March 12, 2007 issue - A few years ago, just as her father was about to disappear into the fog of dementia, journalist Lucinda Franks stumbled upon a small box in a corner of his dilapidated apartment. The contents shocked her. Beneath some mysterious maps and crumpled foreign bank notes, she found a military cap embellished with the raised metal insignia of an eagle, a skull and crossbones—and a swastika. Franks knew little about her father's military service during World War II, and had always sensed that he was hiding something. Now questions consumed her. "Was my sphinx-like father presenting one character and living another?" she writes in her new memoir, "My Father's Secret War." "Whose side was he really on?" When she pressed for an explanation, her father refused to talk, citing a decades-old pledge of secrecy.
But after years of detective work and long conversations with her ailing father, Franks eventually pieced together most of his story. Fluent in German, he was a spy and occasionally an assassin. The Nazi cap was part of his disguise as a member of the Waffen SS, worn the night he broke into a Gestapo headquarters and killed a guard while looking for files with the names of people wanted by the Nazis. Near the end of his life, he finally tells Franks he kept the hat because of the "death's head" insignia: "I never wanted to forget who these German soldiers really were."
几年前，正当父亲即将陷入痴呆的境地，记者露辛达弗兰克斯在她即将坍塌的公寓角落里偶然发现了一个小盒子。盒子里的东西深深的震撼了她。在一些神秘的地图和皱皱巴巴的外国钞票下面，她发现了一顶饰有金属勋章的帽子，而帽子上突起的花纹赫然印着一只鹰，一面骷髅旗，和一个纳粹的十字记号。弗兰克斯并不太清楚她的父亲在第二次世界大战中服兵役的情况，但却觉得他总是在试图隐瞒着什么。如今一个问题深深的困扰着她：“难道我的斯芬克斯般的父亲真的向我们展示一面而背地里却是另外一个人吗？”她把这些记录进了自己的文章中，“父亲的秘密战争。”“他到底是站在哪一方？”每当她试图让父亲解释，父亲却总是拒绝说话。
但是在几年时间的侦查和与病中父亲长时间的沟通后，弗兰克斯终于拼凑出了父亲大概的经历。在德国的时候，他是一个特工人员，甚至有的时候进行一些暗杀工作。那个纳粹的帽子是他伪装的一部分，有天晚上他闯入了盖世太保的指挥部并且杀掉了一个警卫人员，寻找一份纳粹分子觊觎人员的名单。在生命的尽头，他终于告诉弗兰克斯他保存着那顶帽子的原因，因为它的主人已经故去了。：“我从来也没有想要忘记那个死去的德国士兵”父亲说。
