Does it sound odd that the mystery of who I was and where I had come from was never discussed? Perhaps. At the time it was simple: I did not have enough of a relationship with Gisela to ask her difficult questions. It would be a long time before I understood that she might have had good reasons for wanting to leave the past alone.
Whatever the reason, the subject was never broached: to all intents and purposes I was Ingrid von Oelhafen, the name under which I was registered at school. I did not have one of the new identity cards, issued by the Federal government from 1951 onwards, but since I was a child no one thought I would need one until I reached the legal age of majority: twenty-one in those days.
As it turned out, the problem of my identity surfaced rather sooner. I wasn’t doing well at school: academic work – particularly maths – was not my strong point. I had decided that I wanted a career as either a children’s nurse or a vet, but Gisela had other ideas. Although she sent me for tests that showed that I had sufficient potential to take the German equivalent of A Levels, Gisela wanted me to earn money as soon as possible. And so it was arranged that I would leave school at the age of sixteen.
I was unhappy about this decision and felt convinced that behind everything lay the fact that I was not Gisela’s biological child. But I didn’t ask her to change her mind. I made a point of never asking her for anything because I was afraid she would refuse. Looking back I think this was a form of self-protection stemming from the time when I had pleaded in vain with her to take me away from Hermann’s house.
Gisela’s plan was for me to train as a physiotherapist, with a view to at some point coming to work in her practice. But as it turned out, I couldn’t begin the college course in physiotherapy for another two years. I still have no idea why I was pulled out of school so early but as a stop-gap, I was sent off to live with the son of a friend of Gisela’s mother, who owned a farm near Lake Constance on the border between Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Here I was supposed to learn household management. The farm was in a village called Heiligenholz: it was remote and tiny, with only three or four houses nearby. For the first four weeks I cried every night because I was so homesick. Gradually, though, I settled in: the farmer had six daughters and the youngest two, aged twelve and fourteen, became good friends. The farmer’s wife was kind and warm, just as I supposed a mother should be. I stayed with them for eleven months and though I didn’t really learn any household or cooking skills – my duties were mostly washing up and helping in the fields – they were very good to me, and inadvertently forced Gisela to do something about my lack of official documentation.
At some point during my stay, the family wanted to go on holiday to Switzerland. But I had no papers – no ID card, no passport, not even so much as a birth certificate – which would be needed to cross the border. The only documentation that anyone seemed to have for me was my state health insurance certificate, and that was in the name of the mysterious Erika Matko.
In 1957, children could be included on their parents’ documents. Faced with the prospect of leaving me behind (or abandoning his holiday plans altogether), the farmer passed me off as one of his own daughters. We crossed and re-crossed the border without incident. But it prompted him to write to Gisela, urging her to sort out my identity documents – if for no other reason than I was shortly to be dispatched to somewhere where border controls were likely to be less relaxed.
There was still almost a year before I was to begin my physiotherapy training. Rather than spending it back in Hamburg, it was arranged that I was to be sent to England to work as an au pair. I would need a passport.
To this day I have no idea how Gisela arranged it. I never saw a passport in my name, and given what was to follow I’m as sure as can be that I was never issued one. Some form of documentation must have been procured, however, as I was able to make the long journey – alone, again – to a small village in Hertfordshire, 30 miles north of London.
The family I was to live with were evidently wealthy. The father was a banker who travelled into London every day. His wife was much younger than him and spent most of her time with the family’s horses. Of their four children, two were away at Gordonstoun – the famous boarding school where Prince Charles was a pupil. The third child, an eight-year-old boy, joined them not long after I arrived, leaving me with only the couple’s five-year-old daughter to look after. I spent six months in their grand house and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The couple treated me very well; I had a lovely bedroom with a private bathroom, and they made me feel like part of their family.
Looking back, I doubt I recognised then the irony of finding in the land of my country’s former enemy the emotional warmth I had longed for at home. I was only seventeen and not as aware of history as I have since become. I returned to Hamburg with happy memories.
Completely unknown to me, while I had been away the problem of my identity had once again surfaced. The start date for my physiotherapy course was approaching and the university needed my birth certificate to register me as a student. I assume that Gisela was somehow involved in dealing with this. (It would be many years before I discovered the flurry of correspondence between various local government offices about me – and in those letters the first hints about my origins.) But whatever she told the officials was not, I think, wholly truthful.
My new birth certificate – dated 1959, the first time my existence was formally registered – was in the name of Erika Matko. It was issued by Standesamt 1 in Berlin, the Federal government registry which had been specifically created to issue papers for people who had come (or had been forcibly brought) into Germany mainly from the east and who had no other documentation. And yet, oddly, it recorded my birthplace as St Sauerbrunn in Austria. It was a record that would, many years later, hamper the search for my true identity.
At the time, regardless of my birth certificate, I continued to insist that I was Ingrid von Oelhafen. That was the name I answered to and the one by which my friends at university came to know me.
To the university authorities, however, I was someone else: they had registered me in the name of Erika Matko, and when I graduated three years later, aged twenty-one, that was the name on my degree certificate. When I asked the university to change this to Ingrid von Oelhafen, my request was refused: without any official paperwork to prove that I was Ingrid, the administration insisted that I was Erika.
It was 1962 and I was now an adult, about to enter the world of work (and to pay my taxes and social security contributions) for the first time. My first job was in an institute in the Black Forest. I was quite used to being away from home by now: I had not really lived with Gisela and her family in Blumenstrasse for any length of time since I left school. And I found myself thoroughly enjoying my new life away from her and without the complications that had dogged my existence back in Hamburg. It was not to last.
In the last year of my training, shortly before my twenty-first birthday, Gisela had a serious accident. She had fallen down the stairs and lapsed into a coma, which lasted six months. Even when she eventually woke, she was so severely ill that she remained in hospital for another year. My grandmother and Aunt Eka had taken charge of her affairs while she was in hospital but when it was time for her to be discharged, I was needed. With much regret, I left my job in the Black Forest and returned to Hamburg.
Gisela was then forty-nine years old: still relatively young and the mother of a young boy, but now severely disabled. The fall had left her with brain damage and she was quite unable to walk. There was no prospect of her picking up the reins of her physiotherapy practice again: instead it was decided that I would have to do so.
It was the last thing I wanted to do. I felt uncomfortable about taking over Gisela’s business and it meant I had to abandon plans to go to America, where I had wanted to study a new technique. I was conscious, also, that the tangled relationships in the von Oelhafen family would not be easy to manage.
I moved back into my old room in the house
in Blumenstrasse. It was a difficult time: my grandmother, Aunt Eka, Hubertus and I all had to adjust to our new circumstances – and to Gisela’s condition. It was particularly hard for Hubertus to see his mother so disabled, but as she learned to walk in the garden and even to share occasional laughter, his unhappiness eased.
The big problem was that Hubertus and Eka didn’t understand one another, and this often led to rows. I was caught between them, which I hated, because each sought my support against the other. Nor were things easy with Gisela. To some extent, she was like a small child and my aunt tended to speak to her as a strict teacher would address a recalcitrant pupil: understandably my mother resented this and became stubborn.
Hubertus and I found it easier to accept her as she now was, though I often found myself feeling aggrieved: I was still made to feel very much like an outsider, with few rights but enormous responsibility. It didn’t seem right or fair, but I knew that I had no choice but to get on with the job and make the best of it.
After a while, for the first time in as long as I could remember, my relationship with Gisela improved. We didn’t talk much, but she lost some of the coldness towards me that had marred my younger years. I realised, of course, why this was: her disability had softened her and as she was now increasingly dependent on me, she let me see that I was needed.
In other circumstances or other families, it might have opened the door to an open and frank discussion about my past, and how I came to be fostered by her and Hermann. But that never happened. We never spoke about Hermann: I think that after his death she, like me (although for very different reasons), felt free of him and of the burden of their failed marriage. Perhaps because they had never divorced, she had felt tied to him and haunted by the need to justify her refusal to live with him.
Or so I suppose now. Gisela never discussed her marriage with me, just as she never talked to me about my origins.
The question of who I really was had not, of course, gone away. In the mid-1960s I decided to take matters into my own hands. Although I called myself Ingrid von Oelhafen, I was still officially Erika Matko. I felt that the time had come formally to change my name by the equivalent of deed poll.
But the process turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined. I discovered that German law required me to seek the permission of the von Oelhafen family. Even if Gisela had been well enough to do this, the regulations did not recognise her as a von Oelhafen. She had married into the name: the law recognised only those who had been born into it as the true owners of its heritage. Once again, the old German belief in the sanctity of blood resurfaced.
Ironically, Hubertus was registered as a von Oelhafen and so, in theory, allowed to grant permission. But he was legally a child and too young to sign any official documents. I don’t know why but Hubertus had an official guardian, a lawyer, and so I had to write to this guardian to plead my case. Eventually he agreed, with one qualification: I was not permitted to call myself Ingrid von Oelhafen, since I wasn’t part of the family by blood. Instead I could style myself ‘Ingrid Matko-von-Oelhafen’ – a signal to the outside world that I was, in some way, a lesser member of the clan. It was hurtful, but there was nothing to be done: I signed the papers and obtained my new name. The certificate cost 100 marks.
I needed to apply for a passport around the same time and was alarmed to discover when I did so that the authorities wanted to classify me as ‘stateless’. Apparently the unresolved question of where I had been born, and to whom, was still an obstacle to being recognised as a genuine German citizen. I was stunned: the ruling made me feel worthless, as though I were a nothing, a nobody. Nor could I understand why it should be – after all, I had been paying taxes for more than three years. Worse still, the classification could have meant that I was not allowed to vote in elections and that I would not be able to travel freely abroad.
It took many months, and the assistance of a lawyer friend of Eka’s, before the government relented and I was issued with a passport showing me to be a real German. I didn’t know it then, but had Gisela been less disabled (or had she been honest with me years earlier) she could have given me a document that she had kept hidden away for more than twenty years which would have cut though all the red tape and bureaucracy. But she wasn’t, and she hadn’t been – and it would be another three decades before I found it in a cache of other vital paperwork.
Of those decades there is little to tell that is truly relevant to this story. I spent six years in Gisela’s house in Hamburg, running her physiotherapy practice. I wasn’t particularly happy with this arrangement: Gisela’s clientele was largely made up of the elderly, and my interests lay elsewhere. On one occasion a three-year-old girl who couldn’t walk came to the surgery: much as I wanted to help her, I wasn’t qualified to do so. From that moment I knew that I wanted to work with children.
I found out about a course at Innsbruck, in the Austrian Tyrol, to learn a new technique for helping disabled youngsters. It would take me away from Hamburg for ten weeks, and a locum would be needed to look after Gisela’s practice (as I still thought of it) while I was away. Aunt Eka was not happy about me going, but I was determined.
Towards the end of the course, I was offered a job on the staff at Innsbruck University clinic: I worried about what my aunt would say – and what would happen to Gisela – but in the end I accepted and spent a happy year doing what I loved in a place where I felt comfortable.
It was during my time in Innsbruck that I fell in love. I met a young man who came from Osnabrück – close to Bad Salzuflen, where I had lived with Hermann, and even closer to the house in Hamburg. We began a life together in Osnabrück, albeit in separate apartments.
Our relationship didn’t last. For whatever reason, I did not find – have never found – it easy to maintain adult relationships with men. Whether this has something to do with my childhood I cannot say: I know only that whilst I like the idea of falling in love, those to whom I have often been attracted don’t feel the same way about me, and I never seemed to like those men who did see something in me that appealed to them.
I do not say any of this to elicit your sympathy: I am not, by nature, comfortable with that, and if I have never known the intimacy of married life or had my own children, I have been fortunate always to find and keep good friendships with other women which have sustained me. And I have known, too, the joy of helping many, many children: in the early 1970s, after years of working in hospitals, I established my own physiotherapy practice dedicated to working with disabled youngsters. From then on I worked six days a week, twelve hours a day, consumed by the need to help them. Every year I travelled across Europe, England and the United States, attending specialist courses that extended my understanding and developed my skills. It has been a lifelong and rewarding career that has brought me immense happiness.
But what of Gisela, the von Oelhafens and the Andersens? What of the life I stepped away from in Hamburg, the strange mystery of my birth and the circumstances by which I came to be fostered? Although I remained in touch with the family throughout my adult life – and stayed close to Eka, in particular – I did not return to live with them, nor work in Gisela’s business.
By the time I did – briefly – go back, the walls had come down across Germany and the east.
SIX | WALLS
‘Because she is a child of German stock, on the orders of the Reichsführer she is to be brought up in a German family’
STURMBANFÜHRER GÜNTHER TESCH
At 10.45 p.m. on Thursday, 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall – that most visible and entrenched symbol of the Iron Curtain – began to crumble. I was forty-eight years old: for almost half a century my life, and the lives of my compatriots, had been shaped by the division of our country into East and West.
It had been a bitter partition: beyond the wall East Germany had re-enforced its borders, imprisoning its population inside a rigid ideological police state. Those who sought to flee, as Gisela had done with Dietmar and
me, regularly found their way blocked by barbed wire and checkpoints – and by troops under orders to shoot anyone trying to make their way to freedom. More than a thousand men, women and children had been killed trying to escape the iron grip of communism.
And then it was over. After a day of confusion and rumour, the East German commander of the key border checkpoint opened the gate and ordered his guards to allow people through. Hundreds of Ossis – as those from the East were known – swarmed through to be greeted by West Berliners waiting with flowers and champagne.
Before long, a crowd of Wessis climbed on top of the wall, where they were joined by East German youngsters. They danced together, joyously celebrating their new freedom. Within hours, television cameras captured images of people using hammers and chisels to chip lumps off the wall: soon these Mauerspechte (literally ‘wall woodpeckers’) demolished entire lengths of it, creating several unofficial border crossings.
The speed of events took the governments of both East and West Germany by surprise. Yet, in truth, change had been in the air for months. It began in August when Hungary – physically and politically one of the outliers of the Eastern bloc Moscow had created – effectively dismantled its physical border with Austria. Within weeks more than 13,000 Ossis had travelled to Hungary and then on into Austria. When the government in Budapest tried to stop the flow, East Germans simply marched into the West German embassy and refused to return home. It was an unprecedented act of civil disobedience from a nation which had, for fifty years, grown used to obeying the orders of its communist masters, and there was more to come.
Throughout that early autumn, mass demonstrations broke out across East Germany. Protestors took to the streets chanting ‘Wir wollen raus!’ (‘We want out!’) and ‘Wir sind das Volk!’ (‘We are the people!’). Newspapers and television stations began proclaiming the dawn of a peaceful revolution.
Hitler's Forgotten Children Page 5