The German Mujahid

MALRICH’S DIARY, 16 DECEMBER 1996

It had been a terrible day. I’d done just what Rachel had done, gone from house to house, drunk coffee after coffee, babbled as best I could and in the end — partly because I felt shattered and needed to get the hell out and partly because mourning does not wait on twilight, Mimed took me to the cemetery. The sun, which had risen early was sinking now, framed by big black clouds but still visible, the wind had died away. The air stinging my lungs was bitterly cold.

This, then, was the martyrs’ section where my parents were buried. The grass had grown over it, the whitewash on the stones had faded and they were covered in mud. Now the martyrs were like the rest of the dead, there was nothing to distinguish them from the others, they had joined the rest of the cemetery where the people who died of natural causes were buried, or maybe, more rightly, those who’d died of natural causes had come to join the victims to shoulder some of their pain. Soon they would be united in the same dust. You couldn’t see the small monument erected by the authorities any more, all the dead were now subject to the same power, to time which obliterates everything.

Mimed stood off to one side and left me to myself. He bowed his head and prayed while standing in front of my parent’s grave. I tried to meditate, to remember happy times from my childhood with papa and maman. I couldn’t seem to do it, but figured I’d soon get the hang of this meditation thing, Rachel got so good at it he went round philosophising like a council of imams. Suddenly I felt a stabbing pain, a spasm ripping through my guts. What had been vague, something I’d known only secondhand from reading Rachel’s diary, something I’d kept private, suppressed, carefully contained, was now here before my eyes: my parents’ graves, the graves of papa, of maman, of our neighbours, the graves of childhood friends, of babies I had not seen born or grow up, all of them butchered like dogs by God knows who. My head exploded, I started to sob, to scream, I couldn’t think straight, I fell on my knees and started to beat my head against the ground. It was all so unfair, so strange, so many things had been hushed up, and everywhere I could smell the stink of injustice, twisting the knife in the wound. I didn’t know what to do. Then suddenly, a sort of madness took me, I wanted smash things, I was filled with hate — I hated myself, I hated the whole world, hated Rachel and this country and these people. I hated the way things were. I hated the people of Aïn Deb for living in silence, for tending that silence like a sacred flame, like a barrier protecting them from themselves. I despised them for treating truth, treating life as things that could be hidden, hushed up, for bringing children into a life of lies, of pretence, of ignorance and amnesia. I am paying the price. Papa never told us anything, and when his turn came, Rachel never told me anything, the authorities tell us nothing, they have broken our spirit. We are helpless, pitiful, weak, ready to make any concession, agree to any cover-up, collude in any cowardice. We’re dead men, we’re sheep, we’re concentration-camp prisoners. I hated my father for making us pariahs. I hated God through whose will things were this way, God who, almighty, invisible, serene, extends across the universe, who doesn’t hear our cries, doesn’t answer our prayers. Well, fuck Him, His truth is not our truth, and our truth is not His. He is not one of us. That’s why I want this diary to be read by people all over the world, people like me, like us. I’ve nothing to hide, I don’t want to hide anything, I want people to see me for what I am, to know who I am and where I come from.

I struggled to my feet, raied my arms and shouted: “My name is Malrich, I am the son of the SS officer Hans Schiller, a man guilty of genocide. I am carrying the weight of the greatest tragedy the world has ever known, I am its repository, and I’m ashamed, I’m afraid and I want to die! I’m begging for your help, because no one told me anything, all of this has been visited on me and I don’t know why. My brother killed himself, my parents and their neighbours were murdered and I don’t know why or by whom, I’m alone, more alone than anyone in the world.”

It was then that I felt rage, black rage, grip my insides, I had no right to feel sorry for myself, the only truth is Nakam—revenge. I hated the Islamists, those Nazi bastards, I wanted to kill every last one of them, to kill their wives, their children, their grandchildren, their parents, to bulldoze their houses, their mosques, their bunkers, break up their sleeper cells, hound them into the next world and crush them before God Himself, the same God they claim to represent. I wanted fireworks like on Bastille Day, to celebrate their deaths our rebirth. Why are they like this, God? Why have You made them like this? Who can save them? Who will save their wives, their children? Who will save us from them?

I was trembling, I collapsed on the ground and rolled in the mud. I wanted to die. “I want to die,” I howled as loud as I could.

Mohamed came over, put his arm around my shoulder and led me back to the village like you’d lead a blind man. He didn’t speak French, so he thought I had been lashing out at Allah. Over and over he said in a reproachful tone, “It is mektoub, Malek, it is fate, we must accept it.” At that moment I wanted to kill him too. I pushed him away and said, “Mektoub, mektoub. . So Allah made you this way, so spineless and weak that when people come to slit your throats like sheep you do nothing?” Even as I’d said it, I felt ashamed. That whole day in the airport, special agents had treated us like dogs, like camp prisoners, we’d been terrified, starving, numb with cold, soaked to the skin, they’d taken our suitcases, our papers, our identities, gassed us with exhaust fumes and left us in the dark, in the filthy hangar, without a word, without a look, and not one of us had done a thing, we hadn’t asked questions, hadn’t demanded that our rights be read to us before we let them take us away. We were all thinking, This is how things are, there’s nothing we can do. And we all watched, silent, relieved, when the others were loaded back onto the truck and driven off into the unknown. “It’s not mektoub, Mimed,” I said, gasping for breath. “It’s us, we’re the problem.”

I needed to be alone. Alone forever.

I went back to my parents’ house. My house now — I am the last of the Schillers. It smelled of mould and neglect. I aired the rooms and lit a fire in the fireplace. Then I changed my clothes, put on my white burnous, sat in maman’s chair and wrote down the first thing that came into my head.

I needed to be happy, to be hopeful for an hour or two to recharge my batteries or I’d go mad. I wrote stuff down as it came to me, little things, everyday things. I wrote that aunt Sakina and uncle Ali would be happier here in Aïn Deb. The air is fresh, the silence is peaceful. Living on the tenth floor of a tower block on the estate, they never go out, except when aunt Sakina goes shopping with Maïmouna, the old woman who lives down the hall. They always go together, they always buy the same things, pasta, rice, tinned tomatoes and a nice white baguette. In Aïn Deb they’d have the whole countryside, neighbours to look out for them, they wouldn’t have to deal with all the noise, the hassle of living in a city. They could get a couple of chickens, a few goats and the rest would come naturally. The years would go by, they’d get used to things, adapt to the seasons and one day they’d die and it would not be a tragedy but they would not go unmourned. And the cemetery is just down the road, they would be buried with their family, with their people, and go into the next life with them.

I remembered my mates and I thought, now that it was my turn I’d tell them everything. I’d tell them all the things I’d been hiding. They’ve lived in silence and ignorance long enough. Maybe it’s too late, maybe they’ll be hurt when they find out, but maybe it will give them hope, the sort of hope that gives you wings and the urge to fly. This was what I needed, hope, to live and to be happy to wait for tomorrow.

I thought about the estate, and I knew now that we could change it. It would be easy — all we had to do was talk to each other and tell the children everything. The rest would come naturally. Despair would scuttle away having nothing left to cling to. The authorities would have to listen to us, they would see in our eyes what we knew, what we wanted: truth and respect. The jihadists wouldn’t dare come near us, they’d run away — heads down, tails between their legs, beards at half-mast. The devil would take them home and devour them. And that would be that. We’d turn the page and throw the party to end all parties.

I thought about Rachel and I promised myself I’d visit his grave and tell him everything. Tell him that I knew everything, and that, thanks to our diaries, the whole world will know who we are, what we suffered, that we will no longer need to to hide, to be ashamed, to lie.

That night, I didn’t sleep, I spent the whole night talking to my parents like I used to do years ago, talking to Rachel, the way we never did, talking to my mates, the way we soon would. It was like I was happy already.

Note: The way the following chapters are laid out and the excerpts from Rachel’s diary were suggested to me by Madame Dominique G.H.

Rachel visited Istanbul and Cairo in March 1996, after the long trek that started in Frankfurt in June 1995 and took him through Germany, Austria and Poland, ending in Auschwitz in February 1996. With one exception, Rachel followed a logical, necessary route, he retraced papa’s career as it appears in his military record: it begins in Frankfurt, goes on to various camps in Germany and Austria and ends in Poland, not Auschwitz, but at Lublin-Majdanek. There are other postings mentioned in his military record — in France and in Belgium — but Rachel assumed they had nothing to do with the Holocaust. They were brief, probably scientific, stints in Paris, Rocroi, Ghent and elsewhere, places where the Reich didn’t have concentration camps. Papa was a chemical engineer so he might easily have been sent to a factory, or a training centre or one of the laboratories run by the Reich. The one thing I don’t understand is why Rachel made Auschwitz the last stop on his journey, when papa had been there mid-way through his career. Was it because to most people Auschwitz is synonymous with the extermination of the Jews? I don’t think so. Rachel had done his research, he knew the horrors in Auschwitz were no different to any other camps, and besides — as he says in his diary — prisoners were regularly shunted from one camp to another, what they didn’t suffer in one, they suffered in another. Whatever his reasons, it’s obvious that his trip to Auschwitz, more than any of a the others, utterly devastated him. I think it was there, at a very specific moment, that he decided to kill himself — to gas himself — as soon as he got back to Paris. Maybe he’d thought about it before, maybe he’d thought about it from the very beginning back in Aïn Deb, maybe it happened in Uelzen or in Frankfurt, or later in Buchenwald, in Dachau, or during the weeks and months he spent alone in his house after he lost his job, after Ophélie left. Maybe Auschwitz was only a catalyst, a trigger. But maybe, in a very specific way, the scene at Auschwitz he describes at length was what finally decided him.

According to papa’s military record, he was at Lublin-Majdanek when the Nazis were defeated. Soviet troops had marched into Poland and were advancing towards Berlin like a steamroller. After that, there’s no mention of him. Did he and his friends go back to Germany to make a last stand? Did they hide out in Austria, go to ground in Poland? Rachel doesn’t know. Nazi troops were deserting in such numbers and the chaos was so great that one guess is as good as another. The only thing we know for sure is that at some point — in Poland or in Germany — papa made contact with Unit 92 and, with their help, made it to Turkey and from there to Egypt.

I’ve taken some liberties in the way I’ve organised the rest of the chapters, and in the pieces I’ve chosen to include from Rachel’s diary. I’ve moved the section about Istanbul and Cairo to the next chapter, and out of all the stuff he wrote about his long journey through the camps of Germany and Poland, I’ve only kept the piece on Auschwitz, which is in a later chapter. If I’d included everything Rachel wrote, our diaries would have been too long, too terrible to read. Some day, I’ll put everything in one book, but I doubt there are many people who could bear to read it to the end.

In his journey to the heart of darkness, Rachel wrote hundreds of pages filled with incredibly technical details about the camps and the appalling, unimaginable stories he heard along the way — some from the guides who showed him round the camps, some from former prisoners who had come to make pilgrimage. Meeting survivors was incredibly painful for him. He wrote pages and pages about it, harrowing and heartbreaking. Sometimes he’d pretend to be a researcher, or a relative of someone who’d been in the camps. He’d persuade them to talk, press them for the most precise, the most intimate details of what they had suffered. He collated the names too, although he already knew everything, he had researched every detail, he had index cards about everything, though I have to say most of them are illegible. The notes he made from the books he read are filled with formulas and symbols, diagrams and sketches and quotes about how the camp prisoners were fed, how the laundry worked, what medical services existed, about the sectors where the clothes were sorted, the laboratories where the experiments were done, about the workings of the famous selection Kommissionen, about the black market that operated in the camps, about the appalling behaviour of the SS officers, constantly on the lookout for someone with a stash of jewellery, for a pretty girl like Nadia, for a bottle of booze or a nice fur coat or a bare-knuckle fight they could cheer on: he wrote about the military ceremonies, the civil and religious commemorations, the inspections when the Bonzen came round, the brothels for the Kapos, the brothels reserved for the officers. He knew all the books by heart, but he needed to hear it from the mouths of those who had lived in the camps, who forgot that there existed a world outside, a world where people lived and danced and read books, where they learned and loved and bought flowers, raised children and thanked God for His blessings. It was uncomfortable, Rachel says, but he was tactful, asked questions only if he felt someone needed to talk, said nothing and stared straight ahead when a man began to choke on his sobs. He’d ask, in an offhand way, whether they remembered their guards — names, ranks, whether some had any particular vices, whether they were more cruel than the rules dictated, whether some behaved humanely. But he always came back to the gas chambers, to the Sonderkommando, the Einsatzgruppen, the soldiers who took the prisoners whose turn it was to “take a shower,” to that self-effacing man — the chemical engineer who prepared the Zyklon B — and asked if they remembered his name. He felt unspeakably guilty, constantly thinking, this man knew my father, he has never forgotten him, he will never forget him, I have to tell him, this is his truth as much as it is mine: Sir, I need to tell you, I am Hans Schiller’s son. I don’t think he ever told anyone — or if he did he doesn’t mention it in his diary. It would have been a terrible thing to do, it would simply have been adding to their suffering.

After he left Dachau, Rachel promised himself that some day he’d go to Jerusalem to visit the Holocaust memorial of Yad Vashem. He wrote: “The victims are in the camps, their dust, their ashes mingled with German soil and Polish soil for all eternity — it is here that I need to ask for forgiveness, here in front of the gas chambers, in front of the Krema, where my father took their lives. But at Yad Vashem I can put a name to every victim. It is important to say aloud the names of those who, to my father, were nothing more than a yellow star and a number branded on their flesh.”

He never went to Jerusalem, to Yad Vashem. If I have the money some day, I’ll make the journey for him. And for me. I’ll read the names aloud, and, after every one, I’ll ask their forgiveness in my father’s name.

I thought about my parents, whose names had been stripped from them, who were buried under names that were politically convenient. Did it matter? I don’t know. Rachel seemed to think it was important, to me it seems secondary. The name on maman’s grave is her maiden name, Aïcha Majdali, as if she died unmarried, childless, an unclean woman nobody wanted. My father’s grave reads, “Hassan Hans known as Si Mourad,” no surname, only his first name and the name he used in the maquis, like he was a bastard who never knew his father. I don’t know what to think, that’s how the story was written. To everyone in Aïn Deb, “Hassan Hans, known as Si Mourad,” is the name of the cheïkh, the mujahid, the man with the big heart, the chahid, and to them, Aïcha is the daughter of her father, the honored Cheïkh Majdali. I think they would have felt intimidated, awkward before a grave marked Hans Schiller, the way people are when they’re faced with something they don’t understand. Questions still go round and round in my head: did the Algerian authorities know about papa’s past? They had to know back when he was in the maquis, and even after independence, but that was a long time ago. I’m sure the young Bonzen these days don’t know shit, they were brought up in a culture of lies, taught the discipline of forgetting. In a system like this there are only certainties, and if you don’t have any, then vague outdated regulations will do just as well. To them, Aïn Deb is the German’s village, and the German is Hassan Hans known as Si Mourad. What about the people of Aïn Deb? Did they know about papa’s past? Did they hide it? Papa lived with them for more than thirty years, did he never tell them anything, did they never ask questions, did they have some sort of unspoken agreement never to mention it? These are good people to whom hospitality is a sacred duty. When a man knocks at your door, you ask for nothing but put yourself at his service, and if he wants to settle there, you marry him off to the most eligible girl and treat him as one of your own. Have people in Aïn Deb even heard of the Nazi extermination of the Jews? Or are they completely ignorant, like I was, knowing only whatever the imam sees fit to tell them? And what about him, that parrot up there in his minaret, how much does he know? I’m guessing that the Algerian government doesn’t teach this stuff in schools, the kids might get upset, they might feel sorry for the Jews, they might start to realise some other truths. I’m guessing they teach kids to hate the Jews, to keep their minds closed. I remember back when I was in the FLN Youth — the FLNJugends Rachel calls them — they talked about the Jews all the time, the instructors could hardly open their mouths without saying Lihoudi—dirty Jew — then spit on the ground and recite the ritual for cleansing the mouth: “May Allah curse him and wipe him from the face of the earth.” But I suppose things have changed, these days it’s all sugar coated. Algeria is a member of the UN, so they probably have to abide by certain rules even if they don’t agree with them — something Bonzen are pretty good at. They keep the country locked up like a vault, and it’s always the same reason: the poorer, the angrier and the more racist you keep the people, the easier they are to manage. Rachel wrote: “You can’t commit atrocities with enlightened people, you need hatred, blindness and a knee-jerk xenophobia. In the beginning, all states are shaped by madmen and murderers. They kill the good people, drive out the heroes, lock up the people and proclaim themselves liberators.” In the end, I think maybe no one knows. Some day, when peace comes, I’ll come back to Aïn Deb with aunt Sakina and I’ll tell the true story of Hans Schiller to Mohamed, the shoemaker’s son, and get him to tell everyone else in the village. He can explain it better than I could. If I told them, they’d go mad, they wouldn’t believe me, they’d argue, they’d curse me, but truth is truth, it has to be told. At least in the minds of the children it will take root.

Rachel didn’t really need to go to Istanbul or Cairo, he knew everything there was to know about the ratlines Nazi officers used to disappear, to escape justice. In Istanbul Rachel never even left his hotel room, he spent the whole day lying on his bed or daydreaming in front of the window, scribbling in his notebooks and the next morning he was off to Cairo to try and find out how papa ended up getting involved with Nasser’s secret services, the Mukhabarat, after the coup d’état against King Farouk, and how he ended up being sent to Algeria to train the maquis, or whatever it was he was sent to do. But he had no hope of finding out — secret services are secret, and everything they do is secret. There was one thing he did in Cairo that I found weird, something that showed me just how mad he was by then. There was only one reason for his trip to Turkey and Cairo in my mind, he was trying to kill time, he needed a break after his descent into the abyss, and he was trying to keep busy until the time came to die. He had already chosen the precise time: 11 P.M., on 24 April 1996. The massacre in Aïn Deb had taken place on 24 April 1994 at about 11 P.M. That was the moment when papa and maman and our neighbours became victims, but it was also the moment when SS officer Hans Schiller, exterminator and imposter, died, taking his secrets with him to the grave. For Rachel, justice was never done. It was a burden he carried with him to the end, a burden I carry now.