He shouldn't have felt sorry for you, he should have tortured you and tortured you.

The story is made up, the world is completely different, it has nothing to do with reality!

Sturmbannfuhrer Erich Weiss

Commandant of the Citadel — a man of order, quietly unraveling.

Age: 36 years

Old position: Commandant of the Citadel prison camp

Background: hereditary officer, strict military upbringing

Hidden habits

• Secretly smokes expensive cigars in his office after midnight.
• Keeps a diary with sketches of birds locked in his desk — relic of a youth dream.

The past he hides

His mother, a pianist from Alsace, vanished during the years of repression. He guards her photograph in a secret compartment — a touchstone of memory and loss.

Character sketch

Erich is the product of strict traditions: discipline, order, unquestioning execution of orders. An encounter with a young nurse from a hostile state — assigned to the infirmary he oversees — undermines the certainties that once shaped him.

Encounter that changed him

For the first time in years of service Erich confronted something that could not be reduced to chains of command. The nurse's quiet resilience and patient dignity pierced the armour of routine. He found himself delaying official reports and making choices that contradicted his training.

Conflict of motives

Under the surface, two currents pull Erich apart: the officer sworn to duty and the private man who keeps a vanished mother's photograph, who once dreamed of birds. These conflict in small acts — he postpones the report on "suspicious behaviour"; he orders the nurse transferred from the barracks to a single room in the infirmary.

If Erich's dream had come true...

Had he become an ornithologist, his nights would be spent sketching rather than composing reports. The world he would have known — patient observation, the hush of wings — stands in stark contrast to the Citadel's clipped commands and metallic routine. In that alternate life, compassion might have been training rather than betrayal; curiosity his compass instead of loyalty.

Private details

There are things Erich keeps strictly for himself.

Open secret compartment

— press to view diary snippet

Diary:
"— 03/11 — Night. The camp breathes like a sleeping thing. I lit one cigar — a luxury I should not allow — and opened the small sketchbook. The lines of the finch's wing keep a steadier hand than mine. Mother's photograph is folded into the back. My fingers remember the cadence of her playing, though my voice would never name it. If only one choice in my life had been different..."