The German Mujahid

RACHEL’S DIARY, MARCH 1995

My life is a living hell. Everything is going wrong. Ophélie is always nagging me, she won’t give me a minute’s peace, she wants things to go back to the way they were, she wants me to be the man I was when we first met. I know now why women love soap operas — they tell the same stories over and over with the same dialogue, the same sets, actors who barely age a day in twenty years. The characters never change. Maybe this is their way of taking revenge on life. But I can understand Ophélie. Her whole world has been turned upside down, she’s living with a stranger, an intruder, an impostor, someone who is not interesting or exciting, some lunatic who is constantly brooding about horrors from another time, another world. This is not the man she married, this stranger has no business being in her life, in our soap-opera love story. I’ve tried to keep things to myself, but it’s getting harder and harder. I’ve tried hiding behind my work, I’ve made up emergencies, deals going south, I’ve blamed the recession the economists are always talking about, I’ve blamed tough negotiations, I’ve blamed the Chinese and the Indians and the Koreans for underbidding and stealing our market share, senior management for their obsession with endless meetings, flurries of last-minute orders, endless seminars and conferences, the unions terrified of losing their benefits just making things worse. I talk to her about these things the way you might explain a war film to a pacifist or a conscientious objector, I try to keep up the suspense, putting in just enough high-minded principles to justify the ruthlessness of our reactions. Our jobs are on the line, we’re fighting for our lives, for her. But she doesn’t care about any of this. In her eyes, none of these things can justify my silence, my constant absences, the bags under my eyes, my lack of interest in food, in sex, and nothing can justify my obsession with those books—those vile books, she calls them — about the war, the SS, the deportations, the extermination camps, the machinery of death, the post-war trials, the worldwide hunt for war criminals. In fact, she once threatened to throw them in the fire, but one look at me and she knew it wouldn’t be a good move. I moved the books out to the garage and put a lock on the tool cabinet. Sometimes she said things that were really hurtful, though I knew it wasn’t really her, it was her mother talking. One day she said to me, “You’re all the same, you half-breeds, it’s all six of one and half a dozen of the other, you have no idea what you want really.” I said, “You can tell your mother from me that six of one and half a dozen of the other are not the same thing, though that’s what the expression is supposed to mean.” Ophélie sulked for a whole week because I corrected her, and her mother phoned me and screamed that she wasn’t about to take French lessons from a foreigner. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I said, “It’s all relative. A foreigner is only foreign to a foreigner. In the absolute he is just a person and there’s no law that says he can’t read Molière and Maupassant.” She slammed the phone down. One night, when I came home with a pile of new books under my arm, Ophélie, with an ingenuousness that scared me, said, “It’s not like we killed the Jews, I can’t see why you’re so obsessed with this whole thing.” This was the last straw. I answered with the same chilly detachment, “You’re right, it wasn’t us, but it could have been us!” I didn’t try to explain and she quickly changed the subject. “My mother’s coming over for dinner tonight, so do me a favour and snap out of this mood.”

My mother-in-law is really something. I don’t mind that she’s fat, ugly, eccentric and her taste in clothes might best be described as garish. It’s quite funny watching her play at being the diva. My problem is she has a poisonous tongue and a stare that could turn a nest of rattlesnakes to stone. When she’s around, I can’t breathe without her thinking the worst.

“I’m very disappointed in you, Rachel, you’ve really changed, you’ve completely let yourself go. In my house, we don’t. . ”

“Well, I’m delighted to say that you clearly haven’t changed at all. But may I remind you that we are not in your house, this is my house. . ”

With that, dinner came screeching to a halt. My mother-in-law stormed off spluttering, her daughter threw her napkin in my face and went after her. A minute later, the front door banged as though a hurricane had ripped it from its hinges, the whole house shook. I sat by myself, finishing my dinner, delighted at the thought that I had spared at least a few rattlesnakes.

The next morning, there was a shitstorm waiting for me at the office. Another one. When it rains it pours. I was summoned to see the boss and, from his secretary’s tone, I knew he was going to tear me off a strip. I’d been expecting it. It was all over the office, people had been talking behind my back for months. Whenever I walked into a room, everyone suddenly changed the subject. I was worried, but not too worried. My boss, Monsieur Candela, is a friend, he’s like a brother, he hired me, he showed me the ropes, and whenever this magnificent money-making machine kicked me in the balls, he was the one who helped me up again. We had two things in common: Nantes, where both of us had studied and where he had once taught fluid mechanics; and Algeria, his birthplace and that of all his tribe going back generations to some distant Basque forefather. The minute he saw my CV, he decided to hire me. He needed a fellow student, a fellow countryman to help him run his kingdom: the largest sales force in Europe and Africa. And he needed a talented engineer, something I believed I could become. I was twenty-four, I had a brand-new degree and a head full of new ideas. The job was a gift, I had made a good friend and had gained the prospect of travelling. Six months later, I moved into our dream house and — with her mother’s rose-tinted blessing — I married Ophélie, the only girl I’ve ever loved. They were good times, our feet only ever touched the ground when we needed to walk somewhere.

Monsieur Candela was sitting at his desk with the sullen, scornful glower of a manager expecting an underling who has suddenly fallen from grace. Playing bad cop doesn’t suit him, he has a sunny, cheerful Mediterranean disposition. I hadn’t even closed the door when he ripped into me. “Are you planning to keep up this shit?” This is how he always talks at work, very American, shooting from the hip, straight to the point, no pussyfooting. It makes sense, after all we are here to make money and the company article of faith can be summed up in three words: Time is money, our god is the Almighty Dollar. The company is 100 percent American, the only thing foreign about it is the market. And the staff — the pissant, prolix, profligate Frogs, though at least they get to pay us in French francs — they consider to be infidels.

“I’m going through a bad patch.”

“So what else is new? Is it Ophélie?”

“Not really.”

“What then? Is Monsieur having a crisis of conscience?”

I told him the whole story, about the April 24 massacre, about papa’s past. I gave it to him in bullet points like it was a corporate debriefing. I skipped over my crisis of conscience. He skipped over his shock and his questions.

“Let’s go to the café, we can talk there. But I’m warning you, the boss wants your hide — or my head. Your sales figures for the last six months are a disaster, and he’s obviously got someone keeping tabs on every day, every minute, you’re out of the office. Congratulations. You’ve set a new world record! I’ve put in a good word for you, but this is a company, not a church, so you’re going to turn this fucking thing around right now or three months from now you’ll be clearing your desk. Is that clear?”

It was clear. I was going to be fired. My stay of execution was complicated by other factors, the union wouldn’t get involved, there were too many human-resources hoops to jump through, too much red tape. The company was doing well, but per capita revenue is per capita revenue. It’s a principle we’ve been taught to carry around like a sick man carries a thermometer. The company philosophy is simple as a biblical exhortation: Better we throw out one bad apple rather than risk infecting the whole barrel. The “we” in that sentence is a formality — the rank and file swallow management decisions hook, line and sinker and parrot them as their own. It’s inevitable, given our profit-sharing system. How was I going to break the news to Ophélie? She wouldn’t believe it. Say nothing, tomorrow is another day, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. .

Monsieur Candela has a flair for understanding things without anyone needing to explain. Our conversation was brief; in his half-closed eyes I saw all the wisdom of the world. I also saw the swift hand that wise men raise to ward off evil.

Stirring his coffee, he said, “Listen to me, Rachel, I know about these things, in my family, we’ve seen it all, hardship, war, deportation, more war, exile, contempt, loneliness, you name it, so listen up: you have to draw a line through this whole thing right now or it’ll destroy you. First of all, you’re grieving for your parents, and feeling sorry for yourself isn’t going to bring them back. You need to do what any good son would do — visit their graves once a year and pray for the repose of their souls. Thank them for the gift of life they’ve given you and let them know that you are making the most of that gift. As for the rest of it — the Holocaust and all the other atrocities in this world — pray to God they never happen again. That’s all you can do. Read if you have to, campaign if you have to, make what little difference you can. Anything more is the devil’s work, anything more means letting your hatred and your thirst for revenge get the better of you. If you let evil in, it will only breed evil, and without realising it, you’ll become a monster. Okay, now, let’s get back to the office. Work is therapy.”

Another favourite Americanism. You wipe the slate clean, spit on your hand, get back behind the wheel. His advice seemed to be to deal with evil by forgetting, which is the worst evil. I was disappointed, but not very. I had expected Monsieur Candela to enlighten me and he had. But was light enough?

Later that afternoon, he phoned and told me that if I needed him he was there for me, then abruptly hung up like a real boss who’s said what he has to say. I wanted to say thank you, but he caught me unawares. Besides, when it comes to expressing my feelings, I take the Buddhist approach: the less you say, the better.

After work, I went to a bookshop. There was a book I needed to pick up. This would be the last book. A man can’t live off welfare even with a couple of hundred share options. We have a lot in common, me and the guy who owns the bookshop. As he gave me book, there was a gleam in his eye. “This is the book you should have started with,” he said. It was true. It hadn’t occurred to me. Urged on by horror, I had started at the end, with the Nuremberg Trials, and slowly worked my way back to the beginning, the hunt for war criminals, the discovery of the camps, the Normandy landings, the war itself, the phony war, etc. All the way back to the source. And this book was the source. When I’d asked him to get me a copy a couple of weeks earlier, he shook his head. “It might be tough to get hold of. It used to be banned. I’ll do what I can, otherwise, you can try secondhand bookshops. . I’ll give you a few addresses.” In the end, he managed to track down a copy of the book which had unleashed the most terrible tragedy on the world. On me. Mein Kampf.

I don’t know how many times I read it. Angrily, compulsively at first, then more calmly, finally with an increasingly anxious serenity. I was looking for the key, the spell that had persuaded intelligent, able-bodied men like my father to shed their humanity and become killing machines. There is nothing in this book, nothing but dishwater, the ramblings of a hick from the sticks, the pretentious claptrap of tin-pot chiefs who dream of being immortal dictators, slogans for election posters in a slave republic. “God helps those who kill the Jews; An Aryan in the hand is worth all the Jews in the world; Preserve the bloodline, beware of contamination; Is your neighbour sick or handicapped? Kill him.” If this was all it took for evil to sway the Germans and turn them into Nazis, you had to hand it to Hitler. I had been expecting some irrefutable line of reasoning, an alchemy of complex arguments, devastating revelations about a worldwide conspiracy against the German people, a chain reaction linking one chapter to the next, extraordinary circumstances skillfully orchestrated, I had expected Satan to have penned certain passages supplying the ink and the details for the rest of it. But there was nothing. All it had taken for evil to triumph was a beardless, blustering soldier, a depressive, syphilitic housepainter, a few well-turned phrases, a muscular title—My Struggle—and a socioeconomic context that fostered grievances, condemnations, recriminations and hyperbole. There were, of course, other factors: the history of the country, its roots in centuries-old sects, in age-old myths filled with vague esoteric ideas, echoes of this or that, far-fetched theories, rediscovered mythology, new philosophies born in the heat of action, dreams of glory that might have come from an inmate at the local lunatic asylum or a drunk in the bar next door, and the lust for power that technical progress and scientific advancements inspire in a society desperate to reassert itself. You didn’t have to look too hard. What country doesn’t have demons locked up in its ancient cellars, what country doesn’t have warmongers, dreams of immortality, what people doesn’t have a few genes damaged by history, what people is not exposed to life’s slings and arrows, what religion hasn’t been rocked by scientific discoveries? There is but one humanity and evil lurks within us, in our very marrow.

I was sinking, I knew that. Worse still, I was gappling with trivial details when what I needed to do was cling to the simple facts. There was no reason for what had happened. To try to find a root cause for evil was absurd. Evil is. It has existed since the dawn of time. Looking for a means to analyse it or a ready-made explanation is pointless, and weighing every detail in the balance is self-defeating. I believe that evil is an endlessly recurring accident that sends good and bad drivers alike crashing into a wall. Good has meaning only at funerals, it is only at such moments that we see ourselves for what we truly are: dust which will be swept away with the next breath of wind. This, I firmly believe, is what goodness means. There is no better deterrent, there is no more salutary lesson. If this person has died, we too will die, there is nothing more to it. But there is no good, evil reigns supreme. What happened to my father happened to others in Germany and elsewhere, yesterday and the day before, and it will go on happening tomorrow and the day after. For as long as the earth revolves around the sun, for as long as life — this sweet madness — keeps company with its antidote mankind — this furious madness — there will be crimes and criminals and victims. And grief beyond measure. And accomplices. And bystanders. And despots who wash their hands of our suffering. And yet, this crime is not like other crimes, and it is this uniqueness I must face. Alone. More alone than anyone in the world.

Rereading what I have just written, I realise I’ve missed the most important point. I’ve ducked the issue, what I’ve written is just gobbledy-gook and cheap philosophy. I have to face the facts. They are what they are, nothing and no one, not even God, can go back and deal the cards again. My father did what he did of his own free will, he acted according to his conscience, the proof being that others refused to do what he did and paid with their lives, or managed to emigrate in time. The other, irrefutable proof is that he kept his files like sacred relics, his military record, his medals, that fucking SS Death’s Head, preserved like blessed sacraments. When you can do nothing in the face of totalitarianism, when you are already caught in the trap, there is still one last means of self-preservation: suicide. It is our last resort, our wild card, invisible, invincible. It is why when the wolf, that magnificent beast, gets his paw caught in a trap, he gnaws on it, he chews it off and finds his freedom, whole, intact, troubling as Psyche herself, struggles on to the last drop of blood and dies of exhaustion and overwhelming relief. Even after the crime was committed, papa still had this recourse, to give himself up, demand justice in the name of his victims, become again the man he had been, regain his dignity. Instead he ran away, he hid, he lied, he disowned himself and, in doing so, left his crime unpunished, silence was his refuge. He consecrated it. I would have preferred him to have appeared before a jury of his peers with the Bonzen of the Third Reich, Hess, Rippentrop and the rest of them. Solemn judgement gives the crimes back their full horror and restores to the guilty some part of their lost humanity. Silence perpetuates a crime, gives it new life, closes the door on justice and truth and throws opens the door to forgetfulness, to the possibility that it might happen again.

One question drives me mad: Did papa know what he was doing in Dachau, in Buchenwald, in Majdanek, in Auschwitz? I can’t think of him as a victim anymore, as some fresh-faced innocent unwittingly infected by evil. And even if he was, there comes a moment, a split second, some event, however trivial, some unexpected, fleeting series of terrible images which lead to realisation, doubt, revolt. At that moment something within us cries out, it must do, if it did not then there is nothing, no God, no man, no truth. How could anyone fail to react, if only with an imperceptible shudder, when faced with the haunted eyes of a sickly child shivering with cold in the desolation of a death camp, with a naked woman hiding her pudenda as she is dragged to the gas chambers, a woman without hair or name, with no more strength to remember, eyes empty and womb cold as a frog in winter, with a man clinging to a dignity long since destroyed even as the last tatters of humanity are stripped from him, a man who dies at a yes or a no.

I tell myself: if a single crime goes unpunished on this earth, if silence prevails over anger, then men do not deserve to live. In a better world, I would have given myself up, put on my black suit, stood before a judge and confessed: “My father tortured and killed thousands of people who never did him any harm and he got away scot-free. By the time I knew what he had done, he was dead, so I have come here in his place. Judge me, save me, please.” But in this world, I wouldn’t even be thought of as laughable, I would be thrown out of court, I would be summarily ejected, lectured. My God, they might wink at me! All I can do is deal with this thing alone. But I don’t know, everything is shocking, secret, squalid, everything in this world that has survived the end of the world is governed by prevarication and procrastination; once again we have come to believe that a lie is a necessary social protection for a people, a useful gift for an unruly child, a comfort for the anxious. I tell myself all sorts of things, I am drowning in a nightmare of horror, I have no raft to cling to. I am alone. More alone than anyone in the world. This world that to me seems so remote, deceptively preoccupied, obsessed with itself, its vague desires, its inconsequential joys, its follies, feeding on them as a cannibal feeds on himself, obsessed with its own time, its own tragedies, its dreams, its powerlessness. I’m struggling. Usually, I’ve got no time for self pity, for interminable obsessions. I remind myself that all this is simply history, that history belongs to the past, that the past is dead, we have forgotten, we no longer know, we have put things in perspective, that we live in an age that has its own problems, problems that are so great, so terrible, we cannot see our way out, while tomorrow, our only choice in life bears down on us with all its cruelties and sorrows. To me, it is an entire world that has collapsed on my head, it is the entire history of evil that stares me in the face, probes at my heart, my guts, steals into my memory, asks to be remembered, tells me endlessly how things were, who we were. The image haunts me, the fog suffocates me, my head aches, my ears are ringing. . I hear a commotion. . I see the dreary camp. . watch the procession of shadows. . men, women, children, all skin and bone, numberless, naked, marching obediently towards a vast inferno beneath the watchful eye of the SS officer. . help!. . I peer further into this horror. . I scream for help, I look around for my father. . Where are you, papa? What are you doing? I need to find him, to wake him, I need to wake up. . to save my father. . my father who is lost. . who has ruined us. My house has crumbled, grief has made me powerless; and I do not know why, my father never told me. . There he is, papa, immaculate in his black uniform, wearing the famous red armband. . He smiles at me, tender but stern, the affectionate smile of a father. . I don’t know how it happened, but he is here with me, just as he was in our house in Aïn Deb. We are living in a beautiful house just outside. . the camp. . the Konzentratzionlager. . Nearby is a beautiful forest, glorious flowers, shimmering colours, and behind the hill. . that place, all black, all grey, the place where I am not allowed to go. . I play with the other boys, the officers’ children and with children they bring over from that place to keep us company, to play games, to be our playthings, our whipping boys when we’re angry, to serve our whims. . but we hate these children, they’re scrawny and sickly, flea-ridden and scrofulous, they have no hair, no teeth, they don’t know how to play, they’re silent and stupid and we don’t understand them. All they can think about is eating, keeping warm, sleeping. . we shout at them, we hit them but still they don’t react, they just curl up like hedgehogs. . Around us, inhuman wretches with sunken eyes shamble through the pretty village, pretending to till the ground, rake the gravel, paint the fences. They are our prisoners, these creatures who have maimed our country, incensed our Führer, they wear filthy striped pyjamas, they are ugly, foul-smelling, deceitful, fawning, ungrateful, they steal whatever they can — cigarette butts, scraps of papers, stale crumbs of bread, the sight of a rusty nail can make their eyes pop out, the sight of a bone can have them slavering like dogs, they poke through our garbage, stare at us enviously. . Sometimes they stop pretending to work, they look up, look out into the distance, past the camp, past the hill. . to the tall column of oily fetid smoke that rises into the sky. . Oh, that scream!. . the sky is dark with wheeling carrion crows, filling the air with their baleful cawing. . Get out of here!. . You too, you fucking kikes. . The prisoners stare up at the sky. They seem constantly surprised by the sudden whirr that sometimes wakes us in the night, at dawn, in the cold, a grinding noise that grows louder, a series of dull metallic sounds, chains clanking, the slamming of heavy metal doors, the quiet fitful hiss of the pumps, the sudden drop in voltage that makes the lights flicker. . screams, perhaps. . a ghostly clamour that grows louder and louder, then gradually dies away, leaving a haunting silence. . My God, how strange this silence sounds, how painful. . people who. . more shaven heads appear by the foot of the hill. . another column of smoke advances stolidly. . emerges from the darkness, trudges through the dull grey day to disappear into the night. . it is far away. . the wind is blowing in the other direction. . the prisoners stop, lost in contemplation, so our Kapos rush over and knock them to the ground, lice hopping from their clothes as the Kapos lash out with clubs and guttural roars “Arbeit!. . Arbeit!. . Schnell!. . Schnell!” We roll on the ground laughing. Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha!. . It’s strange that flayed and wasted as they are, the prisoners feel nothing, say nothing, do nothing, some laugh, baring their horrid teeth, staring up at the sky, they look as though they might sing. . They are fascinated. Then, when they are ready, they scramble to their feet, pick up their tools and pretend to till the ground, rake the gravel, paint the fences, check that everything is spick and span. Infuriating automata, they look as though all their lives they have done nothing but make these same gestures, as though they were born to this. Sometimes, there are two or three still sprawled on the ground but their comrades do not see them, pretend not to see them. The Kapos bark orders and they are carried off on stretchers past the camp, over there, past the hill. . Officers laugh or yell angrily, their whips whistle, slapping against their boots. . the Kapos laugh, they bow and scrape. . the Kapos are favoured prisoners, they have some flesh on their bones at the expense of their suffering brothers. . they speak a language I don’t understand, or barely. “Gut, gut, Juden kaput, fini, Konetz, danke, Dûkuji, merci beaucoup, dobry¯den.” Papa calls me inside for something to eat. . I. . I. . the wind has shifted, the air is suddenly rank and muggy. . We go inside and close the windows.

I feel like screaming, like ripping my skin off. I don’t know, I don’t know what to do, I feel crushed by the silence, this terrifying silence, it is impossible for me to tell things apart. Dream, nightmare and reality have merged. There is no way out.

I woke up sweating. It was — I don’t know, it might be night, it might be day. I called out for Ophélie. I shouted again, “Ophélie, Ophélie!” I heard a noise in the kitchen, a dull drone. . the hiss of gas expanding. . the fridge. “Ophélie. . Ophélie!” She isn’t there. She hasn’t come home. She has left me. The silence is preternatural. . I can hear it, it smells of burning, it clings to your skin. Something falls off the sofa. My God, the noise! A book. . Mein Kampf. I take it into the garage and burn it.