Boualem Sansal - The German Mujahid

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.