Aoliy

Olij is a Dutch SS officer whom Manuel Arroyo identifies among the former Nazis and collaborators attending his Spanish classes in Madrid. His brief appearance links wartime power over civilians to a postwar refuge in which a wanted man can become an ordinary pupil, while the narration makes clear that the classroom’s calm surface conceals a record of violence.

Identity and wartime record

Olij is one of two Dutchmen in Arroyo’s group of students. The other, Abraham, is also associated with a violent wartime past; Olij is distinguished as an SS officer who served as mayor of his town during the final years of the war. His civilian office and military affiliation appear together, making the local authority he held part of the same history as his membership in the SS.

Exposure in the classroom

Arroyo recalls identifying his pupils one by one while listening to Guillermo discuss Otto Skorzeny. The portraits he mentally assembles are concrete and incriminating: Attila had ordered armed men to push bound Jews into the Danube, while another student had used his position at Dachau to reduce prisoners’ rations. When Arroyo reaches Olij, he notes that the Dutch SS officer had been mayor near the war’s end and that the Dutch government had placed a price on his head. That detail turns the language lesson into an implicit confrontation between the students’ present identities and the crimes or accusations attached to their pasts.

Postwar impunity and narrative role

Olij’s appearance is brief, and the passage does not describe his later actions or give an account of his fate. What it does establish is the distance between the ordinary setting in which Arroyo teaches and the violent histories his pupils carry into it. The bounty offered for Olij’s capture points to the contrast at the heart of this setting: he is wanted by a government, yet appears among men living in Spain after the war. In this way, Olij contributes to the novel’s portrayal of postwar shelter for Nazi fugitives and collaborators without becoming the focus of a separate escape narrative.