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IN OUR FIRST MEETING, Niklas Frank and I sat on the terrace of the Hotel Jacob on the outskirts of Hamburg, overlooking the river Elbe. It was early spring, and after a full day of hearings in court—Hamburg was home to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea—we were under the canopy of a sweet-smelling tree, with a bottle of Riesling and a generous plate of German cheeses.

Niklas was seventy-three, with a bearded, vulnerable face, recognizable from the childhood photographs. He had the air of an academic, kindly gentle but also steely, with his own temperament and agenda. Niklas was three when Malaparte visited the Wawel in the spring of 1942, so he didn’t remember the Italian but knew what he wrote of his father. I learned this from the book Niklas wrote in the 1980s, the catalyst for our meeting. For many years a journalist with Stern magazine, in 1987 he published Der Vater (The Father), an unforgiving, merciless attack on his father, a work that broke a taboo that directed the children of senior Nazis to honor their parents (and not spill too many beans). An abridged version was published in English with the title In the Shadow of the Reich, although Niklas told me he was unhappy with the translation and certain sections that were left out. I found a copy on the Web—ten pence (fifteen cents), plus postage—and read it over a weekend. Later I located the translator—Arthur Wensinger, professor emeritus of German language and literature at Wesleyan University—who introduced me to Niklas. In yet another odd coincidence, it turned out that Niklas Frank’s translator had spent the war years at Phillips Academy in Andover, where he was a classmate of Eli Lauterpacht.

Niklas Frank with parents, the Wawel, 1941

Niklas and I met a few weeks later in Hamburg. I liked him from the outset, a generous man with a good sense of humor and a sharp tongue. He spoke of a childhood in Kraków and Warsaw, of life at the Wawel Castle, of the challenges of having had a father like Hans Frank. When, as a journalist in the early 1990s, he traveled to Warsaw to interview Lech Walesa, newly elected as president of Poland, they met at the Belvedere Palace, in the same room where Malaparte had watched Frank play the piano.

“I remembered running around the table, my father on the opposite side. My only wish was to be embraced by him. I was crying, because he kept on calling me fremdi”—stranger—“as though I was not a member of the family. ‘You don’t belong to this family,’ my father told me, and I wept.” I must have looked puzzled, so Niklas offered an explanation.

“Only later did I learn that my father believed I was not his son but the son of his best friend, Karl Lasch, the governor of Galicia; he was for a short time my mother’s lover.” Niklas eventually learned what had happened from his mother’s letters and diaries. “She was a true writer,” he explained, “always writing down conversations, including the one she had with my father when Lasch was shot.” (Accused of corruption, Lasch was removed from his position as governor of Galicia in the spring of 1942, to be succeeded by Otto von Wächter, and was either executed or committed suicide.)

In fact, Brigitte Frank’s letters made clear that Frank was Niklas’s father. Years later, the truth was confirmed when Niklas visited Helene Winter (née Kraffczyk), who was Frank’s personal secretary in the Wawel years. “As I approached her house, I noticed a tiny movement of the curtain. Later I asked, ‘Frau Winter, do I look like Mr. Lasch?’ ” Frau Winter’s face turned pale. It was true—she wondered whether he would resemble Frank or Lasch, but was relieved that the likeness was to Frank.

“She loved my father; she was in love with him.” Niklas paused, then said with a blunt finality that I had come to enjoy, “They had sex together; she was a very nice woman.”

Niklas’s feelings toward his father and members of his family had not warmed over the years. Frank’s sister Lily traded off the family connections. “She liked to go to the Płaszów concentration camp,” Niklas explained, close to Kraków, where they lived. “After the Kraków ghetto was demolished, thousands of the Jews went to Auschwitz, others to Płaszow. Our aunt Lily went to them at Płaszów and said, ‘I am the sister of the governor-general; if you have some precious thing to give me, I can save your life.’ ” How did he know? I asked. “My mother’s letters,” he replied.

Niklas thought that Brigitte Frank had good relations with Jews until 1933. Even after the Nazis took over, she continued to trade with them, buying and selling furs and baubles of the kind that her new status required. “The first months after they took power she was still dealing with the Jews.” This upset his father. “You can’t do this,” he would say. “I am minister of justice and you are dealing with Jews, and I will throw them all out.”

What of his relationship with his father? Niklas recalled but a single moment of affection, which occurred at the Wawel Castle, in his father’s bathroom, near the sunken bath.

“I was standing beside him; he was shaving. Suddenly he put some foam on my nose.” Niklas said this wistfully. “It was the only private, intime moment I remember.”

Later Niklas and I visited the Wawel Castle, toured Frank’s private apartments, the family rooms, the bathroom. We stood before the mirror as Niklas showed me how his father bent over toward him, putting a spot of shaving foam on the tip of his nose.

“It hasn’t changed,” Niklas said, admiring the sunken bath next to his father’s bedroom. Above the door, carved into the sixteenth-century stone lintel, we read the words inscribed into the stone, Tendit in ardua virtus. “Courage in hard times.”