Chapter Eight
The surroundings seemed very alien this time. The houses looked bigger and bulkier, reminding Diego somewhat of oversized square boxes. The large street they were standing on was no longer cobblestone but had an unfamiliar smooth grayish surface. The sky too looked gray and cold. The city itself seemed somehow to be reflecting the unfriendliness of the gloomy firmament – murky and sinisterly silent, as if it were waiting for something terrible and inevitable to occur.
A foreboding of that something overcame Diego too, causing him to shudder.
"What is this place?" he asked in a low voice.
"Kiev, Ukraine. September 29, 1941." The phantom cast an evaluative glance at his 19th century protégé. "I guess, I will have to give you a little bit more history here," he remarked. "In 1933, the Nationál Sozialístische Déutsche Árbeiter Partéi (better known as Nazi) came to power in Germany. That party was obsessed with the idea that Germans were the supreme race on Earth and, as such, had the right to be the leaders of the world. And so, on September 1st, 1939, Germany launched an attack on Poland, thus starting World War II."
"World War II?" Diego gasped in disbelief.
"Do not interrupt," the phantom snapped. "By 1941, all of Europe was occupied except those few countries that collaborated with the Nazis – such as Spain, Italy, Finland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary."
Diego listened with half-open mouth.
"According to Nazis, not only were the other races inferior to Germans, but there were also so-called imperfect races, parasites of the society, that needed to be weeded out. Those races included Gypsies, Slavs, and, especially, Jews."
The phantom pointed to the end of the street, where Diego just now noticed a huge crowd of people walking slowly in their direction. They walked in silence all –the eyes of the little ones filled with terror, the faces of others expressing hopelessness, despair. Beside them marched uniformed men with guns that looked smaller than the rifles of the soldiers of the King yet deadlier. The crowd passed by a corpse that lay face up open-eyed on the sidewalk. An old man in the lead of the crowd slowed down his pace. His sad brown eyes lingered on the dead empty eyes of the corpse, as if he read something in them. His face grew paler, and he turned away, continuing his way in grim silence.
"He knows," the phantom noted quietly, "they all know."
"Know what?" Diego asked without taking his eyes off the old man.
"It must be terrible to know that you are being led to your death and can do nothing about it," the phantom mused calmly. "Nazis gathered all the Jewish residents of Kiev – more than 33,000 of them – and took them outside of the city to a ravine called Babi Yar."
The scene changed abruptly as the phantom spoke. They were now standing a few feet away from the edge of a ravine that astounded with its enormity. The uniformed soldiers quickly barked orders, and the condemned to death obeyed silently, taking off their clothing and throwing it into a pile. They were told to form small groups at the edge of the ravine, and they stood there, shaking in the freezing autumn wind, bunching up to each other; mothers hugging their children close to themselves in a vain attempt to protect and comfort them.
"This is insanity!" Diego cried out, turning to his ghostly companion. "Can nobody stop this?"
The phantom shook his head. "They were doomed. If anyone tried to escape, they would be shot down immediately. And the Ukrainians… they would not help either. Some because they were afraid to share the fate of the Jews, others because they thought the same way about them as did the Nazis."
A rapid line of gunfire interrupted the phantom’s explanation momentarily, but he soon continued talking to this horrible accompaniment of shots and screams.
"By 1942, Germans began deporting Jews to death camps, where the killing became a faster and easier business. People were shoved in large groups into chambers that were later filled with poison gas. Men, women, children – they all died screaming in agony, choking to death on that gas. But even after death, their bodies would not be left alone. Their hair would be cut off and used for stuffing chairs, their bones would be crushed and used as fertilizers, their bodies – boiled to make soap. At one such camp, a place called Auschwitz, the Nazis have slaughtered as many as 12,000 people in one day." The phantom paused and then added sarcastically, "As you can see, the numbers have risen significantly since 1572. The humans have been working on perfecting the art of killing. Almost 6 million Jews were killed between 1941 and 1945."
Diego listened, watching with eyes wide with horror, as the helpless victims were being gunned down like animals; their bodies, disfigured by bullets, falling into the indifferent depth of the ravine and covered almost instantaneously by new corpses piling on top of them. The guns worked incessantly; their roar seemed to be more deafening than the cries of the dying people. And the faces, the faces of their assassins showed no feeling of remorse or pity. Quite to the contrary, the soldiers were smiling, and there was nothing human in their smiles.
Diego dropped to his knees; he was suffocating. The pleading faces of those in the crowd were spinning in front of his eyes mixing with the sadistic expressions on the faces of the Nazi soldiers. He closed his eyes, squeezing his eyelids until they hurt, but he still kept seeing them, no matter how he tried. The terrible scenes of massacres of inhumane proportions that the phantom described cut into his consciousness with all their horrifying vividness, stifling him. He could not breathe. Tears of anger and helplessness were burning his face, and even the bitingly cold air of the Ukrainian fall could not cool them.
"Enough," he pleaded hoarsely in a barely audible voice, looking up at the imperturbable figure of the phantom. "Please … enough."
And through a mantle of tears that clouded his vision Diego could swear he saw something in the deathly pale face of his companion that resembled compassion so uncharacteristic of his otherwise cold nature.
The phantom nodded and raised his cloak yet again, and the dreadful scene dissipated into the air.
Chapter Nine
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