The Kostekino massacre is recalled not as a fully witnessed scene but through Hans Reiter’s troubled reconstruction of the killing of Boris Abramovich Ansky and the Jews of Kostekino. Its significance lies in the way mass violence enters the present indirectly: through a notebook, an unused hiding place, and Reiter’s dreams, which blur the boundary between what he knows and what he fears he did.

The hiding place and the imagined escape

Reiter considers who built a hiding place for one person behind the farmhouse fireplace. He decides it was probably Ansky’s father, though he cannot settle whether it was made before Ansky returned to the village or after his parents learned that their son was an enemy of the state. Reiter imagines its construction as careful and unhurried, an impression that gives Ansky’s father the aura of either a seer or a madman. He also concludes that nobody used it.

The possibility that Ansky hid there during earlier visits by party officials remains open to Reiter. But in his reconstruction of the decisive moment, when Einsatzgruppe C arrived, no one took refuge in the hiding place—not even Ansky’s mother. Instead, Reiter imagines her securing her son’s notebook before going with the other Jews of Kostekino toward their deaths. The shelter’s survival as an empty space makes escape imaginable while marking the moment when it did not occur.

Reiter’s dreams and sense of guilt

Reiter dreams of Ansky walking westward at night as a nameless person, then falling under gunfire. For several days, he believes that he was the one who shot him. The massacre is thus bound to a personal fear of culpability, although the account presents this as Reiter’s belief and nightmare, not as confirmation that he killed Ansky.

These dreams disrupt Reiter’s life after the killing. He wakes in distress, reads Ansky’s notebook at random, and withdraws from the communal routine of the village, preferring the snowy forest and the farmhouse to the building where his comrades gather around food and warmth. At the hearth, he sometimes imagines a shadowy, timid, benevolent figure looking out from the fireplace. He even climbs into the hiding place and remains there until morning, turning a shelter that no one used during the massacre into a place he inhabits in its aftermath.

The massacre in historical perspective

Elsewhere, the novel places the social recognition of killing beside the selective attention given to it. A speaker contrasts the many deaths during the Paris Commune with widely reported individual murders, arguing that some victims were treated as outside society and that their deaths could not readily be made legible in public language. This reflection does not describe the events at Kostekino directly, but it sharpens the novel’s concern with how mass death can be obscured, even while its traces endure in private memory.

The account of Kostekino likewise reaches the reader through what survives and what can only be imagined: Ansky’s notebook, the unused hiding place, and Reiter’s recurring dreams. Its narrative form withholds a complete eyewitness perspective. Rather than resolving that absence, it makes the uncertainty part of the event’s lasting consequence.