I know it sounds incredible, but I didn’t know anything about the war, the extermination. I’d heard bits and pieces, things the imam said about the Jews and other stuff I’d picked up here and there. I always thought it was like a legend, something that happened hundreds of years ago. But the honest truth is I didn’t think about it much, I didn’t care, me and my mates, we were young, we were broke, all we cared about was our own lives. Rachel wrote terrible things. Everything was boiling over in his mind – words and phrases I’d never heard before cropped up again and again: the final solution, gas chambers, Kremas, Sonderkommandos, concentration camps, the Shoah, the Holocaust. There was a phrase in German, I didn’t know what it meant and Rachel didn’t translate it but it sounded like a curse: Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens. And another one that I recognised straight off: Befehl ist Befehl. That means ‘Orders are orders’. When we were little, living back in the bled, Papa used to say it under his breath sometimes if we argued back. Then, in French, or in Berber, he’d say, ‘We’re not at the circus!’ It’s like what Monsieur Vincent used to say when we tried to get round him: ‘Just do what I told you to do, if there’s time later, we’ll talk about your ideas.’

I guess after he read all this stuff, Rachel sat up all night. Reading what he wrote about it did my head in. Rachel was clever, he could always see the big picture, he understood things. I’m not like that, I need explanations, I need time to get things straight in my head. If I’d been Rachel, the stuff in the suitcase would have meant nothing to me, all I would have thought was: my parents have been murdered and I’ll never see them again. I’d have thought: Papa was a soldier back in Germany, then he came here to train the maquis, end of story. The only thing that seemed weird to me was that with all the experience he had, Papa ended up in a godforsaken hole like Aïn Deb. I’d have been off to California, I’d have been a stuntman in Hollywood or a bodyguard to some rich heiress. But that was Papa, he was a bit of a poet, a bit like those weirdos who get up one morning, sell their big city apartments and head off to the mountains to raise sheep that wolves will end up eating before they do. Papa went a lot farther, he went to Aïn Deb. It was the perfect place, really – even Algerians have never heard of it. Or at least they hadn’t until 25 April 1994.