Lizards

I'm not exactly sure if the Lizards are symbolic. Anton is remarried and has a son whom he calls Peter. It is the time of Cold War and fear of nuclear weapons and Anton unwillingly gets dragged into one of the demonstrations. There he gets the final piece of the puzzle of the past, namely he encounters Karin Korteweg, his neighbor from the past who, together with her father, moved Fake Ploeg's body in front of their house for his family to take the blame. She reveals that Peter was killed in their house by Nazi Germans and the main reason her father moved the body is to protect his lizards. When asked why particularly move the body in front of their house, she answers that the Beumers were hiding a Jewish family in their basement. Karin reveals that her father was plagued by fear of Anton which led him suicide not long after he managed to escape to Canada. In this final revelation Anton realizes the senselessness of it all, and how everyone did what they did and had some reason to do it. The woman from the cell killed Fake Ploeg because he was responsible for deaths of so many innocents, Korteweg decided to move the body from his home to protect his lizard pets, and he decided to move it in front of Anton's home because he didn't want to condemn the Jewish family to certain death. Now, after finally discovering the truth of the past, Anton has no other choice but to be moved forward by the demonstrating crowd.