As far back as he could remember, Roze's mother had always been in tears. And time and again his father had been fired from work; he seemed to have been sacked from more jobs than he had actually had. It was from his parents that Roze had learned his quiet, sidling walk -intended not to disturb anyone – and the anxious smile with which he greeted his neighbours, his landlord, his landlord's cat, the headmaster and the policeman on the corner of the street. Gentleness and friendliness had seemed the fundamental traits of his character; even he was surprised how much hatred lay inside him and how long he had kept it hidden.

He had been seconded to the special unit; the commander, a man with a fine understanding of people, had at once sensed his gentle, effeminate nature.

There was nothing pleasant about watching the convulsions of the Jews in the gas chambers. The soldiers who enjoyed working in the complex filled Roze with disgust. He especially disliked Zhuchenko, the prisoner-of-war on duty by the door of the gas-chambers during the morning shift. He always had a childish and particularly unpleasant smile on his face. Roze didn't like his work, but he was well aware of the many official and unofficial perks it brought him.

At the end of each day one of the dentists would hand Roze a small packet containing several gold crowns. Although this represented only an insignificant fraction of the precious metal taken every day to the camp authorities, Roze had twice handed over almost a kilo of gold to his wife. This was their bright future, their dream of a peaceful old age. As a young man, Roze had been weak and timid, unable to play an active part in life's struggle. He had never doubted that the Party had set itself one aim only: the well-being of the small and weak. He had already experienced the benefits of Hitler's policies; life had improved immeasurably for him and his family.

42

Sometimes, deep in his heart, Anton Khmelkov was appalled by his work. As he lay down in the evening and listened to Trofima Zhuchenko's laughter, he would be overcome by a cold, heavy fear.

It was Zhuchenko's job to close the hermetically sealed doors of the gas chamber. His large, strong hands and fingers always looked as though they hadn't been washed; Khmelkov didn't even like to take a piece of bread from the same basket as Zhuchenko.

Zhuchenko looked happy and excited as he went out to work in the morning and waited for the column of prisoners from the railway-line. But the slow progress of the column seemed to incense him; he would twitch his jaws and make a thin, complaining sound in his throat – like a cat watching sparrows from behind a pane of glass.

Khmelkov found Zhuchenko very disturbing. Not that he himself was above having a few drinks and then going off for a bit of fun with one of the women in the queue. There was a little door through which members of the special unit could go into the changing-room and pick out a woman. A man's a man, after all. Khmelkov would choose a woman or a girl, take her off to an empty corner, and half an hour later hand her back to the guard. Neither he nor the woman would say anything. Still, he wasn't in this job for the wine or the women, for gabardine riding-breeches or box-calf boots.

Khmelkov had been taken prisoner in July 1941. He had been beaten over the head and neck with a rifle-butt, he had suffered from dysentery, he had been forced to march through the snow in tattered boots, he had drunk yellow water tainted with fuel-oil, he had torn off hunks of black, stinking meat from the carcass of a horse, he had eaten potato peelings and rotten swedes. All he had asked for, all he had wanted, was life itself. He had fought off dozens of deaths – from cold, from hunger, from bloody flux… He didn't want to fall to the ground with nine grams of metal in his skull. He didn't want to swell up till his heart choked in the water rising from his legs. He wasn't a criminal – just a hairdresser from the town of Kerchi. No one – neither his relatives, his neighbours, his fellow workers or the friends with whom he drank wine, ate smoked mullet and played dominoes – had ever thought badly of him. There was a time when he thought he had nothing whatever in common with Zhuchenko; now, though, he sometimes thought that the differences between them were insignificant and trifling. What did it matter what the two of them felt? If the job they did was the same, what did it matter if one felt happy and the other felt sad?

What Khmelkov didn't understand was that it wasn't Zhu-chenko's greater guilt that made him so disturbing. What was disturbing was that Zhuchenko's behaviour could be explained by some terrible, innate depravity – whereas he himself was still a human being. And he was dimly aware that if you wish to remain a human being under Fascism, there is an easier option than survival – death.

43

The director of the complex, Sturmbannfuhrer Kaltluft, had arranged for the controller's office to provide him each evening with a schedule of the next day's arrivals. He was able to inform his workers in advance of the number of wagons and the quantity of people expected. Depending what country the train was from, the appropriate auxiliary units would be called up – barbers, escort-guards, porters…

Kaltluft disliked slovenliness of any kind. He never drank and was furious if he found any of his subordinates the worse for drink. Only once had anyone seen him bright and animated: sitting in his car, about to go and stay with his family over Easter, he had beckoned to Sturmfuhrer Hahn and showed him photographs of his daughter – a little girl with large eyes and a large face like her father's.

Kaltluft enjoyed work and disliked wasting his time; he never went to the club after supper, he never played cards and he never watched films. At Christmas the special unit had had their own tree and arranged for a performance by an amateur choir; a free bottle of French cognac had been given out to every two men. Kaltluft had dropped in for half an hour and everyone had seen the fresh ink-stains on his fingers – he had been working on Christmas Eve.

He had grown up in his parents' old home in the country. He wasn't afraid of hard work and he enjoyed the peace of the village; it had seemed he would live there for ever. He had dreamed of increasing the size of the holding, but – no matter what he earned from his wheat, swedes and pigs – he had expected to stay on in the quiet, comfortable house. His life, however, had followed a different course: at the end of the First World War he had been sent to the front. It seemed as though nothing less than fate itself had decreed his progression from the village to the army, from the trenches to HQ company, from clerk to adjutant, from the central apparatus of the RSHA to the administration of the camps – and finally to his appointment as commander of a Sonderkommando in an extermination camp.

If, on the day of judgment, Kaltluft had been called upon to justify himself, he could have explained quite truthfully how fate had led him to become the executioner of 590,000 people. What else could he have done in the face of such powerful forces – the war, fervent nationalism, the adamancy of the Party, the will of the State? How could he have swum against the current? He was a man like any other; all he had wanted was to live peacefully in his father's house. He hadn't walked -he had been pushed. Fate had led him by the hand… And if they had been called upon, Kaltluft's superiors and subordinates would have justified themselves in almost the same words.

But Kaltluft was not asked to justify himself before a heavenly court. Nor was God asked to reassure him that no one in the world is guilty.

There is divine judgment, there is the judgment of a State and the judgment of society, but there is one supreme judgment: the judgment of one sinner over another. A sinner can measure the power of the totalitarian State and find it limitless: through propaganda, hunger, loneliness, infamy, obscurity, labour camps and the threat of death, this terrible power can fetter a man's will. But every step that a man takes under the threat of poverty, hunger, labour camps and death is at the same time an expression of his own will. Every step Kaltluft had taken – from the village to the trenches, from being a man-in-the-street to being a member of the National Socialist Party – bore the imprint of his will. A man may be led by fate, but he can refuse to follow. He may be a mere tool in the hands of destructive powers, but he knows it is in his interest to assent to this. Fate and the individual may have different ends, but they share the same path.