A good number of years ago, I was coming home from somewhere or other and stopped off at a Tower Music (remember them?) store in Northern New Jersey. After doing my usual search-and-destroy explorations, I approached the check-out counter with my plunder. The young clerk proceeded to ring up the albums, then stopped when he got to the Helen Merrill one. “She’s a nice lady,” he said. I was momentarily nonplussed; who was this wet-behind-the-ears kid to make a statement like that? As if to answer my unspoken question he added, “My uncle arranges for her.” When he identified his relative, I told him that I knew of his uncle’s work with, among others, Tony Bennett. Then he told me who his father was—a jazz drummer—and I replied that I had albums with both men on them. At that point, the clerk’s face broke into the most radiant of smiles. He was proud of his people. And I felt good.(1)
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Hans Frank was by all accounts an excellent pianist.(2) He was also the Nazi “governor-general of the occupied Polish territories,” for which role he was denounced as the “Butcher of Poland.” Captured after the defeat of Germany, he was placed on trial at Nuremberg in November of 1945, found guilty of war crimes, and executed by hanging on Oct. 16, 1946.
Niklas Frank, Hans Frank’s son, has succinctly summed up his father as “a slime-hole of a Hitler fanatic.”(3) Niklas, who became a journalist, wrote what Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler, characterized as a “brilliantly vicious, utterly unforgiving portrait” of his father in a memoir called In the Shadow of the Reich, depicting him
as a craven coward and weakling, but one not without a kind of animal cunning, an instinct for lying, insinuation, self-aggrandizement.(4)
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One should not take Niklas Frank’s repudiation of his father as the norm amongst the offspring of notorious Nazis.(5) But even to those children who remained devoted to their fathers one cannot attribute the guilt of their parent. However, I have often wondered whether I was right to feel good that the Tower clerk glowed at my appreciation of the work of his uncle and father. Isn’t there something asymmetrical about how one deals with the descendants of good ancestors versus the descendants of bad ancestors. For the latter we allow the past to be erased; the former are allowed to own the past.
Yes, it’s a failure of analogy. But much better it is that human factors outweigh false compare.
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(1) The uncle was Torrie Zito. He was married to Helen Merrill.
His father is Ron Zito.
(2) His son wrote about him: “You could play Chopin so beautifully. You loved Beethoven. You were friends with Richard Strauss.”
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