Sonata in Auschwitz
Published in Issue #30 Translated from Portuguese by Claudio Bethencourt(Excerpt from a Novel)
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1. Berlin, April 1999
It is a special date for the Germans. After decades, Berlin is once again the capital of Germany, now reunited. It is a special day for me, too. I’m going to meet my father’s grandmother: my great grandmother Frida. The re-inauguration of the Reichstag, the German parliament, happens to be on the day of my arrival.
It is not the first time that I’ve been to Berlin, although it feels like it. Right after the fall of the Berlin wall, I and some other students from Lisbon’s Law School made our way to this city. Our professor from Criminal Law organized this informal trip because he is keen on the German legal system that has greatly influenced the Portuguese one. He used to call me “Hafner”, the little German. At that time, I was barely twenty and such words neither bothered me nor affected my existence. I’ve never told my father about that. Under no circumstances was I to speak about his German past. I never dared to joke with him about that.
My father claims to be a full-blooded Portuguese man. He loves this country more than anyone who was born here. He was only five when he came to live in Portugal and he quickly assimilated the country’s language and culture. He claims not to remember a word of German. Actually, he has never been keen on learning it. He met my mother in college in the early sixties and...
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