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My name is Marla Eton. I’m a 43-year-old Briton, currently living what I consider to be my dream life with Julio, a considerate, handsome, late-thirty-something Italian university art history instructor and avid painter, here in sunny Italy. Ever since my stressful divorce from a Fleet Street solicitor four years ago, I’ve lived here in the beautiful Tuscan countryside, an hour’s drive from Florence, were I now work part-time as a visiting professor of Linguistic Anthropology.
Several years ago, seeking both solace and diversion following my divorce, I embarked on a two month mini-sabbatical to South America. I traveled to Argentina were I did some of the final investigative research I needed in order to finish my Ph.D. thesis, the subject of which addresses with the lack of native language evolution among European immigrants to the Americas.
While rummaging for transatlantic linguistic material in a dark, musty old government document storage bin in Buenos Aires, I stumbled across a journal, a tattered-edged daily diary of sorts, handwritten in German. I discovered the hardbound, dust covered ledger in a smelly, unventilated subterranean cellar whose ceiling was unceremoniously decorated with drain pipes and a single, dim, dangling light bulb. My Argentine hosts were lead to believe that the room was once part of the archives for the Argentine National Office of Immigration. Its contents had apparently never been moved when the ministry relocated to a trendier neighborhood some thirty years earlier.
The cool, dark gray concrete walls of the windowless archive were stacked high with dusty, sagging cardboard boxes crammed with paper files. The files contained mostly official looking documents taken off German and Italian citizens entering Argentina in the mid-20th-century. That moment in which I first opened the dusty, aging ledger was one I will never forget. I was instantly transported back to another time as I gazed at pages meticulously written using an old style fountain pen. The penmanship, clearly from another era, was immaculate.
The text had sat undisturbed for decades in a box full of seemingly unrelated immigration files. What had brought my attention to it was its binding. I had seen that exact color and style of binding once before while searching through a war documents archive in Frankfurt. It was the official, military issue binding of a German war log, a journal used to record an individual German army unit’s daily activity and movement.
Much like a ship’s log, this army field journal would have been the responsibility of an individual unit’s Commanding Officer. For a Company, a unit of maybe 250 soldiers, it would have been kept by a Captain, or in the case of a smaller unit, by a Lieutenant. Every German military unit, right down to the 35-man platoon, was required to keep this journal, and to make at least cursory daily entries.
If the Company Captain was lucky enough to have one, he may have dictated the journal entries to a scribe, who was most likely a senior sergeant in possession of penmanship and spelling skills. A unit’s scribe, often a conscripted school teacher, would assist the unit’s Captain with official communications, and would write a condolence letter, in the Captain’s name of course, to the parents of any soldier kill in action.
While I won’t pretend to be even remotely fluent in the wonderful German language, as I browsed through the pungent leaves of this yellowing military log book, I became suspicious that it had not been used for its intended purpose such as I had witnessed in Frankfurt, but had been used, possibly, as a soldier’s personal diary. Was it confiscated and placed with these archival documents because it was thought to be part of official Nazi military records? I could only guess.
Fascinated by what I had found, I tucked the ledger under my jacket, confident it would never be missed by a nation whose authorities couldn’t distinguish a fleeing Nazi from a sub-Saharan refugee.
Upon returning to Italy I invited a German acquaintance from the university, who I will only refer to as Anna, to visit Julio and I out at our old Tuscan farmhouse. Anna, like myself, had in her mature years developed a penchant for Italian companionship and an equal distain for middle-aged northern European males. After a half hour of small talk and a half liter of claret, Anna agreed to painstakingly translate and transcribe the entire handwritten journal into English for me.
Two months passed before her Volvo graced the gravel driveway of Julio’s farm again. As she stood on the portico, thick transcript in hand, I could tell from the look on her face that’s something deeply troubled her.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Tears welled up in Anna’s eyes as she struggled to answer, turning to avoid eye contact.
“It’s so horrible” she said.
I took Anna by the hand and led her to a creaky old wicker sofa in the veranda as a warm Tuscan afternoon breeze drifted through the house. Without speaking a word I poured us each a glass of lightly chilled pinot, glancing up at Anna for any sign of what was wrong.
Anna, a buxom, forty-something native Berliner with a short brunette bob, struggled for the best choice of English words, words which percolated haltingly from her lips as tears welled in her eyes.
“It is a diary, written by a German officer, SS I believe, who was in charge of a special group of soldiers, about 200 or so of them from what I could gather. The job of this special group was, simply, to terrorize civilians. The company traveled from place to place throughout Europe on orders from some high Nazi official. Sometimes Germany, occasionally France, and the Low Countries, but mostly Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary, terrorizing villages with rape, torture and murder on orders from above.”
“This is a special squad of monsters had no other purpose but to terrorize innocent civilians. These horrible Nazi killers raped hundreds, maybe thousands of girls and women; even young boys. They tortured and killed to get information from, and seek revenge on, those whose villages where known to harbor underground resistance fighters.”
“Their goal was to instill such unimaginable terror among the villagers that they would give up the names and hiding places of the underground resistance. These Nazi monsters did the most horrible things imaginable. They had a blank check to write their own living nightmares. They tortured and killed young boys and old men alike. They raped young girls as their fathers were forced to watch. They killed poor, defenseless old men as their grandchildren looked on. They forced sisters and mothers to have sex with their own sons and brothers.”
“They stripped an entire family naked, then forced them to slowly walk humiliated through town to their execution the entire village looked on.”
Raising her head to make eye contact for the first time since she began to speak, Anna said “Marla, this journal was written by a monster, a real, living monster. Each time I turned another page I prayed that it was not true, that the next page would say this was all made up, just some sick, pervert’s pathetic attempt at fiction or fantasy. But I’m afraid my hope was in vain. I’m certain it is real, Marla. It is just too unbelievably horrible to imagine. I want to believe this is fiction, but, but ….”
Anna’s voice trailed off as she placed her face down in her hands and began to weep. I reached my arm around her shoulders in a vain attempt to comfort her, knowing there was nothing I could say or do until I had read her English transcript of the diary myself.
“What do you have there that is so interesting” Julio asked me later that night as I huddled in a leather chair near a corner, reading from the thick stack of white translated papers. I didn’t reply, but kept reading, transfixed.”
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August 17, 1941
We are in western Ukraine, just east of the Polish frontier. We are encamped just outside a small village. This morning, just before we broke our encampment, I gathered the men and informed them of our next mission. In support of Operation Barbarosa, the Fuehrer’s recently initiated plan for the conquest of Russia, our orders today are to neutralize the nearby village of Orbstecz, where known underground resistance operatives were being harbored.
These orders, sent to me in code via the wireless last night from SS intelligence headquarters in Berlin, mandate that our unit uncover the village’s subversives at all cost, and, if possible, take them alive and interrogate them to obtain information vital to the Reich’s cause.
I mounted my half-track and headed the one kilometer east to Orbstecz, confident that my men would achieve today objectives.
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