Your loving son,
August Molin.
Now promoted to Unterscharfuhrer.
Molin’s motives were now clearer than ever. He’d been encouraged by his parents to fight for Hitler against Bolshevism. When he went to Norway, it was not as some kind of adventurer. He had set himself a mission. Towards the end of 1944, possibly in connection with the wounds he had suffered, he had been promoted. What was an “Unterscharführer”? What was the Swedish equivalent? Was there an equivalent?
Lindman read on. The entries became less frequent and shorter, but Molin stayed in Germany until the end of the war. He is in Berlin as the city falls, street by street. He describes how he saw a Russian tank at close range for the first time. He notes that on several occasions he was close to “falling into the clutches of the Russians, in which case I would have had to rely on the mercy of the good Lord.” No Swedish names crop up by now, nor are there any Danish or Norwegian ones. He is now the only Swede among German comrades. The last wartime entry in his diary is dated April 30.
April 30. I’m fighting for my life now, fighting to escape alive from this living hell. All is lost. Swapped my uniform for clothes taken from a dead German civilian. That’s more or less the same as deserting, but everything is crumbling on all sides now. I shall try to escape over a bridge tonight. Then we will just have to see what happens.
It is not clear what happened next, but Molin did survive and did manage to get back to Sweden. A year passes before he makes the next entry in his diary. He is in Kalmar by then. His mother died on April 8, 1946. He writes on the day of her funeral: “I shall miss Mother. She was a good woman. The funeral was beautiful. Father fought to hold back his tears, but managed to keep composed. I think about the war all the time. Shells whistle past my ears even when I’m sailing in Kalmar Bay.”
Lindman read on. The entries became shorter and sparser still. He notes that he has gotten married. That his wife gives birth to children. But he writes nothing about changing his name. Nor is there any mention of the music shop in Stockholm. One day in July 1955, for no apparent reason, he starts a poem. He crosses it out, but it is still possible to read the words:Morning sun in Kalmar Bay
The birds are twittering in the trees
Today will be a lovely day
Perhaps he couldn’t think of anything to rhyme with “trees,” Lindman thought. “Bees” would have worked. Or “breeze.” He took a pen from his pocket and wrote in a notepad: “With white clouds scudding in the breeze.” It would have been a very bad poem. Perhaps Molin had enough sense to realize the limits of his poetic gifts.
Molin—he is now Molin—moves to Alingsas, and then to Boras. Ten days in Scotland produce an unexpected outburst of writing. To find anything like it Lindman would have to go back to the first months in Germany when Molin’s optimism was intact.
After Scotland everything reverts to normal. He seldom takes up his pen, and then merely notes individual events, with no personal comment.
Lindman became more attentive as he came to the end of the diary. Before that, Molin had noted when he did his last day’s work at the police station, and when he moved to Harjedalen. One particular entry aroused Lindman’s curiosity:March 12, 1993. Greeting card from the old portrait painter Wetterstedt, congratulating me on my birthday.
On May 2, 1999, he makes his last entry:May 2, 1999. +7 degrees. My master jigsaw puzzle maker Castro in Barcelona has died. Letter from his widow. I realize now that he must have had a hard time these last few years. An incurable kidney disease.
That is all. The diary is far from full. The book Molin bought in a stationer’s in Oslo in June 1942 was with him for the rest of his life but is incomplete. If a diary can ever be finished. When he started writing he was young, a convinced Nazi, on his way from Norway to Germany and the war. He eats ice cream and is embarrassed when Norwegian girls look him in the eye. Fifty-seven years later he writes about the death of a jigsaw puzzle maker in Barcelona. Six months later, he is dead himself.
Lindman closed the book. It was almost pitch-black outside. Is the solution in this diary or elsewhere? he asked himself. I can’t answer that question. I don’t know what he left out, only what he wrote. But I now know a few things about Molin that I didn’t know before. He was a Nazi, he fought for Hitler’s Germany in World War II. He also traveled to Scotland and went for a lot of long walks with somebody he called “M.”
Lindman packed the letters, photographs, and the diary into the raincoat again. He left the house the same way he’d come in, through the window. Just before opening the car door he paused. A vague feeling of sorrow had come over him. About the life Herbert Molin had led. But he realized that some of the sorrow was directed at himself. He was thirty-seven years old, childless, and was carrying an illness that could send him to his grave before he reached forty.