I lost my identity watching a VHS tape
At one time, I was a young woman who found my soulmate by going to quirky cult classic movie showings such as the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Trolls, ....
Now I find myself alone in a city. I constantly move about every six months to a different city.
Every time I go to a grocery store, I always have to look over my shoulders. Anywhere, I move to, I have to give a fake name and take jobs that pay in cash.
I'm writing this story as a form of therapy. I can't afford a therapist and I can't sign up for welfare without giving up my social security number.
My husband Marc, and I enjoyed going to flea markets to buy and sell movies. We liked more obscure vhs tapes that weren't well known.
One day Marc and I came home and found a movie on our porch. The movie was labeled "my nazi revenge" and had a note on it stating "I figured you'll like this one". I could only guess at who dropped it off.
The movie was of low quality, shaky camera work, like the Blair witch project. The movie can be summarized like this. A German squadron who went through a Polish town during WW2 and terrorized a rural farm. The Germans killed all the family members and only the father who was severely wounded survived. The Germans inadvertently left a paper that had their names on it.
Years later, when the war was over, the father vowed to track down the men who killed his family. By looking through German military records he is able to track them down to a town in Germany. All but one of the men had escaped to Argentina. Reaffirming his vow, he goes to Argentina.
The father learns that the men found refuge on a remote Argentinian island. After his short boat ride to the island, he systematically tortured and kills all of the Nazis and their families.
Marc and I were shocked by the gruesome nature of the movie. But what stood out more was that the only credits on the movie are the German soldiers and the father.
In doing what we usually did with videos we purchased, we looked online to see what it sold for. There was no reference to the movie. Upon many hours of research we were able to find a small article from WW2 regarding the "fire" that killed the father's family. We also found that the German soldiers were all from the same German town and listed as MIA.
Rewatching the movie, we found clues about the Argentinian island's whereabouts. Research provided little information about the island but we did discover a property record from 1946 that the half mile island was bought by a Juan Alvarez. No other information about Juan Alvarez was discovered.
Having had a vacation planned to South America anyway, we added a trip to the mysterious island to our itinerary. The island is completely isolated so we knew we would have to rent a boat.
Upon arriving to the impoverished Argentinan town, the locals seemed impoverished and downtrodden. We asked around and nobody was aware of a low budget movie being filmed there. It appeared that the Argentinian government leaves German "immigrants" alone, perhaps because of a large financial endowment.
After renting a boat from a local man, we used the research we did online and google maps of grainy photos we were able to tell that the island was about 2 miles away. We passed by small mountainess uninhabitable islands and determined that they were not the island we were looking for. Eventually, we got close to an island riddled with no trespassing signs, like the ones we saw in the movie and the grainy google maps photos.
We laughed and say I guess the film crew didn't clean up. After docking our boat we realized the same houses from the movie were still there. The houses were in shambles from years of storms. We joked to each other about the preserved movie set. After wandering around we entered one of the houses and discovered skeletonized corpses.
We were appalled and shocked and discovered the same outcome in the other houses. We didn't know what to do except leave the island in a hurry. Not knowing who we can trust in the mainland, we returned the boat and cut our trip short.
From our research, we knew one german man from the movie didn't go to Argentina. With the assistance of a small Israeli company that specializes in finding missing nazis. The Israeli's tell us the german man was in their database and they couldnt do anything to him due to a lack of evidence. The Israelis do tell us that his name had changed several times and he now lives in the United States. We didn't have a phone number for the German man but the address is around 400 miles away. We decided to drive and knock on the german man's door - we figured he would be in his 90's.
Amazingly an old thick accented German man answered the door. We explained the reason why we have come And the german man started to cry and invited us in. He knows about the movie and says "i'm so sorry but your both dead". This alarmed us, and we waited for the man to go on.
The german man explained his plight and what happened after the war. He says that he has moved around multiple times and says wherever he goes the Polish father finds him. The German man says his wife and his whole family have been murdered over the years and that the Polish father made him watch the movie and said that every relative will be killed.
The German man told us he had kids that he had to give up for adoption and never knew what happened to them. At that point I gasped, realizing that the German man was my Grandfather.
We then realized what the German man meant about us dying and that the movie was purposefully mailed to us to show the horror of what my grandfather did and in turn the demise of the German mens relatives.
My Grandfather continued to cry and apologize. I asked "what can I do?" and my Grandfather said "there's nowhere you can hide no where you can go ... they might be outside right now ... they might come tonight ... they know where you are ... "
We returned home absolutely petrified. The movie had vanished.
The same day we went to the police station and they didn't seem interested in what we had experienced. The movie was gone. My Grandfather said because of being a Nazi in hiding, he wanted nothing to do with the police. The police told us to contact the Argentinian authorities.
I was still on leave from my job at the time.
Marc went to work the next day and he didn't return from work that day. I called his job the next day and they told me he left the previous day with nothing out of the ordinary.
I called the police and filed a missing person report. I called all of our friends and posted fliers, but there was not one inkling of any type of clues of what happened to him.
Every time I left the house I put a piece of masking tape, where the front door met the frame to tell if someone was in the house.
Four days after Marc's disappearance, I noticed the tape had been torn, after I returned from hanging up fliers around town.
I knew it wasn't Marc because he would have called me and he wouldn't have locked the door after returning.
So, I left that day with all of my earthly belongings in the house. I had nothing besides my credit cards, car keys, and my phone.
I cut and dyed my hair. I had to abandon all of my friends and ditch all of my online social media. Anything I enjoyed in the past is now in the past.
I loved Marc so much and now I have nothing. The only hope I have is that the Polish father will die and his hired goons will just go away.
Credited to mtp6921
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