Klooga is the forest where Adrián Gallardo’s participation in the murder of prisoners becomes the decisive rupture in his life. The killings leave him not merely afraid of what may follow, but convinced that he has been remade by the crime: he has no country or home to return to, and understands himself as a dead man still alive.

The Killings in the Forest

From September 20 through 22, 1944, Kleiber’s men spent three days drinking vodka while assisting the guards at Klooga in murdering prisoners. The unit helped kill approximately 550 people a day; the soldiers under Kleiber were assigned 400 each day, 1,200 in total. Gallardo remained certain that the victims had always been human, even as he ceased to care. Jan Schmitt de Wandaleer, by contrast, no longer felt the need to insist before each firing that they were not human. The difference does not prevent either man from participating in the massacre.

On September 23, the soldiers left the Narva front in an orderly retreat, carrying the smell of burning flesh with them. The violence at Klooga had taken place amid drunken euphoria and embraces, but that mood dissolved at the border. Afterwards, Kleiber’s men did not speak naturally about what had happened in the forest. They returned instead to anxious questions: whether the advancing Russians had reached Klooga, found the bodies, or discovered survivors. Some tried to reassure themselves that even survivors might not recognize German army insignia. The reassurance lasted first for days, then only hours, before the same fears began again.

The Forest’s Afterlife

Gallardo never joined the soldiers’ conversations about Klooga. He believed that speaking of it was foolish: Germany would lose the war, the burned bone piles would be found before the pines and firs grew back, or a prisoner would identify the perpetrators. He imagined that any of the men might begin reciting numbers, names, and surnames, perhaps Kleiber himself. Unlike the others, Gallardo feared there could be no confusion about his identity: he was the group’s only Spaniard.

The massacre also severed him from the person he had been. The Tiger of Treviño, once an unsophisticated man, seemed to Gallardo to belong to another life, as did the innocent grandson of Don Carlos Garrote. He now understood himself as a living dead man, born again alone and soaked in blood in Klooga’s woods. The place became more than the setting of a crime: it was the point at which he believed he had lost any country, village, or home to which he could return.

Guilt and the Road to Berlin

For Gallardo, the prospect of punishment was inseparable from the certainty of Germany’s defeat. He believed that someone would eventually uncover the burned remains or that a prisoner would speak; the fact that he was the only Spaniard in Kleiber’s group made him especially certain that no one would mistake him for another perpetrator. Yet he did not expect to survive the war. Knowing that he deserved death, he fought through the final months of 1944 and the opening months of 1945 in Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and finally Germany, like a machine trying to postpone it.

His retreat toward Berlin was more than a military withdrawal. Gallardo had decided to die there, carrying his journey back to its furthest possible limit until his body reached the condition he believed his spirit had already attained: dead, and at last one with it. Klooga thus remains the origin of the identity from which he cannot escape, while Berlin becomes the destination he chooses for a life he considers already ended.

Narrative Significance

Klooga marks the reversal at the center of Gallardo’s transformation: the soldiers’ brief, drunken euphoria gives way to recurring fear of discovery, while his silence masks a different certainty—that their crime will eventually be exposed. The forest becomes inseparable from the remains they left behind, the names he expects someone to recite, and the blood-soaked identity he believes he acquired there. His chosen retreat toward Berlin carries that rupture forward: although he expects to die, he keeps fighting to delay death, seeking a final destination where his body and spirit might become one.