This was how I planned it, I wanted to end my journey in Auschwitz. I arrived in the early morning, I wanted to be on my own before the busloads of tourists showed up. It was going to be a long day. The camp is vast, over 45 square kilometres, more than 11,000 acres. It is a city, like the gold-rush towns that sprang up in far-off countries in an era of rampant capitalism, booming cities sprawling out from a small encampment, motivated by greed and haste, funded by new finds, new wealth; a city both orderly and chaotic, with well-defined boundaries, broad avenues, parade grounds vast enough to intimidate a marathon runner, ugly administrative buildings, posh neighbourhoods with ridiculous houses, baroque castles, opulent cathedrals, cookie-cutter working-class slums stretching out forever, rococo theatre, extravagant cinema, trendy nightclubs, bustling brothels and dreary bars, industrial estates, train stations and shunting yards, warehouses, anaemic parks, astonishing wastelands, the hectic markets, and the sports grounds that show the city is dying of boredom and inaction, the frightening barracks and the rudimentary runway flanked by a control tower that will soon be an aerodrome worthy of a capital. This is how they are, these vast, mushrooming cities, electrifying and monotonous, full of potential and doomed, they create wealth and poverty in equal measure and in the end, they make poverty and violence a daily occurrence, they are madness in search of apotheosis. Here, life is sparkling, free, clever, a constant spectacle, while in the underbelly, in the measureless favelas that ring the city, people’s lives are cramped, teeming, shameful, nameless and they die with disturbing ease, die at a yes or a no. These unplanned cities, carved into the logic of the totalitarian system that created them, flourish based on a myth, and based on that same myth they die. One day, nature reasserts itself and everything silently disappears, swept away by the absurdity that created it. It was not gold that spawned this oppressive city, born out of the ashes of a poor remote village in the heart of Poland, it was not oil, or coffee, or rubber or rare metals, but the systematic extermination of the Lebensunwertes Leben, Jews preferably, and gypsies, but also political prisoners, antisocial elements, and all possible types of Minderwertige Leute. To tell the truth, this city was a powerhouse prepared to burn anything it could lay its hands on—there was no question of shutting down the furnace just because the supply of Jews dried up. In hell, everything burns, tramps and traitors, enemies and resistance fighters. Auschwitz was the largest, the most dismal, the most deadly and the most rapacious of the Nazi death camps. In four short years, 1,300,000 men women and children, ninety percent of them Jews, were tossed into the furnaces—an average of a thousand souls a day, the equivalent of a village wiped off the map, house by house, family by family, between daybreak and sunset.
It was still dark and terribly cold, a grubby snow was falling and the wind from the east cut through me. If I had been hoping for the worst welcome to punish me for returning to the scene of my father’s crimes, I got my wish, but it was still far from enough. For a prisoner arriving here on the death train, there were many things that made their arrival infinitely more cruel, the exhaustion of having had to stand for days in crowded cattle trucks: the hunger, the thirst, the filth, the panic, the fear, the torture of the selection process, the pomp and ceremony, the contemptuous orders, the barking dogs, the brutality of the soldiers, the humiliation of having to undress outdoors, the shaving of their hair, the tattooing of a number on the forearm, and, through everything, the overpowering sense that something incalculable and terrible has happened here: it was here that humanity ended, betrayed by God himself. Were they still men when they arrived in the camp? Arriving here on a tourist train on a bright spring day would have been obscene. I am not just any visitor, I am Helmut Schiller, son of SS Officer Hans Schiller, and in this place lie my father’s share of 1,300,000 dead, gassed for the most part, shot in the head if they were lucky. I had only one choice, to arrive as my father had, in a warm car, calm, perhaps preoccupied by some technical problem, or arrive like a prisoner, terrified, starving, numb, soaked to the skin, more alone than anyone in the world, traumatised by what was going on, not knowing what was expected of him, of him in particular. I wanted to approximate the reality of a prisoner arriving here, wanted to know how far my father had come. But I know that this atrocity beggars belief, that nothing and no one could bring me even a fraction of an inch closer to understanding it. I am free, I came here of my own free will, I stand here a free man, I have my hair, my teeth, I have my papers in my pocket, and, barring some accident, murder, a fatal illness or suicide in a moment of madness, I know that I will be alive tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that and so on to the end of my days. I cannot make myself a camp prisoner, a guinea pig in a Nazi laboratory, a Sonderkommando or a Kapo, all I can do is slip into my father’s thoughts, retrace his footsteps, try to follow his terrible path; I can do nothing but try to empathise with a prisoner, try to feel as he must have felt as death, mysterious and degrading, sweeps over him. I can do nothing. But I am here, I had to come, and I must go on to the end.
I followed the tracks for the death train from the Jewish platform, the Judenrampe. In the distance, barring the horizon, is the building that appears in every book, a long, low, red-brick building with a red-tiled roof and a watchtower in the middle, straddling the tracks. This is Auschwitz II, Konzentrationslager Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Past the entrance arch, barracks stretch out endlessly in serried ranks. On one side is the women’s camp, on the other, the men’s, and everywhere you look, watchtowers, barbed wire, electric fences. There can be no mistake that hell was once built here, not long ago: everything is still as it was, everything is ashes and solitude just as it once was. Here, in Birkenau, evil reached its apogee. To the east is Auschwitz-I, the wrought iron gate crowned with the famous motto: Arbeit macht frei. Work shall set you free. Inside, in what was once a high-security area, is the Krupp armaments factory, the DAW, the Deutschen Ausrüstungswerke factories, the SS Werkstätten—workstations, the general pharmacy and a number of hospital blocks known as the HKB, the Häftlings-Krankenbau for soldiers and Arbeiter. Three kilometres to the north is Auschwitz-III Monowitz. The great, grey complex of buildings you can glimpse through the mist was occupied by IG Farbenindustrie, which specialised in making Zyklon B, fertilisers and detergents. You have to imagine all these things: the buildings are no longer there, they were bombed in 1944 and later razed. You can still see the foundations. In the Buna-Werke, another complex which was bombed, synthetic rubber, essential to the Third Reich, was made. Ten thousand prisoners worked in gruelling shifts. I don’t believe a single one emerged alive, they knew too much, the secrets of production, they had had contact with military secrets far ahead of their time. The last Arbeiter were massacred during the chaos after the Soviet army marched into Poland and its units advanced on the camps at breakneck speed, trying to get there before everything was destroyed or removed.
I went into Birkenau and let myself be guided by instinct. I tried to forget everything I knew, I wanted to know what it felt like to step into this camp for the first time, knowing only its monstrous reputation. It was difficult, it was impossible, I knew too much, I had spent so much time studying this place, I could have moved around it with my eyes closed, the map was burned onto my brain. I could have moved around like a diligent soldier, anxious to get from A to B to execute his orders promptly. I could retrace his footsteps, walk boldly as he did, wrapped up in a thick greatcoat against the blizzard: bringing a wounded worker from the infirmary to his workstation; dragging some human wreck to Bunkers I and II, where French Jews were gassed; picking up the daily productivity reports from one of the four ultra-modern complexes—the famous K II, III, IV and V, marvels of extermination designed, they say, by Himmler himself, to function both as gas chambers and crematoria—and dashing back with it to the SS Administrative Building, allowing myself a quick visit to the Kapos’ brothel to see the new arrivals or, out of morbid curiosity, peeking through the window of the experimental clinic run by Carl Clauberg, or the one run by the sinister doctor Josef Mengele, the Frankenstein of monozygotic twins, swing by the laboratory where chemical engineers like my father—who, given he was a SS-Hauptsturmführer by then, was probably in charge—worked on their magic potions, their treatments for “lice”; everywhere in fact, except the baleful area of Block 11, where lunatics unlike any on earth experimented with tortures and methods of execution that were bizarre even in Auschwitz. I could just as easily move from the parade ground to where the prisoners assembled at dawn and lead a group to wherever they were assigned to do forced labour.
I’ve learned to follow my father in my mind: I could have wandered around the Lager as though I had grown up here. There is not a single detail of his working day I have not imagined. Papa was a methodical man, regular as a metronome, he spent his whole life obsessed with timing things. Our life in Aïn Deb was regulated by his watch. While my childhood friends needed only a ray of sunshine, a sudden whim to go from place to place, there I was, champing at the bit, watching the big hand on the house clock, waiting for my fifteen minutes of freedom.
I found myself standing in front of the K Complexes, my father had probably worked on the development of K IV, he may even have inaugurated it. Why that one in particular? The dates fit. My father was posted to Auschwitz-Birkenau between January and July 1943, work on the complexes began early in 1942 and was completed in late 1943. By the time he arrived here my guess is that the first two were already operational and the third was in the testing phase, the foundations were probably still being dug on K V. In fact, I knew this was true, I had read so many books, so many survivor accounts, I knew all there was to know. This is why I know that papa was working under the orders of the first Kommandant of Auschwitz, the sinister SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höß, who would later be arrested by the Allies in Bavaria living under an assumed name; he would be tried and sentenced to death by the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in 1947 and hanged in front of one of the Kremas of his beloved Auschwitz. In the summer of 1943, when my father was taking up his new post in Buchenwald, Höß would be replaced by Arthur Liebehenschel and Richard Baer. The first would be arrested and executed in ’48 with the creepy Kommandante of the women’s Lager in Birkenau, Maria Mandl and her deputy, “The Beautiful Beast” Irma Grese, whom papa probably flirted with between shifts. Richard Baer died in prison awaiting trial in 1963. Josef Mengele, known as the Angel of Death, escaped via the Franciscan ratline in Italy, and took off first for the clear air of Perón’s Argentina then to Paraguay and Brazil to invest his part of the immense Mengele family fortune, live it up and die a natural death in 1979 at the age of 68 somewhere in Brazil, leaving behind him the myth of an Übermensch whom even death could not touch. When asked, “Why does your father not turn himself in?” in an interview in New York, Mengele’s son replied, “That has nothing to do with me, that’s his business.” If I’d been his son, I would have turned him in and would have demanded to testify at the trail as one of his victims.
The further I have gone on my journey—which I wanted to be instinctive, the better to penetrate the mystery—the more I understood the implacable system that regulated this place down to the last second. I was a prisoner of what I knew. I was trapped in my books, my technical reports. In reality things did not work like that. Behind the cold logic of the Machine was the savage mystery of death which pervaded the camp, the cruel laws of random chance which, here more than anywhere else, stalked the prisoner’s every step, watched him, made certain that the selection for this task, this punishment, fell to him, which decided that illness should strike him rather than another, which meant instant death; things conspired magically such that trivial incidents snowballed to become great catastrophes which jammed this splendid, unstoppable Machine, panicking the Bonzen, humiliating them, unleashing reprisals, terrible fury, wanton acts, unending punishments; there were the days and nights of privation; there was the mystery of time, stretching out to infinity until it broke the will, destroyed all hope, even all regret, then suddenly contracting, choking the world, making every movement seem hurried, a pitiless garrotte that made each minute weigh more heavily, each second more uncertain; and there was the weather, its shifting moods, its tortures, its sudden fevers; there was the lack of privacy, the shame and the animal instincts that accompanied it; there was the hunger, endless, frantic; the smells that turned your stomach; there was the terrible loss of awareness that made the prisoner his own worst enemy, each having signed a pact with hunger, with the instinct to survive, with madness, and there were the thousand tiny everyday events which could at any moment turn to tragedy; my God, the tragedy that might result from a stolen shoe, a cap lost in the dead of winter, one glance too many at an officer, a second of inattentiveness, a bowl shattering, a twisted ankle, a bout of dysentery or lumbago, an infected wound; there was the gruelling preoccupation with constantly having to look busy, to never raise suspicion; there was the turmoil you carried around in your head all day, all night; there were the suppurating fears, the endless questions, the morbid moments of elation, the childish fears, the excruciating needs, the impossible dreams, the fleeting memories of another life in a world where the sun existed, where day and night were a mercy shared with others. A trivial thing could mean death, could make life unbearable, everything was uncertain, everything doomed to failure, to darkness, to decay. It must have been so bad that we hoped this splendid, unstoppable machine would keep on turning. Perhaps we even prayed to God to forget us and to watch over the Beast. Ensure she had her dead so she might gorge herself on them and leave us in peace. When everything runs well, we might snatch a moment of peace here and there. When everything runs smoothly, we can bide our time and die in peace.
My mind too is filled with mysteries. One of them haunts me, I think about it all the time, it is the mystery of the survivor. How is it possible to live after the camps? Is there life after Auschwitz? Of all the accounts I’ve read, particularly those written in the heat of the moment, when the camps were liberated and during the first war trials, not one expressed hate or anger, not one clamoured for revenge. I didn’t understand, I don’t understand. It is a mystery to me. Calmly, shyly, these women, these men, simply explained what it had been like, answered the questions asked of them by investigators, by judges. “My name is X, I arrived in the camp on such and such a day, month, year . . . I was posted to the clothing workshop . . . yes, I knew prisoners were being gassed . . . yes, I was beaten by the Kapos . . . I witnessed punishments . . . one day they had us all assemble for the execution for five prisoners accused of stealing a remnant of material . . . another day, a friend of ours, Y, threw himself against the electric fence, we were all beaten for not stopping him . . . He wanted to kill himself, we could understand that.” What about you? “Me? I was lucky, I was posted to ‘Canada.’” Can you tell us what you mean by “Canada”? “That was the name for the huge warehouses near the camp where they sorted through the belongings of new arrivals, we’d put all the money in one pile, jewellery in another, and we would sort the clothes and make large bundles of them that the trucks took to the station. The work was exhausting, but it’s wasn’t so bad . . . Canada was like paradise for those who had to slog away outside in the cold and the mud.” I read and reread the books of the famous survivors of Auschwitz—Charlotte Debo, Elie Wiesel, Jorge Semprun, Primo Levi—and I didn’t find a single word of hatred, the hint of a desire for revenge, the least expression of anger. They simply described their day-to-day life in the camp with all the detail they could remember, and this is their artistry, they related what they saw, what they heard, what they smelled, what they touched, the heaviness and the tiredness in their backs, their legs. They replicated it as a camera replicates an image, as a tape recorder replicates a sound. When they talk about their torturers, they say, “Officer X said this or that on such a day at such a time.” When they talk about their companions, they say, “So-and-so said this, he did that, one morning he was gone, we never saw him again.” Why this detachment? Where is the rage? Where is the hatred, the cry for revenge, where is the longing to destroy everything, to reject humanity, to turn your back on God, to run and keep on running, to stop listening? The experience of the camps is unlike any other, all the noise in the world cannot drown out the suffering that rose up from this place. This is how we talk about it, like a sunless day that by chance was visited upon the world. We talk about pure evil, about the incalculable suffering it inflicted on us. “Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking anymore? Can Kuhn fail to realise that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again. If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.” This is the only note of anger I can find in Primo Levi’s book If This Is a Man. He notes that nothing, not prayers, not pardon, not the expiation of the guilty, nothing that is within man’s power to do can ever make this right, nothing more. I don’t understand. In my own way, I am a survivor, but I cannot find the words, I have not the strength within me to express my rage, my shame, my hate, and I know that nothing can ever stanch the longing for revenge I carry inside me. To discover that you are the son of a murderer is worse than being a murderer yourself. The murderer has his justifications, he can hide behind language, he can deny, he can brag, he can take responsibility for his crime and proudly face the gallows, he can claim he was only following orders, he can run away, change his identity, find new justifications, he can mend his ways, he can do anything. What can the son do but enumerate his father’s crimes and drag that millstone with him all through life? I hate my father, I hate this country, the system that made it what it was, I hate humanity, I hate the whole world, I hate all the famous people who coldly wrote their books describing what my father did as though it were a job, nothing more, a job he was being paid to do, they stripped him of what humanity he might still have had and portrayed him as a witless automaton obeying the orders of the Führer, I hate them for sparing him, for not hating him as one should hate a tormenter, for not insulting him, I hate them for their detachment, I hate them for their restraint. I know my father—he was aware of what he was doing, he was a man of conviction, a man of duty, he deserves all the anger in the world. You are scum, Hans Schiller, you are the vilest murderer that ever lived, I loathe you, I despise you, I would have your name obliterated, I would have you burn in hell until the end of time and those you gassed come and spit in your face! You had no right to live, you had no right to give us life, I want nothing to do with this life, this nightmare, this unending disgrace. You had no right to run away, papa. I have to take it upon myself, I will pay for you, papa. May you be cursed, Hans Schiller. I sat down and, like a camp prisoner who has witnessed too much in a single day, I cried waterless tears.
It had stopped snowing. The wind had died away. The cold was not so biting. A small unseen sun brought a faint warmth. Perhaps only one degree, but to me it felt like a breath of life. I got to my feet. I ached all over. I stretched and continued to wander around the camp. I wanted to go back to the station, all things considered it is the most important place in the camp, the most cruel, the place where everything is decided. It was here that the men, the women, the terrified children, the babies sleeping in their own filth arrived at the end of the line. They are still dressed as they were in the city, they carry a suitcase, a bag, a briefcase, a toy, the women carry their babies, hug them to their breasts, fingertips gently stroking their cheeks, sheltering them from the cold, from the sun, they have their papers on them, their watches, their jewellery, money in their pockets. And that yellow star on the lapels of their jackets, true, the Judenstern, a badge of shame, but it signifies only that they are Jews; it is possible to dislike them, it doesn’t matter, no one can be expected to like everyone. Others are shamefaced, the Gypsies, the dark-skinned people, the sick, with their strange pallor and their frail voices, the old men and women pitiful to see so far from the life they once led, and what of the children who can neither grow up nor pretend to be grown-ups nor understand what is going on around them, what is being done to their parents. But this station is not like any station in the world. And this star is not like any star in the heavens. It is here, on the Judenrampe, on this wasteland around the station, that the selection took place, that they were separated, registered, tattooed, where they dressed in camp clothes, lined up, and here they waited for someone, some deus ex machina beset by terrible fears, some Bonzen, to give the order. They wait for hours and every minute is endless. For the old, the sick, the children, this is where it ends. They will see no other day. They do not know it, some of them suspect, but something that has not yet happened, something you have not seen with your own eyes is simply a speculation, life is still possible: the doors to the gas chambers are already open and the Sonderkommandos are waiting for them, standing to attention, by their wheelbarrows, the stench of rotting flesh and the stony silence helping them to forget what they have come to. In a few hours, they will be smoke rising into God’s heaven, the deaf, blind, cruel God to whom they have been praying all their lives. How is it possible to believe in such a God? A cat, a rat, a cold-blooded snake affords humanity more warmth. It is a life rubbing up against another life. For the able-bodied men and women, this is where it begins. In this place they are forever stripped of their autonomy, their dignity, their memories, their humanity. Everything. It is at this moment that they truly become Abgewandert. Death is a formality that will come later, when they earn it through good, honest work.
She was standing at the gates of Birkenau. A frail old woman, her legs slightly bowed, a handbag dangling from her elbow, wearing a ridiculous little hat. Her coat had seen better days and was shiny with wear. She stood alone, motionless, staring fixedly at something in front of her feet. She looked like an elderly housekeeper standing at a bus stop in a chalk white, windswept housing estate waiting for the first bus of the morning. She glanced left and right, then turned again and for a long time she stared at the train tracks that stretched out towards the horizon, at the banks on either side, at the sky wrapped up warm in its heavy clouds, before turning to look again at the building and the watchtower. She took in every detail. I could feel something inside her cry out as she stood frozen before this threshold which was once crossed only to die. She steeled herself and walked forward under the archway where she stopped dead—I think even her breath stopped. Her head jerked from side to side as though twisted by some malfunctioning machine. It was fear, the all-consuming fear that is Auschwitz. I stood transfixed by this strange, piteous ballet in this theatre of horrors beneath a sky which left room only for grief and silence. I could tell that she was searching her memory, searching for landmarks, reference points. Memories. She stood, thinking. I would say that she was feeling things inwardly, evil and its mysteries scattered by time, she moved like an animal that instinctively senses the reverberations of some distant earthquake and begins to panic. But she, she did not move, no longer moved, she looked as though she could stand there forever, waiting. Then she shuddered, and, as though resolved to face her suffering, stepped through the entrance into the camp, a single step, then stopped again. She scanned the place, then turned to her right and, taking small steps, walked slowly, her head down. She had stepped into another world, this world I know so well on paper I could guide her, predict her every reaction in advance. I realised that she had lived here in this loathsome place. How I knew, I’m not sure, but in her I saw a star in my dark sky. I followed her.
She went into the women’s Lager. She stopped, took a handkerchief from her bag, rolled it into a ball, wiped her eye then pressed it to her nose. She moved forward, read the number on the first block, then the next, and the next. She was walking faster now, darting ahead in jerky little steps, the block she was looking for was not far. Then she stopped and for a long time she stared at the block on her right, then stepped towards the entrance, climbed the three steps, reached out and put her hand on the doorknob. She hesitated, then turned it first one way, then the other. The door was locked. She did not try again. She sat down on the top step. I watched her. She did nothing, she did not move. She was off somewhere in her mind, in some dark place. I felt a surge of affection for this woman. She seemed so frail, so alone.
I hid in the shadows so I could watch her. Head tilted to one side, she was toying with her handkerchief in her lap, folding and unfolding it, rolling it into a ball and unrolling it again. In her mind, I thought, she was very far away. After half an hour, she got up, gave a little sigh and headed east towards the gas chambers and the crematorium. There was a crowd. Tourists. A group of kids, schoolchildren, and an adult group. They were listening to their respective guides. The kids were taking photographs, whispering to each other. What they wanted was to shout, to ask real questions, but this was not a place where conversation was customary, those who came here were gassed, incinerated, rose in a column of smoke, they knew that. The older group said nothing, they stood motionless. The woman joined the older group. She said something to the man standing next to her, who put his arm around her shoulder and kissed her on the forehead. The gesture of a friend. I joined the group. The guide was talking, explaining. I didn’t like his voice, there was something wrong about the tone. What irritated me was that he was trapped in his books, in his technical reports, what he was describing was a process. That is not what extermination is! Not just that. It cannot be brought down to its final act. There is everything else, the most important part, the part that is nameless, the everyday evil that you quickly grow accustomed to, that you never grow accustomed to, that thing which the old woman instinctively understood, that thing that I have been trying desperately to understand for months without even coming a fraction of an inch closer. I had felt this from the first: I could know my father, know myself, by following his path to the end, to the heart of the Machine. But no knowledge, no insight, no compassion, no imagination can achieve what experiencing the genocide has etched on the minds of the prisoners, and they, the survivors, have no means of communicating it to us. My father will forever be a mystery, and my pain will know no end.
The group moved on. I positioned myself so that I would be walking beside the little old woman. We struck up a conversation. She spoke English with a thick Mitteleuropean accent I couldn’t quite place. She told me she was born in Czechoslovakia, in Bratislava, but had been living in New York since ’48. I told her I was French and that I lived on the outskirts of Paris. When I felt we were getting on well, I said, “Were you in Birkenau?”
She blushed and said, “Oh, no, not me, my sister Nina was sent here. I was at Buchenwald . . . with my parents.”
“Your sister . . . did she die here?”
“Yes. I found out from a friend who was at Birkenau with her . . . She died last year.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“They were at school together in Bratislava. One day, they didn’t come home. Later on, they came for us . . . for the whole family.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“What about you?”
“Me? I . . . well, I . . . ”
“One of your parents?”
“Yes . . . my father . . . My father was at Birkenau and at other camps . . . miraculously he survived. I never knew, he never said anything . . . I only found out recently, by accident, after he died.”
“I understand . . . You mustn’t feel bitter . . . there are things you cannot speak of to your children. Believe me, it is almost unbearable to speak of them even with those who were here.”
We came to a crossroads. Her group was heading towards their bus, I had to follow my journey to the end. As she was getting on to the coach, I suddenly rushed up to her, I gripped her elbow and said, “I wanted to apologise . . . ”
“But what have you to apologise for, young man?”
“I . . . life has been cruel to you . . . to your family, your parents . . . I feel somehow responsible . . . ”
She looked at me, her old, beautiful eyes had known too much pain, and taking my hand she said, “Thank you, child, I’m very touched. No one has ever has ever said sorry to me before.”
I leaned and kissed her on the forehead. A gesture of friendship, of solidarity across the gulf that separated us.
I was overwhelmed by the encounter. This woman did not deserve for me to lie to her. I had the sickening feeling that I had robbed her of her life, her dignity. But I told myself perhaps she had long since done her mourning and that it would have been cruel to wake the dead. In fact, I realise the only person I have lied to is myself, no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again. If I were her, Helmut Schiller, I would have spat your apology into the dust.
It was time I left. I had no business being here, I have no place here. I should never have come, I have defiled it.