With the Spanish title “El niño de la peonza”, José Barceló debuts in the literary world. The real story started in 1927 and went into World War II, and in 2010 the author heard abut it. But it was not until 2013 when he finally was seduced by it.
During the terrible and disastrous times of World War II, on a day in July 1943, the corpse of a crew member of a German submarine washes up on a beach in Castellon, Spain, now under the tight grip of Franco. The body of the young man Hubert Sase is claimed by Josef Kaufer, a German businessman working in Spain, who, as if it were his own son, takes the body into his care and gives it burial in small cemetery. Soon after, Kaufer travels to Germany with the intention of finding the family of the dead seaman. From then on, the story is consigned to oblivion, the handsome tomb and a precious old photograph being all that remain and the only witnesses to that tragedy.
But 70 years later the incident comes to light once more, when in 2013 Jose Barcelo makes a tip expressly to visit the seaman’s burial place. Then he meets Marta Kaufer and that surprising woman shows him what kind of man her father had been.
That very day the author discovers the small universe of relationships formed between two families, one in Germany and another in Spain, united by a story that begins in 1927, when in the small village of Affeln, almost at the dawn of the Nazi presence in Germany, a boy named Hubert lives out an apparently uneventful childhood, but soon it is the decade of the 1930s and Germany is poised to enter a tragic period in the history of Europe.
The life of that boy runs parallel to the story of the German national Josef Kaufer Zeller, a former football trainer who arrives at a small and peaceful fishing village in Spain. But the feeling of well-being is only an appearance. Kaufer soon will find himself forced to participate in the Spanish Civil War. In those years of hard combat he will undergo a myriad number of experiences that will lead him to reflect of the question of evil and the reason behind the atrocious behavior of men.
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