I’ve been watching Shameless on Showtime, that wild, raunchy comedy-drama about a dysfunctional family on Chicago’s South Side. It’s vulgar, over-the-top, and somehow addictive.
One of the show’s most unforgettable characters is Mickey Milkovich—a small-time hood, gay, volatile, and trapped in the shadow of his father, a tattooed, alcoholic neo-Nazi. The man’s skin is a canvas of swastikas and SS lightning bolts, history’s hate etched in ink.
Spoiler alert: Near the series’ end, Mickey’s father dies—suffocated by a deranged nun, no less. Mickey inherits a cardboard box of horrors: a framed photo of Hitler, an early edition of Mein Kampf, and an SS dagger, its silver blade glinting beneath the imperial eagle and swastika.
In one chilling scene, Mickey lifts the dagger to his face, staring into its reflection as if it holds a secret.
“I wonder how many Jews this dagger has killed,” he mutters.
The line stopped me cold.
Because I have said those very words.
Years ago, I visited my friend Jim at his home in Interlachen, Florida. He’d read my book, A Hebraic Obsession, and knew my fascination with World War II. One afternoon, he opened a closet and drew out a German Mauser rifle—heavy, black, and silent.
“My father was in the Army,” Jim said softly. “He fought in Germany. This was his souvenir of the war.”
I lifted the rifle with both hands. The wood was worn smooth by another man’s grip. The barrel was cold. I checked the chamber—empty. Then I pressed the stock to my shoulder and aimed out the window at a towering cypress tree.
And without thinking, I whispered the same words Mickey spoke:
“I wonder how many Jews this rifle has killed.”
A darker thought followed, uninvited:
“I wonder if any of them were my relatives.”
I handed the rifle back to Jim. He returned it to the closet, closing the door on its dark history.
“Your father must have been a brave man,” I said.
“I always thought so,” Jim replied. “But he never talked about the war.”
We fell silent. And in that quiet, I felt the weight of eighty years pressing down. Even now, the simple touch of a Nazi weapon summons the same haunting question for a Jew:
“How many of my people did this kill?”
I wondered, as I left Jim’s house and as Mickey’s words echoed through my living room, if there will ever come a day when that question no longer needs to be asked—or if history will always whisper from the cold steel of its relics.
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