ibozuk.Istanbul, 9 March 1996
No one riles me more than a Turkish man. Self-important, steeped in the idea of himself as a rebel, he constantly feels the need to prove himself. You only have to look at the way he walks, like he’s about to headbutt a wall and bring it crashing down, or grapple with a rutting ram. I get pissed off by people who feel they have to live up to national stereotypes. The Italian who’s permanently cheery and insists on trying to help you when you haven’t asked for anything, the Spaniard who gets belligerently protective when you ask after his sister, the Pole who feels he has to knock back another six vodkas when everyone else has stopped, the Arab who gets his back up and draws his sabre when all you’ve done is congratulate him on his celebrated restraint, not to mention the Englishman who keeps a stiff upper lip when you tell him his clothes are on fire. The Algerians piss me off – and I’m half Algerian – by claiming they’re the most hospitable people in the world when they’ve turned their country into the most inhospitable place on earth and made their government the most repulsive under Satan’s sun. As for the French – don’t even go there. We’re all of these things and more besides. It’s the Universalist in us. In other countries when people badmouth the French, they know what they’re talking about. The Frenchmen who’ve gone before us have given them all the evidence they need to calculate the extent of our arrogance. Someone should write up a guide to national stereotypes and hand it out with travel guides, that way the unwary traveller would know where not to go and what not to say. Of course, they’re simply stereotypes, all these people could shake them off and live happily ever after. No stereotype, no song and dance, everyone just gets on with his life – that’s something it might be worth teaching people.
Anyway, from the minute my plane landed to the minute I got to my hotel on the Bosphorus, in a steep alley in the shadow of the Blue Mosque, every Mamamouchi I’ve met has blanked me. I’ve not heard a single ‘Merhaba, Salam’, still less a ‘Günaydin’ or ‘iyi günler’ or ‘Güle güle’ that they’re always saying to each other. I suppose my cadaverous appearance and my hollow eyes made them feel afraid and disgusted. I was a walking corpse, a dead man who had seen too much. At the airport, the security guard looked at me like I was a drug dealer, one taxi driver refused to take me because he said I was dangerously ill and, at the hotel, the receptionist took so long to answer me I thought he was going to grab me by the throat and send for the baibozuk.
But that’s not what this was really about. I looked at them contemptuously. To me Turkey is a country which, though technically neutral, colluded in the Holocaust. They signed a pact of friendship with the Third Reich, they had a close relationship with the Axis powers and they offered Nazi officers an escape route. In the history of their own country, they have a genocide of their own, one which is all the more terrible since they have the gall not to admit to it. Why don’t they follow the example of the Germans whose crime is the most heinous ever committed? But who am I to cast the first stone, sitting here driving myself mad, wondering why my father never acknowledged his crimes?
I used to love Turkey, the country is beautiful, the air is fresh and clean. The multinational I used to work for has an assembly plant here in partnership with some big Turkish conglomerate. I used to come here all the time. There’s not much I don’t know about Turkish food, or the underhand deals they’re so fond of, perched as they are between two stools – two divans, I should say – between West and East, and being so secretive they end up winning on all counts. I never could stand the way they were secular in the morning and mysterious at night, when we were always completely cut-and-dry, utterly transparent. Tomorrow, I’m taking the plane to Cairo. The air might not be as fresh, but, from what I’ve seen from my numerous business trips there, the people have both feet in the same camp.
From my hotel window, I sat, staring out on this mystifying world, nodding as I watched. At one point, I’m not sure why, I watched a young European guy discreetly following an old Turk wearing a frayed saroual but solid as an ox, as they disappeared into a dark alley. In that moment, I slipped into my father’s skin. This is the way I’ve learned to understand him better, I steal into his thoughts, walk in his footsteps, following the terrible road he travelled. I am Jekyll and Hyde. I can picture myself as my father after a hard ride across Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, with the Balkans in flames all around me, travelling by night, sleeping by day, cutting through field and forest, careful to avoid the towns, finally arriving in Bulgaria to find myself surrounded by Bolsheviks. From here, I steal into Istanbul where Turkish traffickers are waiting to help me. There have been rumours going round for months, rumours that reached the camps just as we began the process of liquidation and closure – a process marked in Auschwitz by the terrible ‘Night of the Gypsies’ when 2,897 Romany gypsies were exterminated, and in every camp by the massacre of the Sonderkommando. According to these rumours, secret negotiations were taking place between the Headquarters of the Reich Security Office on behalf of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen SS and the Gestapo, and the Turkish secret services, negotiations establishing escape routes allowing German officers to use Turkey as a hub – at least for as long as Europe is in turmoil. It is the only possible escape route, every European country is occupied by one power or another and the hunt for collaborators and war criminals is in full spate. A lot of money had been transferred into Turkish bank accounts in Switzerland to save the German military elite. Later, in 1947, when ODESSA is up and running, there will be other escape routes – through Switzerland, Italy and Austria, the chaotic plans of the early post-war days over, a new era will dawn, an era ruled by business interests, horse-trading, millions of dollars, buried treasures, priceless paintings, rare documents, mythical objects worth their weight in diamonds, top-secret files. There will be top-secret negotiations with governments, secret organisations, high-ranking emissaries, great secret wars will be fought, old ideologies explosively rekindled. The concentration camp prisoner and his tragic tale will be forgotten, as though the next world war is already being fought. Demand will outstrip supply, everyone will want their very own German – an expert in missiles, solid fuels, chemical and atomic weapons, an expert in medicine and military engineering, in military-industrial systems, in ciphers and codebreaking, in propaganda, in art, in dealing with minorities. There will be no one not prepared to do a deal with ODESSA. I can imagine myself, a clandestine European in search of some adventure too shameful to mention, slipping through the streets of the medina, holing up in some insalubrious caravanserai and waiting, just as I am doing now in this hotel, spending my days staring furtively through a rickety oriel window and nodding. I imagine myself startled by the slightest noise, listening to the BBC as it triumphantly announces the end of the world – the end of our world reporting as, one after another, our cities are bombed as Allied and Russian troops squabble over the Reich, over our beloved Berlin, as senior party members are arrested, the reports of the Führer’s suicide, of the mass surrender of whole divisions of our magnificent army, of starving people scrabbling through ruined streets. I think of Uelzen and I can hear my elderly parents moaning beneath the rubble. I can imagine myself, desperate, holding my head in my hands, hesitating between suicide, between fight and flight.
Then, at dawn one morning, someone comes to tell me the coast is clear. I have to hurry. I must be careful not to speak German. They dress me as a Turk, give me false papers, perhaps a message from my distant benefactor, the famous Jean 92, and send me off in a truck, a relic from the First World War. Are there other SS officers in the truck? Why not? After all, there are thousands of us trying to save our skins. Despite screams and threats, I refuse to hand over the knapsack that contains what no officer of the Reich should ever be without: my military record and my medals. After all, the war is not over – there are other ways to fight: resistance, sabotage. In planning for victory, one must necessarily plan for defeat too – perhaps the German High Command has plans set up for this eventuality. After all France – hardly the greatest military strategist in the world – after its defeat regrouped in London, in Algiers, and went on fighting. The trek across Turkey is long and difficult, there are constant alerts, then one day someone whispers that the border is just across the horizon and a Syrian guard is waiting for me there. Egypt is still a long way off, but I have already made it to the East, to the sun, the deserts, the caravans, the chaos, the motley colours. No one will go looking for a needle in a haystack here. When everyone wears a djelleba and a keffiyeh, everyone is anonymous. Egypt, of course, is still occupied by the British, but there is so much turmoil, so much confusion, that hope is possible, anything is possible – a man could easily disappear and reappear again, King Farouk has clearly had his day and no one knows what will come after him – rumours and speculation are rife but they corroborate and conflict until no one knows what the truth is. Spies from all over the world are already in Egypt posing as smiling diplomats, harried archaeologists, greedy businessmen, devotees of Islam, sheep-like tourists, they keep one eye on the derricks and the Suez Canal and the other on the other spies. This is the Middle East where, since the dawn of time, nothing has ever been straightforward. Having studied the possible routes to Egypt, I assume my father travelled overland. The sea route was shorter, but infinitely more dangerous. American and British marines everywhere were on constant alert, the war was over but the embers were still smouldering. Warships patrolled the Mediterranean, inspecting, checking, seizing cargo, the shipping lanes were teeming with smugglers trafficking opium, American cigarettes, alcohol, weapons, secret documents, forged papers, works of art, this was the hub of piracy and of a slave trade that affected even the faithful from Europe and North Africa making pilgrimage to Mecca, to Nadjaf, Qom, Karbala, Jerusalem. The British, furious with the Jews, were determined to stop them emigrating to Palestine where they wanted to establish a state encompassing Galilee and the desert of Negev – the State of Israel, something which would have incensed the Arabs already waging war on anything that moved, threatening, dreaming of independence, toying with communism, socialism, Pan-Arabism, fundamentalism, even going so far as to flirt with that ridiculous Judaeo-Christian concept, democracy. They would never agree on anything, being too divided, too rich for their dreams, too poor to make them reality, it was this which would push them into the arms of Moscow. As is often the case, the longest road is the least dangerous. I decided that my father and his guides had probably travelled via Adana, Dörtyol and Hassa in eastern Turkey, crossed the Syrian border at Afrin and from there travelled via Aleppo and Damascus to Mafraq in Jordan, and from there through Amman and Ramm in the south of the kingdom. All that remained, then, was to cross the Akaba Gulf to Sinai and travel by camel to Suez and on to their final destination, Cairo. A journey of thousands of miles beneath an ancient, implacable sun.
Exhausted, I surfaced from this endless, monotonous journey through the deserts of the Middle East. I took a shower, collapsed on the bed and fell asleep.