Kemposki's life story and the conclusion of All for Nothing

A final note on Walter Kempowski's 2006 novel, All for Nothing, which I highly recommend to all readers of these posts (see previous posts on this novel), but spoiler will follow: I read Jenny Erpenbeck's forward, which did touch on the unusual ending to the novel, in which the 12-year-old son is the only surviving member of the von Globil family and in which the head of the local Nazi party gives his "seat" on the last boat escaping from Eastern Germany over to the young boy. I still am not sure why this nasty and officious party leader would make this gesture of sacrifice to the young man whom he barely knows and whose landed-gentry family he holds in contempt - but there you have it, a charitable gesture from a despicable man, a sort of "Christian" ending to this dark story of the final days of World War II. But JE's intro does indicate that my hunch was correct in that, although the novel is not autobiographical, the life of the young boy and his escape from the Russian advance does parallel that of Kempowski himself. Kempowski's father was captain of the last ship to escape into the Baltic - the ship that the young boy was bound for once he leaves the harbor aboard the skiff - and Kempowski was separated from his family for some time as hundreds of thousands of refugees made their way west at the end of the war. He was 15 years old at the time, still young but not as vulnerable as the 12-year-old von Globil child, obviously. JE's intro also notes that Kempowski spent much of his writing life compiling a 10-volume (?) collection of first-hand accounts of the German experience in the war, along w/ many documents and artifacts; in the novel, there are at least 3 "collectors," assembling at archiving various pieces and records of German culture and contemporary German life. Preservation of history, and of memory, is one of the forces that drives someone to write, whether a novel or in some other genre, and Kempowski's - an unflinching depiction of a German family, not exactly collaborators or even sympathizers with Hitler's leadership, but going along with quiet acquiescence and willful blindness to the horrors taking place in their country. and in the end abandoned by their leaders and left to die, literally, in the snowbanks by the side of the road.