retro: meet the nazis

I have a confession to make. I am not generally fond of owning up to my mistakes, but I also have a wildly overactive conscience, and the guilt is killing me. So here it is, my big confession: for the last six years, I have been telling people that I knew a family of Nazis in Paraguay.

This is totally, totally wrong of me. Prejudiced and sophomoric, more concerned with cheap laughs than human dignity. Honestly, I'm a little ashamed of myself.

The truth is, they were only probably Nazis.

To their credit, Mr. and Mrs. Probably Nazis managed to blend in much better than my partners and I did. Despite their misleading title, they weren't a married couple, but rather brother and sister, and each had made respectable marriages to local (i.e., "real") Paraguayans. The man was fair of hair and square of jaw, tanned to within an inch of his life, like Val Kilmer in Top Gun. His sister was equally blonde, a large agreeable woman who sold sweets to the kids at the primary school. Our host mother referred to them both somewhat liberally as her cousins. (I don't mean to sound snobbish, but in a town with a whopping three surnames to go around, everyone is your cousin.)

Obviously, something was off. One look at their pale eyes and flaxen hair told you that these folks were not from around here - and before you nerds get all het up over recessive genes and shit, can I just remind you: three surnames.

So how did these strapping Aryan specimens come to live in our town?

Paraguay, as I like to think I've made pretty clear, is not a place to which any sane person would relocate. Your average emigrant would sooner stock up on Tang and freeze-dried ice cream and blast off for Mars. But self-imposed exile in the ass-end of nowhere becomes a lot more attractive when your alternative is life in prison for your enthusiastic participation in a brutal genocide.

See, a lot of Nazi soldiers and higher-ups flew the coop at the end of WWII, and a number of them ended up down South America way. (You know, like Portugal.) Like many of its neighbors, Paraguay was at that time under the control of a military dictator, a charming son of a gun by the name of Alfredo Stroessner. As a fervent nationalist and grade-A dick - not to mention proud owner of one ugly-ass mustache - Stroessner naturally felt a certain affinity for Hitler and his regime, and so he cordially invited the fleeing Nazis to lay low at his pad until the heat died down.

Not pictured: one single shred of human decency.

Oddly enough, the heat never did die down. While Hollywood would have you believe that each and every escaped war criminal went on to build enormous nuclear weapons and/or torture Dustin Hoffman, the reality is that most of them took a look around their new homes, shrugged, and resigned themselves to relatively harmless, patently boring lives in exile.

(As for Stroessner, he was eventually overthrown and brought to justice for his terrible reign of repression, torture, and fear-mongering - by which I mean he hung out in Brazil for the last seventeen years of his life, drinking caipirinhas with a bunch of other exiled dictators and, needless to say, yet more Nazis.)

Mr. and Mrs. Probably Nazis were not old enough to have taken part in any genocidal activities themselves. No doubt their parents had settled in our town when Mr. and Mrs. were children, perhaps even before they were born. They had been raised Paraguayan and, as I mentioned earlier, had both happily married locals and produced a number of adorable non-Aryan children. There was no blood on their hands. They could not justly be condemned for the sins of their parents, and yet my partners and I did so instinctively. Their appearance marked them as alien, suspect, and we eyed them with distrust, hypothesizing amongst ourselves about the nature of their crimes.

Our host family did not feel the same, and so we occasionally found ourselves joining Señor Iceman and his family for meals. No doubt eager to impress the norteamericanos, his wife invariably served intestine soup. I am deliberately not calling this soup menudo. Both dishes revolve around offal, but menudo is generally flavored with chile, lime, cilantro, and other tasty condiments, while this soup was nothing more or less than intestines au jus. I could barely eat it, although my suffering was mild in comparison to some other volunteers'. I distinctly remember one entry in our supervisor's route journal that announced, K ate cow intestines and barfed TWICE!!

Our host was a loud, gregarious fellow, and he enjoyed chatting with me and my partners. One night, he took it upon himself to explain to us why we as Americans were perceived as intrinsically cold and aloof. Being lectured on our people skills by a Nazi was bad enough, but the worst part was that he was right. He spoke emphatically, frequently reaching out to lay a hand on our shoulders, and every time he extended a hand toward Lady Partner, she visibly shrank back in her chair. In her defense, she understood very little Spanish, and so was oblivious to the topic of conversation. Still, it was embarrassing. Here we were, trying to defend the generally affable nature of our people, and LP was cringing away from our cousin's hand like it was covered in horse shit and plague sores.

Night had fallen by the time we left his house, the new moon plunging our surroundings into a darkness unimaginable to anyone accustomed to street lamps and light pollution. My partners and I strode briskly off down the familiar road toward home, putting some distance between ourselves and our host family, and immediately fell to arguing. Dude Partner and I attempted to communicate to LP that her behavior had been embarrassing and insensitive; LP attempted to communicate that we should mind our own fucking business.

"I have personal space issues," she said defensively, storming ahead of us down the enormous hill that led from the primary school to the church.

"I have cow intestine issues, but you don't see me being such a baby," I snapped back, a bit disingenuously, as that evening's stew had brought me perilously close to a full-on meltdown. "Suck it up, already."

DP was a bit more sympathetic. "You have to compromise," he said. "You don't have to go around hugging everyone, but he's our cousin. That's just how they roll here."

I would have agreed, but I was distracted at that moment by the sensation of my foot suspended dreamily in mid-air. It was dark enough that we couldn't see the placement of our feet, and, rocket scientist that I was, I had unwittingly strolled onto a ridge of exposed rock. This wouldn't have been so bad, except that, as is often the case, the ridge stopped when it was good and ready. I did not, and so I face-planted off the edge, arms flailing like the wings of an angry goose, and skidded face-first down half the length of the hill.

Stunned into silence by the abrupt and dramatic nature of my fall, my partners stopped bickering and hurried down the hill to stare at my prone body. Twenty feet behind us, the darkness echoed with the raucous laughter of our host mother, who never saw an accident she didn't approve of. My knees and elbows were hot and stinging with pain; later inspection would reveal that I had managed to shave off several layers of skin, simultaneously packing the open wounds with sand. To add insult to injury, I was lying in such an awkward position that I couldn't figure out how to stand up without sending myself tumbling further down the hill.

Goddamn fucking Nazis, I thought.

Of course, it wasn't really their fault. It was my fault, for not paying more attention to the placement of my feet, and it was LP's fault, for being so goddamn obstinate, and it was God's fault, for putting that rock where it had no business being, and above all it was Mr. and Mrs. Probably Nazis' parents' fault, for moving to Paraguay half a century before and setting the whole thing in motion.

I rolled over, staring up at the pitch-black sky and the curious faces of my partners, neither of whom were making any effort to assist me. Our host family was catching up to us, tittering noisily in Guaraní. I hated them, hated all of them - our stupid nasty host mother; my stupid gawking partners who didn't care enough to drag me off the ground; the stupid neighborly Nazis who didn't even realize how out of place they were.

The fall had obviously rattled a few things loose - teeth, brain cells, my last remaining ounce of dignity - and I couldn't help wondering, as the blood rushed to my brain, what the original Mr. and Mrs. Probably Nazis would have thought if they could have seen me at that moment: the young idealist, the idiot, angry at a country that refused to let her save it. So quick to judge, to instinctively recoil from anyone who didn't fit into her view of the world. Unable to move past her prejudice, to reconcile her naive expectations with the strange, gloriously unpredictable quirks of reality.

I spat out a mouthful of blood-tinted sand and glared up at my partners. "Help me up, man," I demanded, "come on, what the hell are you waiting for," and DP stretched out a belated hand to drag me, stumbling, to my feet.