Old police problem: don’t know whether the boy who shot Mrs. Kuzich is very brave or very stupid. Certainly stupid, a woodcutter from over Gomel way. Question of his bravery hangs in balance, though he’ll certainly die well. Apolitical. The Germans unleashed the Latvian militia on his village last autumn—Ganz speaks with some sense when he says that sort of thing creates Bolsheviks. Sturdy boy with wiry hair. Opaque eyes, all the transparency of childhood long vanished. Two of my men caught him in the lane behind Sorokin’s department store. Sergeant Jasper had the right to interrogate him for military purposes. Just begun when Obersturmführer Harner turned up from SD office next door demanding the boy. What that undergraduate will find out, said Harner to me, wouldn’t fit under a thumbnail. Said Harner, “I want to get at the partisan before Ganz invites him round for dinner and a little buggery.” Fashionable for the SD to talk like that about our friend and provincial governor Oberführer Ganz.
