I think I have been honest, I think where possible I have weighed things carefully, nothing is ever absolutely black and it is rarer still that things are white as snow. I have neither tempered the responsibility my father bears, though he was only a tiny cog in a fantastical machine, nor considered even for a second that that blind machine could have functioned without the determined commitment of each and every man who was a part of it. I could be wrong, but because I know him as well as any child can know his father, I believe he was never deliberately cruel. He was what he was: stern, exacting, inflexible. A bit of an opportunist, too, from what I know of his time in Egypt and Algeria. He had to live, he took whatever was offered: spy, weapons instructor, anything. In Algeria at least he did enough to earn the title of veteran Mujahid, a title of great glory to Algerians. In the village where he lived he was a respected cheikh, he was a loving husband to Maman and a good father to us, devoted enough to deprive himself of our presence and send us to France to be educated so that we might have a solid future. He was the victim of a barbarous act and was elevated to the status of chahid, a martyr of the nation. To the people of Aïn Deb, he was a Righteous Person.

You do not choose your life. My father did not choose, he found himself on a road that led to infamy, to the very heart of the Holcaust. He couldn’t leave the road, all he could do was close his eyes and keep on walking. No one dreams of being a torturer, no one dreams of one day being a torture victim. Just as the sun releases its excesses of energy in sporadic sun spots, from time to time history releases the hatred humanity has accumulated in a scorching wind that sweeps away everything in its path. Chance decides whether one is here or there, protected or exposed, on this side of the channel or that. I chose nothing, I chose to live a quiet, hardworking life and here I am before a scaffold that was not built for me. I am paying for another’s crime. I want to save him, because he is my father, because he is a man. This is how I choose to answer Primo Levi’s question If this is a man. Yes, no matter however far he has fallen, the victim is a man, and however terrible his shame, his executioner is still a man.