It was thinking about him, about his incredibly stressful, unrewarding work that prompted me to collate all this information on the gas chambers and the Kremas. I wanted to be able to picture his daily routine in the death trade. I also felt that to judge my father I needed to understand his crimes, to set down each stage, to reconstruct everything as accurately as possible. There would still be a chapter to be written about extenuating circumstances but, having given this some thought, I decided that a man engulfed by evil who does not commit suicide, does not resist, does not give himself up and demand justice in the name of his victims but runs away, hides, conspires so his family are oblivious, has no right to compassion, no claim to extenuating circumstances. Children always judge their fathers harshly, but they do so because they love and respect them more than anyone in the world. I also thought – thought first and foremost – of the victims in this vast hell, and it occurred to me that all the meaning in the world had gone up in smoke with them. We live in a new era, an era in which the impossible is the only thing that is possible. With computing, automation and modern methods of manipulating the masses, the great Miracle is now within our grasp – just look at the horrors visited on so many honourable peoples by homilies as pathetic as Mein Kampf, and with only the meagre resources of third world countries: Mao’s Little Red Book, Qaddafi’s Green Book, the writings of Kim Il-sung and Khomeini, and those of the ‘Türkmenbay’ – Saparmurat Niyazov, and the millions of people destroyed by sects devoid of ideas and of means.