Kolpino

Kolpino is the frontline setting where Adrián Gallardo’s friendship with Jan Schmitt takes shape and where Schmitt’s accounts of his family’s suffering begin to connect Gallardo’s military service to the crimes he has chosen not to see. It is also the place where the story makes that evasion consequential: words Gallardo half-listened to remain in his memory when he is confronted with the victims of a concentration camp.

Frontline setting and Jan’s arrival

A week after Gallardo reached the front at Kolpino, a stray bullet killed his company’s interpreter. For several days the unit was left without reliable contact with Wehrmacht command or the other foreign volunteer divisions operating on the same front. Jan Schmitt arrived as an answer to that practical problem: he could speak several languages fluently, although each sounded far from the standardized forms favored by ultranationalists.

Schmitt introduced himself with both surnames, but the second was so difficult to pronounce that the soldiers dropped it. His Spanish was that of Buenos Aires; his German carried a Flemish accent and was mixed with Dutch words. Both registers irritated his interlocutors, yet no one else available in the Wehrmacht spoke Spanish. Schmitt was therefore transferred provisionally from the Flemish Legion to the Blue Division and assigned to Kolpino.

An unlikely companionship

At Kolpino, Schmitt soon learned that Gallardo had been Spain’s boxing runner-up. That distinction did not impress him. Schmitt preferred football and spoke enthusiastically about River Plate, the Argentine boxer Firpo, and the Sundays he had spent at the stadium with his father. Gallardo found much of Schmitt’s Buenos Aires Spanish difficult to follow, but laughed at the mismatch between the new interpreter’s volubility and his own silence.

The two men were nearly the same height, and Jan was two years older, though his slight build made him look much younger. Their friendship formed quickly because each had something the other needed. Gallardo, troubled by his reputation as a false idol, disliked the soldiers who disturbed the trenches at night to ask for autographs. Schmitt cared chiefly about politics and could speak for hours about Hitler, gendered ideologies, and his belief in the supposed genetic defect of Marxists. Gallardo rarely answered, but Schmitt’s talk kept him company; in time, Gallardo grew fond of the Spanish that other Spaniards disliked.

Their closeness also changed Schmitt’s position in the unit. During his first days at Kolpino, soldiers had imitated and mocked his way of speaking. Once he and Gallardo began going everywhere together, the lieutenant’s presence deterred that treatment. Schmitt recognized the protection plainly: the soldiers feared Gallardo.

The history that Gallardo carries

Schmitt’s political convictions were rooted in a family tragedy he recounted repeatedly. His brother Martin had died; Josef was confined to a wheelchair; Johann had died by suicide. Their father, Klaus, had mourned them with enduring bitterness while instilling in his firstborn an uncompromising hatred. Schmitt claimed that inheritance with pride.

Gallardo did not attend closely to these stories when Schmitt first told them. He sometimes challenged Schmitt’s racial hierarchy with a mocking observation: if Slavs were supposedly subhuman, why were the Russians defeating them so badly? Schmitt answered with a comparison between lions killing humans and human beings being killed by animals, presenting his belief as scientific truth. Kolpino thus places Gallardo beside an ideology he does not fully engage: he can recognize its absurdity in argument, yet remains content to let Schmitt speak without seriously confronting what the talk means.

Memory, complicity, and consequence

That apparent inattention does not erase what Gallardo heard. Later, when he is ordered to wait beside a truck and sees the camp guards, the narrative recalls both Schmitt’s family history and his defense of the idea that Slavs were inferior. Gallardo had volunteered without knowing that a concentration camp lay hidden in the woods, or knowing its name and the number of its prisoners. But he had heard Schmitt describe the dead, the disabled, and the bereaved, even if he had listened as though to rain.

Kolpino’s significance therefore extends beyond the immediate military setting. The friendship begins as companionship and practical protection, while Schmitt’s talk supplies facts that Gallardo’s conscience has not yet absorbed. When the reality of the camp confronts him, those remembered words make ignorance harder to claim as innocence. The place marks the distance between hearing about suffering and accepting responsibility for what follows.