Boualem Sansal - The German Mujahid

How things change. In a few months, the estate has become unrecognisable. What was a Sensitive Urban Area, Category 1 has become a concentration camp. In a few short minutes, the time it took to flick through a military record that should never have been there, Rachel fell into history’s black hole. In two years, he lost his health, his mind, his job, his friends, his Ophélie: the girl he’d loved his whole life. And me, in ten months I’ve gone from dumb apathy to a state of permanent panic somewhere between madness, anger and the urge to rush halfway across the world and drown myself. I don’t know what to do or what will be done tomorrow. I feel terribly alone. More alone that anyone in the world. My parents are dead, Rachel is dead, uncle Ali is not much longer for this world and I have no idea what will happen to aunt Sakina. Life is unutterably sad.

Me and my mates have been saying that maybe it’s time to get the fuck out, to go die somewhere else. Then again we’ve been talking about hanging in there and fighting. One day, we’ll swear it’s all worth it and the next day we’re saying it’s not worth shit. We can’t see what kind of miracle could set it off.

Time has seemed so slow to me these past few months. I’ve lived through a whole century, and not the easiest of centuries, one filled with horror and shame. It has been long and painful, I have paid a price for every step, every word, every scrap of information to know my father, to know in myself the meaning of the extermination and his part in it. I followed his path from start to finish, slipped into his thoughts, set my foot in his footsteps. At no time did I flinch, not before the gas chambers, not before the unbelievable everyday horror of the camps, not even before the grief that every day ate away at my heart. If the walls of the camps, the ghosts of the prisoners, if the men and women I met on my journey into the heart of the Holocaust, if the books I have read could bear witness they would say: this man has given all he can give, he may speak, he knows.

I think I have been honest, I think where possible I have weighed things carefully, nothing is ever absolutely black and it is rarer still that things are white as snow. I have neither tempered the responsibility my father bears, though he was only a tiny cog in a fantastical machine, nor considered that blind machine could have functioned, even for an instant, without the determined commitment of each and every man who was a part of it. I could be wrong, but because I know him as well as any child can know his father, I believe he was never deliberately cruel. He was what he was: stern, exacting, inflexible. A bit of an opportunist too, from what I know of his time in Egypt and Algeria. He had to live, he took whatever was offered: spy, weapons instructor, anything. In Algeria at least he did enough to earn the title of veteran Mujahid , a title of great glory to Algerians. In the village where he lived he was a respected Cheïkh, he was a loving husband to maman and a good father to us, devoted enough to deprive himself of our presence and send us to France to be educated so that we might have a solid future. He was the victim of a barbarous act and was elevated to the status of chahid , a martyr of the nation. To the people of Aïn Deb, he was a Righteous Person.

You do not choose your life. My father did not choose, he found himself on a road that led to infamy, to the very heart of the Holocaust. He couldn’t leave the road, all he could do was close his eyes and keep on walking. No one dreams of being a torturer, no one dreams of one day being a torture victim. Just as the sun releases its excesses of energy in sporadic sun spots, from time to time history releases the hatred humanity has accumulated in a scorching wind that sweeps away everything in its path. Chance decides whether one is here or there, protected or exposed, on this side of the channel or that. I chose nothing, I chose to live a quiet, hardworking life and here I am before a scaffold that was not built for me. I am paying for another’s crime. I want to save him, because he is my father, because he is a man. This is how I choose to answer Primo Levi’s question in If This Is a Man . Yes, no matter however far he has fallen, the victim is a man, and however terrible his shame, his executioner is still a man.

And yet at every moment of our lives, we all have a choice. We have a pact with life, it can leave us when it chooses, if it should judge us unworthy, too obsessed with our power, and we have the luxury of leaving it when we choose, the moment it takes a direction which does not conform to our ideals. We make our decision and we choose an amicable separation, however painful and permanent it may be. If one is to die, one might as well do so with a little self-respect, a little respect for others. My father chose his path and each time life presented him with an alternative, he persisted in that path. He did not kill one person, he killed two, then a hundred, then thousands, tens of thousands, he might have killed millions. He was caught between hatred and servitude and such chasms of the mind are bottomless. And in the end, when the day of reckoning came, he chose to turn his back on his victims and run away. To do so was horrifying, it was to kill them a second time. Later still he knowingly made the mistake of fathering children, aware that sooner or later the truth would come to light and that his children would suffer. To say that such a man is not a man is to strip him of his responsibility, his guilt, it is a way of offering him his quietus, to suggest that he has nothing to atone for, no forgiveness to ask. But even for God in all his glory, or Satan in all his power, such impartiality does not exist, they must earn their thrones and protect them, it is we who have made them kings. And even if “nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again,” we can at least agree to this: we must pay, pay in full. We must not leave our debts behind us.

So, for my father, for his victims, I will pay in full. It is simple justice. Let it not be said that all the Schillers have failed. May God, that blind and senseless thing that majestically roams the heavens, forgive my father, and let Him take note that for my part I expect nothing of Him. May his victims forgive us, that is all that matters to me. My death does not atone for anything, it is a gesture of love.

My dear Malrich, my beloved brother, if you should read this diary, forgive me. I should have told you, should have shared this terrible burden with you. You were so young, so ill-equipped. But I have made amends, I have written this diary as much for you as for myself. Be strong and steer your course. I love you. Give my love to aunt Sakina and uncle Ali. If you see Ophélie, tell her that I love her and ask her to forgive me.

It is 11 P.M. It is time.

THE END

P.S. I wish this diary to be given to my brother Malek Ulrich Schiller. Thank you for respecting my wishes.

Boualem Sansal was born in 1949 in Algeria. Since his debut novel, Le serment des barbares , winner of the Best First Novel Prize in France in 1999, he has been widely considered one of his country’s most important contemporary authors. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Algeria.