The lifelong friendship of Angelus Thomsen and Boris Eltz

The lifelong friendship of Angelus Thomsen and Boris Eltz is a bond formed before either man’s adult life could be divided by politics and history. Childhood intimacy, shared journeys, candid argument, and acts of concern give their friendship a continuity that the surrounding violence repeatedly tests but does not erase.

A friendship formed early

Thomsen remembers Boris as his permanent familiar: emphatic, intrepid, handsome, and almost princely in manner. Their closeness spans kindergarten, childhood, and adolescence, so the friendship is presented not as a later alliance of convenience but as part of the structure of Thomsen’s life. Boris belongs to his earliest recollections and remains beside him as those lives change.

Their shared history also includes travel for its own sake. They take cycling holidays in France, England, Scotland, and Ireland, then undertake a three-month trek from Munich to Reggio and onward to Sicily. These journeys give the friendship a geography wider than the place where their adult lives become constrained. They have known one another through ordinary time and movement, long before the pressure of political events makes their closeness more difficult.

History enters the friendship

Thomsen locates the change in adulthood: their friendship runs into difficulty when politics, or history, comes down on their lives. The wording makes the rupture larger than a private disagreement. The men have not simply grown apart; circumstances now distribute risk and time differently between them. Their intimacy persists, but it has to operate within a world that can make even personal choices consequential.

Boris states that contrast plainly. Thomsen, he says, will be gone by Christmas, while Boris expects to remain until June; he asks why he is not being sent east. He then judges Thomsen’s chances with a woman as nonexistent because she is too conspicuous, and warns him to be careful: the Old Boozer is also the Commandant. The warning is teasing in its bluntness, but its substance is serious. Boris knows that Thomsen’s personal hopes exist inside the camp’s danger and hierarchy, and he refuses to treat them as safely separate. Thomsen answers that stranger things have happened; Boris replies that much stranger things have happened. Their exchange keeps the familiar rhythm of challenge and counterchallenge even as its subject is peril.

Candour, everyday talk, and practical care

Their ease is also visible in the way conversation begins. When Boris is about to tell Thomsen the story of Special Train 105, Thomsen first asks who Boris has on at the moment. Boris mentions a cook in Bunatown, a barmaid in Katowitz, and his hope of getting somewhere with Alisz Seisser, a sergeant’s widow who may soon return to Hamburg. He complains that although he likes women of all kinds, he is attracted only to women from the lower classes. The exchange is relaxed and indiscreet: Thomsen can interrupt a grave story to ask after Boris’s romantic life, and Boris answers without ceremony.

That familiarity does not make the men indifferent to danger. When Boris arrives restless and sober to tell Thomsen that Esther has sent a postcard, Thomsen asks how they can get her out. The moment turns their informal closeness toward a concrete question of rescue. Boris brings the news to Thomsen; Thomsen responds by trying to find a way to help. Their friendship is therefore not only a store of shared memories or a source of jokes. In the present, it is also a channel through which urgent news and responsibility pass.

Conflict, remorse, and moral disclosure

The bond has never depended on an absence of anger. When they are twelve, a shouting match becomes physical, and Boris’s violence is so intense that Thomsen compares its force to being run over by a frenzied, self-righteous combine harvester. Once back on his feet, Thomsen thinks Boris must have hated him all along. Boris’s subsequent response overturns that first interpretation: he weeps, strokes Thomsen’s shoulder, and repeatedly apologizes. The scene preserves both the frightening force of the fight and the tenderness of its aftermath. In their friendship, violence can wound, but it does not settle the meaning of the relationship; remorse and physical comfort follow.

As adults, Boris also trusts Thomsen with an account of how his view of the state began to change. At Goleschau, he heard that psychiatric patients were being killed in Konigsberg to clear beds for men who had broken down after killing women and children in Poland and Russia. Boris describes the realization as an anti-eureka: he began to understand that all was not as it should be in Deutschland. This disclosure gives their friendship a moral dimension without making Boris’s recognition a substitute for action or a simple resolution. He tells Thomsen what he heard and what it made him suspect; the friendship can hold that recognition alongside their ordinary talk, attraction, and personal worries.

The evidence presents no final settlement of the friendship’s adult difficulties. Instead, it shows the bond continuing through exchanges that combine teasing with warning, familiar conversation with urgent concern, and remembered hurt with apology. Its significance lies in that persistence: Boris and Thomsen remain each other’s intimates even when history changes what closeness can safely mean.