‘Secret War’s’ roots lie in Holocaust

Parents are the great undiscovered country, a vast uncharted landscape that endlessly tantalizes by being so close and yet so far away. You can listen carefully to every story your parents tell, but in the end, because they existed long before you entered the picture, there are parts of their lives you’ll never know.

Lucinda Franks was irritated by her father’s grim silences. He had “walled off almost everyone from his life with his obstinacy -- his wife, his daughters, his friends, his co-workers,” she writes in a new memoir, “My Father’s Secret War” (Miramax Books).

She thought she knew pretty much all there was to know about this exasperating man, about his youth in Champaign, Ill.; about his marriage to Franks’ mother, a woman he met at the Marshall Field’s store in downtown Chicago; about his uneventful Navy service in World War II; about his drab family life in a Boston suburb; about his increasing crankiness and irresponsible antics.

She just assumed he was a selfish mess.

But she didn’t really know him at all, Franks concedes in her book. And when just a tiny hint of the truth finally emerged, it was so momentous, so astonishing that it prompted her to set off on a long journey of discovery to learn more. The trip took her into the horrifying heart of the 20th century’s most heinous crime: the Holocaust.

“When I found out the truth about my father, I developed a yen to let it out,” Franks said in a phone interview from her New York City home. “It was just so amazing. I couldn’t believe it. That’s why I did the research. He had once been a completely different kind of person. A two-year chunk of time had totally altered his personality.”

And Franks was compelled to find out how and why.

The impulse is even more understandable when you realize that Franks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter, a woman accustomed to digging out facts from obscure sources. In “My Father’s Secret War,” she recounts her struggle to locate the people who could confirm her father’s adventures behind Nazi lines, to ascertain how he ended up “a haunted man,” as she calls him.

Thomas Edward Franks, it turned out, had been an Allied spy during the war. He was one of the first people to witness the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps just before the conflict’s end. But because he was part of an elite, ultra-secret unit, he was never able to speak of his experiences. Instead, the memories lived inside him, tormenting him, poisoning his relationships with anyone who tried to get close to him, Franks believes.

“I thought to myself, ‘He went his whole life, unknown.’ He was a compassionate, earthy, loving person who was frozen by what he had seen. He wanted to be known -- but he was so traumatized and shut down, he just didn’t know how to do it.”

Her first inkling of her father’s alter ego came about a decade ago, Franks said, when she and her sister were dealing with his infirmities and infuriating habits. He wouldn’t work, wouldn’t keep his house clean, and he continued to insist that his drinking wasn’t a problem -- when events proved the contrary, again and again -- and called them repeatedly for money. She was at the end of her tether, Franks admitted.

And then a friend of her father’s told her about an odd moment: Overhearing someone making an anti-Semitic remark one day, Thomas Franks became unhinged. He sprang upon the man and had to be hauled away forcibly.

This didn’t fit with anything Franks knew about her father. So the mission began. “I decided that maybe I didn’t know him as well as I should. Maybe there was something about him that had caused the failures, the dependence.”

That “something,” she found, was nothing less than a brief but intense clandestine life, one that intersected with some of the most malevolent forces of the last century. She tracked down her father’s colleagues, scoured public records, scanned old photographs and interrogated officials who might have known about his work.

Writing about her family was difficult, Franks said. “At first it flowed, but then I froze. It was coming out slowly and laboriously.” She prayed, she worked and she waited.

“One day, it just seemed to flow again. It was like a miracle. I found a distance I didn’t have before. There was a lack of self-consciousness in writing about my childhood, my follies, my faults. It all seemed like I was writing about a different person than who I was.”

Her father, who died in 2002, finally revealed his espionage to her, Franks said. Still, she was left to fill in many details. She realized how deeply her father was estranged from his own life, how much like a ghost he was, haunting his own autobiography.

What would he think of “My Father’s Secret War”?

“I laugh every time I think about that,” she said. “I imagine him smacking his head and saying, ‘Oh, Cindy -- why did you do this?’ Then he’d get a sly smile -- and he would take enormous pleasure out of it.

“In his own quiet way, he wanted to make himself right with the world, to be part of a community.”

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Julia Keller is cultural critic at the Chicago Tribune.