Hugo Hamilton - The Sailor in the Wardrobe

When my mother had finished her cigarette, she stayed at the window while it was starting to get dark. So then I asked her about Stefan’s father. I had been thinking about what he had told me very briefly about his father in the war, and now I was sorry I didn’t ask him any more questions, because he might not come back and I would never find out. At first, my mother didn’t want to talk about it. But there is always time for the truth in our house, she says, so she told me what she knew and what she had heard from Käthe.

Stefan’s father had been studying as a chemist during the Nazi years, but sometime after Hitler started the war with Russia, he was taken into the army and was ordered to go east. They drove all night and all day, because the German army had gone far to the east, as far as the Ukraine. She remembers Stefan’s father saying how he could not believe that the land could be so flat for so long. He said the drivers of the tanks and the trucks were given special medication called Pervitin that would keep them awake and driving for days, but it then made them exhausted and aggressive. The same drugs that young people are now using for recreation. The Nazis had a factory for mind-altering drugs to keep the troops going. The soldiers were drinking a lot as well and often you could see them asleep in the back of the trucks, with spittle dripping down on their uniforms, not interested in where they were going or what the landscape looked like. Stefan’s father loved travelling and he was excited about going somewhere new and seeing the little villages in the Ukraine with wooden houses and cows tied up outside. Women with headscarves in the fields with their children working on the harvest.

Stefan’s father didn’t see much of the fighting, although he did pass through villages that had been bombed or set on fire. He saw people being evicted from their houses and driven up the road in clusters, carrying their belongings. But the first indication that they had come close to the front was when they stopped at a makeshift barracks and he could hear the very distant sound of artillery fire. He must have been afraid and excited, my mother says, because she remembers that sound as well. It’s a sound where you keep wondering how far away it is and whether it’s coming closer or whether it’s going away. She says that sometimes you try and convince yourself that it’s moving further away when it’s actually coming towards you.

The soldiers were getting drunk every night on the alcohol they had found in the small houses. Other soldiers said the real party was going on just east of the camp, and Stefan’s father believed what they said. He didn’t realize that the word ‘party’ meant killing. My mother doesn’t know exactly how this happened, but at one point, while Stefan’s father was patrolling through the forest close to the camp, he came across the killing himself. There had been gunshots earlier that morning, but it had become very quiet. When he came to the edge of the forest, he could see German soldiers and SS men out in the open. He saw women undressing and had no idea what this meant. Women of all ages with their children and grandchildren. A group of soldiers got the order to fire and the women and children began to fall backwards into a pit behind them. It took Stefan’s father a moment to realize what he was witnessing. He ran away, back into the forest, and could not understand what he had seen. He knew it was wrong, but he didn’t know what to do about it.

My mother says Stefan’s father got back to the camp and felt he would be arrested for what he had seen. He was afraid to speak to anyone about it. He felt that what he had witnessed was a crime and that he would be found guilty for speaking about it. He was afraid that he might be killed for knowing the facts. So he kept it to himself and even when others were hinting that there was something going on, he was terrified that if he uttered a word in public, he would pay for it.

‘He had the weakness,’ my mother says.

I wondered if Onkel Ulrich might have thought it was an illusion or something he had fabricated in his own mind. Of course he knew it was a scene of horror, because he heard the sound of children screaming as he ran back into the forest. He didn’t know how his legs even carried him, because they were gone soft like jelly. He could still hear the sound of weeping years later, like a sound that would never die down, like some kind of tinnitus that came back every time he heard a baby crying. He was like the landlord in the fiery carriage, condemned to hearing the sound of weeping for eternity.

I know what it’s like to have the weakness, to be powerless and have no way of doing anything to stop what’s happening. Maybe Stefan’s father is like me, waiting for somebody who would tell him what he had seen. People often don’t understand what they have witnessed until it has been made clear to them.

It was not long afterwards that they were sent further to the east and my mother says he must have lost any sense of self-protection. He was shot in the leg almost immediately and taken to the field hospital. His knee was completely shattered and he never walked without a stick again. I remember when we were small and went to Germany, we saw him always sitting sideways at the table. My mother says he was glad that he had been injured. He didn’t care about his leg as long as the nightmare would go away and let him sleep. But the nightmare never left him. It kept coming back again and again, as if he was seeing it for the first time and he wanted to run away again each time but couldn’t.

After he got back to Germany, he thought of reporting what he had seen, going to the newspapers, but everything was controlled by the Nazis. He told his own family, but they were afraid of what they were hearing and begged him never to say anything out loud in the open or they would all be sent to the concentration camps. So he kept it to himself.

It was only after the war, when he got married to Tante Käthe, that he could speak about it. It was all out in the open and he found out that things were even worse than he had imagined as he learnt about the concentration camps. Everybody was trying to rebuild their lives and all they talked about was repairing houses and finding food. He tried to work really hard to undo this nightmare that kept returning. He didn’t think of writing it down in a diary or turning it into a letter to somebody who would take the images away. And it was not something he could talk to his wife about every night either.

It was only when Stefan was growing up that he finally found the right moment to speak out. He could have kept it like a secret to himself, my mother says, but he did the best thing of all, more courageous than anything he could have done during the war that might have been futile. Onkel Ulrich told his own son. He took the biggest step of all long after the war, in peacetime. He took the risk of losing the affection of his son, the risk that he would be killed by his own son, the risk that his only son would never speak to him again.

So that’s how Stefan inherited the history of his father and the nightmare of the forest massacre in the Ukraine. That’s why Stefan cannot get rid of it either. And now I bear the image in my head as well. I know that Stefan can do nothing to un-remember it either, because it’s stuck in his mind as if he had seen it himself. My mother says, there is nothing you can do to put this nightmare out of your mind. ‘We have to invent ways of un-killing people,’ she says.

At first I don’t understand what she means. But then she explains that we have to bring all those dead people back to life again. It’s the Germans who killed them, but it’s also the Germans who will bring them back by remembering them. As long as only one person in the world remembers, then they are still alive and not quite dead yet. As long as there is still a trace of those people, however small, left in your memory, that’s all that matters. My mother says it’s a new German invention, keeping those murdered people alive. We can’t be afraid of the past. The past is not a weakness and we have to think of ways of keeping those murdered people from disappearing. It’s the hardest thing to do, she says, but they are our people and it’s going to be a great talent, something the Germans are going to be the best at, the un-killing of millions of people.