Lviv is the city Walter Kutschmann names while explaining how he survived the collapse of Nazi power: after crossing the Pyrenees, he found refuge in religious houses in Galicia, whose communities protected him without asking what he had done in Lviv. The brief reference turns the city into the concealed center of his account—a place whose significance is defined by the question his protectors did not ask.

A City Inside a Refugee’s Story

Kutschmann’s account reaches the false Adrián Gallardo during a weekend in Buenos Aires. Gallardo has arrived as part of Clara Stauffer’s network, and Kutschmann, an established German émigré, takes him around the city. In a candid conversation, Kutschmann says that his grandmothers’ religion saved his life: after crossing the Pyrenees shortly after the Allied landing in Normandy, he was passed among religious orders in Galicia and hidden in monasteries and convents. He says they never showed interest in what he had done in a Polish city called Lviv.

The wording makes Lviv a place of suppressed history rather than a destination in the itinerary. Kutschmann gives Gallardo a route of escape—Pyrenees, Galicia, cloister, Madrid, Buenos Aires—but the account’s most consequential detail is the gap between shelter and inquiry. His protectors provided concealment without examining the acts for which he might have been answerable.

Concealment and Reinvention

Kutschmann says that he remained under religious protection for three years, leaving the cloister only in the summer of 1947 to travel to Madrid. There he planned a journey with Clara Stauffer and attended the anniversary of the July 18 uprising in the mountains. Six months later he reached Buenos Aires without difficulty, carrying the genuine passport of a genuine Carmelite priest who continued to live in Sevilla.

His passage through these places is shaped by borrowed identities and institutions that make movement possible. The priest’s passport gives his escape an appearance of authenticity, while the protected years in Galicia leave his earlier history untouched. When Gallardo remarks that Kutschmann had entered as Pedro Ricardo Olmo, Kutschmann laughs and tells him to relax: they are no longer in Spain, but much farther from Nuremberg. Lviv remains the unspoken counterpoint to that reassurance, the place in his story that distance and a new name cannot erase.

Narrative Significance

The novel does not recount Kutschmann’s deeds in Lviv within this exchange; it records that he had done something there and that the religious communities sheltering him never asked what. That deliberate incompleteness gives the city its force. It is the buried premise beneath a story of rescue, and a measure of how easily escape networks and their protectors could separate humanitarian acts of shelter from scrutiny of a fugitive’s past.

Lviv’s brief appearance also sharpens the contrast between the intimate ease of Kutschmann’s confession and the gravity of what it withholds. He speaks openly enough to describe his refuge, route, and false papers, yet the city is left as the question mark at the heart of the conversation. The place anchors the novel’s larger concern with postwar flight and impunity without turning the scene into a full account of the crimes themselves.