There are two Algerian documents. The first one, dated 17 June 1957 and signed by Colonel Boumédienne, Chief of Staff of the Armée des frontières, reads:
This is to attest that Si Mourad has been appointed to the training corps of the EMG as an advisor on logistics and weaponry.
CC: BE, SBLA, head of the CFEMG, heads of the technical and operational units of Wilayah 8 (communications, transport, engineering. .).
The second, dated 8 January 1963, is signed by the General Secretary of the Officer Training Academy in Cherchelclass="underline"
1) This is to confirm the appointment of the aforementioned Mourad Hans, a temporary civil instructor.
2) The chief of service of personnel shall be responsible for implementing this decision.
CC: personnel department of the Ministry of Defense.
For information only: Office of Military Security, district of Algiers.
There is a battered little booklet: papa’s military record. The writing on the front is in this really impressive German gothic type. The first page lists his personal details: Hans Schiller, born 5 June 1918 in Uelzen, son of Erich Schiller and Magda Taunbach. Address: 12B Millenstraße, Landorf, Uelzen. Education: Chemical engineering, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. His regimental number is stamped in a little box, and at the bottom of the page is the signature and the stamp of the recruiting officer: Obersturmbannführer Martin Alfons Kratz. The rest is a complicated list of the postings, transfers, ranks, promotions, citations, medals and injuries he received during his career. The pages are peppered with stamps. Papa reached the rank of Captain, he was a big shot. And he was a hero too. He was wounded a bunch of times and he was mentioned in dispatches and decorated over and over! He was posted to Germany, Austria, France, Poland and other places which would have meant nothing to me without Rachel’s notes: Frankfurt, Linz, Grossrosen, Salzburg, Dachau, Mauthausen, Rocroi, Drancy, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Ghent, Hartheim, Lublin-Majdanek. Some of the places were extermination camps. These were top-secret places where the Nazis exterminated the Jews and other undesirables. Rachel says hundreds of people died and the article in Historia says millions. Fucking hell, I thought.
I had already read Rachel’s diary over and over and I had found out a lot of stuff, but holding papa’s medals, his military records in my own hands, seeing the names, the documents, the stamps on them with my own eyes really fucked me up. I felt sick. This meant papa was a Nazi war criminal, he would have been hanged if they’d ever caught up with him, but at the same time it didn’t mean anything. I refused to believe it, I clung to something else, something truer, fairer, he was our father, we are his sons, we bear his name. He was a good man, devoted to his village, loved and respected by everyone, he fought for the independence of his country, for the liberation of a people. He was a soldier, I thought, he was just obeying orders, orders he probably didn’t understand, orders he didn’t agree with. The leaders were the guilty ones, they knew how to manipulate people, get them to do things without understanding what they were doing, without thinking. Besides, I thought, why stir up all this shit now? Papa dead, his throat cut like a sheep at Aïd, murdered along with maman and all their neighbours by real criminals, by the most brutal bastards the earth has ever produced, criminals who are supported, cheered on, even helped by people, in Algeria and all over the world. These criminals speak at the UN, they have ads on TV, they insult whoever they like, whenever they like, like the imam in the mosque in Block 17, always jabbing his finger to heaven trying to scare people, to stop them thinking for themselves. I can understand Rachel’s pain, his whole world falling apart, I can understand why he felt guilty, tainted, why he felt that somehow, somewhere, someone had to atone. Rachel was the one to atone, though he had never hurt anyone in his life.
I know it sounds incredible, but I didn’t know anything about the war, the extermination. I’d heard bits and pieces, things the imam said about the Jews and other stuff I’d picked up here and there. I always thought it was like a legend, something that happened hundreds of years ago. But the honest truth is I didn’t think about it much, I didn’t care, me and my mates, we were young, we were broke, all we cared about were our own lives. Rachel wrote terrible things. Everything was boiling over in his mind — words and phrases I’d never heard before cropped up again and again: the final solution, gas chambers, Kremas, Sonderkommandos, concentration camps, the Shoah, the Holocaust. There was a phrase in German, I didn’t know what it meant and Rachel didn’t translate it but it sounded like a curse: Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens. And another one that I recognised straight off: Befehl ist Befehl. That means “orders are orders.” When we were little, living back in the bled, papa used to say it under his breath sometimes if we argued back. Then, in French, or in Berber, he’d say, “We’re not at the circus!” It’s like what Monsieur Vincent used to say when we tried to get round him: “Just do what I told you to do, if there’s time later, we’ll talk about your ideas.”
I guess after he read all this stuff, Rachel sat up all night. Reading what he wrote about it did my head in. Rachel was clever, he could always see the big picture, he understood things. I’m not like that, I need explanations, I need time to get things straight in my head. If I’d been Rachel, the stuff in the suitcase would have meant nothing to me, all I would have thought was: my parents have been murdered and I’ll never see them again. I’d have thought: papa was a soldier back in Germany, then he came here to train the maquis, end of story. The only thing that seemed weird to me was that with all the experience he had, papa ended up in a godforsaken hole like Aïn Deb. I’d have been off to California, I’d have been a stuntman in Hollywood or a bodyguard to some rich heiress. But that was papa, he was a bit of a poet, a bit like those weirdos who get up one morning, sell their big city apartments and head off to the mountains to raise sheep that wolves will end up eating before they do. Papa went a lot farther, he went to Aïn Deb. It was the perfect place, really — even Algerians have never heard of it. Or at least they hadn’t until 25 April 1994.