I would have loved to ask her myself. But Helena died in 1994: at that time I had not even found the documents Gisela had hidden from me, much less discovered that my roots lay in Slovenia. The actions of my real and my foster mother had conspired to rob me of the chance to seek answers.
My emotions needed a lightning rod: someone living who I could blame for my position. Erika Matko – the other Erika – became the focus of all my anger and pain. Her refusal to meet me, even to answer my letter, enraged me: it seemed so callous. The feeling that she had stolen my life gnawed away at me. Maria had told me that she had been ill much of her life and as a result had never worked. I thought about how hard I had worked to build my physiotherapy business and my struggles with German bureaucracy, and compared this to the way Erika had apparently been supported by her government. And my anger grew.
My friends tried to reason with me. It was not, they rightly pointed out, Erika’s fault that she had been given my identity. As a child she could not have known how our lives were swapped and nor could she have done anything about it. And after the war, in Tito’s Yugoslavia, surely it would not have been safe for Helena and Johann to reveal any brush with the German occupiers: the communists were not always careful about the innocence or otherwise of those tainted by any form of involvement with the Nazis. Most likely she never knew the truth about her origins; perhaps no one except my parents knew.
Other people urged me to imagine what it must have been like for Erika when I first contacted her. She was then over sixty and suffering from a severe heart condition: it must have been an enormous shock for a complete stranger suddenly to appear and challenge everything she knew about her family. Could I not sympathise?
I could not. I was too consumed by the injustice of everything that had happened to allow myself to feel sorry for a woman whose life I had surely turned upside down.
It took a long while for the anger to dissipate. As months, and then years, passed, I slowly gained enough distance to analyse the situation more clearly. I began to consider what an alternate history would have looked like for me. I thought again of Barbara’s story of being taken away from her German foster family and the only home she could really remember; I made myself imagine myself on the train with her to Poland, and feel her bewilderment.
I knew from meeting the group of stolen children in Celje that some of those kidnapped from Yugoslavia had been returned to their families. There had even been a court case to set a precedent for these repatriations. Ivan Petrochik had been snatched by an SS detachment in 1943 when he was less than two years old. His father had been shot by the Gestapo and his mother sent to a concentration camp: he was given the label Banditenkind and handed by Lebensborn to a German family.
His mother survived the war and searched for seven years to trace him. In 1952, a court ordered that Ivan be returned to Yugoslavia: he was eleven and had been raised for most of that time as a German child.
Ivan and Barbara’s stories made me wonder how the process of repatriation worked and what effect it had on those involved. In 2014, I found some of the answers.
Gitta Sereny was a highly respected journalist and author. She had been born in Vienna in 1921, the daughter of an Austrian aristocrat and a former actress from Hamburg. When she was thirteen, her parents sent her away to boarding school in England, but her train was delayed in Nuremberg and she witnessed one of the Nazis’ mass rallies. It left an indelible mark on her and when she finished school she moved to France to help orphans suffering under the German occupation. She also worked with the French Resistance.
When the war ended, she joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), helping to repatriate the millions of displaced people scattered across the former Reich. She was later assigned to the Child Tracing Department: fifty-three years later she published an account of her experiences in a now-defunct magazine.* In it she described the repatriation of a young boy and girl from Germany to Poland, and for the first time I truly understood what being returned to Yugoslavia would have meant for me.
The process began with Sereny visiting the foster home. It was a traditional Bavarian single-storey farmhouse, its windows uncurtained and with only two dim lights showing the way to the front door.
Sereny had prepared for the visit by examining the region’s population records in the local mayor’s office. Six people were registered as living at the farm: the farmer and his wife, both in their mid forties, and his elderly parents. There were also two young children – a boy and a girl.
She was keenly aware of the potential distress her visit, and the uncomfortable questions she needed to ask, would cause. It was vital to see the children in the family surroundings, but she hoped that before the interview went too far the youngsters would be sent to bed.
Her reception was distinctly chilly. The family was sat around the kitchen table and deliberately declined to stand up when Sereny stepped inside. Although the farmer, his wife and the two children shook her proffered hand – the boy uneasily, the girl enthusiastically – the grandfather refused to do so, hiding his hand behind his back and gruffly demanding what this intruder wanted.
The children were called Johann and Marie. Both were officially six years old and both had blue eyes and blond hair – the boy’s cut short and crudely, the girl’s longer and neatly braided.
Sereny explained that she only wanted to talk with the family for a short time. To ease the frosty atmosphere she gave each of the children a chocolate bar – a precious gift in the austerity of post-war Germany. It provoked, though, a mixed reaction.
It was when the little girl, beaming, said, ‘Danke’, and I stroked her face, that the farmer’s wife said sharply, ‘Geht zu Bett’ [Go to bed], and the two children shot up to obey.
The little girl hugged her mother and reached out for her father’s hand. The little boy politely, but formally, bade his parents goodnight then gave Sereny a suspicious look before kissing his grandfather. Then the farmer took the two children away and put them to bed, holding them tightly as he did so.
In 1945 there were 8,500 ‘unaccompanied children of United Nations and assimilated nationality’ registered in the tracing services’ files. Within months, tens of thousands of new names were added, sometimes accompanied by snapshot photographs or physical descriptions, all of them kidnapped from the east for Himmler’s Germanisation programme. Marie and Johann were among them.
Gitta expressed her disbelief at this situation:
Who would have taken babies or toddlers away from mothers? … How could anyone, even bigots gone mad, believe they could discern ‘racial values’ in young, undeveloped children? Above all how, in practice, could there now be large numbers of foreign children – at least some of whom would have to be old enough to have memories – living, basically in hiding, within the German community?
The farmer was hostile when Sereny began asking questions. He said that their son had been killed by the Red Army during the siege of Stalingrad; his sister had died four years earlier in a road accident. They had fostered Johann and Marie to replace their lost children.
It was plain that this family loved the children and Sereny tried to reassure the farmers that she understood this, whilst simultaneously insisting that they must disclose everything they knew about the youngsters’ origins. When she asked about their biological parents, the farmer’s wife said that they had died, but was very vague about who had given her this information. Sereny pushed harder, explaining to the family that many Eastern European parents were searching for children who had been stolen from them.
‘East?’ said the grandfather and, repeating it, virtually spat out the hated word: ‘East? Our children have nothing to do with “east”. They are German, German orphans. You need only look at them.’ And there it was: ‘You need only look at them.’
Somebody had indeed once looked at them. Just as had happened in Celje, villagers around the city of Łodz had been instructed to bring their children to th
e Youth Welfare Office where the race examiners had done their work and shipped the chosen children off to Lebensborn. Johann and Marie’s parents had been searching for them ever since and had photographs to support their claim. UNRRA decided the children were to be returned to them.
Gitta Sereny was deployed away from the area shortly afterwards. Then, in the summer of 1946, she was sent to work in a Children’s Centre in Bavaria. To her surprise – and dismay – she found Johann and Marie were being held there. They were plainly struggling to cope with their removal from the farmer and his wife: both had deep shadows under their eyes and their skin was unhealthily pale. Sereny was shocked by their condition.
Marie was scrunched up in a chair, her eyes closed, the lids transparent, her thumb in her mouth, but Johann raced up as soon as he saw me, and shouting hoarsely, ‘Du! Du! Du!’ [‘You! You! You!’], hit out at me with feet and fists …
The staff at the centre had seen all of this before: the children’s pitiful state was, they told Sereny, all too typical of other youngsters who had been taken away from their German foster families prior to being sent back to their countries of birth. Many, including Johann and Marie, had to be kept in the unit after their official repatriation date; it seemed the only way to ease the pain of what was, after all, the second separation in their young lives and to prepare them for the overpowering expectations of their biological parents. Experience showed that these reunions placed a terrible mental strain on already traumatised children.
This was a caring and thoughtful approach – but for Johann and Marie it had clearly failed. The young boy was already showing signs of aggression, whilst his sister had effectively reverted to babyhood: she wet the bed frequently and would only eat when fed from a bottle.
Later that night, the resident psychiatrist suggested that Sereny try feeding Marie with the bottle.
She lay there, her eyes shut, the only movement in her lips, which sucked, and in her small throat, which swallowed. I held her until she was asleep. It helped me but, I fear, not her.
What are we doing? I asked myself. What in God’s name are we doing?
Now I understood. This would have been my fate, had I been sent back to Rogaška Slatina. I cannot believe that I would have understood what was happening any more than Johann and Marie grasped why they were taken from the only family they could remember. Now, at last, I wasn’t angry any more.
_______
* Talk Magazine. Reproduced in the Jewish Virtual Library, 2009. The magazine ceased publication several years ago and Gitta Sereny died in 2012.
EIGHTEEN | PEACE
‘My identity might begin with the fact of my race but it didn’t, couldn’t, end there.’
BARACK OBAMA, DREAMS FROM MY FATHER:
A STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE, 1995
What is identity and how is it formed? Does identity shape the person – or is it the other way round?
This is not, as it might seem, merely an exercise in abstract philosophy. As my journey ended, it was the question I had to face up to. I knew now who I was – or had once been; I was less sure about what this meant.
Identity is much more than merely the answer to the question ‘who am I?’. It is also about personality. I was struggling to understand how I had become the person I was today. Was I simply the product of the first years of my life as a Lebensborn child? Was my past to blame for my shyness, my lack of confidence and my desire to put the needs of others – of children especially – above my own? In other words, was the course of my life set in stone by Himmler? That, after all, was what he intended: we Lebensborn babies were supposed to fulfil his vision of a new and uniform generation of the German Master Race.
Surely I was just as much the product of my own choices. Genetics may dictate hair and skin colour, but identity must involve an element of free will. I had chosen to devote my life to working with disabled children; chosen not to get married and have a family of my own. These were my decisions – not the ineluctable result of the Lebensborn programme.
Perhaps those who have never endured the uncertainty of not knowing who they really are, are rarely troubled by these existential questions. And yet which of us hasn’t, in our darker moments, returned to a particular moment of our lives and wondered what would have happened had events played out differently?
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia says, ‘We know what we are, but not what we may be.’ I could not help but dwell on what might have been. What if I had failed the racial examination that day in Celje? What would my life have been, growing up as Erika Matko? Would I have had the opportunity of a rewarding career, or would my horizons have been limited – as seemed to have been the case with the other Erika – by my environment? If Gisela had been more honest and if the Cold War had not intervened, I would have been reunited with my biological parents: what would that have meant for the course of my life? I asked myself whether I would have been better off had the Nazis left me with my family or whether, in some twisted irony, they did me an eventual favour.
The annual meetings of Lebensborn children exacerbated this uncertainty. The tensions I had detected at our first gathering had grown steadily over the years until Lebensspuren was riven by arguments. All of us had been damaged by our involvement in the Master Race experiment; all of us struggled to come to terms with our personal histories. By 2014, many of those who had joined together to create a supportive environment had walked out or drifted away to form new and smaller groups: I was one of them.
But that year I made two trips which helped me to find some peace. The first was a visit to a former Lebensborn employee, Anneliese Beck. Now ninety-two and almost blind, when I arrived at her home near Frankfurt she greeted me with tea and stollen.
Frau Beck had worked at the Sonnenwiese home in Kohren-Sahlis at the time when I was held within it. She did not remember me: there were 150 youngsters living there, and I had not been in the group for which she was responsible. But she was able to tell me a great deal about the daily routine at Sonnenwiese and to help me understand what my life would have been like. She showed me a photograph of her with some of the children. I was pleased to see that they were nicely dressed and clearly well fed. And she was adamant that despite the circumstances and the presence of the SS, for the most part our time in Kohren-Sahlis was happy and comfortable.
Sitting with Frau Beck helped me fill one of the last remaining gaps in my knowledge. I had no memories of Sonnenwiese, and though I often tried, I was unable to visualise the years I spent there: no matter how much I forced myself to think about it, all I could see was a dark hole. Now that hole was filled and the walls that protected me from my memories were beginning to crumble. I sensed that the final stage would be to travel to Kohren-Sahlis, to walk inside the buildings there: that would, I felt sure, unlock my mind. I was not yet strong enough to go, but I knew that in the coming years I would make that journey.
In October I returned to Slovenia. I went first to Rogaška Slatina where, in a pretty public park, I paid my respects at the memorial to the men and women who were shot between 1941 and 1945. More than one hundred names were carved into the stone: I looked for my Uncle Ignaz and when I found him I traced the letters with my fingertips.
Later, Maria showed me the house where I was born, before taking me to the cemetery, sitting on the top of a hill, where my parents, my grandmother, my brother and my sister are all buried. I laid flowers on the graves and lit candles for my sister and brother, while Maria and her niece cleaned the paths around the stones. I had expected to be overwhelmed by a sense of loss and so I was surprised to discover that, aside from the normal sadness of visiting a graveyard, I felt very little.
It was a similar story later in the afternoon when Maria invited me back to her apartment for Slovenian coffee and homemade blueberry liqueur with other members of the family. The atmosphere was warm, and everyone was hospitable and open. The Matkos had come to accept me as one of their own, and they gave me photographs of my parents, sibl
ings, nephews and nieces. But although I was grateful for the love and generosity of the family I had longed for, I felt like a child among them. My overriding emotion was anxiety, the sort I had always endured when faced with an exam.
The following day I went to the civil registry office to look for records relating to my parents’ marriage. The official there dug out a large book in which every local birth was documented. Together we found the page that recorded my arrival; it also revealed that Johann and Helena were married in 1938, several years after my sister Tanja and brother Ludvig were born. It was a clue to the puzzle of the DNA tests: these had shown that while Ludvig’s son, Raphael, was definitely my nephew, I was equally certainly not a blood relative of Tanja’s son, Marko. Given that both Tanja and Ludvig had been born before my parents’ wedding, the most likely explanation was that Tanja had a different father. The Matko family seemed to have more than its fair share of secrets.
The last remaining mystery was the other Erika. She had still not responded to my letters nor, according to Maria, was she willing to speak to me in person.
I thought long and hard about what I should do. In the end I decided that I would go to her apartment and confront her. I had her address, which turned out to be on the fourth floor of a run-down block in a poor area of Rogaška Slatina. I knew Erika would be at home: the Matkos had told me she was too ill to walk down the stairs and so stayed inside every day. I found her letterbox and the bell with her name on it. I wanted to press it, to be invited upstairs and to see this enigmatic woman with my own eyes. I wanted to hug her, to speak with her and to demand answers. I wanted, above all, to find the peace of mind that would come with confronting my other self.
Hitler's Forgotten Children Page 18