Ingrid watched the flickering images on the screen. She recognised Father’s sharp features beneath his SS cap, remembered being up close to his neck when he had held her as a little girl, the neck that was now partially covered by a black and silver SS tunic lapel adorned with the sig–rune and insignia. The bold and proudly worn Nazi symbols diminished both his credibility and his pre–eminence as a father in her eyes.
She pressed clammy palms together as she read the names of his comrades in arms – Trzebinski, Pauly, Heissmayer – names familiar to her in a chilling and yet indeterminate way. Why did she recognise them? Glancing to her right, she saw their ghostly images reflecting off the faces of Otto and Dieter, whose eyes were glued to the screen, engrossed yet simultaneously horrified, but seemingly unable to look away.
Ingrid felt nauseous. She could not halt the tide of disclosure revealed on the screen; she could not deny its authenticity nor claim ignorance of the evident facts. A tightness was enveloping her, restricting her breath, accentuating her growing unease. History was catching up with her. It was catching up with all of them. As she stared at images of Father helping to administer arsenic to prisoners she began to doubt that her waning resolve to keep their past at bay could endure much longer.
Seeing Father turn the prison labourer over to the guards because he was missing several fingers was a chilling reminder of his brutal capabilities. She had observed that icy disaffection at first hand, witnessed its calculated destruction as it tore into her beloved sister. Instinctively she covered her mouth with one hand, biting down on a knuckle.
She recalled searching Father’s eyes for signs of humanity, acceptance and forgiveness, hoping to be able to convince him of tolerance and persuade him towards absolution for her sister’s sake. But she never found what she so desperately hoped to evoke in him, and consequently she never saw Inez again.
Father’s unyielding face, his poised, self–assured eyes, so confident of his own moral righteousness, shone out of the screen images and impaled Ingrid in her heart. Seeing Father inhabiting a world that she had never known, never imagined, participating in medical crimes so heinous that most of those onscreen beside him were hanged soon after the war ended, left Ingrid gasping for air, realising that the father she had struggled to know and failed to love was in reality an unlovable beast. History had finally judged him.
Otto and Dieter never once took their eyes off the screen. Ingrid felt a sudden inexplicable pang of empathy for them, caught up in Father’s conspiratorial web of congenital evil when they were still so young and impressionable, oblivious to the extent and depravity of his fervour. What a shock this must have been to them.
By the time the images of young boys and girls being probed and painfully injected by sadistic hands glared at her from the screen, Ingrid’s eyes were swimming with tears, blurring the monochrome images of unimagined savagery that glimmered before her. Droplets soaked into her silk dress, forming craters of deepening anger.
Twenty lifeless souls, still dressed in threadbare and ill–fitting coats and trousers, suspended barefoot like puppets by their murderers in the shadowy retreats of yesterday’s oblivion. But it had surfaced to haunt them yet again.
Ingrid rose suddenly and rushed to the bathroom, retching her anger and shame into the toilet. She was not of such stock, not capable of such heinous acts and to demonstrate this she had tried to put distance between herself and her parents, those who had been accomplices to unimaginable injustices.
So why had she colluded? She cried out and vomited more, trying to expel the demons from her soul.