Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Salvador García was to remember that distant afternoon when he had witnessed the slaughter of the pipil natives and had said nothing. For years he had assuaged his conscience by telling himself it was the Indian rebels who had instigated the violence, that it was his obligation as a Colonel in the Salvadoran Army to quash the rebellion. After all, it was the pipil peoples who had provoked the two-day war by fiercely attacking the white landowners, burning down their homes and executing entire families in a frenzy of violence. What response did the Indian peasants expect, if not repression? And yet in his heart of hearts Colonel Salvador García knew that the Salvadoran army had gone far beyond what was necessary to quell an insurrection, that after defeating the pipils in battle the military men had reacted with a genocidal fury, had spared neither women nor children, had killed pipils by the thousands. The soldiers’ intention was not merely to end a rebellion, but to obliterate an entire people. The newspapers owned by the oligarchy – the fourteen families – reported that ten thousand natives had been killed. Colonel Salvador García knew that it was more like forty thousand. He also knew that many of the slaughtered pipil peasants were completely innocent of any crime. For the rest of his days Colonel Salvador García would feel shame when he remembered that in his youth he had been silently complicit in the great slaughter of pipil natives known as la Matanza.

Colonel Salvador García did not participate in the mass killing of El Salvador’s indigenous peoples, but neither did he object. As la Matanza was unfolding – the massacre of an entire race – the Colonel did nothing to remedy the situation. Years later, when he was about to be executed by another murderous regime – this one in distant Europe – the Colonel knew that the annihilation of an entire ethnic group is never justified no matter the excuse. And yet while he was in El Salvador in the days of la Matanza, he merely looked the other way. In retrospect, he should have immediately resigned from his post as Colonel in the Salvadoran army as an act of protest. But that would have meant that he would have had to give up a range of perquisites that came with his position in the military. So, he gritted his teeth in silent indignation, thought his whole country had gone mad, begged the Lord for His forgiveness, but did nothing to prevent the situation from getting worse. Soon President Maximiliano Hernandez – a longtime dictator with Indian blood himself – began to punish the pipil natives in a myriad ways, not only by killing them in massive numbers without trial but also by banning the use of their Nawat language, forbidding their style of dress, limiting the places where they could travel. “Never again,” promised the dictator Hernandez, “will the uncivilized pipils threaten El Salvador’s legitimate ruling classes with their machetes, cuchillos and huaracas.” It would take the Colonel many years to fully understand what uncivilized actually means and he would figure it out in what he had believed was the most civilized of nations.

As he was facing the firing squad in 1944, Colonel Salvador García asked not to be blindfolded and remembered that the rebel leader Farabundo Marti had made the same request in 1932 when he came before the Colonel’s firing squad in San Salvador. Yes, Colonel Salvador García would always remember he had blood on his hands – seven captured rebel leaders – although he had not participated in the mass carnage of the pipil peasants which ensued. Farabundo Marti was the man who had led the revolted campesinos and was executed with six of his men. At the time Colonel Salvador García thought their execution was just deserts for the bloodshed they had unleashed in their alleged defense of the native Salvadorans.  As the years passed, however, Colonel Salvador García came to recognize the legitimacy of the grievances of El Salvador’s indigenous peoples and developed a grudging respect for the rebel leaders he had executed. As he was to admit to his companion Margot Stein a decade later, sometimes – certainly not always! certainly not with Hitler! – you grow to admire those who are your enemies in war.

“If I had met Farabundo Martin ten years later,” the Colonel confessed to his companion Margot Stein on the eve of his greatest act of courage, “it is quite possible I would have been on his side and not that of the fourteen families. Genocide must be opposed with all one’s might irrespective of the circumstances.”

Colonel Salvador García’s full conversion would take many years but it had begun in earnest long before he left San Salvador. Before he left Central America for Europe, he had begun to use his military rank and family connections – his father was a four-star general in the Salvadoran army – in order to make his voice be heard with respect to the Hernandez regime’s ongoing abuse of El Salvador’s indigenous peoples. Indeed, the obstreperous Colonel had become such an outspoken critic on the issue that the dictator Maximiliano Hernandez felt the Colonel might be plotting a palace coup. So, the wily dictator decided to nip the problem in the bud and invited the Colonel to dinner at the Presidential Palace. The dictator knew that the Colonel had admired the Germans ever since he had attended the Deutsche Schule San Salvador as an adolescent. So, the dictator attempted to seduce him with a plum assignment, an offer the Colonel would find very difficult to reject, particularly given that at the end of the day the alternative was death before a firing squad for insubordination.

“How would you like to be the Salvadoran consul in Munich?” asked the dictator as he nursed his anisette. “I know that, like me, you greatly admire German culture. El Salvador is too backward a place for a man with your ambitions and abilities. Wouldn’t you prefer to live in Germany where you’ll be feted as the consul and will be able to attend the opera with cultured dignitaries?”

“Germany,” echoed the forty-year-old Colonel, “land of Bach, Beethoven and Goethe...the most cultured nation on the planet...”

“I expected you to jump at the opportunity,” said the dictator as he continued to sip his anisette. “El Salvador is not a place for a man of your many talents. What can you accomplish in this land of wretched Indians who are semi-civilized at best? Do you think European women walk about the house with their breasts uncovered as the pipil women are wont to do? Do you think the Germans live in free union as the Indians do, not caring a whit about the dictates of Christian morality?”

“Those Indians you denigrate, General Hernandez,” the colonel replied in a pensive voice, “actually need people such as me, someone to protect them and bring their legitimate grievances to the government. They lack the most basic necessities of life and it shouldn’t be.”

“What has any one of those peasants ever done for you? They’ll be the first to slash your throat once the opportunity arises. You’re a white man and the Indians hate you for that reason. Don’t forget what happened in 1932 when the Indians proved beyond any doubt that they can be ruthless animals when they have the opportunity to kill their betters.”

“Still, they need a voice. Who else will stand up for them so they stop living in such squalor and privation?”

“The pipils live in poverty because they are ignorant and lazy, because they don’t work unless they’re forced to do so. And there is no way for you to achieve any outsized plans for the peasants of El Salvador unless you mean to replace me. Lately, you’ve been making a lot of noise. Please recognize the choice is stark. It’s Germany or annihilation at the hands of your own soldiers. There’s only so much your father can do to protect you. Do you need me to make it any clearer? I’ve had enough of your rabble-rousing. I can order your execution for lèse-majesté.”

Colonel Salvador García looked at General Maximiliano as if he was a Doberman Pincher ready to pounce at any moment. The Colonel knew he was being offered a Faustian bargain.

“Well, I suppose you’re not giving me much of an alternative,” responded Colonel Salvador García in a muffled voice, “so I accept your invitation. I suppose nothing would gladden me as much as living in Germany. I remember my instructors at the Deutsche Schule San Salvador with the sweetest of recollections, especially a lovely Jewish woman who taught me to love Rilke and Wagner.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go searching for any Jewish professors when you move to Munich. They’re all considered Communists by the Third Reich as you well know. And please don’t ruffle any feathers. Don’t get involved in what’s none of your business, or I’ll have to recall you to this land of pestiferous Indians. Don’t forget that I’m staunchly pro-Hitler and that I made the Fuhrer’s birthday a holiday in El Salvador.”

When the two men shook hands to seal the deal, Colonel Salvador García felt a sudden revulsion, as if he had just made a pact with the demon.

***

When Colonel Salvador García arrived at the Munich airport in June of 1938, he was immediately struck by how clean and well-organized everything seemed to be. The airport workers were smiling and polite in their impeccable navy-blue uniforms, the stocky baggage handlers readily helped with the passengers’ valises without expecting a tip, the planes arrived and departed according to schedule, the floors were clean and well-scrubbed. It was the exact opposite of what you would find in the airport at San Salvador where everything was dirty and disorganized, where hungry, lice-ridden Indian children would accost the travelers and try to take their luggage in order to earn a few reales. Unlike the airport in San Salvador, the Munich airport was run with a marvelous efficiency, without long lines or misplaced luggage. But there was something else which surprised the Central American Colonel as soon as he arrived in Munich. In every corner of the airport, there were huge banners with the Nazi swastika as well as giant posters of Adolf Hitler above the words Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer – One People, One Nation, One Leader. It would take Colonel Salvador García exactly five months to understand what Hitler meant when he spoke of one people and one nation, or to grasp that Germany’s marvelous efficiency could be used not only to make the trains run on time but also to perpetrate evil on an organized and massive scale. At any event, there was one Volk and one Reich and neither included Jews. The nation was now defined by what it was not – not Jewish, not disabled, not queer, not Catholic – but the Colonel didn’t figure it all out overnight.

Soon after the Colonel arrived at the airport, he saw Margot Stein among the crowds waiting for all the passengers to disembark. She was the one who recognized him, for he was wearing his soldier’s uniform and was clearly not an Aryan given his olive skin and mestizo features although he had been considered white in San Salvador. Margot worked as the office manager at the Salvadoran consulate located in the Bogenhausen District, the only job she had been able to obtain after she had been expelled from the university and forbidden to work in any other position due to her status as a Jew. Margot spoke fluent English and Spanish and had impressed the previous Salvadoran consul with her intelligence and capacity to work. Physically, she was not recognizably Jewish, looked no different from her Aryan neighbors, with her auburn hair in a barrette, a soft white face and luminous green eyes. Her identity papers all were stamped with the letter “J,” however, reflecting she was a Jude, but she was one of many Jews – before the night of broken glass – who still thought it was possible to be both Jewish and German at the same time. Indeed, as the weeks went by, she delighted in showing the Colonel all of Munich’s architectural wonders, all its castles and cathedrals, the Ohel Jakob synagogue in the center of the city where she worshipped, even the monuments to the Third Reich that had been built quickly after Hitler rose to power in 1933. She did not discuss the matter of Nazi oppression with the Salvadoran Colonel until he raised the issue himself after he learned that she could neither use public transportation nor attend the opera because of her Hebrew race. Even then she made short shrift of the Fuhrer’s plans for those of the Jewish faith, perhaps lying to herself. After all, she had always been a fiercely loyal German. She thought Hitler could not possibly expel her from her own country.

“The Jewish people have been a part of the German nation since before the Middle Ages,” she explained to the Salvadoran Colonel. “We have contributed to every sphere of German life and culture and our men even lost their lives in World War I.  Hitler is a menace but if history teaches us anything it is that anti-Semitic tyrants come and go. The German people are far too noble to succumb to his insanity, and the Jews are far too brave not to resist.” She felt a certain trepidation discussing the depredations of the Nazi empire with the Colonel, but he had asked her a question and she was not one to be silenced.

Then she added, as if it went without saying, “Adolf Hitler will face the same fate as every leader of his ilk. Either he will be killed by one of his many enemies, or he will die by his own hand. And it won’t take too long for Jewish life to bloom again in Germany.”

At the time, neither Margot nor Colonel Salvador García realized the prescience of her words. In the end, Hitler was indeed assailed by an unexpected enemy, but they had no way of knowing it in 1938. At all events, Margot’s words betrayed a stunning naivete about the capacity for evil of her German neighbors and compatriots. She advised the Colonel that she had given up on the German Fuhrer but not on the German people. How would she learn to rue such expectations! After the debacle of World War II, few Jews would return to Germany. Hitler’s deepest wishes would be fulfilled!

At some point, a week after the Colonel’s arrival in Munich, they found a long line of people waiting at the wrought iron gate at the entrance to the Salvadoran consulate. It did not take long for Colonel Salvador García to figure out most were Jews as many were dressed in Hasidic garb and most of the others wore yarmulkes. Margot told the Colonel that in the past, many Jews did not wear skullcaps but that now they were doing it as a gesture of defiance. Before entering the premises, Colonel Salvador García had a chat with Margot in the parking lot of the consulate.

“Why are they all in the queue?” asked the Colonel. “What business do they have with El Salvador?”

“They’re all Jews seeking a visa,” replied Margot. “Jews are encouraged to leave the country but they need a visa to emigrate to a foreign nation. And given some recent statements from the Fuhrer, they don’t think they can wait any longer.”

“Why do so many Jews want to go to El Salvador? We’re not exactly the most attractive place for Europeans. Ours is a simple and destitute country, not necessarily a place where European Jews might prosper. Our only export is coffee, and we have virtually no industry, let alone what you Europeans call civilization – no concert halls, no wonderful universities, no Paul Klee and no Wolfgang Mozart.”

“At this point, many Jews think that things will only get worse in Germany,” Margot replied. “They want to flee to any country that will take them. They desperately seek visas to the most varied places: South Africa, Palestine, El Salvador, even Shanghai.”

“Shanghai?” echoed the Colonel with a great surprise. “Why would anyone want to leave Europe for Shanghai? Things can’t be that bad. It’s not as if all the Jews have been rounded up and killed. My recollections of la Matanza haunt me to this day. But such atrocities cannot happen in Germany, land of Schiller and Bach and so many Marian shrines.”

“I hope what you say is true,” answered Margot, “but some Jews have deep-seated misgivings about the extent of German evil. You have to understand that the Fuhrer is making it harder and harder for Jews to live a decent life in this country. We are barred from any position with the government, we can’t teach at universities or enroll in classes, we can’t even go to the cinema or attend ballets because we’re Jews. Nor can we visit vacation resorts or sports clubs because Jews and Aryans must never interact. Certainly, no Jew can use a public swimming pool to avoid commingling between Jew and Aryan which could lead to forbidden sexual activity across racial lines– one of the Fuhrer’s most stubborn obsessions. Hitler has an almost pathological fear of the idea of male Jews debauching Aryan women. He even has a name for the crime: Rassenschande. There are now new categories of ‘race’ depending on how much Jewish blood you have. There are full-fledged Jews, three-quarter Jews, one-half Jews and one-fourth Jews. And Hitler considers homosexual relations among men a shameful Jewish vice as well, suggesting that innocent German adolescent boys are corrupted by older Jewish predators.”

“That’s quite a list,” said the Colonel. “Every aspect of Jewish life seems to be regulated by the Fuhrer, even the way people can interact when they fall in love. The Nazi list of different racial categories reminds me of the racial caste system in Latin America, although our system is ultimately more humane. I never thought I’d say that but it’s true. A man with a white father and an indigenous woman is considered a mestizo, a man with a black father and an Indian woman is a zambo, a man with a white father and a black mother is a mulatto.... But the Spanish conquistadors in power did not have the sexual punctiliousness of your Fuhrer, and relationships across racial lines have always been commonplace in Central America. After all, the child of a mestizo mother and a Spanish father is considered white again.”

 “And you don’t know everything,” Margot replied. “I could spend the whole day explaining German oppression to you. Jewish stores and businesses have been forced to put Yiddish words on the entry to their stores so all will know the establishments are run by Jews. And at the same time Aryans are encouraged to boycott Jewish businesses with the ultimate goal of bringing the Jews to penury. As far back as 1923, Hitler advocated the gassing of the Jews in his polemical Mein Kampf. Of course, it will never get to that. Martin Luther advocated similar punishments against the Jews including the burning of synagogues many centuries ago, but all his plans came to naught. The so-called Aryan Germans are members of humanity after all. I believe in my deepest heart that they will not be complicit in such crimes.”

“I had no idea,” mused Colonel Salvador García, “that it was so difficult to be a Jew in Germany.”

“And that’s not the worst of it,” Margot continued. “The Jews are barred from owning pistols or any weapon under pain of death. Why disarm the Jews unless you are plotting to attack them?”

“That’s a distressing coincidence,” replied Colonel Salvador García as he saw the parallels between the way the government of El Salvador treated its Indians and the way the Germans dealt with their Jews. “During the days subsequent to la Matanza, Indians in El Salvador were forbidden from wielding machetes or cuchillos if they didn’t want to be killed. And of course, that made it easier to murder the defenseless Indians in outlandish numbers once the rebellion had been crushed.”

“That causes me a deep worry,” answered Margot. “I feel there’s no limit to the Fuhrer’s depravity.”

“Then why have you decided to stay?” asked the Colonel. “You can easily get a visa for El Salvador.”

“Perhaps I’m not leaving because I don’t want evil to prevail. I refuse to surrender. That’s what Hitler wants, to make all the beleaguered Jews leave their motherland. I know Hitler detests the Jews, but that’s not true of all the German people. If he ratchets up the persecution, it is the so-called Aryans who will violently protest. There is nothing ‘scientific’ about Hitler’s demented notions about eugenics. Most of the Jews, at least the Ashkenazi, are of the same racial stock as the so-called Aryans. There are many blue-eyed persons among the Jews persecuted by the Fuhrer.”

“The same thing happened in El Salvador. Those who annihilated the pipil Indians had Indian blood themselves.”

“At least the acts of violence against the Jews,” said Margot, “have been few and far between – so far – mostly sporadic attacks on Jewish stores and occasional acts of vandalism against synagogues. But many Jews have been sent to work camps where anything might happen. Of course, the attacks against Jews have been somewhat seasonal. Some periods are better than others. Some periods are simply horrific.”

“Well, what are we to do with the Jews waiting outside our gates? Are we supposed to give all of them visas?”

“I suppose you’ll have to seek guidance from the Salvadoran ambassador to Germany in Berlin. You should know that it’s the policy of the Salvadoran government to issue very few visas to the Jews, just enough to placate the Americans.”

“You mean the policy of General Hernandez, don’t you?”

“The General admires Adolf Hitler for his ability to exercise absolute power against his people but doesn’t realize that if he were ever to set foot in Germany, he would be treated harshly because of his mongrel race. I suspect he might be considered inferior even to the Jews.”

“I’ll take it up with Ambassador Alvarez. There’s no reason El Salvador can’t take in a few more Jews. If anything, El Salvador would greatly profit from the influx of cultured and industrious Europeans into the country. You should know we Salvadorans have a little phrase: hazlo para mejorar la raza – do it to improve the race. Many Salvadorans think that importing Europeans will enhance the gene pool. Of course, they’re not obsessed with eugenics as you tell me your Fuhrer is.”

“You realize why the prior consul Alejandro Flores left, don’t you? It was his policy to issue as many visas to the Jews as possible. And truly it was just a drop of water in an ocean. There are hundreds of thousands of Jews who desperately want to emigrate. Most countries are hesitant to take in a large number of Jews. And there are only so many Jews that are willingly accepted by Great Britain and the United States.”

“I don’t think things will get much worse,” said Colonel Savador García. “Believe me, I lived through la Matanza in my own country and know what state violence means when it is used to punish a despised minority. Forty thousand people were killed in less than a week. But let me repeat what I said before. What happened in San Salvador could never happen in your country, not with its educated citizenry, not with its professional military, not with its centuries of culture. Things cannot possibly get worse for the Jews in the Third Reich. The country has reached its nadir and the only way to go forward is to go up.”

“I trust in the benevolence of the German people,” Margot replied as if trying to convince herself. “I attended school with their children and counted many among my friends. But you should remember that no regime is immune from falling into the hands of a despot willing to perform atrocities in order to retain power, not Great Britain, not France, not even the United States. I studied American history at the university before I was expelled for being Jewish so I know what I’m talking about. Are the blacks in America treated any better than us Jews in Deutschland? Aren’t they banned from restaurants and even public toilets reserved for whites just as the Volk are now banning Jews from their restaurants and latrines? Didn’t the Americans sterilize the disabled long before us Germans? I hate to even ask the question but what is to prevent Hitler from killing Jews for some supposedly ‘scientific’ reason?”

“You seem to have an exaggerated notion of man’s capacity for evil.”

“Given what you saw in San Salvador,” Margot replied witheringly, “I don’t understand why you think the notion is exaggerated. Is there any ambiguity in Hitler and Goebbels’ statements that all Jews must be banished from the planet? Still, I trust in the nobility of the German Volk. They’ll be the first to say, ‘this shall not pass.’”

***

When Kristallnacht happened, many Aryan Germans became ashamed of being German. For his part, Colonel Salvador García became ashamed to be a human being. He had felt that way before, during the days of la Matanza, when he had done nothing to stop the homicidal carnage unleashed upon the pipil natives by their “white” overlords. And yet he felt that the Nazi pogrom against the Jews was in some ways much worse than la Matanza. In San Salvador, many of the Indians killed had engaged in their own atrocities, torturing the white men, violating their wives, promising a “wedding night” where all the white girls would be taken by the peasants in a collective rape. The detested Jews, on the other hand, were being punished merely for being; in vain the Jews protested that as human beings they had the right to exist. The Germans countered that for the Hebrew race there was no such right, that the Jews’ very existence was a crime.  Ultimately, the night of shattered glass was an act of synchronized chaos as thousands of Storm Troopers and their civilian allies coordinated the mayhem with a diabolical German precision.

As far as Margot, it was as if the scales had suddenly fallen from her eyes as she suddenly accepted that the Jews were but foreigners in their own home. She had tried to deceive herself for years but could no longer do so. What had been foreboding had become a certainty. She now understood what the Nazis meant by the “Jewish problem” and shuddered at the thought of its solution. She discovered during the course of a single night that a person could be German or Jewish but not both at the same time. Never in the worst of her nightmares had she anticipated such devastation or such a bottomless hatred against the sons of Jacob. Never had she expected that modern-day Germany could become an immense torture chamber with synagogues aflame everywhere and Jewish men rounded up by the thousands and taken to Dachau and other death camps. And worst of all, she suddenly discovered that the German people rather than standing up with their Jewish brethren were quite ready to destroy them, to settle Germany’s “final account with the Jews” as Hitler’s acolyte Hermann Goring had described it. The German Volk was not simply apathetic. They were eager participants in the brutality, sharing in the rancor of their masters, as implacable as their Fuhrer. Or worse, thought Margot, perhaps it was the German mobs at the grassroots level who were leading Hitler by the nose as he quenched his endless hatred for the Jews. There were even German children among the perpetrators entering the synagogues and destroying holy Torah scrolls. Margot in her endless pain discovered that ordinary Germans – the Volk – were capable of extraordinary evil against the Jewish race and other so-called mutants. And she learned that nations, like individual humans, have a collective conscience that gradually withers away when it is ignored step by step over time. The initial social sin – dare one say a crime – is followed by another greater social sin, and then another, until by the end the greatest of sins is confused with virtue. What begins as barring a race from restaurant latrines can end up resulting in ethnocide on a massive scale.

“I thought you said this couldn’t happen in twentieth century Europe,” Margot cried out as she buried her weeping face in the Colonel’s chest. “You told me the Germans were a civilized nation, but they’re worse than cannibals and their nation has become an abattoir for those convicted for the crime of being Jewish.”

The Colonel and Margot had an inkling – just an inkling – of what was in store for the Jewish people during Kristallnacht long before desperate crowds congregated outside the gate in front of the Salvadoran consulate seeking refuge. It gets dark early in Germany during the month of November, and the night of November 9, 1938 – the night of shattered glass – was no exception. By six o’clock that evening the marauding Aryan thugs – many of them mere teenagers – were already pulverizing the glass display windows of Jewish businesses and burning down the synagogues where the detested Jews got together to worship. The first reports on the radio described some of what was happening but not the vast extent of the destruction. In fact, the sheer reach of the pogrom was unprecedented in Jewish history. One thousand synagogues and seventy-five-hundred Jewish businesses were  destroyed during the course of a few hours in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. The shards of glass were everywhere, and the shattered Jewish lives could never be repaired.

“The people of Germany, particularly its brave Aryan youth,” said the announcer on the radio, “have not tarried to exact their vengeance against the Jewish parasites for the murder of German diplomat Ernst von Rath by a traitorous Polish Jew. Our Jungvolk – our young folk – are at the head of the spear. Even German children aged eleven to thirteen are participating in the retribution, throwing stones at the stained-glass windows of Jewish temples. All the Jews of Europe are complicit in the murder, so all the Jews must be punished for it. The Jewish vermin say, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’  We say to world Jewry everywhere, ‘a thousand eyes for an eye, a thousand teeth for a tooth.’”

Colonel Salvador García had seen it before, how before decimating a people it is first imperative to find some guilty member of the tribe in order to justify the mayhem. During la Matanza, the scapegoat – the one who justified the repression – had been an indigenous man named Farabundo Marti who was eventually killed by Colonel Salvador García’s firing squad as entire Indian villages were disappeared without the Colonel’s approval or consent in retribution for the acts perpetrated by the Amerindian man. In Germany, Herschel Grynszpan, the Polish adolescent who had killed a German diplomat in Paris, was just the right person for the role. The diplomat’s assassination was the excuse the Reich had been anxiously awaiting for months.

“Oh Christ!” cried out Colonel Salvador García as he listened to the reports on the radio and crossed himself. “This can’t be happening again, not in Germany! Please, my Lord, don’t let it be!”

The Colonel reminded Margot how forty-thousand Indians had been killed during la Matanza even though only ten thousand had been involved in the rebellion. After the insurrection was crushed, the luckless natives had been invited to visit the military barracks to obtain safe conduct passes, but it was a monstrous trick. Everyone who arrived dressed like a peasant or with Amerindian features had been shot. Anyone caught with a corvo in his hands – a knife used by peasants as they worked in the fields – had also been executed without trial. Even when a bishop had appeared on the scene to lambaste the soldiers for their dastardly deeds, the Salvadoran military did not desist but laughed at the old prelate.

“You always remember the massacre in El Salvador, don’t you?” queried Margot.

“It is like a scar,” responded the Colonel. “How can I forget the extermination of a whole people, a people I consider to be my own? How can I possibly forgive my inaction at the time?”

Now Colonel Salvador García once again had to fathom the unfathomable. Kristallnacht had come to the Salvadoran consulate, and the Colonel had to ponder what his reaction would be. Large crowds of Jews, desperately fleeing furious mobs of youths and SS men dressed as civilians, had amassed outside the gates of the consulate. One of the guards at the consulate – a Salvadoran youth named Genaro – had approached the Colonel and asked him if he wanted the guard to “disperse” the desperate crowds.

“What do you mean by disperse?” asked the dumbfounded Colonel, shocked by the noise outside.

“If I don’t shoot into the crowds, they will breach the gate. If we do nothing, more than a hundred people will force their way into the consulate.”

Colonel Salvador García did not need much time to decide on his course of action. During all the years since la Matanza, he had concluded that inaction is never the correct response to evil. Apathy and complacency only lead to a worsening of the oppression. Never again would he look the other way when faced with state violence against a people. He had listened with horror to reports on the radio concerning the unwarranted violence unleashed against the Jews not only in Munich but throughout the Greater Reich. He knew of the burning of synagogues, the mass incarceration of Jewish men, the destruction of every Jewish business, the desecration even of cemeteries. The term “Jewish life” was becoming an oxymoron in Germany. And though the Nazi newspapers played it down, Colonel Salvador García knew that many Jews had been beaten and murdered during the night of crystal glass, more aptly called the night of German shame. Colonel Salvador García was incensed and decided to do all he could to save as many Jews as possible.

“Let them in,” commanded Colonel Salvador García to Genaro. “Those men and women can’t be harmed while they’re in a consulate. Even Adolf Hitler won’t dare to follow Jews into the consulate as such places are sacrosanct. The consulate is like a little bit of El Salvador right here in Munich.”

Soon a group of bedraggled Jews made its way into the consulate. As the last of the Jews entered the premises, the marauding German thugs appeared outside the gates. Genaro and the other guard entered the consulate and asked the Colonel what to do.

“Let me handle this,” he said, preparing to address the furious Aryan throngs himself. 

“That wouldn’t be advisable,” said Genaro. “They come armed with rocks and knives. And given their numbers it won’t be too difficult for them to tear down the gates. Your pistol won’t be too useful against such a massive crowd.”

Yes, it was an omnivorous crowd. The Colonel knew it well, but he felt a primal anger over the ruthless persecution of the harmless Jewish folks – men, women and children – who had found safe haven in his compound.

So, he walked outside the main door of the consulate and began to speak to the multitudinous Germans, thirsty for Jewish blood, hungry for Jewish treasure. The Colonel knew that unlike their Fuhrer, the German lumpen who had gathered at the gate were not the personification of evil. He also knew that neither were they blameless. They were mostly people whose lives had not turned out the way they wanted, who for one reason or another envied those they perceived as rich and rapacious Jews. So, when a rock hit his left shoulder, the Colonel was not surprised. He expected the unremitting fury of the men shouting obscenities at him and coveting the death of the hated Jew-lover. “Juden liebhaber!” they cried out furiously and without cease. He realized he was risking his life, but he could not turn over his blameless wards to the ravenous wolves – not this time. In a way, he felt he was making amends for the complacency of his youth in El Salvador. He felt a righteous indignation at the mere thought of the senseless punishment inflicted against the innocent Jewish people of Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland.

Soon he was pelted by rocks hurled at him with a deadly precision. Colonel Salvador García calmly responded with a gunshot as he wiped the blood off his forehead. And then he fired another shot. And then another and another.  Three Aryans were felled by the bullets and many quickly fled. Then he told them – he had to lie – that the office of the military attaché was on the premises and that he had more than half a dozen machine guns ready in his closet. The crowds began to disperse, not wishing to risk their lives for a group of Jews in a hardened consulate when there were many Jews available for the taking in other places. When he went back into the consulate, Colonel Salvador García found many of the people weeping. They knew if the Colonel had been killed, their fates would have been sealed, one way or another, although at that time they had not heard about the crematoria – the huge ovens where Jewish corpses were incinerated after the detested Jews were killed. So, when they saw the Colonel, safe and sound, despite a bit of crimson on his face, they cried out in unison juden liebhaber! juden liebhaber! juden liebhaber! Although the Germans used the phrase as a pejorative term, the Jewish crowds were using it to make manifest their gratitude. He was a Jew-lover and they knew it.

But Colonel Salvador García felt he had done what any other human being would have done in his place and circumstances. He felt hopelessness and anger knowing the limited reach of his benevolence. By contrast, the power of the furious Volk and the depraved Reich were limitless.

***

As soon as Colonel Salvador García returned to the premises of the consulate, a woman in her mid-sixties approached him. She was still weeping, sobbing loudly, for she had thought that if the Nazi sympathizers breached the compound, not only would she be in mortal danger but most importantly so would her Yitzel. Yolande Klausner’s daughter lived with Down Syndrome, but she was a cheerful, well-adjusted adolescent and was a threat to no one. But Yolande knew the Nazis hated those they called the “feeble-minded” as much as they hated the Jews. Not surprising that the Third Reich would arrest and exterminate the mentally challenged even before they turned to the Jews, gypsies and homosexuals. By the time of the Kristallnacht, the mass slaughter of the mentally deficient had not yet begun, but the idea was in the German zeitgeist. It was not easy for the Nazis to conceal their plans, as the “scientific” extermination of the “feeble-minded” could only be accomplished with a vast bureaucracy, spearheaded by countless doctors who had lost their souls like so many ambitious generals. In the same year as the Kristallnacht, the first disabled child was killed with an injection to the arm, supposedly at the insistence of his parents. And the murder of defenseless handicapped people had just begun, which was a trial run ahead of the extermination of the Jewish people. But Yolande knew none of that when she sought refuge in the Salvadoran consulate – although she knew enough. The “mongoloids,” as the Nazis called them, were still not being killed, but Yolande had heard rumors that something was in the works. The Fuhrer himself had ordered the sterilization of countless disabled adolescents when he first took power in 1933. And when he gave his speeches, he did not avoid vitriolic language referring to the mentally deficient as a burden on society and describing them as subhuman mutants, “unworthy of life.”

“The problem,” Yolande said to the Colonel, “is that we have no means to escape. When the foreign consuls realize Yitzel is mentally deficient, they refuse to provide her a visa. It is something that happens with the consulates of every country, from South Africa to Great Britain, from India to the United States. I must simply grit my teeth and wait for the SS to take my beloved Yitzel. Who knows to what horrors they will be subjecting my little girl? I should tell you that I meet with a group of women to discuss the fate of our mentally retarded children. Most of them are Aryan women who know that despite their race, the Nazis wouldn’t spare their ‘worthless’ sons and daughters. In fact, Hitler hates the retarded children of Aryan women with a particular animus for they belie his claims that Aryans are the master race.”

Little did Yolande know that within a year, clinics would be retrofitted with gas chambers to kill people like Yitzel or that doctors and psychiatrists would be complicit in the evil, sending over sixty thousand people to their deaths for the crime of being special. The depravity of the mass murder was only matched by its efficient administration. Like the Jews, like the gypsies, like the queers, the disabled were punished for simply being who they were. And hearing about the program’s implementation, Colonel Salvador García would feel a righteous indignation once again.

“Well, I will not refuse my help,” said the Colonel to Yitzel’s mother. “Give me your passports, and I will immediately stamp them with Salvadoran exit visas.”

Then he turned to the young Yitzel.

“My niece Flor – her name means flower – lives with the same condition as you, Yitzel, in fact you look a lot like her, except her skin is a soft brown like mine and she holds her black hair in twin braids. El Salvador, primitive as it might be, will be a good home for you. With this visa you’ll be able to move to San Salvador and live your life without fear.”

“You mean I won’t be afraid of those bad people on the streets? Why were they smashing windows? Why did they run after all of the other men on the street and beat them up?”

Colonel Salvador García felt at a loss for words. He couldn’t explain the reasons for the pogrom to an ordinary person. How could he possibly explain the incomprehensible to a special person like Yitzel?

“Let’s just say some people are very angry,” he finally responded, “that they lash out at people and places that have done nothing to cause their feelings. They have no way to make things better for themselves so they look to the nearest scapegoat.”

“Scapegoat?” giggled Yitzel. “I don’t understand what you mean. What do goats have to do with anything?”

“I mean the bad people want to punish the good people,” said the Colonel, “because they need someone to blame for their own condition. For example, they unfairly blame certain people for Germany’s loss in the Great War.”

“Do you mean they’re cross at those people called the Juden? That’s what they yelled out at us. Aren’t we all Juden? I thought everybody was a Juden.”

“No,” intervened Yolande. “There are relatively few Jews in Germany. And a very few of them are rich. Most Jews are now poor. The bad people hate the Juden because they need to blame someone for their own poverty. That’s what the consul means by scapegoat. The term comes from the Jewish faith, whose rituals include the killing of a goat to bear the punishment for all the misdeeds committed by the community. The bad men are resentful so they cast all the blame for their circumstances on the Juden since they want to be considered superior to someone.”

And then Yitzel beamed a smile, having understood nothing.

After Yolande and Yitzel got their visas, a number of other people lined in a queue to ask for their own. It soon became clear that Colonel Salvador García would provide a visa to all of the luckless Jews who had made their way into the compound. He well remembered the thousands of Salvadoran pipil peasants who had been killed during la Matanza when the Guatemalan President had refused to allow them into his country after they sought refuge from the slaughter there. Margot asked him if he didn’t need authority from the Salvadoran Ambassador in Berlin to issue so many visas. The Colonel responded that if he asked for permission, it could be denied. Better to let the Ambassador know about the granting of the visas once it was a fait accompli. He wasn’t about to replicate the actions of Guatemalan President Ubico who turned over the Indian fugitives to the Salvadoran army, which proceeded to decimate them with machine gun fire.

Among the crowds was a Jewish businessman named George Mandl, a slight, slender man in horn-rimmed glasses whom everyone knew as the owner, along with his brother Isaac, of the three largest and most exclusive department stores in all of Munich, known as the Wertheim stores.

“I see that you’re giving all the people visas,” he said to the Colonel. “I come to you in need of a passport. I could leave for El Salvador immediately, but my wife and two sons have sought refuge in Poland. Now that it is abundantly clear the Fuhrer plans to invade Warsaw, my family is no longer safe there. With a Salvadoran passport in hand, I could hide in plain sight and make my way to the Polish capital undisturbed. Time is of the essence. Soon we Jews will be pariahs in all of Europe as the Reich’s Army advances.”

“You don’t speak a whit of Spanish, do you? How do you intend to pass as a Salvadoran?”

“Many of the German guards, particularly the oldest among them, view their new duties with distaste. Many will look the other way if given the excuse, especially if they’re given a little bribe.”

“So, you brought a little money with you?” asked Colonel Salvador García.

“I have a few reichsmarks in Swiss bank accounts. All I need is enough money to get me to Basel. Then I shall be able to travel throughout Europe in peace if I have a Salvadoran passport. As you know, Jews like me are being singled out for especially harsh treatment given our perceived prosperity. Jewish bankers are hated above all, but the owners of large retail businesses as well as men in the professions are not far behind.”

“You’re asking me to do something illegal.”

“Illegal but ethical and moral,” responded George Mandl. “If I don’t get to Poland before Hitler invades the country, my family will be doomed. I don’t mind telling you that in some way my brother Isaac has already died at the hands of Hitler. When Isaac realized he was losing a business it took him a lifetime to develop, it was too much for him and he swallowed the bitter poison. Not every man can face disaster with resignation or accept being a hostage in his own land without falling into despair. And there have been dozens of Jewish suicides as a result of the persecution of the Jews tonight. The only reason I have not acted in a similar manner is that I have a family to protect. But I can’t do it without a passport.”

“You want a Salvadoran passport? You want to tell the Nazi men that you’re a blonde-haired, blue-eyed guanaco? That’s what we call our Salvadorans.”

“Yes, I do. In fact, I apologize for the imposition, but I need a passport for my wife as well. I am willing to pay you handsomely for it. Look, here is an emerald necklace for the two passports. I must tell you I think the Nazis are more demented than ever. They could have taken our businesses through what they call ‘Aryanization” – really another word for theft on a grand scale – but instead they decided to destroy them. Of course, their entire Judenpolitik is irrational and self-defeating. The expulsion of the Jews from commerce is having an adverse effect on the entire German economy.”

Colonel Salvador García then took the emerald necklace in his hands.

Then he told Mandl, “I’m sorry but I can’t take it.”

“I beg you to give me the two passports,” pleaded the desperate businessman. “Or I’ll lose my family. Hitler – that vile swine – has already made it clear his messianic plans to rule the world begin in Poland.”

The Colonel gently smiled.

“I haven’t said I won’t give you the two passports, I’m only telling you I won’t accept the necklace. I must tell you that I think you’re a madman by thinking you can pretend you and your wife are Salvadoran. But if you think you can save your family through this small deception, who am I to get in the way? From now on, your name is Jorge Mendez and your wife’s name is Mariana. Keep the emerald necklace for when you face a close call and have to buy your way out. I’ll charge you nothing.”

The next week, after the disquiet was over, a long line of Jews was waiting at the entrance to the Salvadoran consulate early in the morning. The word had gotten around. The Salvadoran consul was granting visas to anyone who requested them. And after the horrors of Kristalllnacht, more Jews wanted to emigrate than ever before. A number of kids with Down Syndrome had also shown up. Yolande had told their parents that Colonel Salvador García was not averse to granting visas to those the Third Reich considered cretins. At the time, the Nazis had not yet decided to destroy European Jewry but sought their removal from German lands instead, so no one interfered with the issuance of the visas. Everyone wanted to get out of Germany before the start of the coming war, since they figured that once the war began it would be impossible to leave the continent. As far as the mentally challenged, the program of annihilation referred to as T-4 had not yet been implemented, but it was in the works,

Six months later, the Salvador Ambassador in Berlin, once he found out about all the visas granted by the Colonel, vociferously complained. When Colonel Salvador García responded that he would not stop the issuance of the visas, the Ambassador threatened that the Colonel would be stripped of his role as consul and court-martialed in El Salvador. The Ambassador reminded Colonel Salvador García that General Hernandez of El Salvador had declared it illegal to issue any more visas to the Jews. In fact, said the Ambassador, a boat full of Jews with fraudulent Salvadoran visas had recently been denied entry into the country. The Colonel made short shrift of the threat and redoubled his efforts to mass produce the visas. In the span of ten months, the Colonel had saved more than thirty thousand Jews, as well as countless “mongoloids,” gypsies and homosexuals. In the end the Colonel was not court-martialed but merely transferred to the consulate in Warsaw, Poland. The distant dictator in San Salvador felt that was a worse punishment than repatriation. General Maximiliano Hernandez wanted to remove the rabblerousing colonel from Germany but didn’t want him to return to Central America where he might incite the Indian masses in opposition to the fourteen families.

Everything changed – dramatically – with the explosion of the war when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. It soon became the policy of the Third Reich not to force the Jews to leave Europe but to send them in death camps instead. General Maximiliano Hernandez knew from his contacts in Berlin that Colonel Salvador García could do nothing for the Jews of Warsaw, as they had all been ghettoized, surrounded by barbed wires in a little city that was a huge prison where four hundred thousand Jews lived as best they could. And the General figured that in Poland the troublemaking Colonel would likely meet his death as the country would soon become the battleground between Germany and the Soviet Union and bombs would be falling everywhere. The Colonel, for his part, greeted the new assignment with panache. If he died, he died, but he would not resign his post. Now it was the Jews of Poland who were in desperate need of aid. Colonel Salvador García was getting closer and closer to his total transformation.

***

The Great War began with the invasion of Poland, a country with a Jewish population of three million people and a long history as a place where Jewish art and culture flourished. Soon, Colonel Salvador García learned that the Polish Jews were being obliterated in massive numbers as the Nazis pursued a scorched-earth policy during the incipient war. The Nazi troops were not following the laws of war but were engaging in every possible atrocity in order to conquer Poland within a few weeks lest the French and the British decide to intervene. There were reports of Jewish noncombatants incinerated in their synagogues, reports of Jewish militias killed after having surrendered, millions of Jews displaced into Nazi ghettoes. Many of Hitler’s own generals protested against the treatment of the Jews of Poland, but the Fuhrer would have none of it. The only imperative of war is to prevail. The ethical niceties, said the Fuhrer, will be determined by the historians of the side which wins. And he had no doubt that the victor would be the German master race and the loser would be perfidious worldwide Jewry. The Salvadoran Colonel knew that in the mind of Hitler the war against Poland and the war against the Jews were coterminous. If anything, it was more important to the Fuhrer to destroy worldwide Jewry than to win the war. Colonel Salvador García also realized that Kristallnacht had been but a trial run, since in Poland the program was to kill the Jews rather than merely to humiliate and impoverish them. Over time it became clear that the end goal of Judenpolitik in Poland was the wholesale annihilation of its Jews, and the entire nation would become a slaughterhouse. But Colonel Salvador García said to himself in a rejection of despair: this too shall pass...as he said a silent prayer to the Virgin of Guadalupe. At the same time, the Colonel was greatly dismayed that some Catholic Poles also referred to a “Jewish problem,” as if the Jews of Poland were not proud compatriots but odious parasites to be eradicated.

Soon, Jews were forced to wear a yellow star on armbands just as the Jews of fourteenth century Germany had been forced to do so because they were blamed for having brought the bubonic plague to Europe. It wasn’t really necessary to identify the Jews in such a medieval manner since the Warsaw ghetto was impossible to escape – it was surrounded by three-meter-high brick walls supposedly built in order to seal off an “epidemic area” – and German sentries and their Jewish collaborators were stationed at each and every one of its twenty exits soon to be reduced to only eight. With their vaunted Teutonic efficiency, the Germans had managed to incarcerate nearly half a million Jews in a very limited area, only three hundred and forty hectares. And the Jews, with their millenarian resiliency, had made of it a living space with schools, clinics, newspapers, temples, theater groups, even an orchestra.

As Colonel Salvador García walked through the sealed and crowded ghetto – he wanted to know if there was anything he could do to help and had bribed his way into the area – the Colonel marveled at the Jews’ ability to make a life for themselves in such cramped and unhygienic living quarters. With time, Colonel Salvador García would come to learn that the Jews could make a living space for themselves even in the death camps.

As the Colonel made his way through the ghetto, he was surprised that the walls were encrusted by bits of glass to make escape impossible. In San Salvador, the wealthy encrusted glass on top of the walls around the periphery of their homes in order to ward off the city’s multitudinous poor.

At first, the Colonel did not find any means to support the beleaguered Jews, but the opportunity would arise as the mass deportations from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp began.

It soon became clear that the Nazi authorities saw the Warsaw ghetto as only a staging area for thousands of Jews who would eventually be gassed. In the space of two months, the Nazis sent more than two hundred and fifty thousand Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka killing center in an act of a macabre synchronicity. The numbers were staggering. The Nazis in control did not tell the Jews remaining in the ghetto that their brothers and sisters, their sons and daughters had all been sent to their deaths, but the Jews quickly figured it out. In fact, it was impossible for the SS to hide their monstrous deed from anyone in Warsaw as the trains to Treblinka arrived every day to take the Jews and virtually no one ever came back. Colonel Salvador García did everything he could as a diplomat to protest the mass murder, but his pleas went unheard. It was then that a ghost from the past arrived.

George Mandl, also known as Jorge Mendez, arrived at the Salvadoran consulate at nine in the morning and asked to meet with the Colonel. The embassy was located on one of the busiest streets in the German district of the Polish capital, far from the Jewish ghetto. When Colonel Salvador García recognized the Jewish businessman, the Colonel was astonished that he was still in Poland.

“I thought by now you’d be running a department store somewhere in New York City. How could you have survived all these years living in Warsaw? Aren’t you confined to the ghetto?  How did you avoid the killing camps?” 

“The Salvadoran passports you provided have been very useful. I made it safely to America with my wife and sons. But I decided to return and join in the Jewish Resistance. Although I don’t live in the ghetto, I am in contact with the two most active defense organizations, the Jewish Combat Organization and the Jewish Military Union. And this is where you come in. You can accept or reject my request, but please promise me you’ll keep what I tell you as a secret.”

“Surely,” replied the Colonel. “What can I do for you?”

“I only disclose this to you because I know you’re a mensch, a person of integrity and honor.”

“Go on,” said Colonel Salvador García.

“As you must know, the Reich is now involved in the mass liquidation of European Jewry. What they did in the past is child’s play compared to what they’re doing now. It’s one thing to cut a Hasidic rabbi’s beard to humiliate him or to shatter the display window of a Jewish business. It’s altogether different to send hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers at Treblinka.”

“What do I have to do with all of this?”

“We have decided to take up arms against our Aryan overlords. The long-suffering Juden have finally said enough. We have no high hopes of defeating them, but we’d rather die standing up rather than begging on our knees. For centuries, Warsaw has been the cultural capital of Jewish Europe. Now the Jewish section is in rubbles, and it is getting worse. In some way, we Jews are already dead. The Warsaw ghetto is a coffin for the Jews. Indeed, you might not believe it, but the streets of the ghetto are full of corpses, victims of starvation or typhus. Now there are dirty, lice-ridden children begging in the streets of Warsaw.”

“Get to it,” demanded the Colonel. “What is the favor you mean to ask of me?”

“We want to know if you can hide some of our weapons in your consulate. We don’t have so many safe houses outside the congested ghetto. Only a few non-Jews are willing to risk their lives to help us. And everything needs to be synchronized to surprise the Nazis.”

“You’re asking me to commit a crime punishable by death,” said the Colonel coolly. “If I’m discovered, I’ll be the one sent to Treblinka.”

“It’s the last opportunity for the Jews of Europe to rise up. Already our numbers in the ghetto are dwindling. While once four hundred thousand people lived in the Warsaw ghetto, now the number is closer to fifty thousand. If we don’t act now, nothing will stand in the way of Hitler’s so-called Final Solution. You should know that by now the Nazis are sending trainloads of Jewish children to their deaths at Treblinka. I know that as a man of integrity you cannot abide that. If we don’t do something about it, Hitler will soon occupy all of Eastern Europe and decimate its Jews. We have no weapons to defend ourselves, literally, only a few pistols and Molotov cocktails, so your assistance is of the essence. If we can get some materiel inside the ghetto, we would be forever in your debt.”

“I take it you want me to smuggle the weapons into the ghetto myself. Or am I wrong?

“That would be ideal,” responded Jorge Mendez. “There’s a curfew which applies to Jews and we’re not allowed to leave the ghetto any way. If the weapons were transported to the ghetto by the Jewish underground, it would be extremely risky. With your passport, the police wouldn’t be suspicious if they stopped you while driving on the street, but I suggest that you take a gun in your pocket in case of danger from the police.”

Colonel Salvador García lit a cigarette as he looked out a window and saw German families with children in tow.

“I am going to do it for the children. It’s a quixotic quest anyway, but I’ll do it for the kids. I shall also do it for the pipil peasants of San Salvador.”

“I don’t understand,” said Jorge Mendez.

“Let’s say,” explained the Colonel, “that I owe the Indians of my country a great debt, and I can pay it down by doing all I can to save the Jews.”

Soon Colonel Salvador García assembled an assortment of bombs, rifles, grenades, and even a few machine guns in an attic of the consulate and in his bedroom. Margot applauded the Colonel in his efforts. She had become the Colonel’s constant companion, but they could never marry given the laws against miscegenation in both Germany and Poland. And so, one Tuesday, in the dead of night, the Colonel loaded the trunk of his consular vehicle with the weaponry and made his way to the Warsaw Ghetto. Jorge Mendez had given him a map so that he could make his way around the ghetto safely until he could find an entry guarded by a Gestapo officer who had been bribed to let him through. Unfortunately, Colonel Salvador García missed the checkpoint and soon was at another one, with a police vehicle right behind him, lights flashing. When the Colonel got out of his vehicle, he was soon approached by a policeman with a gun in its holster and a yellow Star of David on an armband. He looked no older than seventeen or eighteen and seemed to be spooked. The Colonel was astonished that the policeman was a Jew.

“I’m going to check the trunk,” the policeman said. “And let me see your papers.”

The Colonel pretended he was going to open the trunk but soon unholstered his gun instead.

“I’m afraid I have nothing to show you, just this revolver. Now turn around and put your arms behind your back. And throw your pistol on the ground.”

“Are you going to shoot me?” asked the young Jew. “You must be with the Jewish underground. You should know that I support your cause.”

“How could you support the cause of Jewish liberation and work as a complicit guard at the beck and call of the Gestapo? You’re a traitor to your race and your death is well-deserved. What do your fellow Jews think about the work you do?”

“They hate me for it, but I can do nothing else. My father and my grandparents have already been sent to the gas chambers of Treblinka. If I stop working as a guard, I will be sent to the crematoria too and so will my mother and my sister. If you were in my position, wouldn’t you do the same thing? Doesn’t family come first? What benefit could be gained by killing me? You should know that I detest the German usurper who has taken over Poland more than you can imagine. If there’s a war against the Nazis, I’ll be on the front lines.”

Colonel Salvador García had initially thought it would be justified to kill the Jewish guard but then wasn’t so sure. After all, he was the merest of pawns in the macabre chessboard that was Nazi Europe. In such a world, one does whatever one must do to survive.

“Can you promise,” asked the Colonel, “in the name of your deceased father, that you will never tell your Nazi overlords that you have seen me tonight?”

“I swear it to you in the name of God and in the name of the Jewish people. And next time you come to the ghetto, I’ll let you in.”

“Well, then, go on your way. I will not touch you. Pick up your pistol so that no one questions if it’s missing.”

“You trust me, don’t you?” asked the young policeman.

“Let’s say that when I was young, I would have accepted work as a guard without hesitation. Now that my hair is gray, I understand the complexity of moral choices. You have been placed in an impossible situation through no fault of your own. I have found myself in such a place myself.”

The Jewish militias were ultimately routed, but they managed to stave off the well-armed Nazis for over a month. Nobody learned of the Colonel’s participation in the “crime,” although he had delivered weapons to the Jewish Combat Organization more than a dozen times. Despite its outcome, he was satisfied to have joined the Jews in their act of collective defiance, dare one say of suicidal resistance. He wept at the thought that the Jewish ghetto, along with its seventy thousand inhabitants, had simply disappeared .

***

The mass killing happened in Poland, it happened in Hungary, it happened in France, it happened in the Netherlands, it happened in Romania, it happened in Lithuania, it happened in Italy, it happened in Estonia, it happened in Latvia, it happened in Greece, it happened in Ukraine. The destruction of the Jews proceeded apace as the whole continent became an oven for the Jews. It was la Matanza on an exponential level. It was the worst possible crime – Germans, Poles and others sepulchering the Jews en masse for the crime of being Jewish. The savage Nazi regime – talk about being civilized – stated that it was no longer the time for half-measures, that the Jews could no longer emigrate. From the summer of 1941 onward, it was the official policy of the German Reich to eliminate Jews everywhere. The Final Solution – the gassing of all the Jews – had begun in earnest.

Colonel Salvador García gritted his teeth in silent anger and muted impuissance as he sat in safety at his desk at the Salvadoran embassy in Geneva. He wanted to rend his garments and cry out in despair and fury. This cannot be! This cannot be! This cannot be! As the months passed, the number of Jews murdered by the Nazi regime was so much greater than the forty thousand peasants killed during la Matanza in El Salvador. And this time – unlike in San Salvador – the Colonel felt there was nothing he could do about it. Now that he wanted to act in defense of a despised minority, it was seemingly impossible to do so. Even the fraudulent visas no longer worked.

But one day George Mandl – also known as Jorge Mendez – appeared at the Colonel’s door. He had survived the massacre at the Warsaw ghetto and continued to work with the Jewish resistance, such as it was. He came to the Salvadoran embassy in Geneva to make a proposal that the Catholic Colonel would find difficult to accept and just as difficult to reject.

Jorge Mendez proposed the assassination of Adolf Hitler, no more and no less.

Colonel Salvador García was taken by surprise.

“What do you have in mind?” he asked.

“I want you to keep this in absolute confidence,” answered Jorge Mendez. “If you can’t bring yourself to do it, just let me know and we’ll forget about it. Are you interested, my friend?”

“I don’t know if I’m interested or not,” replied the Colonel as he nervously lit a cigarette. “You can’t ask me to plot the killing of a human being and expect an instantaneous response. Sure, it would be a good thing to eliminate the German butcher, but I’m not quite sure that I am the man to do it – either morally or practically. At least let me know the logistics of the proposed assassination. If I were to agree to participate in any such plot, I’m pretty sure that I would end up dead as well. And it wouldn’t be the first time an attempt on Hitler’s life calamitously fails.”

“You’ve been in the military for over twenty-five years and know how to handle explosives. All I have in mind is for you to murder Hitler in a restaurant. It’s called Zur Letzsen Instanz and the arrangements have already been made. And you shouldn’t have qualms either from a moral or practical perspective. By blowing him up, you shall be saving a million lives. And we’re in the midst of a war. Hitler is the Supreme Commander of Germany’s Armed Forces. If you can kill a German private without moral compunctions, you can certainly assassinate the man who directs them all. As far as practicality, I won’t deny it’s risky. But if we do it the right way, you’ll be able to escape.”

“How will I even be able to bring a bomb to the restaurant? How can you even ensure that he’ll be in the restaurant on the appointed date?”

“I know from my informants with the Resistance that Hitler intends to meet with the Salvadoran Ambassador at  Zur Letzsen Instanz on the third Wednesday of next month. I also know from my sources that he goes there every week with his lover Eva Braun. Your President has recently been making noises about switching sides to join the allies. Seeing how both America and the Soviets are now at war with him on two fronts, the Fuhrer wants to shore up help wherever he can find it, even in tiny El Salvador. He still dreams foolishly about Argentina, Chile and Brazil. All you have to do is finagle your way into joining them for dinner.”

“I’m not sure I understand” replied the Colonel. “You’re talking about bombing a public restaurant. Civilians will be killed, including Hitler’s consort Eva Braun. How can I as a Catholic perpetrate such a heinous act?”

“It is not a crime to decapitate a diabolical regime. Under the laws of war to which every civilized nation subscribes, sometimes one is forced to choose between the lesser of two evils. And what can be more evil than what Hitler is doing to the Jews, indeed to all the world?”

“Still, can a Catholic engage in crimes for the greater good? What you’re suggesting is tyrannicide.”

“I have it from a Pole engaged in the resistance that the Catholic Church does not oppose the principles of a just war. The Church has made it clear that self-defense is a God-given right. In fact, the Church states that the defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm. A private citizen who takes the life of a tyrant acts in the same way as a soldier during war. And remember this, Salvador: there is not a war in human history that does not involve some degree of unintended harm to the innocent.”

“Still, why must we put in danger the lives of other restaurant patrons? Why don’t I just put a bullet in his head?”

“If you shoot him, you will be immediately apprehended. If you put the bomb in a briefcase and leave it beneath your table, you’ll have fifteen precious minutes before the bomb is detonated. I will be waiting in a car outside the restaurant, such that you will be able to escape. Once the Fuhrer is killed, one of his dissident generals will take over, and you’ll be celebrated rather than punished for your crime. You should know that there are a number of generals who think Hitler’s assassination is necessary given his reckless battle plans and the way he is wasting precious resources in his never-ending war against the Jews. It is well-known in resistance circles that none other than General Claus von Stauffenberg, a staunch Catholic who lost an eye and a hand during the war, is also plotting the man’s death because he cannot abide the extermination of the Jews and wants to sue for peace with the allied forces.”

“Listen to me, Jorge. In the event that I agree to your demented plan, I want someone to put a pistol behind the toilet in the bathroom of the restaurant just in case my briefcase is confiscated.”

“We can do that, but I repeat that it would be very risky to kill Hitler that way. Although I think it is unlikely, he may have guards at the restaurant dressed in plain clothes ready to pounce upon you if you shoot him.”

Colonel Salvador García abruptly ended the conversation, saying he needed time to think. So, he aimlessly walked along the Rhone River with no direction in mind pondering the conundrum in which he found himself. Oh, how he hated Jorge Mendez for putting such a choice before him! On the one hand, Colonel Salvador García believed that if tyrannicide were ever justified, it would be justified in the case of Adolf Hitler. If his killing wasn’t permissible in the eyes of God,  it would be difficult to think about one which would. On the other hand, the Colonel was very troubled by the idea of bombing a place full of innocent patrons simply eating their kraut, schnitzel and frites. Eva Braun and the Salvadoran Ambassador to Germany would be blown up too, persons who had no role in the Final Solution and whom the Salvadoran colonel knew from his days as consul in Munich. So, he walked and walked and walked, walked until his legs were weak, and then he walked some more. The future of the world was in the balance as well as the fate of his eternal soul. He should have dismissed the proposal out of hand, thought the Colonel. But then... but then... he would be sending millions to their deaths as Hitler’s extermination of the Jews galloped ahead. Wouldn’t inaction be the greater sin? He remembered an old Spanish proverb as he threw himself onto his bed. The righteous pay for the faults of sinners. Innocent guests at the restaurant including the Salvadoran Ambassador and the Fuhrer’s lover would pay for the faults of Hitler!

In the morning, after a sleepless night, he called Jorge Mendez on the telephone. “I’m all in,” he said. “The execution of Hitler is clearly the lesser evil.”

 Jorge Mendez responded with a laugh.

“I knew you were good for it,” he said. “Now let’s get you on your way back to Berlin. The doomed Fuhrer awaits you at his favorite restaurant! Try to enjoy the schnapps as you may not enjoy them again if our dream fails.”

“Thanks for the gallows humor,” responded the Colonel with a grim face, as if he had just swallowed some bitter purgative.

“Just kidding, Colonel. This is a failsafe plan. Hitler has gotten rather sloppy with security in recent months given how many times he’s foiled plots to kill him. He’s not a religious man, but he believes that he has a special role in history which cannot be thwarted by ordinary men. “

“Well, then, let’s change history,” pronounced the Colonel.

“One thing you should remember is that Adolf Hitler hates cigarette smoke and thinks tobacco is the worst of vices. At the right time, tell him you want to go outside the restaurant for a smoke. Then we can detonate the bomb.”

“So, Hitler thinks it’s bad to smoke? How a man immersed in the worst of crimes can worry about a minor vice is simply beyond me.”

“No, the man has his little virtues. I know because the Resistance has a whole dossier about him. He won’t touch liquor and is a vegetarian because he’s against the slaughter of animals and animal suffering in general. Cruelty towards animals greatly distresses him, and the torture of animals is verboten in the Reich even if done for medical experiments. Don’t forget the Reich Animal Protection Laws, which prohibit vivisection of dogs even as he condones experiments on human beings.  He loves his two Alsatian dogs above all, more than his mistress. And it’s well known that he delights in the company of children...”

“As long as they’re not Jewish, Roma or handicapped,” Colonel Salvador García bitterly responded.

“Or even Slavs,” replied Jorge Mendez. “He’s specifically ordered the annihilation of Polish children, even the Catholics among them.”

When the Colonel arrived at the Zur Letzsen Instanz restaurant in East Berlin, Ambassador Alvarez was already there. The two men had never been close and had been antagonists for a while, during their spat over the visas for the Jews. That dispute was far behind them, however, and the Colonel remembered better days when he was invited to Salvadoran meals at the home of the Ambassador in Berlin. Eating pupusas and chicharrones reminded the Colonel of his life in San Salvador. But what the Colonel most remembered about his visits to the home of the Ambassador was his interaction with the kids. He still had not forgotten their names: Carlitos, Tania and Wilfredo. And now Colonel Salvador García was planning to make them orphans forever. But he tried not to think about that as he sat at the table nursing a beer. Nobody had asked to see the contents of his briefcase, which contained the two kilograms of plastic explosives so there was no impediment to the plan. Given the small size of the restaurant, there was no doubt that the bombs would destroy it completely. Then the Fuhrer arrived along with Eva Braun. They, too, would be incinerated by the explosion if all went according to plan.

As soon as the two Salvadoran diplomats saw Hitler, they made the Nazi salute, which was mandatory for all civilians in the Greater Reich. The Nazi leader also raised his right arm in the air to acknowledge the salute. Colonel Salvador García asked the Fuhrer if he would be bothered if he had a smoke. He knew what the response would be but suggested it to let the Fuhrer know he was a smoker and thus prepare him for when he would have to excuse himself later in the dinner. For his part, Hitler told the Colonel that smoking as well as drinking alcohol were Jewish vices meant to make addicts of healthy Aryan youths and to profit off their addictions. In addition, if a woman smoked or drank while pregnant, she would be more likely to bear a defective child – another goal of perfidious Jews bent on polluting the Aryan gene pool.

“But if you proceed on your way to lung cancer,” said the Fuhrer with an air of exasperation, “who am I to interfere? ”

At some point, a young family arrived, two blonde parents and two blonde children, neither of them older than five. When they recognized Hitler, the parents made the Nazi salute and the Fuhrer put both children on his lap, one on each leg.

“Have your parents told you what to say when you’re in the presence of your Fuhrer?”

The two children did not understand him,

“You’re too little,” said Hitler, “but here is what you should say. ‘Daddy loves me, Mommy loves me, but the Fuhrer loves me most of all.’”

“We’ll teach him that,” said the mother with a wide smile.

“They’re beautiful children. Have some more. The mongrel races breed like rats. We Aryans must reproduce like rabbits.”

When the waiter arrived to take the orders, Hitler told him he would have “the usual,” by which he meant asparagus soup, egg dumplings, radish salad, cabbage rolls, and mashed potatoes along with a little orange juice.”

The Colonel and the Ambassador both asked for steaks with mashed potatoes. The Fuhrer looked at the dishes with an expression of disgust and advised them if they knew what happened in the abattoirs they would never eat meat again.

Colonel Salvador García was not thinking about food, however. The young German family was sitting only a few meters away from them, and their deaths would be unavoidable once the bombs exploded. There was also a group of four men sitting at a table close to them, whom the Colonel thought looked like military men given their athletic build and their army crew cuts. The Colonel, claiming he was suddenly indisposed, soon stood up from his chair and went to the bathroom where he found the pistol planted in the restaurant by some member of the Resistance.  The Colonel preferred to kill the Fuhrer with a bomb rather than a bullet and decided to wait for the young German family to leave the restaurant before he made his choice. He had already decided – it was not a difficult decision to make although his life hung in the balance – that if the kids did not depart before Hitler finished his dinner, the Colonel would just shoot the Fuhrer in the head. As far as aborting the mission – a thought that he briefly considered – it was ultimately out of the question. Those two German kids he decided not to kill needed him to assassinate Hitler more than anyone. If they were taught to love Hitler since their childhood, constantly subjected to Nazi propaganda, what future would they have? They would become moral monsters themselves as had so many other so-called Aryans. Many of those involved in the desecration of synagogues during Kristallnacht had been children after all... And it’s self-evident that children never hate unless they’re taught to do so.

Colonel Salvador García was pleased by how prolix the Fuhrer was, as if he was delivering a speech rather than engaging in ordinary conversation. That would give more time to the German family to depart. Hitler waxed poetic about the superiority of the Nordic German race as if he was not speaking to two people who were clearly not among their number. He spoke with extravagant and misplaced enthusiasm about Germany’s expected victory against the Russians and the Americans, a thought his own generals deemed to be demented, and of course he discussed his obsession, the treacherousness of international Jewry. Wasn’t the New York Times controlled by a Jewish family named Sulzberger?  Weren’t the men who masterminded the Russian revolution Jews as well? As he spoke about the Jews, the Fuhrer’s face grew hot with fury. He blamed them for the missteps of the First World War, and he blamed international Jewry for the participation in the Second World War by the United States and the Soviet Union, both enthralled to Zionism. During the entire conversation, very little was discussed about the role of El Salvador in the world war for the Fuhrer didn’t want to grovel.

Finally, Adolf Hitler declared that the dinner was over – he skipped dessert – and thanked the two Salvadorans for sharing dinner with him. At that moment – the kids had not yet left the restaurant — Colonel Salvador García took the pistol he had kept hidden in a pocket of his pants and shot Hitler in the head three times. There was a great hullabaloo, and the four men sitting in a corner soon rose from their seats and subdued the homicidal Colonel.  As Colonel Salvador García was being arrested, an ambulance arrived to pick up the bleeding Fuhrer, still breathing despite his wounds. Soon the news arrived in Munich, arrived in all of Germany, arrived in the whole world. Adolf Hitler had been shot execution style in a restaurant in Berlin by El Salvador’s Ambassador to Geneva.

One of the four men who had been sitting at the adjacent table took out his weapon and directed it at Colonel Salvador García, but another guard told him not to kill the Colonel as it was necessary to discover who else had participated in the plot. Soon the Colonel was taken to the Berlin Army barracks where he was subjected to torture in order for him to disclose the names of his co-conspirators, Jorge Mendez and Margot Stein. Despite the brutality he endured, the Colonel refused to speak. Then another SS man entered the torture room and told his confederate that the Colonel had to be executed forthwith. Hitler had died from his wounds and some of his generals had already revolted. Colonel Salvador García had to be brought before the firing squad immediately. Ambassador Alvarez was also shot, accused of being complicit in the murder.

Colonel Salvador García had managed to change history.