Jack, Jon and Sam Green remember their childhoods as happy and their father, Boris, as a vital part of that. But he was “not an open book at all”. This was surely the same experience as many children of Holocaust survivors. Boris and his brother Fima, who spent years as partisan fighters in eastern Europe, hunting Nazis in the Lithuanian forests, were the only members of their extended family still alive by the end of the second world war. When Fima found Boris again, he was living 200 miles away from their home town with a handful of other survivors, wanting to die with them rather than live with all his memories and terrible losses. Fima wouldn’t let him stay, or die. “That is what I achieved in my life,” he tells an interviewer compiling their stories for a Holocaust memorial museum. “I saved my brother. That is all. That is all.”
They emigrated to Australia in 1948, but instead of the real-life paradise they had been promised, they found themselves in a land that also offered succour to Nazis and collaborators who had – thanks to the uninterest of the international courts in prosecuting them for war crimes – easily escaped punishment.
Danny Ben-Moshe’s film Revenge: Our Dad the Nazi Killer follows Boris’s sons through their investigation of the possible consequences arising from that awful conflation of circumstances. There were always whispers and hints, shadowy family lore that suggested their father had been involved with the murder of a man in Sydney in the 1950s – a revenge killing, perhaps, of someone connected with the Nazi regime.
They hire the private investigator John Garvey, a former police detective. He sifts through the dusty police archives and fragile documents found for him by various Jewish museums in Australia and Lithuania, and gathers what facts he can. Usually with Jack or Jon present, he also interviews Boris’s old friends and fellow postwar émigrés to try to get a sense of the man and answer the question at the heart of the film and the boys’ quest: did he have it in him to kill a man, and what do you do with that knowledge if the answer comes back “Yes”?
His old friends are clear that they believe the man who came out of the Lithuanian forests did not leave his partisan past behind. Between them and the archives, Garvey pieces together evidence of an entire network of Jewish surveillance groups who tracked suspected war criminals and collaborators in Australia. When they reported their findings to the police, they discovered that the police were more likely to tip subjects off about their discovery than arrest them. There were, as the 50s and 60s wore on, a high number of suicides and unexplained deaths among those the groups suspected. Garvey narrows down the list of possible victims and, as Boris’s own interviews with Holocaust researchers recording for posterity are screened, it becomes increasingly likely that he and Fima were directly involved in at least one death, of a man likely to have taken part in the killing of their townsfolk, and probably their family.
The question is not – and perhaps can never be – definitively answered, but that is not the point of this industrious film, and perhaps not even the point of the brothers’ inquiry. Instead, it disinters a relatively unknown part of Jewish and Australian history, and poses the question of whether it can be morally right to kill and – more subtly – how much blame should be laid at the feet of governments and authorities who fail to deliver justice and punishment for those guilty of some of the worst crimes in history.
Richard (no surname given), a child aide to the partisans, who also emigrated to Australia, where he was part of a local committee of Jewish survivors, says that he believes Boris did kill a fugitive collaborator after the war “and I hope that he did”. The survivor Abe Goldberg, who remembers babies bayonetted by Nazi soldiers and saw Boris speak at a Holocaust commemoration service in Melbourne, says killing those responsible would have been the moral thing to do, and he would have shaken Boris’s hand if he had.
“There was a war after the war,” says Sam Green, who worked with his dad in the family jewellery shop, and remembers shattered survivors coming in to tell his father that they had seen the men who had killed their families and being taken into private rooms for further discussion. Jack says he feels closer to and prouder of his father now that his secrets have been at least partially brought into the light. “If we’re talking about standing up for justice and preventing more [harm] when other people aren’t doing that, then I don’t only hope that he did it, but I’m proud of him if he did,” says Jon. The film doesn’t insist on a point of view, but it is hard to disagree with Boris Green’s boys.
• Revenge: Our Dad the Nazi Killer is on BBC Four and iPlayer
