Is your father a Nazi?

My father spent 80 years hiding from who he was. And that takes a toll on a person. He once said to me that there was nothing left inside him but ashes. He spent hours and hours reading about Hitler and the Third Reich and our bookshelves were filled with books on the subject. Once, a friend gazed at the crammed shelves and asked me “Is your father a Nazi?” How could I answer? “No.” I replied “No, definitely not.”

And yet my father was in many ways  many different people.  He was a husband, a father, a grandfather, an uncle. He was "Hans" to all of us in North America, but he was "Gunther" to all who knew him in Europe. While my father tried to leave behind all the trappings of his former life,  his name did not leave him. Even as a small child, I knew that he was “Hans” here, but to his family he remained “Gunther”. When some of his ashes were sent to Sweden after his death to be reunited with his parents, the marker was inscribed “Gunther”, not Hans.

In my mind they were two different people.  Hans was completely North American. He lived here, worked here, took vacations, mowed the lawn and ate pizza.  People said he had an accent, but I didn’t hear it. To anyone who knew him he was Swedish. Gunther was more complicated. He emerged when family came from Europe or during the rare times he went to visit them. He spoke Swedish and when pressed to do so, German. No one knew Hans’ secrets, but everyone who knew him knew Gunther’s secrets.  Hans was not a particularly happy person, but Gunther was miserable.  I knew that this hadn’t always been true because my father had 4 nieces to whom he was “Onkel Gunther”, and they adored him. They were considerably older than I and they liked to tell stories of how as a young man in North America, he would often gather as much candy as he could in a big box and send it to them in Europe.  Yet growing up, I watched my father sincerely and lovingly welcome his family when they visited from Europe, and then watched him slowly and inevitably close in on himself and withdraw behind an unhappy, self protective shell. Being Gunther was dangerous.