Estonia is where the novel makes the moral cost of war impossible to treat as abstraction. At Klooga, as German forces withdraw from the Narva front in September 1944, Adrián Gallardo is drawn into the murder of prisoners; the forest, stripped of its trees and crowded with evidence of impending death, becomes the place where he understands himself as already spiritually dead. The episode binds the occupation of Estonia to the novel’s longer concerns with guilt, silence, and the identities people carry after catastrophe.

Setting and wartime context

The Klooga concentration camp opens in the summer of 1943 in northern Estonia, beside the small village from which it takes its name. It is a satellite camp of Vaivara, the central installation in the SS concentration-camp system in Estonia. Vaivara lies 27 kilometres from Narva, where a weakened German army is resisting the Soviet advance. The camp’s location therefore places its prisoners within a landscape already shaped by the approaching front and the German retreat. During its year of operation, Klooga holds between two and three thousand people. Most are Jewish prisoners transported by freight train from the Vilna ghetto in August and September 1943. Other substantial groups arrive from the Kaunas ghetto and Salaspils; the camp also holds Jews and Roma from Romania, Russia, and Estonia, as well as about one hundred Soviet prisoners of war. This varied prisoner population is presented not as a backdrop to military movements but as the human reality those movements threaten and expose to violence.

Gallardo’s arrival and the changed landscape

The novel shifts to the Narva front on 20 September 1944. Adrián Gallardo does not understand the Flemish commander’s announcement asking for volunteers. He has missed much of what is said, though he understands Hauptsturmführer Ernst Kleiber better because Jan has been teaching him German. Gallardo remains in place until Jan elbows him, a small gesture that helps send him toward Klooga without his grasping what awaits there. The journey is only a little over twenty-five kilometres, but its landscape registers a larger devastation. The truck moves along an unusually busy road before dawn, repeatedly yielding to convoys heading west. Gallardo sees a forest reduced to stumps, with sparse grass between them. Having grown up among beech and oak woods, he had found consolation in Estonia’s towering pines and firs: their apparent promise that life might survive the armies and ruined fields. The destruction of the Klooga woods wounds him. That loss connects the local landscape to the boy he once was, the child who went mushrooming and trout-fishing with his grandfather, a trace of an earlier self that Gallardo has nearly lost. When the truck stops, the men encounter two hundred prisoners, emaciated and barely able to stand. Gallardo cannot comprehend why they do not flee, nor why they meet death without the cries, curses, threats, or defiance he remembers from executions in Spain and from a Soviet execution he had ordered. In that earlier case, he had commanded the firing squad that killed seven civilians, five men and two women, accused of sabotage and terrorism for resisting the occupation of their own country. He understood that their compatriots would regard them as heroes, and saw their hatred and pride as they faced death. At Klooga, by contrast, he cannot make sense of the prisoners’ silence and apparent submission. The contrast exposes the limits of the explanations by which he had previously made violence seem comprehensible.

The massacre and its immediate aftermath

Kleiber selects men who had not volunteered to form the first firing squad. The others are placed where they can see both the executioners and the victims, who are arranged before a long row of logs. Over three days, 20–22 September, Kleiber’s men help the camp guards murder roughly 550 prisoners a day. The soldiers’ share is four hundred daily, or 1,200 in total. They drink vodka at breakfast, with meals, and before sleep; the drink accompanies the killings rather than interrupting them. Jan stops needing to insist after every volley that the prisoners are not human. Gallardo remains certain that they have always been human, but says that the knowledge no longer matters to him. His recognition does not prevent his participation. On 23 September, the unit leaves the Narva front in an orderly retreat that is only three days ahead of a rout. The Soviet army is close behind; by the time it enters Estonia, Kleiber’s corps has already moved into Latvia. The retreat is unlike the earlier withdrawals Gallardo has experienced because the men know it can end only in Berlin. The physical movement westward thus begins immediately after the Klooga killings, carrying their perpetrators toward the war’s final defeat without carrying them away from what they have done. The massacre continues to travel with the men as a recurring, unspoken subject. They stop talking naturally about the forest, but ask whether Soviet troops reached Klooga, found the bodies, or left survivors. One reassurance is that Baltic Jews would not be able to identify the German insignia; it calms the men first for days, later for only hours, before the questions return. Gallardo never joins these conversations. He understands that the others fear discovery, and expects that Germany will lose the war and that someone will eventually find the charred bones or hear a survivor’s testimony. He also knows that he cannot be mistaken for someone else: he is the group’s only Spaniard. Silence, for him, is not an acquittal but an interval before the reckoning he expects.

Guilt carried westward

Klooga marks a change in Gallardo’s sense of self. He realizes that he has become a living dead man, like the prisoners he helped shoot, and that he has no country, village, or home to return to. He imagines himself reborn alone and covered in blood in the Klooga woods. The contrast between the remembered child among living forests and the soldier among stumps gives his transformation a material setting: the forest that once promised survival has become the site of a moral death he cannot reverse. Gallardo does not expect to survive the war. Believing that he deserves death, he fights with mechanical determination through Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Germany during the final months of 1944 and the opening months of 1945, trying to postpone it as long as possible. He resolves to die in Berlin, treating the east-to-west retreat as a journey to the last possible limit, where his body might finally match what he believes his spirit has become. He reaches the ruined city on 2 April 1945. Estonia is behind him geographically, but Klooga remains the decisive point in the path that brought him there.

Memory, aftermath, and narrative significance

The novel places the Klooga episode within an explicitly historical frame: the site of the former camp is later marked by a monolith commemorating more than two thousand innocent people murdered simply for having been born. Hans Aumeier’s crimes at Auschwitz prevent him from being tried for the Klooga massacre. The memorial and the failed prosecution establish two different afterlives of the crime: public remembrance of the dead, and an incomplete accounting for those responsible. The historical note does not turn Gallardo’s actions into an isolated battlefield episode; it locates them within a mass murder whose victims vastly exceed the number he personally saw or helped kill. Estonia also appears in the later family narrative through a different kind of belated return: what war and secrecy have concealed becomes legible decades afterward. In January, Guillermo García Medina finds his old family documents after searching a leather folder hidden inside the lining of a trunk. Among them are a family record in the names of Guillermo García Medina and Amparo Priego Martínez, the birth certificate of their legitimate son, Guillermo García Priego, and a wedding photograph. The note from Amparo, dated 28 March 1939, says that she is sorry and did not want what happened; the black ink blot leaves the explanation unresolved. These papers restore facts that had been stored away rather than destroyed. The son grows up as José Antonio Urbieta, with an arbitrarily chosen Basque surname and a new name drawn from the absent leader of the Falange. In Amparo’s home, a portrait of a smiling young Falangist in a blue shirt and equipment belt stands in a silver frame, accompanied by a single flower. The boy believes the pictured man is his father, a hero who died in Russia, because that is what the documents say. Guillermo, meanwhile, has watched his son grow from a distance, sometimes seeing him arrive with scraped knees and his shirt hanging out. He discovers that he is troubled by the possibility of losing even that distant opportunity to watch the boy grow. The concealed identity finally reaches the son through the very objects that had been kept hidden. In 1958, short of money, José Antonio searches his mother’s underwear drawer for cash and finds a family record from the Republic, his birth certificate, a photograph of an apologetic note, and a picture of his pregnant mother beside the doctor who visited him during illness and taught him chess. He later learns from Experta that Guillermo had hidden his mother and lived with her until 1939, and that Guillermo was his father and a leftist. The discovery converts scattered keepsakes into evidence capable of revising a family story built around a dead Falangist substitute. That recognition also has an intimate, unfinished edge. Guillermo had painted José Antonio a wooden toy train as a child, but the son does not know this when they speak; the detail is another sign of the distance imposed by concealment, even after the truth begins to emerge. In 1976, Guillermo and Manuel Arroyo Benítez meet again at the arrivals gate of Barajas Airport. Their hair, bodies, and ages register the years between them; both have children who do not bear their fathers’ surnames, and neither is using his real name. Yet each calls the other by his authentic name. Guillermo’s hands had once sewn up Manuel’s scarred body, and each owes the other his life. Their first embrace briefly restores the strength and hope that had joined them before defeat scattered them. The later reunion does not erase Estonia’s violence; it shows how a life marked by war can continue through aliases, family secrets, and recognition delayed for decades.