition. "I never told her my story," the old lady sobbed to herself.
