Narva, Estonia’s border city beside the Soviet Union, marks the eastern edge of a German position already under mounting pressure. In the novel, the Narva front is not simply a battlefield: it is the setting from which retreating SS troops are sent to help murder prisoners at nearby Klooga, and the place from which the perpetrators withdraw carrying the knowledge of what they have done. Its significance lies in that conjunction of military collapse, mass murder, and attempted escape from responsibility.

Border City and Front Line

The city stands about 27 kilometers from Vaivara, the principal camp in the SS concentration-camp system in Estonia. In the summer of 1943, as the German army in the East grows weaker and resists the Soviet advance with increasing desperation, this borderland is already defined by the expectation of a moving front. The military threat around Narva is thus close to the labor-camp network established to exploit Estonia’s resources, though the camps and the fighting remain distinct parts of the same occupation landscape.

Narva returns as the setting of a dated scene on 20 September 1944. By then, Adrián Gallardo Ortega is serving in the III SS Panzer Corps, a force made up of scattered European volunteers and depleted German replacements. His unit has retreated from Pokrovskaya through Ukraine to Estonia with what remains of the Flemish Legion. There are no other Spaniards in his company; surrounded by Germans, Flemings, Walloons, Finns, Hungarians, and Balts, he has had to learn enough German to follow orders. Jan has tried to improve his German so that Adrián could manage alone if Jan were killed.

The Klooga Massacre and the Retreat

In September 1944, an SS officer arrives by truck at the Narva front and orders the men to form up. Adrián understands only fragments of the Flemish commander’s words and has a better grasp of the German spoken by Hauptsturmführer Ernst Kleiber, partly because Jan has been teaching him. He realizes that volunteers are being requested, though he cannot tell what for. He stays where he is until Jan nudges him. Fewer than twenty men step forward at first; after Kleiber presses the request again, fewer than a dozen more volunteer. Adrián notices the reluctance but cannot understand its cause.

Kleiber has recruited fifty men to take part in the operation at Klooga. For three days, 20–22 September, the men eat, sleep, and drink vodka as they assist the camp guards in murdering prisoners. The killing averages roughly 550 prisoners a day; the men under Kleiber are assigned 400 each day, making 1,200 victims in total. Their drunken celebration and brutality belong to the same episode: the account does not let the apparent camaraderie of the truck rides obscure what the group is doing. Jan stops repeating, after every volley, that the prisoners are not human. Adrián remains sure that they have always been human, but says that it no longer matters to him.

The contrast between the foreign SS volunteers and Spanish soldiers helps explain the different attitudes in the unit. Many men at Narva had joined the SS as committed Nazis, fighting for racial supremacy and a Europe purged of Jews, Roma, and Slavs. The Spaniards who had gone to Russia, by contrast, had chiefly come to kill communists while invoking Catholic and national causes. Jan mocks them as fascists and retells the story of a priest who stopped a boxing match and forced three thousand men to sing carols at gunpoint. In Estonia the episode strikes Adrián and the others as comic and absurd. Their laughter does not amount to opposition to the massacre; faced with Kleiber’s demand for volunteers, Adrián still cannot imagine why the men hesitate.

On 23 September, after the final hangover and with the smell of burning flesh in their nostrils, Kleiber’s men leave the Narva front with what remains of the German army in the East. The retreat is orderly, but only briefly ahead of a rout. Soviet forces pursue them; by the time the Soviet army enters Estonia, the III SS Panzer Corps has crossed into Latvia. Adrián has seen the units he served with retreat repeatedly since reaching the Leningrad front. This withdrawal feels different because the men know it can end only in Berlin.

Flight, Memory, and Consequence

The men carry Klooga with them after they leave Estonia. The feverish, drunken euphoria that accompanied the journeys to and from the camp fades at the border. They do not again speak naturally about what happened in the forest, but the question of whether the Soviets reached Klooga and found the bodies returns among them. Some wonder whether any prisoners survived. Others reassure themselves that even if survivors were found, Baltic Jews would not be able to identify German army insignia. The reassurance works for days, then only hours, before the fear starts again. Narva’s retreat therefore opens onto a second kind of pursuit: not merely the Soviet advance, but the perpetrators’ recurring anxiety that the evidence of their crime may be discovered.

The novel also places Narva beside the nearby concentration-camp geography rather than treating the battle as an isolated military episode. Klooga was a satellite camp of Vaivara, and its prisoners included mostly Jewish people deported from the Vilna ghetto, as well as people transported from Kaunas and Salaspils, other Jews and Roma, and about a hundred Soviet prisoners of war. By the time Kleiber’s men arrive, the camp has held between two and three thousand people during its year of operation. A later account states that more than two thousand innocent people were murdered at Klooga and that a monolith at the former site commemorates them. Hans Aumeier’s crimes at Auschwitz prevent him from being tried for the Klooga massacre, leaving the memorial to mark both the dead and the limits of postwar accountability.

Narrative Significance

Narva joins the novel’s military chronology to its moral one. The German retreat is measured in roads, convoys, and changing territory, but the Klooga episode makes clear what moves with the soldiers: a crime carried out under orders, remembered in fragments, and followed by an effort to imagine that the victims cannot name their killers. The physical distance between the front and the camp is small; the distance the men try to put between themselves and their actions is much harder to cross.

Adrián’s limited German matters to the scene’s structure. He can understand that a request for volunteers has been made, but not what the mission entails; later, the narrative establishes the killings and the men’s assigned share in them. His partial comprehension echoes his inability to understand the reluctance he sees at the assembly. The resulting gap does not absolve him: he participates, recognizes the victims’ humanity, and then treats that recognition as irrelevant. At Narva, retreat is therefore more than a military movement westward. It is the passage from an atrocity the men have committed to the uncertain future in which its discovery remains possible.