Love Thy Enemy

When reading Nightfather, I was stunned when Friedman says, "Perhaps he [the father] misses his enemies most of all"(37). Friedman, throughout our entire reading so far, talks about how her father is constantly haunted, and even consumed by his memories of the camp. He sleepwalks "without ever finding peace"(6) and constantly tells his children gruesome stories, despite the fact that they are simply too young to understand them. The narrator, however, has a strange moment of realization when she says her father misses his enemies. In this moment, the narrator seems to lose much of her childishness, letting it give way to rare understanding. She understands that, after so much suffering, her father feels his life is pointless and purposeless without enemies which he has to fight against. The father describes how he "gave [the SS officer] a purpose in life, he was a dependent on me as I was on him"(46). It seems as though the father needed to see the cruelty of the SS to gain the willpower to survive, and the father's will to survive granted the SS a reason for his cruelty. Now that he is not in danger, he has no more reason to live. The father feels that life is purposeless because the Holocaust has distorted his mind so much he almost needs it.