Secrets She Kept

by Cathy Gohlke

  “Then we need to find someone who knew your mother or Frau Kirchmann in the camp.”

  I nearly dropped Grandfather’s urn. “Is that possible? Can we find such a person?”

  “A prisoner of Ravensbrück? That should not be impossible—there are lists. But there is someone else we must find as well. And perhaps that person can lead us to the first.”

  “You mean Lukas—or Marta, the youngest Kirchmann.”

  Carl smiled, nodding.

  “But your parents said they’d gone—moved away. All our searching has turned up nothing. We don’t even know if they’re still alive, or still living in Germany.”

  “This is true.” He took the urn from me before I dropped it. “All it means is that we haven’t searched in the right place.”

  It took three weeks of letter writing and phone calls, of Carl translating endless pages of questions and then translating my answers, of reassuring the powers that be that our motives were pure, that I was only trying to locate someone who remembered my mother.

  Finally, Carl tracked down the barracks my mother and Frau Kirchmann had been assigned to, and in the process found the name of a woman who’d been incarcerated in Ravensbrück at the same time and assigned to the same barracks. He telephoned her and she agreed to see us on Saturday.

  With a stop for luncheon, the drive to the outskirts of Cologne took just over five hours. “Helga Brunner . . . she’s seventy-seven now? Do you think she’ll remember my mother?”

  “She’s likely to remember one of the Kirchmann women. Frau Kirchmann was more her age.”

  “Yes, of course.” I drummed my nails against my knee. I felt like I was going to meet my mother for the first time—which was silly. Please, God, please let me see her as she was. Help me understand the woman she was before life and Grandfather changed her.

  We stood before the painted black door and rang the bell. It took a few minutes—minutes in which I almost despaired of anyone answering—before we heard the slow but rhythmic tapping of a cane and the shuffling of slippered feet.

  The door opened to reveal a woman who looked more than ninety.

  “Frau Brunner?” Carl asked.

  “Ja? I am Helga Brunner. You are . . . ?”

  “Carl Schmidt, a friend and driver of Hannah Sterling, the daughter of the woman we wanted to talk with you about. Do you remember my telephone call?”

  “I am old, young man, and a bit decrepit, not senile.”

  “Forgive me, Frau Brunner, I—”

  “Never mind. You are young, as if that is an excuse. Come in, come in.”

  “Danke schön, Frau Brunner.” I stepped through the door. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me. There’s so much I want to know about my mother.” I followed her into her sitting room and bit my lip to stop my babbling.

  She motioned us toward her settee while she sat down heavily in a straight-back chair and pushed her three-pronged cane aside, staring at me through thick glasses. “You don’t look much like your Mutter.”

  “You remember her? Lieselotte Kirchmann?”

  “Lieselotte? Nein, nein! I mean, I did not know her name, but she was the young one. There were two women together—like mother and daughter, but not by birth.” She smiled softly. “So, our little mama finally got her answer.”

  “Her answer? Anything you can tell me about my mother I would truly appreciate.”

  “You say that now, but you may not appreciate all I have to tell, what I remember. Horrendous days. Truth is often hard to understand, sometimes harder to believe.”

  “I’m not afraid to hear whatever you might say.”

  She nodded, and her rheumy eye took my measure. “Perhaps. It is difficult—very difficult—to learn of violations to your mother, your grandmother.”

  “My grandmother?” My throat constricted; I was certain she did not mean Elsa Sommer. “My mother never told me the name of my real father. She married someone after the war—an American, who raised me as his own. I’ve only learned, since Mama’s death, that he could not have been my birth father. She didn’t know him then.” The math wasn’t right. Oh, Aunt Lavinia, if you could see me now.

  Frau Brunner’s eyes rose and she nodded slowly. “That war produced a great many orphans, and stories to explain their existence.”

  I wasn’t sure I understood. “Please tell me anything you know, anything you even suspect from that time.”

  Frau Brunner shifted in her seat, straightening her back. She closed her eyes and remembered aloud, “We told each other our stories—a half-dozen times, a dozen. We rehearsed lines of plays. We shared the tedious details of recipes, how to turn a collar, how to smock a dress, how to knit a particularly difficult pattern. We recited Scripture and poems and sang songs until our vocal cords could not contribute anything more. Starving and thirsty and beaten, but we talked on—whenever we could get away with it.”

  “You were a community of women.” I understood how important that could be, at least in theory.

  “We did all to survive, to keep our sanity. The Nazis did everything to dehumanize us—to steal our dignity. Talking about daily life, the life we’d left behind, reminded us of who we were.”

  I remembered Herr Horowitz and bit my lip. “You were already there when my mother came?”

  She nodded. “Such a pretty girl—so frightened. She stuck like glue to her mother-in-law. But the older woman could not keep the guards away.”

  “The guards?” I felt the sickening rumble of snares in my stomach.

  “You are certain you want to hear?”

  “Yes, please.” I held my breath.

  “She’d been married such a short time.”

  “Two days, when they arrested her, I think.”

  “Ja, two days with her husband and his family. I did not know the full story, but I gathered that her father did not approve the marriage, that he denounced them, turned them in—the entire family of her husband—to the Gestapo.”

  I nodded, swallowing.

  “The older woman was rumored to be half-Jewish, but some mistake in the lists occurred and she was not sent to the Jew barracks—which assuredly saved her life. She and the young one, both convicted of harboring Jews—a criminal offense—were assigned to our barracks.

  “The older woman encouraged the younger to tell the guard that there had been a great mistake, to contact her father—an important Nazi who would surely reward him handsomely. But the girl refused to leave her—like a daughter to her, and the older woman a mother. A Ruth and Naomi pairing, if I ever saw such. I think of them so.”

  Thank You, God, that Mama had such a woman in her life as Frau Kirchmann. What would it be like to have a mother love me like that?

  “When they had taken our clothes and shoes and shaved our hair, they stole even our names, that remnant of our identity. Numbers replaced them.”

  “Did you know Frau Kirchmann’s name—the older Frau Kirchmann?”

  Frau Brunner opened her eyes and smiled sadly. “I remember all the numbers of the women in that barracks, shouted out in roll call day after day. The ones who walked out at the end and the ones who never walked out. But I did not know their names—at least not most of their names.”

  “I understand.”

  “As I said . . .” Frau Brunner closed her eyes as if it helped her remember. “The young woman, so very beautiful—I still see her golden hair. There was one guard in particular, very soon after the two women arrived . . . Something to do with a mix-up in the names of the older woman’s daughter and a search for the missing daughter of a Nazi Party member—I don’t know how it happened that he knew.”

  “Yes, Carl’s parents said that the day they were arrested, the youngest girl was away. They must have thought my mother was that girl, her sister-in-law—at least that’s what we think.”

  “Possibly. The older woman worried over her daughter but was careful not to speak of it much. Informants in the barracks—always. Information was exchanged for a slic
e of bread, a bit of potato, a needle and thread, old newspaper to line our clothes against the cold. If word got out that there was a family member not arrested, they would surely go after her. If not, she might be safe.”

  “The women turned on one another?”

  Frau Brunner shrugged. “Ja, for favors. But not all. You must understand this. We were shouted at day and night, called bad names . . . no longer treated as human, and in time, we stopped thinking of ourselves as human. That is what they wanted, what they worked toward—to dehumanize us, to make us compliant so we responded submissively, without thinking, without reasoning. Under such circumstances, it does not take long to behave as a mangy dog begging a bone—to fight one another over bones.”

  “Someone reported my mother?”

  Frau Brunner shook her head. “This I do not know, but a guard learned that her father was a Nazi. One night, as we returned from work at the factory, the guard pulled the younger woman from our ranks. I don’t know all that happened, but I think she believed her father appeared—that he rejected her.”

  “Her father saw her there, and left?” Carl broke in.

  “Ja, this is true—so she thought. She believed she heard his voice.” Frau Brunner shrugged. “At any rate, she was not released.” She sighed as if the story had sapped her energy. “None of us chose Ravensbrück. We all suffered, some more than others.”

  “Grandfather actually left her there. He was there, and he walked away, leaving his daughter.” I said the words, still trying to comprehend.

  “Ja. But the guard was not through. He’d expected reward for his discovery and evidently received reprimand. He wanted revenge.”

  “Revenge?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this.

  Frau Brunner stared at me so long I thought she might have forgotten my question. “He raped her. And then he brought two others to rape her.”

  The world dropped from beneath my feet. Mama! Oh, Mama!

  “She missed her monthly. But that was not unusual. So little food and we were worked so hard that most women dried up. It didn’t take long.”

  “She was preg—”

  “Ja, she was pregnant, and she kept the baby, though she risked her life to do so.” Frau Brunner smiled. “When were you born, Hannah?”

  “June 5, 1945.”

  “A miracle from Ravensbrück.”

  I pulled away. “You’ve just told me my father was a Nazi—a criminal guard.”

  “Nein,” she retorted. “This I did not say. I say only that your mother did not know the father of her baby, that she risked everything to carry her baby. Pregnant women were eliminated or experimented upon—and yet here you are, alive.

  “Two sisters—Dutch women, I think . . . Such preachers they were. They and the older woman and perhaps a half dozen of us women in the barracks worked to help your mother carry you. We shared our food—a crust of bread here and there, only—but that was our ration, our thread to life. We kept the little mama warm at night and took turns doing what we could to make her load lighter in the day while we all worked, nearly to death.

  “One of the sisters died—I don’t know her name. But I remember her as a bright light. That is all I can say—she radiated light among us. And then the other sister—the one who has written the book about it all—was released not so very long after.”

  “And the baby lived.” But she ignored me.

  “Finally, the two women—the older first, and later the younger, your Mutter—were sent away. I don’t know where. Many women were shipped or marched elsewhere near the end of the war.”

  She sat back, taking me in. “Until Herr Schmidt telephoned me, I thought perhaps they had perished. Now, I see they live on in you.” She smiled. “The promise of a baby brought life and hope to our barracks, no matter that we all risked our lives to see you live. She could have aborted you—there were ways. But she didn’t. She chose to give you life.”

  “But my father—”

  “Nein, I say again, she didn’t know the father—how could she tell? Her husband? One of those wicked guards? But seeing you now, I believe . . . yes, I believe you must have been her husband’s child. How else could you have the eyes of her Naomi?”

  We drove back to Berlin, stopping only for dinner in a lovely old hotel. But the restaurant’s mesmerizing music—Frank Sinatra in English—the warmth of the snapping wood fire, the sweet white dessert wine, and the yellow table roses served only to mellow me to the point of sleepiness, and numbness.

  “It’s been an exhausting day for you.” Carl kneaded my palm with his fingers.

  “I just keep thinking about my mother. Wondering how she endured any of it. Everything Frau Brunner told me about her—I never knew. And I can’t help but wonder if her memories are reliable.”

  “She mentioned two sisters. Have you heard of them?”

  “No.”

  “I remember a few women with the same name from the lists I saw. One was Cornelia ten Boom and her sister—very much in the news these days. She’s written a book—her story of her time in Ravensbrück. The Hiding Place, they call it.”

  “So they really were there at the same time, or else Frau Brunner has read the book and incorporated their story into her memories.”

  “I do not doubt her mental capacity. The thing that I could not comprehend was how Herr Sommer saw his daughter in that vile place and did nothing to help her, to save her.”

  “She wouldn’t bend to his will.” It was the thing I knew most about Grandfather, the thing I could also understand about my mother.

  “Nein, but how could he abandon and condemn his own child? This I cannot understand.”

  I pressed his hand in return. “That’s because you’re a good man. Not all men are good.”

  Carl shook his head. “He spent an entire life scheming and stealing and condemning others to fates worse than death . . . and for what? What did he gain? A closet full of treasures he could not enjoy, did not dare to show to the world? And no one to share them with. A pitiable, wasted life.”

  “I can’t pity him. And I can’t forgive him. I’ll never forgive him, and yet I’m so very sad.”

  “No, Hannah. Such bitterness will eat you away. Do not let him rob your life as well.”

  “I’ll take that risk. He’s dead and ashes, but I still want to shake him.”

  “Shake him? Is that an American cure?” He smiled.

  “Maybe a Southern one—a good old North Carolina mountain-man cure.”

  “And you are now a mountain woman? I thought you were the ‘miracle of Ravensbrück.’” He smiled broader, but not in a teasing way.

  “It’s a miracle that I lived—that my mother kept me. But I don’t know why. I can’t help but think Frau Brunner was romanticizing about Frau Kirchmann being my grandmother. How can she remember her eyes after all these years?

  “And although I hate to say it, I don’t think my mother especially loved me. She kept me at arm’s length. If anything, I think that would be proof that she didn’t believe I was Lukas’s daughter, that I was . . . the child of . . .” I couldn’t say it.

  “And for you, this is hard?”

  “Well, of course it’s hard! To think I might have been the product of my mother’s multiple raping? I’m sick. I’m absolutely sick.”

  “Then we must learn the identity of your father—if we can.”

  “I don’t see how that’s possible. Frau Brunner said Mama and her mother-in-law were sent away. Even she didn’t know where. We don’t know what happened to them. I don’t even know how Mama met my fa—Joe Sterling.”

  “You’re forgetting Lukas and Marta.”

  “Finding them might explain what happened to them, but they won’t be able to tell me who my father is—not if Mama didn’t know.”

  “Frau Brunner only said your Mutter didn’t know in Ravensbrück. Perhaps she knew later.”

  “I can’t change the past. But, oh, I wish Lukas could be my father. I would so prefer that to—to—”
r />   “We must find him—and Marta.”

  “That will certainly require a miracle.”

  “Another miracle.” Carl squeezed my hand. “I believe they follow you, Hannah Sterling.”

  When we returned to Berlin, we found the police surrounding Grandfather’s house, tramping the snow in and out of the front and back doors. The neighbor across the street, the same one Geoffrey had observed spying on Dr. Peterson’s tirade, had reported the burglary.

  Carl spoke at length with the policeman in German, as well as Frau Huber, the neighbor. I waited as patiently as I could.

  When they’d finished, Carl turned to me, eyebrows raised. “Thanks to the inquisitive Frau Huber, the illustrious Dr. Peterson is now in custody.”

  “You’re kidding. He tried to break in?”

  “Ach, he broke in, for certain. Frau Huber saw us leave this morning, knew the house was empty.”

  “I’ll bet she did.” I smiled, and Carl winked.

  “So, when she saw the curtains suddenly drawn closed and no car in the drive, she suspected someone was in the house and telephoned the Polizei. By the time they arrived, Dr. Peterson was on his way out the door with fifty thousand marks.”

  “Fifty thou—”

  “Shh.” Carl pulled me aside. “Evidently there was a safe built into the floor in the library. That is what was robbed.”

  “I didn’t know one existed.”

  “Peterson evidently knew.”

  “That’s why he wanted the house and the ledger. Do you think that means he doesn’t know about—”

  “I suspect Herr Sommer never showed it to him, though perhaps he knows about it in theory and intended to find it. This safe must contain all Herr Sommer had converted to cash.”

  “Then Dr. Peterson has no idea how much—”

  “Probably not.”

  “Excuse me, Carl; I must thank Frau Huber personally—and profusely.”

  40

  LIESELOTTE KIRCHMANN

  APRIL 1945

  I lost track of the days spent on the floor of the stationary cattle car. Day passed into night and night into day, and the cycle repeated. Surely we’d been forgotten. Then, without warning, the door would slide open and a basket of turnips might be thrown in, or a pail of water set just inside before the door slammed shut again. Those nearest the door got the water. The rest of us had fallen too weak to fight for it. One by one, each day, another closed her eyes forever.