disposal was always a problem. Stripped naked, the corpses were stacked in piles, like cordwood. Occasionalsound and movement emanated from the piles, and the living had to be dug out.
Throughout the film, Klaus maintained an air of careful reserve. He clung to it the way a shipwrecked sailor might cling to
a piece of flotsam in a lonely sea. He was afraid to let it go. He did not know what might take its place. Not until several
weeks later, when he had read and seen everything he could uncover on what the German people,
his
people, had called the
final solution
to the Jewish problem, did he find out. What came was a very fine and continuing madness.
At the age of twelve, Klaus Logefeld was left with the cold certainty that nothing in his life was ever going to be as it
had been before. All he could think of were the cordwood skeletons, and that it was Germans who had put them there, and that
he
was a German. He learned to control the feeling as he grew into adolescence, but it stayed with him. Finally he became disgusted.
Why was he molesting himself with abstract issues of national guilt, of historical evil? He was no philosopher or priest.
He was just a German with an aching soul. That was hardly a life’s work.
Yet no one could say he had not been trying to turn it into just that. How? By becoming a schoolboy bomb-maker? A particular
irony lay in that, too, since the bombs were always used for good causes.
Human qualities still had to be cherished.
They also had to be protected from the crazies.
There were always the crazies.
Their names and colors might change but they were always there.
At one point Klaus might have become one of them, until he had very deliberately pulled a switch and changed a lot of things.
Changed his name and identity.
Changed his personal history.
Changed his career path from revolutionary to establishment academic.
Changed everything but his long-term goals.
In the general nature of things, he sometimes thought wryly, that still left him pretty much of a crazy.
Except, of course, to his own grandfather, a once celebrated, war-maimed hero of the Third Reich, who mockingly referred to
him as Little Jesus, yet understood and cared about him as no one else ever had.
Klaus still had the old scrapbook, reverently put together and passed on to him by his mother, that heralded his grandfather’s
glory. Tempted to burn it a hundred times, he had kept it as a lesson and a reminder. His legacy. As if he could ever have
forgotten the yellowed news clippings and photographs, especially the one picture that had shown Adolph Hitler himself hanging
the Iron Cross around the neck of Major Helmut Schadt, whose hideously patched together face bore testimony to the heroic
actions that had saved an entire Wehrmacht battalion from certain annihilation.
It had become perhaps the most famous news picture of World War II, shamelessly exploited by all sides for their own purposes.
Pathways of glory, leading straight to hell. For years, antiwar stamps and posters had carried that same silently scream ing
face.
Not only was his grandfather alive and remarkably well, but Klaus still loved him and carried him whole in his heart.
Chapter 5
T HE ONLY WAY for Paulie to have prevented the public event that the funeral finally became was for him to have spirited away his parents’
bodies in the middle of the night. He had not wanted to do that. His mother and father had lived on the Amalfi coast for twenty-seven
years, he had been born here, and a lot of people cared about them. So he just let things take their course and tried to handle
it as best he could.
Circumstances made even that nearly impossible. With the unsolved double murder of a major artist and his wife sending the
media into an instant feeding frenzy, with hundreds of the morbidly curious gridlocking the roads and plazas surrounding the
church, police from several neighboring towns had to be called in simply
Throughout the film, Klaus maintained an air of careful reserve. He clung to it the way a shipwrecked sailor might cling to
a piece of flotsam in a lonely sea. He was afraid to let it go. He did not know what might take its place. Not until several
weeks later, when he had read and seen everything he could uncover on what the German people,
his
people, had called the
final solution
to the Jewish problem, did he find out. What came was a very fine and continuing madness.
At the age of twelve, Klaus Logefeld was left with the cold certainty that nothing in his life was ever going to be as it
had been before. All he could think of were the cordwood skeletons, and that it was Germans who had put them there, and that
he
was a German. He learned to control the feeling as he grew into adolescence, but it stayed with him. Finally he became disgusted.
Why was he molesting himself with abstract issues of national guilt, of historical evil? He was no philosopher or priest.
He was just a German with an aching soul. That was hardly a life’s work.
Yet no one could say he had not been trying to turn it into just that. How? By becoming a schoolboy bomb-maker? A particular
irony lay in that, too, since the bombs were always used for good causes.
Human qualities still had to be cherished.
They also had to be protected from the crazies.
There were always the crazies.
Their names and colors might change but they were always there.
At one point Klaus might have become one of them, until he had very deliberately pulled a switch and changed a lot of things.
Changed his name and identity.
Changed his personal history.
Changed his career path from revolutionary to establishment academic.
Changed everything but his long-term goals.
In the general nature of things, he sometimes thought wryly, that still left him pretty much of a crazy.
Except, of course, to his own grandfather, a once celebrated, war-maimed hero of the Third Reich, who mockingly referred to
him as Little Jesus, yet understood and cared about him as no one else ever had.
Klaus still had the old scrapbook, reverently put together and passed on to him by his mother, that heralded his grandfather’s
glory. Tempted to burn it a hundred times, he had kept it as a lesson and a reminder. His legacy. As if he could ever have
forgotten the yellowed news clippings and photographs, especially the one picture that had shown Adolph Hitler himself hanging
the Iron Cross around the neck of Major Helmut Schadt, whose hideously patched together face bore testimony to the heroic
actions that had saved an entire Wehrmacht battalion from certain annihilation.
It had become perhaps the most famous news picture of World War II, shamelessly exploited by all sides for their own purposes.
Pathways of glory, leading straight to hell. For years, antiwar stamps and posters had carried that same silently scream ing
face.
Not only was his grandfather alive and remarkably well, but Klaus still loved him and carried him whole in his heart.
Chapter 5
T HE ONLY WAY for Paulie to have prevented the public event that the funeral finally became was for him to have spirited away his parents’
bodies in the middle of the night. He had not wanted to do that. His mother and father had lived on the Amalfi coast for twenty-seven
years, he had been born here, and a lot of people cared about them. So he just let things take their course and tried to handle
it as best he could.
Circumstances made even that nearly impossible. With the unsolved double murder of a major artist and his wife sending the
media into an instant feeding frenzy, with hundreds of the morbidly curious gridlocking the roads and plazas surrounding the
church, police from several neighboring towns had to be called in simply
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