Amazing how one can bump into interesting people on a park bench. 74-year old Titus Kastner is one such guy I met one Sunday last summer.

Kastner is a first-gen Cretan immigrant from Arkadi, Crete, having received his landed status in 1976. His father had been SS Hauptscharfuhrer Franz Kastner of the SS-Totenkopfverbande, the Death’s Head Unit of the Waffen-SS, a sledge hammer-like division within the SS during WWII, which followed behind the regular Wehrmacht troops and dealt with townsfolk, rounding up Jews, as the German armies marched through conquered lands.

A Kastner from Crete? It’s like a VHP member having a name like Lashkar Kumar Toiba.

If you aren’t too busy, I can explain…..

20yr old Franz Kastner was a member of a Totenkopf SS squad that was parachuted into a field 20kms north of Arkadi, Crete, one winter’s night in 1941. Leaping from the Junkers-52 at 9000ft, Franz and his comrades drifted through the highly humid, still air for a while.

While the others were floating down bunched up together, Franz got carried further north by a sudden freaky gust and landed at a spot roughly 10 miles from the rest of the squad. 10miles on hilly terrain can be a very long distance to cover, especially when it is pitch dark and you’re blundering over jagged rocks and can’t switch your flashlight on.

Staying put till daybreak would invite capture by the partisans, so Franz began picking his way through the rocky valley floor. After 50 yards, his right foot snagged under something, snapping his ankle in two. With a shattered ankle, Franz dragged himself for days, slithering beneath rocky ledges at night for shelter.

He was found under a rocky overhang on the fourth night, delirious with fever from the onset of gangrene, by a 15yr old girl who half carried, half dragged him to the nearby farmhouse where she lived, with her parents and brothers.

Her name was Lorenza and she promptly proceeded to nurse the blue-eyed, flaxen-haired young German back to health.

There is this titbit Titus shared with me that has stayed…..

First, a background. The Totenkopfen were hand-picked men who underwent extensive training, to disable all macros such as emotion, remorse, pity and empathy from their brain cells. This was important for them to be able to function normally and carry on their day-to-day lives, ie: slaughtering Jews during the work day and then going home, playing with the kids, watering the roses. That sort of thing.

The Totenkopfen had to be able to switch from the Satan to the dutiful husband in the course of 24hrs. Evenings, they would do the dishes, help the children with their homework, enjoy a leisurely late evening smoke with kamarads and laugh at some silly joke about how fat the base commanding officer’s wife was. Mornings they would butcher little Jewish children by holding them by their feet, swinging them around over their heads and smashing their little heads against the trunks of trees.

The young Totenkopf, Franz, was probably no different. As she nursed him back to health, Lorenza paid no attention to his mirthless blue eyes and complete lack of any humor.

Cretans have always had this urge to make outsiders feel comfortable, tourism having been the mainstay of their economy before the war. This had been another reason why most Cretans spoke passable English. Titus’s father too knew spoken English, having been trained in it at the Totenkopfverbande. Important, since the invasion of England was in an advanced stage of planning at the time.

One day, when the delirium of gangrene had passed and Lorenza was wiping the sweat from his face, Franz reached out and grasped her wrist. Pulling her close till her lovely hazel eyes were inches away, his blue eyes brimmed over.

“Why?” he asked, his eyes frantically surveying her, for a moment disregarding the pain in his ankle, “Why do you help me? I’ve done nothing good my entire life.”

“Funny,” she replied, “When I look at you I see nothing bad.” She couldn’t see the Totenkopfen in Franz.

Titus’s Dad hid inside that farmhouse till the allied forces took back Crete. Then, when the time came, he gave himself up to a passing British patrol and was incarcerated for 6 months, before they let him go.

Late 1945, as he was making plans to go back to Hamburg, Franz got news that both his parents had been killed in the allied bombing, their house completely destroyed. He stayed back in Crete, and began working in Lorenza’s father’s orchards.

I’d love to tell you that Franz and Lorenza fell in love, married and lived happily ever after and that is what indeed happened, but not right away. It took a few years. And many tumbles in the barn. On Titus’s grandfather’s hay.

One such tumble created Titus.

Since it was a given that they’d eventually marry, Lorenza’s parents and brothers didn’t mind all the barn sex. The Cretans are in fact a very lusty people. Easy to see why. Their women are the loveliest in Europe. Wish I had been born a Cretan. (Maybe the Holy Spirit did give me my wish but his secretary missed the typo …..she typed an ’i’, instead of an ‘a’.)

When they were bored with all the tumbling, Franz taught Lorenza to make franzbrötchen, a pastry that his mother would make on Sundays before the war, and frikadelle, meatballs made from pork, beef and onions, then popular in Hamburg. Lorenza began adding spicy pickled zuchinis to the frikadelle. Franz loved it. As he did, her Apáki, a kind of marinated, spicy BBQed pork, and Tzatziki, a Turkish yoghurt with cucumbers and garlic peppers.

Parachuting and paragliding were a passion for Franz and so it was natural that he opened a club and operated it profitably, for tourists who were in Arkadi to visit the famous orthodox monastry there.

Just a few days shy of Titus’s 11th birthday in 1973, Franz went for a practice jump. His chute didn’t open and he was found just a few feet away from the spot where he’d landed 30yrs prior, as an SS Hauptscharfuhrer.

Franz was laid to rest right beneath the same rocky ledge where Lorenza had first found him.

————————-

The moral of this story is….. Always open a conversation with the person sitting next to you on a park bench.