By David K. Shipler
In the unlikely event that I ever have a chance for a conversation with an agent after he has dragged a half-dressed middle-aged citizen from his own house, wrenched a husband from his weeping wife and children, taken a five-year-old boy into custody, or shot into the innocent face of a mother of three, here is what I would ask:
1. Do
you realize that the person’s face will haunt you for the rest of your life?
(A former NKVD secret police agent under Stalin, writing in a letter to the
Soviet magazine Ogonyok decades later, described his torment: “Now the
people in the cases I investigated visit me at night, and instead of fear in
their eyes I see that they despise me. How can I tell these people I tortured,
how can I explain that my damned life was a tragedy, too?”)
2. When
your children and grandchildren ask what you were doing during the assault on America’s
democracy, how will you answer? (Many young Germans, coming of age after
World War II, questioned their elders closely about what they had done during the
Nazi era; searing conversations often followed.)
3. What
did your parents do to you? (A line from a Seinfeld episode.)
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