Trieste

by Daša Drndic

  Before I left on my trip, I got in touch with several acquaintances, I can call them friends and fellow sufferers, who have gone through or are still going through the hell I had been going through for eight years, people I met at various gatherings and workshops at which one practises breathing in the truth and at which there is a lot of weeping. Aloizy Twardecki (the Nazis kidnapped him too and changed his name to Alfred Hartmann, then gave him up for adoption to a German family) told me, Come on, perhaps this is the end, though I doubt it. After the war Aloizy was repatriated to Poland and today he teaches at the University of Warsaw. I got in touch with Don Alexander Michelowski, who was ten in 1942 when he was kidnapped from his home and his name changed to Alexander Peters. He knocked around orphanges for years because he was too old for adoption, and later, as a Catholic priest, served the Polish Diaspora in Newcastle. Alexander said, Even God didn’t help me. Helena was adopted by a German policeman and his wife, a seamstress, but after the war she was returned to Poland, and today she is a judge in Warsaw. Helena told me, Write a book, maybe it will heal you. It was hardest to talk with Ingrid von Oelhalfen. Ingrid was stolen as an eight-month-old baby from Slovenia. They kidnapped me in Celje, she said. She was taken to Germany and never returned, and she never found any of her family; she only found this small and useless fact stating that she is not Ingrid von Oelhafen.

  My name is Ana Johnson. I was born on 3 March, 1946, in Reutlingen, Germany. Because of an illness of the joints and bones I took my first steps only at the age of two. When my mother Mary Božić tried to board a ship for Australia in 1946 they stopped her. You cannot leave Germany without your child, they said. So Mary waited for me to walk. We arrived in Australia in 1948 and Mary immediately left me at St Therese’s Orphanage in Essendon. On 16 December, 1984, I was found by the Federal Police. Mary Božić has less than a month to live, said the men from the Federal Police. Mary Božić has cancer of the large intenstine and she wants to see you, repeated the Federal Police. We will take you to Mary Božić, they said three times. Then I saw my mother after thirty-six years and I had no recollection of her, so I thought right away that maybe she wasn’t my mother. I nursed Mary Božić and she told me the story of her life as she was dying. On her left arm Mary Božić had a tattoo of a swastika and the number LB 0097. I was a Lebensborn slave, she told me. I worked at the munitions factory in Reutlingen. We produced rockets and rounds for the German Army, she said. There were many S.S. men there. I was beautiful. The S.S. men raped me whenever they felt like it. There were many S.S. men. They raped me often. I was beautiful, she said. Luckily you were born on 3 March, 1946, she said, because had you been born on 3 March, 1945 you would not be alive today. They would have killed you, because Hitler wanted as many male children as possible. I spent my whole life in fear, my mother Mary Božić said, as she lay there dying in Australia, and I told her that I had constantly felt guilty, but didn’t know why. They moved me from orphanage to orphanage, I told my newly discovered mother, Mary Božić, then they sent me to reform school. To this day I don’t know why, because I never had any reason to reform. I was quiet and obedient, I told her. My mother, Mary Božić, died on 2 February, 1985. We talked for a month, for a month we were together. This was a great joy for me. I got in touch with the Red Cross. I hoped the Red Cross would help me find out my grandparents’ names. I might have relatives. I might have nephews. My mother had six brothers. My grandmother was a Gypsy from Hungary and my grandfather was from Yugoslavia. I believe I have hundreds of brothers and sisters. Who knows how many women he slept with, the man who got my mother pregnant? Mother never told me my grandmother’s name. I am German property, because I was made in Germany at the behest of Heinrich Himmler. I was born in Germany, but when the war ended they forced Mary Božić to take me with her, because they wanted to forget I existed. They did not want to see me. They wanted to forget I had ever lived, but I’m not giving up. Germany owes me an apology. It owes me compensation. Me and my mother Mary Božić. I must find out who my family are and where my grandfather and grandmother are buried. Thank you for hearing me out.

  At Nuremberg, for crimes against humanity, for the theft of children, for Lebensborn manipulations, the following people were brought before the court, and sentenced or released:

  Ulrich Greifelt: life imprisonment

  Rudolf Creutz: 15 years

  Dr Konrad Meyer: released

  Otto Schwarzenberger: released

  Herbert Hübner: 15 years

  Werner Lorenz: 15 years

  Heinz Brückner: 15 years

  Otto Hofmann: 25 years

  Richard Hildebrandt: 25 years

  Fritz Schwalm: 10 years

  Gregor Ebner: two of the charges dismissed, convicted of the third charge, but released on account of time served

  Max Sollmann: released

  Gunther Tesch: released

  Inge Viermetz: released

  My situation is complicated many times over. I was stolen. I am a Lebensborn “child”. I was raised by former supporters of Nazism, Jürgen Traube (who never, thank God, sullied his hands) and housekeeper Martha Traube, who also, thank God, renounced her “support”. I still consider Jürgen and Martha Traube to be my parents. I would like to disown them, but I cannot, because they were good and tender parents, they were permissive parents, though they were Catholics, I mean they were not fanatic Catholics, because fanatic Catholics are the worst Catholics, just as all fanatics are horrible and dangerous people. As tolerant parents, Martha and Jürgen Traube took my pronounced anti-fascism in their stride, my anti-Nazi photographs and exhibitions, my often uncontrolled outpourings of fury and, for me, not the least bit benign ressentiment of Austria’s part in the war. They put up with my disgust at Austrian silence, at Austrian blindness bound to Austrian Nazi history. They listened to what I told them and when I married Rebecca they said, Rebecca, you are ours as much as Hans is. But then into my life crept that murderer, S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz and that Jewish woman who spread her legs for him, for the blonde angel of death, the admirer of music and nature, the bad amateur fanatic photographer, the baby-faced executioner, she spread her legs while trains rumbled past, right there in front of her nose, on their way to killing grounds all over the Reich. At first I was sorry that S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz was dead, I wanted to shake him up, though his story didn’t interest me, I didn’t want to hear it, because the story was clear to me and for me the story has no inside or outside, it is a monstrous story, full stop. Maybe I would have killed him, S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, believing that I was thereby destroying, expunging, exterminating all the dirty genes that are planted inside me. Today nothing matters. I wanted to hear out the woman who gave birth to me, I wanted to forgive her, because she might be able to bring to life the little man, the stunted midget, Antonio Tedeschi, who has been waiting inside me for sixty-two years to grow up, to obtain some kind of a biography, no matter how dull and defective. This Haya Tedeschi could inscribe a history onto my minuscule, half-dead double, this foetus inside me, after which he, Antonio Tedeschi, would open his glued-shut eyelids, straighten up and maybe go his way, leaving me in peace.

  I know, there are more stories like mine.

  Ah, said my wife Rebecca, relax. The world is full of horrors and life is unpredictable. Look what happened to Beate Niemann, the protagonist of that documentary My Father the Murderer.

  I know the story.

  Beate Niemann was born in 1942, but it was only in 1997 that she set out to search for her father, which seems both comprehensible and incomprehensible, reasonable and unreasonable, courageous and cowardly. But who am I to judge?

  Beate Niemann looked for a father she could be proud of, but she found a murderer. She found S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler up to his elbows in blood. She traced a life shadowed by her mother’s lies, by lies never renounced or denied. Only a few weeks before Beate Niemann was born, Bruno Sattler grouped gassing trucks around SajmiŜte concentration camp on the outsk
irts of Belgrade, he assembled lorries for the gassing of women and their children. Bruno Sattler was killing women and children at SajmiŜte concentration camp and sending his pregnant wife little love letters, photographs from the field, photographs of nature. Beate Niemann’s father, S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler, had ordered the shooting of several tens of thousands of Jews in Smolensk and near Moscow. They say that Beate Niemann’s father, S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler, took part in the liquidation of 500,000 Yugoslav partisans, Jews, Gypsies and others.

  Poor Beate Niemann. Born in Nazi Germany which after the war has for decades publicly, persistently, even courageously, been uncovering the dangerous refuse of its past, Beate Niemann, fifty and something years later decides to start digging through the secrets of her own family, utterly shaken with and surprised by what she finds. Where had the loads of logical doubts been hidden? Which waters did they flow into? Where were her parents’ monstrous truths stored? In tightly packed bundles of hatred which will, covered by layers of mould, of deposited dirt, spontaneously dissolve?

  Thus, when in her sixties, when body, but also spirit, become weaker, Beate Niemann, as if stepping on a land mine, faces the truth that additionally crushes her.

  After World War One, during the 1920s, Bruno Sattler sells jewellery at the Wertheim department store in Berlin. The proprietors of the store were members of the Wertheim Jewish family, Sattler knows that, so he quickly joins the Nazi Party and becomes a policeman, then advances further and further, until he finally arrives at the Gestapo. Then he moves to the secret service of the S.S., then to the Einsatzgruppen who kill more than a million and a half civilians in the Soviet Union before the butchers and slaughterers of Auschwitz and Treblinka even appear on the scene in Poland.

  Beate Niemann’s mother dies in 1984, and that is when Beate Niemann starts searching for her father. She makes the rounds of more than a hundred archives in three countries, but the first traces of truth she finds among her mother’s belongings and in the urban planning office in Berlin, right under her nose. She comes across a document that confirms how already in 1942 Bruno Sattler buys a house from a Gertrud Leon for the miserable sum of 21,000 Reichsmarks. To the purchase and sale agreement which Beate Niemann finds, there is attached a guarantee from Bruno Sattler in which he declares that he will spare Gertrud Leon from any possible transport, that he will guard her life, and that he will not allow anyone to move her anywhere or take her out of Berlin. Two weeks later Gertrud Leon goes off first to Theresienstadt, then from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz to breathe her fill of gas.

  Beate Niemann then visits Belgrade. In Belgrade she meets Ljiljana Ȉorđević, who says, Oh, yes, I remember S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler. S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler killed my father at the camp in Sajmište.

  So, how does S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler come to his end? In 1947 Russian agents pick him up in broad daylight on a Berlin street and take him off to an East German prison. Many years later, Beate Niemann goes to Leipzig, to the former Stasi prison then already abandoned, in order to peep into the cell her father had occupied. It is a small cell, in it twenty people slept on boards, they tell her, in that cell one could not walk, one could only lie. The walls were still filthy, ghostly, stained with various histories. Finally Beate Niemann learns that her father, S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler, died on 15 October, 1972, they say he was shot in the back of the neck. After that agonizing but greatly belated revelation, Beate Niemann begins her homage to Eastern Europe, seeking out surviving Jews, those who lived through the camps and all the torture and all the humiliation, and when she couldn’t find them, because not many remained, she looked for their children, and to everybody she would say, to those who prevailed, to the leftover people, Beate Niemann would say, Forgive me, forgive me, please forgive me.

  Then there’s Monika Göth, the daughter of Amon Göth, the commander of Plaszow camp, the one from Schindler’s List who loved shooting inmates from the balcony of his villa, and people wouldn’t have known about him, they would have had no idea who he was, most people wouldn’t have known who Amon Goth was had they not watched Schindler’s List, but many did not see Schindler’s List, they didn’t want to see Schindler’s List, because the theme of Schindler’s List makes them nauseous, that’s what they say, We don’t want to get upset, they say, all that is in the past now, they say, and Monika Göth, who was one year old when in 1946 her father was hanged as a war criminal, Monika Göth, many years after, forty, fifty years after, also searches for surviving camp inmates tortured by her father and seeks their forgiveness, she roams the world and asks for forgiveness and to everyone she says, I am not like him. Every year Monika Göth goes to Auschwitz and in Auschwitz she pays her respects to the victims of her father, Amon Göth.

  Then Peter Sichrovski, a journalist from Vienna, born in Vienna, who grew up in Vienna and who after the war played with the children of former Nazis, and who then, many years later, goes looking for them, for his street pals, in order to ask them, What did your fathers do during the war? and then records their answers.

  Some of my kind ask me, What does the child of a murderer look like? Is it obvious, is it evident that we are the children of murderers? Oscar tells me that until their death his parents regretted that today no-one can force him to wear a pink triangle. We are all trapped, we, the children of Nazis. The prisoners of history. Those who grieve for their “tender” fathers who brought them souvenirs from Polish concentration camps and dandled them on their knees, and we who are trying to face our family truths. The woman who begs Sichrovski to take her paralysed father living in an old people’s home for a short “walk”, that pathetic, demented old man who still feeds on his Nazi faith, even if through a feeding tube, literally through a tube, she, too, is fucked up. No matter what he was, says this woman to Peter Sichrovski, he is still my father, he loved me, I know he loved me, says the woman in whose bosom a tornado must be raging. That frightens me. When in people who are monsters, butchers, slaughterers, perverse sadists we discover scraps of gentleness and frailty, I freeze in horror.

  Hans, what do the children of murderers look like? some of my kind ask me.

  Like us, I tell them, they look like us.

  Helga Schneider I remember from Salzburg, then we met again at the promotion of her book in Bologna. Many of us write books, make films, hold photographic and video installations, paint the horrors we excavate from our own innards, monstrous worlds that remain mostly unintelligible and inaccessible. We are a lot unto ourselves, an ilk that has unhooked itself from Earth and now wanders through space. We are little Helnweins and Bellmers in search of stars and meteors, of straggling heavenly bodies on which we could land, just to feel the ground beneath our feet, even if that ground is very far away. We do not believe in any gods, especially not in supernatural gods. In fact, we have no faith, because it is faith we do not believe in. Least of all do we believe in the Catholic faith, it has sullied itself the most, it has defiled itself.

  Helga Schneider comes to Salzburg at the age of seventeen. I am ten at the time and I am already hanging out at Isabella Fischer-Rosenzweig’s photography studio. Helga drops in during the afternoon, because she cleans Isabella’s darkroom and mops the floors for pocket money. Helga takes me out for an ice cream.

  By the time Helga Schneider tells me her story in 2001 I am already in frantic search of myself, I seek the dwarf who has resided in me from the time I was born, who breathes with me as I take each breath, who has been crouching for fifty-seven years in the dark, in the dark of my skull, in the gloom of my gut, who touches my bones and squeezes my heart with his little hands. Then I arrive at Helga’s book launch in Bologna in 2001.