Offenbach am Main was a short trip over the Kaiserliebrücke. Martin found himself staring out at the grey waters of the river, watching the sun slowly slip below the horizon, a palette of colours spanning across the broken landscape. He stepped down from the bus, looking at the crude map he’d drawn for himself. The streets were narrow lanes of broken stone, with wide, spacious pathways in between where pedestrians used to stroll under the shade of old trees. He was looking for #23 Adriaanastrasse, and followed a narrow walkway, looking at several old houses that had somehow escaped the bombing.
#23 was near the end of the street, where a large open field of scrub brush and tall, spindly aspens was all that was left. The ground was littered with broken stumps that were weathered and jagged; the sod had been churned up with large mounds of dirt and wide standing berms he assumed were from artillery rounds. The berms around the mounds were covered in long grass and wildflowers. He could see lights on inside the house and slowly made his way up the battered pathway to the scarred door.
He knocked.
It was a moment before he heard what he thought was the sound of the door being unlocked. He stood back, expecting the door to open. There was nothing. He looked at the door, saw a shadow moving back and forth in the small stain of light at the bottom of the door, spilling out across the porch.
“Herr Beck?”
“Whatever you want, I’m not interested,” an old voice called back through the door. It was hoarse and sounded brusque.
“Herr Beck, it’s me,” Martin said quickly, and he could hear the old man pause—hesitating—before he spoke through the door again.
“Martin? Is that you?”
“It is.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Martin heard the locks being turned again. He also heard what sounded like a chair being pushed aside. And then the door opened. He looked down at the old man and waited until recognition crossed his face. He’s aged, Martin thought. As much as Martin understood how much he’d changed himself, Beck had aged more. There were deep lines sculpted on his face. His eyes were milky white and he seemed to focus more on Martin’s voice than he relied on his own eyesight. His hair was snow white.
Beck stood in silence, looking at Martin closely—studying him, he was sure—and then shrugged, stepping aside and inviting Martin in. Martin took off his hat as he stepped in through the door. The living space Beck had created for himself was centred around a large fireplace, the andirons a medieval rendering of some mythological creature Martin didn’t recognize. There was a dark wooden bookcase with a broken door to the left of the fireplace, and a sunken leather armchair kept level with a large block of milled timber. An oval rug that had seen better days sat in the middle of the floor, in front of the chair. A dimly-lit kerosene lamp stood on the side table beside the chair. Along with the remnants of a past meal and an open bottle of Canadian whiskey with a half-full tumbler beside it, was an overfull ashtray with a chewed piece of cigar. There was an open book on the chair.
Martin paused in front of the bookshelf. There were a variety of Classics in several languages. He turned, letting the fire warm him, and looked at Beck.
“I didn’t know you read Italian,” he said.
“I don’t,” the old man said. “I do the same thing everyone else does with their pretentious Italian classics; I wipe my ass with them. That’s about all they’re good for,” he added, as he picked up the book he was reading and sat down. “I’d offer you a chair, but as you can see,” he said with a half-hearted shrug. “I thought you were dead,” he said at last, looking up at him.
“Funny that, my mother said the same thing,” Martin smiled.
“She made it through, did she? Good. Good for her.”
“Good for her? Is that all you have to say?”
“What else is there for me to say? Sometimes, when I look around and see what’s left, I think the lucky ones were the ones who died. We’re just here to pick up the pieces and rebuild; that’s all.”
“Until the next war.”
“I think it’s safe to say it won’t be in my lifetime,” Beck smiled.
“They could turn on each other tomorrow and Russia would be crushed. The Allies could be inside of Moscow within a month. Who knows? The people might actually welcome them.”
“Some will,” Beck said, staring at the flames. “The old ones. The ones who remember what it was like before.”
“Did you fight?” Martin asked.
“Like a true patriot,” Beck said with no excitement, and Martin didn’t know what to think.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
Beck looked directly at him. “It means, I pointed my gun and pulled the trigger. I didn’t care who it was. Men, women, young boys looking for food; it didn’t matter. I fought for what was mine.”
“And what was that?”
“My life.”
“Your life? What about your National Socialist idealism? Where did that go? Wasn’t that worth fighting for?” Martin asked. “Isn’t that what it was all about in the first place? National Socialist idealism, and the Master Race?”
“Fuck their idealism! In the end, it all got twisted about, didn’t it?” Beck said after a lengthy pause. He picked up the cigar stub and pulled a match out of his shirt pocket; he lit it with his thumbnail.
“They made it into something monstrous—in the end, I mean. It became something hideous. I believed everything they said about the Jews, and the Gypsies—and the rest of your lot, really—that they were a waste of good, clean, air—in fact, a part of me still wants to believe that your sort don’t belong in a racially pure, Aryan nation. While I understand how impure blood will mix and weaken the ideal of the Aryan Superman—well, that’s what they said, and that’s what we wanted to believe, for the most part. But the wholesale slaughter of millions of people?” he said after a moment with a slow shake of his head. A wreath of smoke surrounded his head like a halo.
“Jews or not, one has to draw the line somewhere. Somehow, I think genocide is a good place to draw that line, don’t you? I can hate. I want you to know that I know how to hate. We all know how to do that. And by that, I mean I know how to hate indiscriminately. I think everyone can to some degree, don’t you? I’m sure you have a lot of hatred built up inside of you after all that you’ve been through. I want you to know I pictured the Concentration Camps as something built to hold the Jews until things were sorted out with them. I was naïve. I imagined there would be mass deportations to their country of origin, no matter where that might be.
“But to kill that many people?” he said with a note of contempt, or maybe it was disgust; Martin wanted to believe that much about the man. “The wholesale slaughter of a people just because they are different from us? Blackened skies with smoke that rained ashes of the dead on the surrounding countryside? What does that say for us as a Nation? What does it say about us as a people?”
“Are you looking for forgiveness?”
“Forgiveness? For what? Genocide? You can’t forgive something like that! You shouldn’t, anyway.”
THE TRUTH OF WHO WE ARE