Cruz Roja Internacional

The International Committee of the Red Cross is a postwar humanitarian organization that appears in the novel at a decisive juncture in the life of the man then living under the identity Alfonso Navarro. Its representative offers to arrange his repatriation to Spain, but that apparently practical offer forces the fugitive to confront the danger of returning under a stolen name. His refusal exposes how an identity that has protected him can also trap him.

Contact with a released prisoner

After nearly two years in overcrowded cells, the prisoner is moved from Soviet custody to a prison in the western occupation zone. In November 1946, rather than meeting a civilian judge or Allied military officer, he is received by a woman from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The encounter follows a long delay: a Russian-speaking Spanish officer had told him almost a year earlier that his file would be transferred to a British or American tribunal, but no trial had taken place. The Allied justice system had been overwhelmed by the Nuremberg trials.

The representative addresses him in English and says that the organization knows his case. She explains that, as a citizen of a neutral country in the conflict, he can be repatriated. The offer treats his nationality as an administrative fact and return as a manageable next step. For the prisoner, however, the name and nationality on which the proposal rests are not a safe route home.

Repatriation refused

The man answers that he does not know whether he wants to return to his country. He has not yet worked out what accepting the offer would require: he would have to reclaim his own identity, and he can see no way to do so without ruining himself. His immediate refusal therefore conceals a more fundamental predicament. He is not simply choosing Germany over Spain; he cannot safely resume the identity he has surrendered in order to survive.

The representative is astonished, but does not force an immediate decision. The prisoner asks for time to think. When she assumes he is Catholic and asks through an interpreter whether he would like a confessor, he agrees. The episode shows the organization’s representative engaging him through both practical assistance and personal concern, while the possibility of repatriation remains unresolved.

A story that prevents return

A Swiss priest, Father Schulze, hears the prisoner’s confession in German. The man says that during the Spanish Civil War he killed many Republicans; the priest minimizes the crimes committed in God’s name. In their subsequent conversations, Schulze supplies clues that help the prisoner build a plausible explanation for refusing repatriation. He tells the Red Cross representative that Alfonso does not want to go back because he took part in repression in his hometown and ordered the execution of members of his own family. The prisoner also claims that he had a girlfriend in Berlin during the final months of the war and wants to remain with her.

The representative is too busy to press the matter again. Shortly afterward, Schulze tells the prisoner that he will not be required to leave Germany and will not face a tribunal. On the eve of his release, the man asks the priest for one final confession. Schulze can offer little material support beyond directions to an Army of Salvation soup kitchen and two Catholic parishes that might help him find food or work. The prisoner leaves prison, vomits outside, and makes his way across Berlin to Schöneberg, carrying no secure future with him.

Narrative significance

The encounter makes the limits of institutional paperwork visible without suggesting that the organization itself knowingly assists the fugitive. Its offer depends on the prisoner being legible as a neutral-country citizen called Alfonso Navarro; that same assumed identity makes repatriation dangerous. A humanitarian procedure intended to return a displaced person home becomes a test of whether he can afford to be recognized, while his survival depends on a fabricated account of past violence and an invented reason to stay. The scene thus ties the Red Cross’s practical role to the novel’s wider concern with false identities and the uncertain passage from wartime survival to postwar accountability.