The Train Was on Time by Heinrich Böll
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Deathly Ironies

Impending death certainly concentrates the mind. In 1943 a German soldier returning to his unit on the collapsing Eastern front, has good reason to anticipate death. His thoughts are not about the past or of loved ones or a life he has left. Rather, he thinks about his war experiences and the present as it streaks by outside his railway carriage. He believes that what he sees and smells is the last time he will see and smell these things - the cities, the girl-volunteers serving coffee at the stations, the autumnal German sky, the trees, the air of the countryside.

The soldier knows his destination is in Poland, a place called Przemysl, and then onward past Lviv in a heavily Polish part of the Ukraine. This is the area of the former Austrian-Hungarian province of Galicia which bordered the 19th century Jewish Pale of the Russian Empire. About 10% of Galicia, 1 million people, was Jewish in 1940. By 1943 almost all had been murdered, many by the Einsatzgruppen, and others were victims of the death camp at Janowska which had been established in 1941 by the SS in a northeastern suburb of Lviv.

What the soldier does not know, and the reader is not informed about directly, is that the railway journey that he is on is, although in relatively much more comfortable conditions, exactly the same as that for the millions of Jews who had already been deported from Germany and the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe on their way to Janowska and the other camps in Eastern Poland and Western Ukraine. He, like those Jews, is being sent to his death. The principal difference is that he is aware of his likely fate; the Jews were not.

Boll’s intentional irony is signalled, I think, very early on when he notes that “Now and again what appears to be a casually spoken word will suddenly acquire a cabalistic significance.” The soldier becomes obsessive about the word ‘soon’ in relation to his death, and conducts a sort of existential analysis to determine when and where ‘soon’ could be. Consulting a map given him by a fellow-soldier, he intuitively estimates that his death will occur in about four days time just past Lviv, that is, in the region of the Janowska camp.

The soldier is a Catholic. He finds himself praying. Remarkably “he said a special prayer for the Jews of Cernauti and for the Jews of Lvov, and no doubt there were Jews in Stanislav too, and in Kolomyya …” And, although he has several opportunities to desert, he stays on the train. Whatever his country has become, it is no longer his: “I don’t want to go back, I never want to go back.…” he says.

After a sumptuous ‘last meal’ and other after-dinner entertainments in an up-market brothel in Lviv, the soldier’s intuition becomes even more precise about his death: “Just this side of Stryy I shall die.…” he says to a Polish prostitute who is also a partisan spy. Stryy had been a largely Jewish city an hour’s train journey from Lviv. Certainly the Jews had been eliminated from the place by 1943, and he includes them in his prayers as well. He is meant to board the train, which will undoubtedly be running on time with German efficiency, early in the morning.

The soldier does not make the train to Stryy. It leaves without him.

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