‘The knowing has been tumultuous’: Angela discovered her father’s Nazi past

My father was a brutal and cruel husband and father – an angry man who came easily to violence. He was anti-Semitic to the extreme. Our lives were tense and unpredictable. We could not understand our father’s cruelty; we were confounded by how vehemently he despised Jewish people.

Mystery surrounded my father and his life. We knew only what we were told; disparate snippets without context in which he always seemed to triumph.

In our home, a framed black and white photograph of him standing next to a Messerschmitt – a German fighter plane – was paraded without explanation. The date on the back of the photo was 1941, the year that Hungary became an ally of Nazi Germany.

During the war and post-war years, photos showed my father living a stylish and indulgent life. While most people were putting pieces of their lives back together after the war, my father was living the high life. It seems that he spent his post war years driving through and staying at alpine towns in Austria and Switzerland; a glamorous woman was always at his side.

I had always been curious about who this man really was and with incredible synchronicity, SBS documentary series Every Family has a Secret came into my life.

Read the article by Angela Hamilton in The Sydney Morning Herald.