That night, I didn’t sleep, I spent the whole night talking to my parents like I used to do years ago, talking to Rachel, the way we never did, talking to my mates, the way we soon would. It was like I was happy already.

Note: the way the following chapters are laid out and the excerpts from Rachel’s diary were suggested to me by Madame Dominique G.H.

Rachel visited Istanbul and Cairo in March 1996, after the long trek that started in Frankfurt in June 1995, and took him through Germany, Austria and Poland, ending in Auschwitz in February 1996. With one exception, Rachel followed a logical, necessary route, he retraced our father’s career as it appears in his military record: it begins in Frankfurt, goes on to various camps in Germany and Austria and ends in Poland, not at Auschwitz, but at Lublin-Majdanek. There are other postings mentioned in his military record – in France and in Belgium – but Rachel assumed they had nothing to do with the Holocaust. They were brief, probably scientific, stints in Paris, Rocroi, Ghent and elsewhere, places where the Reich didn’t have concentration camps. Papa was a chemical engineer so he might easily have been sent to a factory, or a training centre or one of the laboratories run by the Reich. The one thing I don’t understand is why Rachel made Auschwitz the last stop on his journey, when Papa had been there mid-way through his career. Was it because to most people Auschwitz is synonymous with the extermination of the Jews? I don’t think so. Rachel had done his research, he knew the horrors in Auschwitz were no different to any other camps, and besides – as he says in his diary – prisoners were regularly shunted from one camp to another, what they didn’t suffer in one, they suffered in another. Whatever his reasons, it’s obvious that his trip to Auschwitz, more than any of the others, utterly devastated him. I think it was there, at a very specific moment, that he decided to kill himself – to gas himself – as soon as he got back to Paris. Maybe he’d thought about it before, maybe he’d thought about it from the very beginning back in Aïn Deb, maybe it happened in Uelzen or in Frankfurt, or later in Buchenwald, in Dachau, or during the weeks and months he spent alone in his house after he lost his job, after Ophélie left. Maybe Auschwitz was only a catalyst, a trigger. But maybe, in a very specific way, the scene at Auschwitz he describes at length was what finally decided him.