Dark Dad is a powerful story of trauma and forgiveness

Remembering her late father Jack Arnott and the countless other people damaged by war, Mary Kisler says she'll likely shed a tear this Anzac Day.

Researching Jack's story for the new book Dark Dad brought back a lot of difficult, suppressed memories, but was also very cathartic, she tells Saturday Morning.

“When I finished writing it, I had to go to the doctor. A week later, my blood pressure had come down 10 points, literally. And I think it was just letting it all go.”

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Children often see only one side of their parents, Kisler says, but she wanted to present Jack as a three-dimensional character in Dark Dad.

Athletic, "damn good looking" and sometimes happy and fun, Jack could also be frighteningly volatile when she and her brothers Mike and John were young.

“I was watching Once Were Warriors, and there's a scene of the three little kids crouching in a lower bunk bed, and they can hear the anger through the wall. I thought, ‘That was my childhood, too'."

'You have to forgive him, because he's been through a lot', they were told by their mother Ewie, who married Jack in 1945 just after his return from service in World War II.

Ewie, who was a great listener, kept forgiving Jack, and as a mother and as a wife, her biggest concern was that other people didn't find out about his angry outbursts, Kisler says.

"She always said, 'You must never talk. You must never say what goes on at home.' It was just the way middle-class families felt at the time. It was shameful, so she was ashamed, Dad was ashamed."

Guilt and shame are the two most destructive emotions, Kisler says, and for Jack, they were put in place during a very difficult childhood with a stepfather who "beat him mercilessly".

“If the war hadn't come along, he might have recovered from that, but I think the war on top of that was too much to bear, and he took it out on the people he loved.”

Putting together the "great big puzzle" of her dad's life story for Dark Dad helped Kisler make peace with her memories of him.

Jack's military records, including his medical record and the details of his internment in prison camps, gave her the "skeleton" of the story.

Because the military recorded "every single graphic detail", sometimes there was even a bit too much information on his activities in the 1940s, which included getting the 'clap' from sex workers in India and Egypt.

“My father was a very private man. I never saw him naked. The details about his genitalia were rather graphic, and I think too much… I felt my mother was a saint. Really, she was a saint.”

In 1941, Jack, who served as a gunner, was captured along with a huge number of fellow Kiwi soldiers at the Battle of Sidi Rezegh in Libya.

For the next two years, the men were treated "very, very badly" in four Italian POW camps in North Africa before being transported via cow cart to a prison camp in Germany until the war ended in 1945.

It's important to remember that before they were thrown together as international soldiers, ordinary New Zealand men like Jack were just going about their everyday lives around the country, Kisler says.

"They were bakers and grocers and truck drivers and shovellers, and they were melded into this fighting force.

"They knew they would see their friends die, but they somehow, psychologically, had never thought that they'd be sent to a prison and not very good prisons at that."

She hopes Dark Dad will resonate with other New Zealanders who grew up with dads damaged by 1940s prisoner-of-war camps.

“If you have a damaged or disturbed and possibly, but not necessarily, violent father, that carries over.”