Einsatzgruppe C

Einsatzgruppe C appears in a brief but consequential moment in Hans Reiter’s reading of Boris Abramovich Ansky’s story and his own troubled reconstruction of Kostekino. Its arrival marks the point at which an imagined refuge behind a fireplace proves unused and Ansky’s mother is pictured among the Jews led to their deaths. The novel gives no operational history of the unit in this passage; instead, its presence concentrates the narrative’s attention on mass murder, the limits of imagined rescue, and Reiter’s growing identification with the violence he reads about.

Appearance in Reiter’s Reconstruction

Reiter considers who might have built a single-person hiding place at the back of a fireplace in the farmhouse. He suspects Ansky’s father, imagining that the concealed space may have been planned well before Ansky returned to the village. The delay and care he attributes to its construction give the father, in Reiter’s speculation, the aspect of either a visionary or a madman. Reiter also allows that the hiding place may have been built only after Ansky returned and his parents learned that he was an enemy of the state.

The space’s possible use is tied to the threat of party officials searching the farmhouse for evidence of Ansky. Reiter thinks Ansky would probably have hidden there during such visits. But he distinguishes those searches from the decisive moment: when Einsatzgruppe C arrives, nobody is in the hiding place—not even Ansky’s mother. The imagined shelter therefore offers no escape from the unit’s arrival.

The Destruction of Kostekino

Reiter’s vision turns from the unused hiding place to Ansky’s mother, who, in his dream, has secured her son’s notebook before going with the other Jews of Kostekino toward the German punishment and death. The passage places the unit’s arrival within the destruction of the village’s Jewish population, but does not describe the unit’s structure, personnel, orders, or subsequent actions. Its significance here is conveyed through the human fate attached to its arrival rather than through institutional detail.

The sequence joins a particular family’s precautions to a collective catastrophe. A hidden space can be conceived, and a notebook can be protected, but Reiter imagines neither as capable of stopping what comes. The passage does not claim that the hiding place was actually used or establish exactly when it was built; it stages these possibilities as Reiter weighs them while reading and imagining the past.

Reiter’s Dreams and Guilt

Einsatzgruppe C’s arrival forms part of a reconstruction mediated by Reiter’s imagination. He dreams of Ansky crossing the countryside at night as a nameless person heading west, then being struck by gunfire. For several days, Reiter believes he may have been the person who shot Ansky. The narrative presents this as a belief that torments him, not as confirmation that he killed Ansky.

At night, Reiter wakes from nightmares and weeps; in the morning, he opens Ansky’s notebook at random and reads. He no longer thinks about suicide because he believes himself already dead. The unit’s appearance thus belongs to a passage where historical violence, the notebook’s account, and Reiter’s guilt blur into a painful imaginative experience. The account offers no further information about Einsatzgruppe C beyond its role in the destruction of Kostekino’s Jews and the moment around which Reiter’s visions gather.