‘The Russkis, the Yanks, the Engländer, the backstabbing French cunts and those vermin the Yids. Can you believe it, there were still some left? The old man had a rough time, what with Nakam and the fucking Jewish Agency who exploited all the upheaval to get their hands on Palestine and France, and then there was Mossad and that bastard Wiesenthal who was lining his pockets . . . and that’s not counting all the people who turned traitor overnight, some of them members of the 92. We didn’t know what was going on, we had to keep tabs on what they were planning, tell the Kameraden, set up the networks, protect the lines, raise money, forge papers . . . I can tell you, I worked like a dog . . . I miss it, really. Back then, people were prepared to go to any lengths for the sake of honour . . . These days . . .’

I listened without really listening. I knew a hundred times more than he did about all this. But seeing him, hearing him, smelling him, squelching with him through this fetid mire I experienced what it was like after the war, that end of the world unlike any other, the ruined wasteland stretching to the horizon, the scrawny hordes of dazed, half-dead people, bulldozers clearing the towering heaps of corpses, madmen wandering through the ruined countryside, surreal scenes, the wind carrying the stench of rotting flesh, the feckless already haggling, wheedling, testifying, making provisions for the future and, over this bedlam and confusion, excruciating, maddening, this haunting silence, this fog that chokes me even now.

‘So . . . what’s the story now, Uncle Adolph?’

‘It’s all over now, Jugend, the Jews have won.’

‘But Hitler will come back . . . or someone else, someone more p . . . someone as powerful.’

‘Yeah, yeah . . . Dream on.’

‘It could be a Frenchman, someone like us . . .’

‘Don’t make me laugh. You ever see a Frenchman with balls?’

‘Pétain had balls, didn’t he?’

‘Yeah, but he didn’t have Hitler’s genius. The sort of guy we need can only come from Germany.’

‘But what about Stalin and Pol Pot, Ceauescu, what about Mao, Kim Il-sung, Idi Amin and . . . the other guy, you know, with the moustache, the one who gassed all the . . .’

‘Scum, the lot of them, nothing but Commies and niggers and gooks, they don’t count.’

‘An American would be good, I mean they exterminated the Indians – though I admit they didn’t do such a great job with the Blacks. And they dropped a couple of atomic bombs on the Japs.’

‘Bullshit! They’re all Jews in America, they should be wiped out, the whole lot of them.’

‘Maybe the Arabs . . . what do you think? I mean they’ve got the rhetoric . . .’

‘The what?’

‘The spiel, the shtick, they’ve got a coherent ideology . . .’

‘Fucking Yids just like the rest of them, they’re only good for making charcoal, and not even decent charcoal.’