The German Mujahid

RACHEL’S DIARY, APRIL 1995

I found Jean 92. It was easy. I simply turned up at the return address he wrote on the letters he sent to papa. He lives in a tumbledown shack at the end of a dark alley in a dismal part of a village somewhere near Strasbourg that has shrivelled away as families have died out. Driving from the urban masterpiece that is Strasbourg to this hamlet which appears on no maps and whose name, out of humanity, I won’t mention, I felt as though I might reach the end of the world and bitterly regret it. In France there are still godforsaken places so out of the way you wonder where you are. My Renault 4 didn’t know the place, though I rented it in Strasbourg and it must have roamed this hinterland often enough. Coming in to the village, a surly farmer jerked his thumb towards the arse-end of the street when I stopped and asked, “Could you tell me where I might find Ernest Brucke?” There seemed no point thanking him, he’d lost the power of speech, he would have been incapable of saying, “You’re welcome, monsieur.”

After scaring three miserable old witches leaning on their brooms, and setting a pack of stray dogs yapping, I finally found the place. It was the last house in the village. Beyond, there was nothing but a wall of wild vegetation.

I had been expecting to be met by an old man and was worrying whether he would still have wits enough to understand my questions; what I found was a man of indeterminate age wearing a curious getup, his belly swollen and distended, his face as mottled and pockmarked as that of only the most dedicated alcoholic. His fly was gaping open but he clearly didn’t care. He was sitting outside in a tiny garden full of flaking, peeling junk — a handkerchief-sized wasteland. He sat at a rickety metal table on which stood a bottle of schnapps; there was a chipped glass whose existence was nominal, fused as it was to the table, half-filled with an oily liquid on which floated leaves, pine needles and dead flies; and there was an improbable ashtray buried under a mound of ashes, cigarette butts and cremated insects. The man stared straight in front of him, saying nothing. He did not even see me arrive.

I felt a surge of pity. Here was a human wreck on the brink of extinction. An image flashed into my mind and I was convinced that this was what would happen: the man would die here, covered in lichen, glued to his chair, the bottle within easy reach, thinking nothing, saying nothing, seeing nothing of what was around him. I found it difficult to imagine papa — a picture of austerity, a very German austerity — being friends with such a man. But a lot of time had passed, I thought, and maybe this man had had his day in the sun. However, a little mental arithmetic persuaded me that he and papa did not know — could not have known — each other. It was a matter of age and circumstance. Papa hadn’t set foot outside Algeria since 1962, at which point this man would have been playing cowboys and Indians with the dirty little village pigs or playing hide-and-seek in the bushes with the sheep before he and his Kameraden discovered alcohol. Now, the man was about fifty years old — clearly fifty years too many — but a far cry from seventy-six, the age my father had been when he died. I didn’t even consider the possibility that he had been to Algeria and had met my father there. They don’t stand for any bullshit in Algeria, they have a border, they have fearsome guards and draconian laws, no one is allowed to visit and there is no question of making exceptions. There are places like that, places where you are not allowed to enter, to leave, or to know why. Perhaps alcohol had preserved him, or prematurely aged him, or maybe it had given him the means to become a different person. There was obviously something I didn’t understand.

The man finally looked up and saw me. His brooding eyes and tremulous lips, like a rapacious old pervert, made me uncomfortable. I felt like a cornered child. I took a deep breath and adopted the posture of a boy accustomed to terrorizing girls in pigtails. I didn’t want to put his back up, the way I had the old man in Uelzen, by asking awkward questions.

“If you’re Ernest Brucke, aka Jean 92, I’d like to shake your hand and thank you on behalf of my father Hans Schiller.”

The man sat lost in thought for a moment, then, exhausted by the sheer effort, stretched his hand past the bottle and said in a gravelly voice, “Schiller?. . Who’s Schiller? You’re the son?”

“Too right I’m his son! On his deathbed, my father asked me to come and say goodbye to some old friends, people who helped him when times were. . “

“Hold on a minute, I’m not Jean 92. . ”

“Then who might you be, monsieur?

“I’m Adolph, his son. . the old man kicked the bucket years ago. . ”

“Oh. . ”

“So what did you want with the old man. . apart from to say thank you?”

“I just wanted to talk about old times. . ”

“Really? What for?”

“I’m, um. . I’m looking for stories, background stuff, I’m writing a book about my father’s struggle, his fight to save humanity, as far as I know Neo-Nazism is alive and well.”

“Yeah, you look like a writer.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to interview you, for a chapter I’m writing about your father, and about you, obviously. . ”

Bingo. I’d hit the jackpot. This drunken slob could see himself at the top of the bestseller list. He sat up, cleared his throat and looked at me a little more warmly. It hadn’t occurred to me — I’d forgotten that this sickness was still out there, this smug self-righteousness, the overweening pride that goes before a fall. I wasn’t about to let this guy slip through my fingers, the wonderful Jean 92 Junior.

“Maybe I didn’t mention it, mon cher Adolph, but I’ve already got a publisher, they pay well. . you’ll get a cut.”

“How much?”

“It all depends on the sales, but it could be a nice little earner. Here, here’s a hundred francs, call it an advance.”

It was a done deal. We sat back and chatted like partners in some lucrative scam. It was pretty futile, as it turned out. And it was hard work. The drunken slob kept trying to sideline his father and hog the limelight. He wanted a chapter to himself. He told me about his childhood, about his grandmother Gertrude who taught him to speak German, his military service in the “fucking French army,” the little wars in Africa where he did a little nigger-bashing to make up for the shame of having to fight for France, some bitch named Greta who ruined his life, some cousin Gaspard or Hector who ripped him off, his aunt Ursula who lived in Brazil with some guy called Felix who trafficked diamonds or maybe it was emeralds, how his house was falling down around his ears, how the village was under threat from some urban renewal scheme, how the fuckers at the city council, etcetera, etcetera. And he told me everything about his work with his Nazi father. Just paperwork at first, a little spying on the neighbours, watching the comings and goings from the post office, his role as acolyte at the shadowy ceremonies and, later, when he attained the age of unreason, the endless get-togethers, the secret meetings of freaks and failures, the summary justice dealt out to traitors and revisionists, the beatings meted out to local hooligans, the altercations with the local police, the winters spent drinking with old veterans depressed at how the world had changed. All in all, a rewarding catalogue of misery. He even showed me his files. I was surprised he was capable of standing up. He had a whole cupboard full of documents and I fell on them like a man possessed. An hour later, I was covered in dust and smelled of rotting flesh. I felt ashamed to be human. I poked around through the sort of jumble and clutter you would expect to find in the attic of a former torturer who has finally gone to meet the Prince of Darkness. It reeked of old men, of misfits, mildew and madness, of futility and horror. Dead or alive, a torturer is still a torturer. Poor Jean 92 should have died at birth. There were grubby posters, tattered books, a book of hours in a linen slipcase, hunters’ catalogues, faded pennants, hideous letters and even more appalling photographs, bile-filled notebooks and nauseating tracts. Adolph offered to sell me the lot for 200 francs. It was a lot of money for such unspeakable shit, but I had come here in search of the roots of evil. There was a pistol, too, and some copper bullets grey-green with age. “A Luger — best gun in the whole world,” he said, gripping it proudly. “You said it,” I nodded. “My old man swore by his.” What with Adolph and his Luger and me carrying a sheaf of Nazi pamphlets and pennants, we looked like we were about to take on the whole world. Any young firebrand who saw us would have signed up to fight with us.

Trying to find out about past wars is hellish, a series of dead ends, of paths that disappear into darkness, suppurating cesspits shrouded in mist, dust rising like curtains of smoke as you grope your way through the void. I’m beginning to understand the problems faced by people responsible for investigating war crimes that are inevitably shrouded in silence, amnesia and collusion. It’s impossible, the truth is always buried, mislaid in a pile of dossiers and reports, hushed up, covered up, doctored. Then there is the silence, the selective amnesia, the half-truths, the carefully rehearsed lines, the pleas by devil’s advocates, speech after speech, the worm-eaten papers. And above the chatter howls the wind of shame, sweeping aside our best intentions, and so we close our eyes, we lower our heads. Victims always die twice. And their executioners always outlive them.

“Papa never did tell me what 92 meant. . ”

“That was the code name for the organisation the old man set up. Unit 92, everyone in the unit had an alias, Jean 92, François 92, Gustave 92. We had to watch our backs, we had the French authorities on our backs, the Yids, the. . ”

“But why 92?”

“It was. . Hitler came to power in ’33, Pétain signed the armistice in 1940, the same year my father joined the Gestapo, he was nineteen. . if you add them up, you get 92. Clever bastard, the old man. That’s what the unit meant, loyalty to the Third Reich.”

“Mein Ehre Heißt Treue.”

“Exactly! So anyway, when the old man died in 1969, I took over and renamed it Unit 134. . I was born in ’42, you see, 92 plus 42 equals 134, get it? But by that time there wasn’t much to do, by then most of the Kameraden were living it up in Santiago, Chile and in Bangkok somewhere over in China. . you know?”

“Yeah, yeah I know. . it’s near Thailand somewhere. . So it was Unit 92 that managed to get my father. .?”

“Absolutely. At the end of the war, when Kameraden were forced to go to ground, the old man and a bunch of his friends set up Unit 92 to help get them out of Germany to friendly countries. Later on, he hooked up with ODESSA, you heard of them?

“Sure. . ODESSA, the Franciscan network, the Vatican Refugee Organisation, the phony papers supplied by fellow travellers in the Red Cross, the Ethiopian line, the Turco-Arab escape routes, and the rest.”

“Anyway, the 92, we mostly looked out for the SS officers who ran the Death Camps. They were the elite, you see, the guys that had to be saved for the future. You’ve got to put all this in the book, the old man did good work, he saved dozens of officers from those bastards. You can see all the names there in the little black book. You father must be in there somewhere. . What was his name again?”

“Schiller. . what bastards?”

“The Russkis, the Yanks, the Engländer, the backstabbing French cunts and those vermin the Yids. Can you believe it, there were still some left? The old man had a rough time, what with Nakam and the fucking Jewish Agency who exploited all the upheaval to get their hands on Palestine and France, and then there was Mossad and that bastard Wiesenthal who was lining his pockets. . and that’s not counting all the people who turned traitor overnight, some of them members of the 92. We didn’t know what was going on, we had to keep tabs on what they were planning, tell the Kameraden, set up the networks, protect the lines, raise money, forge papers. . I can tell you, I worked like a dog. . I miss it, really. Back then, people were prepared to go to any lengths for the sake of honour. . These days. . ”

I listened without really listening. I knew a hundred times more than he did about all this. But seeing him, hearing him, smelling him, squelching with him through this fetid mire, I experienced what it was like after the war, that end of the world unlike any other, the ruined wasteland stretching to the horizon, the scrawny hordes of dazed, half-dead people, bulldozers clearing the towering heaps of corpses, madmen wandering through the ruined countryside, surreal scenes, the wind carrying the stench of rotting flesh, the feckless already haggling, wheedling, testifying, making provisions for the future and, over this bedlam and confusion, excruciating, maddening, this haunting silence, this fog that chokes me even now.

“So. . what’s the story now, uncle Adolph?”

“It’s all over now, Jugend, the Jews have won.”

“But Hitler will come back. . or someone else, someone more p. . someone as powerful.”

“Yeah, yeah. . Dream on.”

“It could be a Frenchman, someone like us. . ”

“Don’t make me laugh. You ever see a Frenchman with balls?”

“Pétain had balls, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, but he didn’t have Hitler’s genius. The sort of guy we need can only come from Germany.”

“But what about Stalin and Pol Pot, Ceaus¸escu, what about Mao, Kim Il-sung, Idi Amin and. . the other guy, you know, with the moustache, the one who gassed all the. . ”

“Scum, the lot of them, nothing but Commies and niggers and gooks, they don’t count.”

“An American would be good, I mean they exterminated the Indians — though I admit they didn’t do such a great job with the Blacks. And they dropped a couple of atomic bombs on the Japs.”

“Bullshit! They’re all Jews in America, they should be wiped out, the whole lot of them.”

“Maybe the Arabs. . what do you think? I mean they’ve got the rhetoric. . ”

“The what?”

“The spiel, the shtick, they’ve got a coherent ideology. . ”

“Fucking Yids just like the rest of them, they’re only good for making charcoal, and not even decent charcoal.”

“Hey, maybe that would solve the energy crisis they’re always busting our balls about — we’d get a cheap renewable source of energy out of burning them, we’d never have to worry again. . ”

“Ha, ha, ha! You’re your father’s son all right! Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!”

In other circumstances I would have been only too happy to wander through his brain, I’m sure I would have found charming grottos and ravines the bastard didn’t know he had, there’s clearly no end to cretinism, what I had seen was only the tip of the iceberg. I felt like. . like. . nothing. You don’t kill madmen, you don’t exterminate the mentally handicapped, you pray for them. But for all his madness, his sickness, he managed to hurt me with that line: “You’re your father’s son all right!” It was like an electric shock to my heart. I thought of him as his father’s son, offspring of Jean 92, good Samaritan to Nazi fugitives, saviour of murderers, and he had reminded me that I was my father’s son, offspring of SS Gruppenführer Hans Schiller, the angel of death.

On the train back to Paris, the phrase ran through my mind—I am my father’s son. . I am my father’s son. . — over and over, to the steady monotonous clacking of the train, until it deafened me, devastated me, until I fell asleep. I think I might have said it aloud, might have shouted it. I was caught between two nightmares, two spasms, two impulses: to die here where I sat, or later, when I had drained the cup to the dregs. I thrashed about in darkness. But I know I heard a voice from somewhere in the carriage whispering to his neighbour, “The fact he needs to say it means he must have doubts,” and another voice reply, “The question is, does his father know?” And suddenly all these good people, the tourists and travellers, started laughing, giggling behind their hands, chuckling behind their newspapers, others snorting half-heartedly. I laughed myself. It was a good joke, these were good people, but just as the laughter petered out into hopelessness I got to my feet and, addressing the assembled company like a prophet of doom, I whispered, “Let he who knows where his father is raise his hand.” A chill ran through the carriage. It brought me back to life.

I don’t know why, but I thought about that Jewish joke: Moishe is lying on his bed kvetching, tossing and turning like a devil in a baptismal font. It’s after midnight and he has promised to pay back the money he owes his friend Jacob by noon. Moishe hasn’t got any money. He imagines himself disgraced, thrown out of the merchants association, vilified by the rabbi. His tossing and turning wakes his wife and she asks, “Moishe, what is it?” “I owe Jacob twenty roubles,” he tells her, “but I have no money. What shall I do?” “Is that all?” his wife says then gets up and bangs on the wall and shouts for all the neighbours to hear, “Jacob! My Moishe still owes you twenty roubles? Well, he isn’t giving them back!” then climbs back into bed and says to her flabbergasted husband, “Now go to sleep, let Jacob stay awake!”

The rest of the journey passed without incident. I picked up the newspaper and caught up on what was happening in the world: everywhere, with giant steps, war was gaining ground.