Rachel didn’t really need to go to Istanbul or Cairo, he knew everything there was to know about the ratlines Nazi officers used to disappear, to escape justice. In Istanbul Rachel never even left his hotel room, he spent the whole day lying on his bed or daydreaming in front of the window, scribbling in his notebooks, and the next morning he was off to Cairo to try and find out how Papa ended up getting involved with Nasser’s secret services, the Mukhabarat, after the coup d’état against King Farouk, and how he ended up being sent to Algeria to train the maquis, or whatever it was he was sent to do. But he had no hope of finding out – secret services are secret, everything they do is secret. There was one thing he did in Cairo that I found weird, something that showed me just how mad he was by then. There was only one reason for his trip to Turkey and Cairo in my mind, he was trying to kill time, he needed a break after his descent into the abyss, and he was trying to keep busy until the time came to die. He had already chosen the precise time: 11 p.m. on 24 April 1996. The massacre in Aïn Deb had taken place on 24 April 1994 at about 11 p.m. That was the moment when Papa and Maman and our neighbours became victims, but it was also the moment when SS officer Hans Schiller, exterminator and imposter, died, taking his secrets with him to the grave. For Rachel, justice was never done. It was a burden that he carried with him to the end, a burden I carry now.

Rachel’s Diary - Istanbul, 9 March 1996

Rachel’s Diary

Istanbul, 9 March 1996