"He had tried so to keep his life from being complicated."

For me, this quote was a constant and important theme throughout the story.  And, I understand why he wants to keep his life simple.  Trying to get back into one's daily life after experiencing war (or another traumatic situation) can be one of the most difficult transitions a person must make.  Daily activities lose their importance, and become trivial in the grand scheme of things.

Krebs's involvement and participation in the war matters little.  He was in a war, where the struggles of life and death, good and bad were clearly defined.  With war, there is a higher purpose, a cause.  Everything somehow gets boiled-down to the simple, and the basic.  Even carnal pleasures were made simple, with visits to Bordellos.

Of course, now, we call that difficulty with transitioning "Post-Traumatic Stress."   Now, we offer help in the form of counselling or therapy to any soldier who is brave enough to ask for it.  I doubt that kind of support existed for our soldiers from WWI and WWII. 

I, like many, have had a several experiences that make one's daily rountine or "grind" extremely difficult.  But, in the grand scheme of things, these experiences have been very good and healthy for me.  I've always tried to keep my perspective on things, thinking that no matter how bad things get... someone, somewhere is having a worse day than I am.  (Actually, that's not exactly my thoughts, but I'm going to keep this post at a PG-13 rating.)  At any rate, it may seem a bit morose, but that philosophy helps me get through problems with a better attitude than I used to have before I adopted this philosophy.

Kreb's experience with war reminds me of my Grandfather's (Pops) experience with WWII.  The differences being that my Grandfather was (and still is) highly respected by his peers, whereas Krebs was not.  Pops had been at the invasion at Normandy (Omaha beach) on "D" day, he had been at the Battle of the Bulge, and had liberated concentration camps. 

He's shared many pictures of the places he'd been, along with their stories.  To this day, some 60 years after, he still shakes and cries when talking about some of them.  He still has nightmares.  And in his mind, he still remembers some of the sights and smells of the war.

One of the scariest experiences he's had was in December of 1944.  He was sleeping in this building when it was shelled.  If a chalkboard hadn't fallen on top of him, he would have been dead.  Many of his crew were killed, including one of his good friends who was just a few feet away at the time.  He still shakes to this day when he hears the sound of a buzz-bomb in a movie or documentary. 

Below is the building Pops slept in when a buzz-bomb went off:
 

By April of 1945, Pops arrived at Buchenwald, a concentration camp near Weimar, Germany.  Visiting concentration camps always reminded everyone why they were fighting in the war.  As disgusting as the concentration camps looked, I'm told they smelled much worse.  At Buchenwald, bodies were stacked like cordwood.  Some stacks were next to buildings for all of the remaining living inmates to see, others were in front of human furnaces.  These furnaces burned bodies, and the heat generated by them were used to heat SS officers' barracks.  Downstairs from furnace rooms, were torture rooms.  Inmates were hung from their thumbs, and shown proof of other torturings such as lampshades made from the skin of women's breasts.  Then there were the 'scientific' experiments in which inmates were forced to participate.  Lastly, many SS officers forced inmates to eat the feces of their fellow inmates for weeks on end.  Some so sick, they couldn't stand, others had fallen into trenches of human waste.  Sick stuff.  But, the good in all that bad, is that seeing these sights re-invigorated many to keep pushing on in the war and fighting the good fight. 

Below is a picture taken of a cordwood of bodies at Buchenwald Concentration Camp.  The sign above the entrance to Buchenwald read, "Those who enter these gates, pass out as smoke."

I have no idea what Krebs saw, or felt, but whatever he saw frightened him.  (p. 70)  "... he fell into the easy pose of the old soldier among other soldiers: that he had been badly, sickeningly frightened all the time."  To expect that a returning soldier go from being frightened all the time, possibly worrying for their life,  to worrying over the small, trivial, complicated tasks of a "normal" life overnight is too much to ask.  It can take months, sometimes years for someone to re-adjust to daily life.  I don't blame Krebs for wanting to keep his life simple.  I understand it.  It's just too bad that he didn't have the understanding and emotional support he needed from his community and his family.  If he had, maybe he wouldn't have started to lie.  Maybe he would have re-adjusted to life faster.  I really don't know, but I certainly wonder.

(The above images are some of the photos taken by my Grandfather during his time in Europe for WWII.)

I really appreciate your pictorial supplements.

It's common to read stories concerning the atrocities of WWII, but having it come from someone at least remotely connected to such surreal events (and with real pictures!) is refreshing, and substantially creates a real, much different taste to normal, everyday texts. 

That's the point, essentially. Here is a man who has been scarred by a surreal vision of humanity and the world "in the grand scheme of things" as you put it, yet these images have brought him that much closer to a new reality, one which does not include his now old, trivial life. In the words of Nelson Mandela:

"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." (A Long Walk to Freedom).

Who knows how Krebs could have turned out. One does not forget such images as yours so easily. I certainly wonder, indeed.