My childhood unfolded across a mosaic of places. My parents were serial movers before finally settling in their “forever home,” once again tucked away in the countryside. In one of those earlier stops — a small, almost idyllic village with a storybook church framed by gentle woods — there lived an old man who was hailed as the village’s “moral conscience.”
We children feared him instinctively. He had the sort of presence that made the air around him feel colder. His speeches were always the same tired sermon: honor, propriety, how society should be structured — all delivered with that brittle self-righteousness peculiar to men who mistake their own darkness for moral clarity. He was not a man one sought out for warmth.
We moved away after a few years. Not long afterward, we heard he had died. The real shock, however, came with the revelation that this revered village moralist had once been a member of the SS death squads. Not just some conscripted soldier lost in the machinery of war — no, those units required active enthusiasm. It takes a particular strain of horror, a deliberate cruelty, to do what they did.I was still a minor when I learned this, but it left a mark. That was the moment I began to distrust those who seek to “improve” humanity, to reshape men in their image of the good. Beneath the polished sermons, there is often rot. Some of the most ardent architects of moral order have the darkest foundations.