The Odessa File
I have read two incredibly good books within the last week or so. I read them simultaneously, but the first one I got to the end of was ‘The Odessa File’ by Frederick Forsyth. My boyfriend lent it to me, having himself read it from cover to cover in a very short period of time, and so I was intrigued to see what it was like given that he was singing its praises despite not normally being fiction’s biggest fan.
I wasn’t disappointed 
The book is set in the 1960s and tells the story of a young German reporter who by a series of coincidences comes across the diary of a Jewish man who has just committed suicide. The diary tells the story of everything that happened to the man during the war, which he spent in a ghetto at Riga. The camp was run by a very sadistic man called Eduard Roschmann who inflicted all sorts of cruelties on the inmates, including forcing this particular Jew to put his wife into a van which was taking people to be gassed. The man, inexplicably I thought, didn’t go to the gas chamber with his wife but instead vowed to survive the war and live to see Roschmann brought to justice.
Survive the war he did, against all odds and by the skin of his teeth, and yet he never managed to achieve his aim. After the war, Roschmann mysteriously disappeared until one day, the old Jewish man saw him as a free man in West Germany, going to the opera. It was at this point that he decided that his life was no longer worth living 
When he reads the diary, the young reporter is totally outraged and vows to track down this murderer who is still at large. His newspaper refuses to commission him, so he takes all of his savings out of the bank and sets off on his own personal quest. As the book progresses, his adventure becomes increasingly dangerous as his path crosses that of an organisation called Odessa, which exists to rehabilitate former SS men with new lives and new passports. At one point he goes undercover and tries to infiltrate the SS but his love of his rather distinctive looking jaguar is nearly the undoing of him and he soon has to contend with bullets and bombs.
Throughout the book there is always the hint that this is about more than the reporter’s desire to avenge a dead Jew, and when the twist comes at the end it is superb. I certainly didn’t see it coming, and I had spent half the book wondering what it was going to be It’s not a book which has a happy Disney-style ending, but nevertheless I didn’t find it depressing to read. I mean, in theory I love books full of spies and plotting and intrigue, but the two John le Carre books I have read (A Small Town in Germany and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold), both set in Germany around the same period, have made me feel that life was so utterly pointless it was hardly worth living! It’s a shame, because my father thinks John le Carre is a fantastic author, and he certainly has a lot of books to his name, but I can’t get on with him at all. Anyway, in my opinion this book is infinitely superior and well worth a read.
There are only two small criticisms that I can make. The first being that I am dubious with regards to the extent that Frederick Forsyth can speak German, because towards the start of the book he describes a random character, supposedly a native of Hamburg, saying Grüß Gott. Nobody from Hamburg would say that any more than a native of Belfast would start talking in Cockney Rhyming Slang! The second thing which stood out to me was that this book would never have been written by a woman. For while this reporter is off gallivanting for months at a time, his poor girlfriend is completely abandoned at home without having the least idea where he is or even if he was dead or alive. No consideration is given to her feelings and he doesn’t contact her until right at the end when he decides she can be useful to him by bringing him a gun. She dutifully does so, more fool her, and in a scene which could only have been written by a man she willingly shags him upon arrival without demanding an apology for the appalling way he has been treating her. She does mildly lose her temper later, at which point the reporter proposes to her as a sort of afterthought, and in a bizarrely unrealistic manner this apparently makes everything okay and she accepts. Hmmm, indeed.
Anyhow, those are but small criticisms which do nothing to marr the overall quality of the book, which is exceptionally well written and constructed. When I got to the end I was highly curious as to how much of the content was based on fact; I started by assuming that all the Odessa stuff was made up, but when references were made to Roschmann being the so called Butcher of Riga, I began to be unsure because I had read about such a man in a completely unrelated book many years previously. A bit of googling revealed that whilst obviously the ins and outs of the plot are an embellishment, the basic facts regarding Roschmann are true and at the point at which Forsyth wrote the book, he was still alive, living a secret life in Argentina. Apparently one of the hopes of the book, which was written with the cooperation of Simon Wiesental, was that it would lead to new information about his whereabouts and perhaps secure his arrest. West Germany did indeed finally request his extradition from Argentina in the late 1970s, causing Roschmann to flee once more. Regrettably, he died a natural death as a free man in Paraguay in 1978.
Tags: Frederick Forsyth, Germany, The Odessa Files