Holocaust period

The Holocaust period is the historical time of Nazi mass murder whose evidence and consequences continue to shape the novel long after the war. It appears not as a closed past but as a test of what documents can establish, what states will acknowledge, and what survivors and witnesses are forced to carry forward.

Mass Murder and Its Evidence

The novel gives the killings concrete form through accounts of victims and the traces left at sites of extermination. In a remembered description of Klooga, bodies were arranged face down in rows, layered with cut logs in alternating horizontal and vertical courses, ready to be burned. Photographs taken by Soviet soldiers recorded the industrial method used by the SS to turn bodies into heaps of ash and charred bone. A monument at the former camp later commemorates more than two thousand people murdered simply for having been born.

A separate account describes a German officer accused of recruiting men involved in the extermination of more than two thousand Jewish prisoners at a camp in Estonia. The same account links the massacre to the killing of a German soldier who refused an order: the officer maintained that his subordinates had volunteered and offered to identify them. These details enter the story through an evidentiary chain—an accusation, a recollection, and an annex naming alleged participants—rather than through an uncomplicated, complete record.

Records, Names, and Gaps

The novel repeatedly makes the survival of evidence part of the historical problem. A list of 104 wanted people names Clarita Stauffer as the sole woman and gives her correct Madrid address, at Galileo 14. Its description alleges that she organized a secret aid association, helped Germans obtain false documents and employment, and received Spanish nationality expressly to continue activity after Germany’s defeat. The list makes an alleged postwar escape network legible, but the surrounding account also shows how Spanish authorities could use citizenship, official protection, or claims of ignorance to prevent people on such lists from being handed over.

Other records are less secure. In the annex about the alleged participants in the Estonian killings, Jan Schmitt’s name carries a question mark; the final entry gives the Spanish name Adrian without its accent and also marks it uncertain. Such misspellings and qualifications matter: the documents point investigators toward people, but do not by themselves settle identity or fate. The novel’s historical knowledge is built from records that can be incomplete, disputed, or politically obstructed.

That uncertainty is sharpened by the destruction of the German Embassy in Madrid. When Allied representatives finally entered on 5 June 1945, after the Spanish authorities had delayed access through bureaucratic obstacles, the building had been stripped of its documents, registers, money, gold, antiques, art, and even furniture. The empty safes and bare walls make absence itself part of the evidence: the end of the war did not ensure that the material needed to reconstruct Nazi operations would remain available.

Perpetrators and Accountability

The postwar fate of Hans Aumeier illustrates both prosecution and the limits of prosecution. After the British intelligence service captured Gestapo files, Aumeier was arrested on 11 June 1945, extradited to Poland in 1946, and tried in 1947 for his conduct at Auschwitz. He denied guilt, denied the existence of gas chambers, and portrayed himself as a scapegoat for Germany’s defeat. Sentenced to death on 22 December, he was hanged in Kraków on 28 January 1948. The novel notes that his crimes at Auschwitz meant he was not tried for the Klooga massacre: one case brought a measure of legal accountability while another remained outside the judgment.

In another postwar encounter, Hans Lazar meets the Allied representatives inside the emptied German Embassy wearing a silk dressing gown. Asked who he is and what he is doing there, he identifies himself and explains that his private residence is in the building. The scene’s dissonance—an emptied diplomatic headquarters and a composed occupant claiming domestic space—underscores the distance between defeat and the dismantling of the networks and advantages built under the Reich.

Memory Beyond the War

The Holocaust’s moral weight also enters the novel through comparison and political disappointment. Saul Burnstein recalls Sara Burnstein, born Berkowitz, who witnessed her husband’s hanging and continued to live and work in Korczyna to support her children, until a new and greater hatred killed her. Against her endurance, he sees the trivial grievances of his own family and the shattered Bar Mitzvah photograph whose broken glass falls across the faces of the dead. The passage places private postwar estrangement beside the survival and loss of a family marked by persecution and murder.

The narrator’s later decision to kill the real Adrián Gallardo is likewise framed against knowledge of the mass killings. He has seen photographs of bodies in an Estonian forest, some arranged for burning and others reduced to a mixture of logs and charred corpses. He says he knows he is killing a murderer, but rejects the idea that he is acting as a avenger or a justiciar; he presents the act as a defense of people and causes endangered by Adrián’s return. The recollection shows how knowledge of atrocity shapes later moral judgment without making violence simple or absolving the person who commits it.

The novel’s sharpest political indictment comes when the narrator confronts Western allies who, in his view, shut the doors to the Spanish Republic while leaving them open to Hitler and Mussolini’s aid to Franco. He links that abandonment to the perceived indifference toward the bodies in the gas chambers, and recognizes his own earlier expectation of solidarity as naive. In this structure, the Holocaust is not only a historical crime recalled through evidence; it is also a measure against which postwar alliances, selective sympathy, and the protection of compromised figures are judged.