Excerpts from
Winter at Dawn
By Jens-Martin Eriksen
Then he asked two of us to step up and join him, there at the top of the slope, so that he could brief us. I donīt know why, I never wanted it that way, but to me it seemed quite natural that his eyes should fall on me. I was to be one of the two. I walked across to him and then he called Ludo over. We looked at each other, Ludo and I, half-smiling, both feeling a bit sheepish. The Commandant was going to tell us how to deal with the situation the very next day, when "the cargo was to be terminated". He took me by the shoulder, turned me around so that I was standing with my back to him and my side to the rest of the group, and then he explained how to go about it. The rifle barrel must be levelled at the back of the head, he put a finger on my neck just at the point where the skull seems to come to an end; the rifle was to be angled slightly upwards to ensure that the shot would penetrate cleanly without meeting any resistance or shattering anything; go straight in and straight on out through the forehead, so that the whole thing could be accomplished without any "unnecessary mess"ī, without any suffering. We had to get this clear. He invited the others to come up close, right up to me; I did not see anything, I only felt the tip of his finger on my neck, there, just at the soft spot where one can almost feel the skull tapering off and the two tendons in the neck beginning. The shot would thus run diagonally upwards and out through the forehead. It would actually be more or less like an instantaneous anaesthetic. Penetrating the back of the cranium, passing through the cerebellum, the pons Varolii, the junction of the optic nerves and out through the frontal bone. The way he described it, quite matter-of-factly, it might have been an anatomy lesson. And in a way, we were given to understand, it was the most humane method of carrying it out, and the most hygienic, so it would not lead to any unnecessary mess. And by this method - which was of course the result of much consideration, it was not just something he dreamed up on the spur of the moment - they virtually would not feel a thing. It would be no more than a brief flash, which really might be anything.
Translated by Barbara Haveland
|
|
