India sent a million men to fight during World War II, and yet few of us know for what. My grandfather spent five years as a major in the Royal Medical Corps on the Burma front and two other great-uncles served in North Africa and Italy. I never spoke to them of these experiences. It seemed to be a war between Europeans in which we were caught up. But the world has shrunk over time, or maybe it was always small and we have finally lifted our head out of the hole of our own self-pity.

In 2012, I was travelling through Germany for book readings from a novel of mine translated into German, and ended up at the small town of Krefeld. My friends in Berlin had told me to expect only an ugly town. What I experienced was something else. The reading was held at an old train station. Built in the early 1900s, it was no longer in use for its original purpose, but had been transformed into a cultural centre. My reading was part of a cultural show and began with a performance by three Indian musicians playing a harmonium, a tabla and something under a blanket that was never revealed. They were Bengalis, judging by their accents, from Cologne, which was all that I managed to learn about them. A German woman in Indian clothes danced to their music. They performed a Bollywood number from the movie Jab We Met at the start, and a hymn of praise to Durga (no dancing during this one), and ended with an old Sufi song made famous by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Sanu, Ek Pal Chain Na Aaye .

After this performance, which seemed neither appropriate nor inappropriate, I read a brief passage from the book in English, and then watched the audience as the sections in German were read out, since my knowledge of the language was non-existent. The reading was by a former evangelical pastor, originally from East Germany, although it would have been easy to mistake him for a successful banker. He was completely immersed in the text and told me afterward, “That imam, Maulana Qayoom — is that how you say it? — I really liked that character. What happens to him... horrible, horrible.” I did not know how to ask him about his experience of the Stasi regime as a pastor under a government that believed all religion was passé at best, dangerous at worst.

My hosts in Krefeld were an elderly German couple, the husband having retired as a teacher of literature. One room on the ground floor of their house was given over to German literature (other topics — geography, world literature — occupied other rooms, even a basement) arranged by the year of the author’s birth, starting from Goethe and Schiller and marching to Grass. Many of them were first editions, but the newest books had no place to be stacked. After Grass, the books by new writers were piling up on tables and the floor. His wife was actually the one playing host to me. She was also a teacher, of German language to foreign students, as well as an activist with Fair Trade in Calcutta and the Literature Club in Krefeld.

After the reading, the old man had been worked up. The passage had rattled an old memory, and he told me, “On November 10, 1938, when I was eight years old, my father took me by the hand and walked me through the town [Duisburg] to show me all the shops and the houses [of Jews] that had been burned down [on Kristallnacht]. He didn’t say anything. I kept asking him, but he didn’t say anything.” His English was not good, and he struggled with it, but these sentences came through. The effort exhausted him though. His closest childhood friend had been Jewish, and it still haunted him. His wife added a few words in explanation. “If his father had told him, then he might have spoken to other children, perhaps. In school, the children were questioned about anybody mentioning the arson, or showing sympathy. Such people were identified and shipped off to concentration camps.”

The old man waved the fingers of both hands in a dismissive gesture that said clearly, without the need of words, that he and his father would have been disposed of as easily as water flicked off a person’s fingers. His story did not end there. He was recruited into the army at age 14 in the last year of the war. He escaped, crossing borders, and returned home after the war, guided by a compass and nothing else.

This was one of the regimes that our million soldiers fought against, and we know so little of it, or those who suffered under its heel, that it saddens me. It is not just the sacrifices we made, but the entirely necessary war we fought, whose goals we do not really engage with, that is forgotten, and something of India is lost with it.

( Omair Ahmad is an author. His last book was on Bhutan; >@OmairTAhmad )

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