We watched a movie last night, "The Debt" with Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson and Ciaran Hinds. It's about three Israelis who in the sixties are sent to capture a Nazi doctor and things go wrong,
enough that he gets away and they lie to their superiors and say they killed and buried him. For 30 years they are heroes, but that decision eats away at them all, but especially the woman and the one man that she loved, but because she impulsively slept with the other man and got pregnant, she can never be with. Thirty years later, though she and the man she does not love are long divorced, their daughter writes a book lauding them. Then they find out where the Nazi is, and that he is still alive and a reporter is about to interview him. The one man has been ordered by the exhusband to find and exterminate him, but kills himself instead when the woman will not agree to finally go public about their deception. She is sent by her ex to kill the Nazi before the reporter speaks to him. Thus, the two people who were in love are eliminated, along with the Nazi, but before she dies she gives the reporter the real story. Karma has punished each for the lie.
You can see that the three, when young, were innocent, and never intended to kill themselves, just bring back the Nazi for trial. But they kill their souls by taking credit for something and having to bolster and repeat lie after lie to conceal the truth. We have great sympathy, as they have lost relatives in the war, but their lack of courage about admitting he escaped is the catalyst for disappointed, miserable lives, though the couple with the daughter become famous and powerful. The third spends his life looking for the Nazi, unable to live with the lie. So love is killed, and when the truth comes out, the daughter will be ashamed and humiliated, and her view of her parents forever tainted. We cannot always know what consequences our actions will bring, but speaking falsehood is in this case like drinking poison. It's a powerful lesson.
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