I need to know, I need to understand. Rachel made a mistake, he got caught up in his grief and it destroyed him, just like his boss Monsieur Candela told him it would. You have to try and put things in context, like Com’Dad said to me, “First you have to understand.” Com’Dad thinks Rachel understood, but he’s wrong, Rachel wanted to understand to take away the grief — or maybe so he could finally grieve. He became obsessed with evil and he turned it on himself. He got so caught up in it that he tried to take papa’s guilt upon himself. He even imagined he’d lived in the camps, imagined himself as an SS officer’s son playing with other kids, beating and killing poor little bastards who never did anything to him. The most dangerous traps are the ones we set for ourselves. Rachel even imagined putting on his black suit and going before a judge to confess to every crime committed in the Third Reich. I think what really finished him off was that poem by Primo Levi that starts off blaming the readers: “
You who live secure / In your warm houses, / Who return at evening to find / Hot food and friendly faces: / Consider whether this is a man. .” It was like the poem was describing Rachel’s life, he’s trundling along with no real worries, and then he suddenly finds out about the massacre in Aïn Deb, finds out our parents have been murdered, then he discovers papa was an SS officer who worked in the death camps for the Third Reich. When it came to me, I got straight to the point. I asked myself, what has papa’s past got to do with us? That was his life, this is ours. How can we be blamed for that war, that tragedy, the Holocaust, what they call the Shoah? Ophélie was right: “It’s not like we killed the Jews, I can’t see why you’re so obsessed with this whole thing.” History is like that, it’s a steamroller crushing everyone in its path, it’s horrible, it tragic, but what can we do about it? Like Monsieur Candela said to Rachel, “Your grieving for your parents and feeling sorry for yourself isn’t going to bring them back.” I can’t rewrite history, and feeling sorry for myself won’t bring anyone back — not my parents, not Rachel, not poor Nadia, not the millions of people I didn’t know who died in the gas chambers. I need to do something. To act. But do what? “Read if you want, campaign if you want, make a difference however you can. Anything else you do is the devil’s work.” That’s what Monsieur Candela said, and he’d seen enough of life to have more faith in the devil than he had in God. And I remembered something Monsieur Vincent used to say when he’d see us scratching our heads over some clapped-out old banger: “If you stop thinking so hard, you might see things better.” And a lot of the time he was right: we’d push start the old rust bucket and it would be fine. People are always making problems for themselves and then wondering why they end up with a headache.