His father built a house on the island as a refuge after escaping from the Argentinian dictatorship of the 1970s. One summer night as a child, Romberg's father told him the story of the Man of the Monkey for the first time: on the other side of that very same island lived an escaped Nazi hiding in the jungle who had taken a chimpanzee as his wife. Romberg lived his childhood both fascinated and frightened that he might run into the man while walking in the island forests.