From my hotel window, I sat, staring out on this mystifying world, nodding as I watched. At one point, I’m not sure why, I watched a young European guy discreetly following an old Turk wearing a frayed saroual but solid as an ox, as they disappeared into a dark alley. In that moment, I slipped into my father’s skin. This is the way I’ve learned to understand him better, I steal into his thoughts, walk in his footsteps, following the terrible road he travelled. I am Jekyll and Hyde. I can picture myself as my father after a hard ride across Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, with the Balkans in flames all around me, travelling by night, sleeping by day, cutting through field and forest, careful to avoid the towns, finally arriving in Bulgaria to find myself surrounded by Bolsheviks. From here, I steal into Istanbul where Turkish traffickers are waiting to help me. There have been rumours going round for months, rumours that reached the camps just as we began the process of liquidation and closure – a process marked in Auschwitz by the terrible ‘Night of the Gypsies’ when 2,897 Romany gypsies were exterminated, and in every camp by the massacre of the Sonderkommando. According to these rumours, secret negotiations were taking place between the Headquarters of the Reich Security Office on behalf of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen SS and the Gestapo, and the Turkish secret services, negotiations establishing escape routes allowing German officers to use Turkey as a hub – at least for as long as Europe is in turmoil. It is the only possible escape route, every European country is occupied by one power or another and the hunt for collaborators and war criminals is in full spate. A lot of money had been transferred into Turkish bank accounts in Switzerland to save the German military elite. Later, in 1947, when ODESSA is up and running, there will be other escape routes – through Switzerland, Italy and Austria, the chaotic plans of the early post-war days over, a new era will dawn, an era ruled by business interests, horse-trading, millions of dollars, buried treasures, priceless paintings, rare documents, mythical objects worth their weight in diamonds, top-secret files. There will be top-secret negotiations with governments, secret organisations, high-ranking emissaries, great secret wars will be fought, old ideologies explosively rekindled. The concentration camp prisoner and his tragic tale will be forgotten, as though the next world war is already being fought. Demand will outstrip supply, everyone will want their very own German – an expert in missiles, solid fuels, chemical and atomic weapons, an expert in medicine and military engineering, in military-industrial systems, in ciphers and codebreaking, in propaganda, in art, in dealing with minorities. There will be no one not prepared to do a deal with ODESSA. I can imagine myself, a clandestine European in search of some adventure too shameful to mention, slipping through the streets of the medina, holing up in some insalubrious caravanserai and waiting, just as I am doing now in this hotel, spending my days staring furtively through a rickety oriel window and nodding. I imagine myself startled by the slightest noise, listening to the BBC as it triumphantly announces the end of the world – the end of our world reporting as, one after another, our cities are bombed as Allied and Russian troops squabble over the Reich, over our beloved Berlin, as senior party members are arrested, the reports of the Führer’s suicide, of the mass surrender of whole divisions of our magnificent army, of starving people scrabbling through ruined streets. I think of Uelzen and I can hear my elderly parents moaning beneath the rubble. I can imagine myself, desperate, holding my head in my hands, hesitating between suicide, between fight and flight.