No Names, No Pack Drill
by Tony Dawson

 

 

In 2004, I drove to Aachen in Germany where the younger of my two sons was living with his German wife. Upon my arrival, my daughter-in-law’s brother, a computer expert who shared the house with them, kindly helped me out by resolving a problem I was having with my clunky laptop. When we sat down for our first meal together, I was struck by the way my son’s brother-in-law ate it. He leaned over his food, with his arm circling the plate to protect it, in the same way that inmates in prison do. I was curious to know why he did such a thing. Later, in private, I was told, much to my astonishment, that when he was younger, he had been one of the most hunted neo-Nazi terrorists in Europe.

His father had been, and still was even then, a staunch Nazi and my son’s brother-in-law had followed in his father’s footsteps. During the 1980s, he had been working as a spy for the Stasi. He was later extradited from France to West Germany and sentenced the following October to ten and a half years in prison for crimes including bank robbery and attempted murder.

It so happened that while he was serving his prison sentence, the Palestinian Liberation Front hijacked the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship taking holidaymakers around the Mediterranean in October 1985. They murdered 69-year-old Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound Jewish-American citizen, and threw his body overboard. It was then that the name of my daughter-in-law’s brother hit the headlines because one of the demands made by the PLF was that he should be released from prison or else they would kill more hostages. Their demand went unheeded. After serving two-thirds of his sentence, he was released in December 1993. Following his release from prison, he studied at the University of Mainz and became a technical translator.

That day at the dinner table in 2004, I had witnessed a symptom of the profound effect that the years he had spent incarcerated had had on his behaviour. What was more important, though, was that he had recognized the error of his ways by then. He had long since abandoned violence and was leading a normal life.

Back in 2004, when the time came for me to leave my son’s family home to drive back to Seville, he asked me if I could give him a lift to Grenoble in France, but I said I wasn’t going that way (even though I was) because I felt extremely nervous about having a convicted terrorist sitting next to me in the car. I was wondering whether I would be safe on the journey… Now, twenty-two years later and looking back, I feel rather foolish and if I knew where he was, I would apologize to him.

 

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