The Lost Boys

by Catherine Bailey

  As the boat pulled away from the quay, I felt my heart breaking into a thousand pieces. Poor Detalmo tried to console me but I just sobbed and sobbed.

  PART SIX

  * * *

  39.

  Detalmo had not received any of the letters Fey wrote during her captivity or the telegrams friends at Brazzà had sent via the Red Cross, telling him that she and the boys had been arrested.

  At the time of their arrest – September 1944 – Detalmo was in Rome, where he was working as political secretary to Sergio Fenoaltea, a senior minister in Italy’s first democratic government in twenty years. At this stage in the war, Italy remained divided. Mussolini’s puppet regime – de facto the Germans – controlled the north of the country, and the Allies – in conjunction with Prime Minister Bonomi’s new government – the south. Detalmo’s job, which involved liaising with the Allies and working on political strategy with his colleagues in the Partito d’Azione, meant that he was a prominent figure. But the Red Cross, inundated with tens of thousands of requests from Italians anxious for news of relatives in the Nazi-occupied north, had failed to pass on the telegrams and it had been five months before he learned that the Gestapo had taken Fey and the children.

  That autumn, the German Army’s entrenched position along the Gustav Line, a series of heavily fortified defences stretching across central Italy, made it almost impossible for partisan couriers to carry messages between the north and south. It was only after the Allies launched their winter offensive in January 1945 that the situation changed and it was not until February that Detalmo received the note from Nonino, sent via an underground courier, telling him that Fey had been arrested and that she and the boys had been deported to Innsbruck. It explains why, when Detalmo arrived at Capri, he expected to see the boys: he assumed that they had remained with Fey throughout her imprisonment.

  On the night he and Fey arrived back in Rome from Capri, thrilled to be able to tell his mother-in-law that she was home, Detalmo sat down to write to Ilse. It was the first letter he had written since her husband’s execution the previous September:

  29 May 1945

  My dear Mutti

  It is very difficult to write to you, and I don’t know how to begin. I’m sure you can imagine my thoughts and feelings. September 1944 was very painful for me, I thought of you every moment. Later, in February, I found out about Fey’s deportation five months earlier. This made it all the worse. I withdrew from every activity, feeling that the world had collapsed around me. I realised that there wouldn’t be much interest in life without Fey, and I awaited my own sentence.

  Fey has been spared. I got her back in good health, and she encloses her own letter for you. You will see her distressing news about the boys. I thought it best for her to tell you the details.

  Now I hope to find the two little ones. If this happens, the balance will have closed with the loss of a father-in-law, a friend who can never be replaced.

  My thoughts are not too clear. They shift from Christian patience to anarchic rebellion. I am not prepared to accept what has happened to us. If I still feel like fighting and working for a better world, it is only out of loyalty to the sacrifice of those who have shown us the way. Father has been a great example for us, and we are still under his shadow. It is as if an enduring monument has been raised inside our hearts.

  Fey has been wonderful. There must have been some of your spirit in her; otherwise she could not have pulled through the prisons and the camps. I feel like marrying Fey anew. I would marry her ten times if I had ten lives.

  Dear Mutti, until we hear from you, very much love,

  Detalmo.

  Despite his touching faith in Fey’s ability to ‘pull through’, in the weeks after she arrived back in Rome, unsurprisingly, she came close to suffering a complete breakdown. With her children still missing, and with her love for Alex having subsumed her relationship with her husband, it seemed all the meaning in her life lay in the past: in her childhood in Rome; in the early years of her marriage; in the war years at Brazzà with the children; and in the close bonds she had formed with the other prisoners in the camps. ‘I was twenty-five years old and I felt my life was over,’ she wrote.

  Finding it extremely difficult to engage in everyday tasks, she barely ate or slept. She suffered from panic attacks and could not relax. Her mind was a constant spiral of thoughts, often flipping back to traumatic events, which she felt Detalmo, however supportive and sympathetic, could never understand: ‘It was not his fault; he had not been behind those walls.’

  Her sense of isolation was reinforced by the world he moved in. His job in government meant he was expected to attend a constant round of official dinners, receptions and cocktail parties hosted in palazzi belonging to the ‘Via Veneto set’. During his time in the Resistance, Detalmo had witnessed the collaboration between the Nazis and some of Rome’s oldest aristocratic families at close hand and Fey was shocked to hear how they had behaved after the Allies liberated the city. ‘Detalmo described how, within the space of two days, American officers had replaced Germans on the Via Veneto cocktail circuit. There had been farewell dinners in the best houses for the German commander Field Marshal Kesselring. A few days later, there had been welcome dinners in these same houses for the head of the Allied forces, General Mark W. Clark.’

  Revisiting this world, so familiar from her childhood, Fey felt completely alienated: ‘Every landmark, every street corner, brought back memories: of my growing up at the embassy, of my friends from school, of the balls and parties, of my father. But it felt wrong. Nothing seemed to have changed. There was no sign of the horror and destruction that had ravaged the rest of Europe. The Via Veneto people lived just like they had before, taking pleasure from frivolous and meaningless things, as if there had never been a Stalingrad, a Dunkirk or a Buchenwald. Understandably, Detalmo wanted me to accompany him to these receptions. He thought it would help me overcome memories of my imprisonment and keep my mind from dwelling on the fate of the boys. But I did not want to talk to people, especially people I did not know and to whom I had to pretend that nothing had happened, so I often found excuses to stay at home.’

  Fey’s struggle to readjust to normal life was unexceptional. Across Europe, millions were mourning the loss of loved ones and endeavouring – or failing – to rebuild relationships with husbands and wives after years of separation. Millions more – prisoners who had managed to survive the Nazi death camps without the privileged treatment meted out to Fey and the other Prominenten, and members of the armed forces, who had fought in any number of air, sea or land battles – had endured far worse. With such a commonality of experience, this was normal life. As a consequence, in country after country, there was no institutional response to this collective emotional crisis. People had to find their own coping mechanisms.

  For Fey, recovery lay in finding a way to vocalize her experiences – and her emotions – to Detalmo. First, however, she bought herself a fan to help her overcome her anxiety attacks. ‘It was amazing how this small gesture helped restore my confidence,’ she wrote. ‘In crowded situations or on the rare occasions that I went to one of Detalmo’s receptions, as soon as I felt a wave of panic coming on, I used the fan: it was cooling and it gave me something to do with my hands.’

  Recognizing that she found it almost impossible to talk to Detalmo about her experiences, Fey decided to write a memoir about her captivity and her time alone at Brazzà. In writing a frank account – including her relationship with Alex, and her feelings of resentment towards Detalmo for abandoning her and the children – she hoped he would understand and they could begin to rebuild their marriage.

  And yet, as Fey acknowledged, however separate she felt from her husband, the loss of the children bound them together. They had a shared understanding in the pain of their loss and a joint purpose in searching for the boys. Very quickly, this was heightened by fury and frustration.

  In Anacapri, they had begun planning their search; Germ
any and Austria were the obvious places to start. But on their return to Rome, they discovered that the regulations imposed by the Allied Military Government prevented them from setting out to find the boys.

  ‘For eight months I had longed for the moment when I could begin the search for the children but I remained as helpless and trapped as I had been in the camps,’ Fey wrote.

  Due to Italy’s status as a co-belligerent, all travel for Italian nationals was forbidden; to go any distance beyond 10 kilometres required a permit from the Allied authorities. Using his government connections, Detalmo tried pulling every string, but it was impossible. ‘In response to our pleas to be allowed to go to Germany to search for the children,’ Fey recalled, ‘one official after another repeated that doing so was strictly forbidden. We tried every conceivable means to get a travel pass, but in every office we met with the same response: “Can you imagine what would happen if we let everybody in Europe go out and search for their missing families?” I could understand their reasoning. I had seen the chaos in the former Reich – the destruction of towns and cities, the endless columns of refugees. But Detalmo just got furious, saying bitterly that of the “everybody” the officials talked about, many were long dead.’

  Upwards of 19 million Europeans had been killed in the war and tens of millions more were dispersed across the continent. In the summer of 1945, in the area encompassing the former German Reich, there were over 25 million ‘displaced persons’ – the term used by the Allies to categorize refugees and those who were homeless.1 Of these, a large number were children.

  During the war, more than at any other time in history, children had suffered on an unprecedented scale. They had been murdered, kidnapped, starved and abused. In the concentration camps alone, as many as 1.5 million children had been killed, about 1 million of them Jewish.2 Another 50,000 children from Nazi-occupied Europe, especially Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands, were estimated to have been ‘Germanized’ in the Nazi period – i.e. taken from their families, stripped of their identity and indoctrinated in so-called Heimschulen (boarding schools), institutions of the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (NSV) or in orphanages run by the Lebensborn society.3, fn1,fn2

  Whether through bombings, military service, evacuation, deportation, forced labour, ethnic cleansing or murder, huge numbers of children had been separated from their families.4 The Red Cross estimated that, in Europe alone, 13 million had lost parents.5 In the final days of the war, the dire needs of those found among the ruins of towns and cities, trekking westward on crowded roads or housed in refugee camps all over Europe, became abundantly clear.6 In the Soviet zone of occupation there were no fewer than 1.17 million unaccompanied children, the majority of whom were German.7

  As early as 1943, the Allies realized that displaced people would pose a grave problem when the war ended, and in an effort to avoid a crisis they created UNRRA to care for and repatriate those who had been displaced.fn3,8 But when the time came, facing a series of daunting challenges – the need to feed and house the vast numbers of refugees, and to punish those guilty of war crimes – it was beyond the Allies’ capabilities to identify and reunite all unaccompanied children with their families.9

  Tragically, retribution played a part in dealing with these unsupervised children. In setting up the Child Search arm of UNRRA, one of the guiding principles was that efforts to locate those missing, of which there were hundreds of thousands, would exclude ‘enemy’ children.10 Instead, the agency’s limited resources were allocated to prioritizing the identification of ‘Germanized’ and ‘Allied’ children (those belonging to nations on the winning side), and the small percentage of Jewish children who had survived the concentration camps.

  In seeking to reunite them with their families, the agency’s officials faced an almost impossible task. Many families could not be re-established because both parents were dead; fathers had died in the fighting, were missing or were prisoners of war; mothers had died in Allied bombing raids, starved or simply disappeared into the East as forced labour.11 The concentration camps had also claimed many parents, leaving their children orphaned. Children arriving in the refugee camps were frequently unidentifiable.12 Although some had name tags around their necks or names sewn into their clothing, most did not. Those accompanying them occasionally had some information, but often nothing was known beyond the point of origin of their train, bus or boat. Further, a name tag did not necessarily confirm a child’s identity. As one official wrote, ‘From experience we have learned that children from these transports are often labelled with the wrong names.’13 The fact that ‘the child’s name is inscribed in her dress’, he added, ‘is absolutely not definitive, since in many cases it has become clear that children – especially ones sent on by the NSV – are very often wearing other children’s clothing.’

  In June 1945, for unsupervised German children, no effective system to locate, support and reunite them with their families was in place. While the Allied authorities did their best to offer them some sort of temporary stability by feeding and housing them in refugee camps, as ‘enemy children’ it was up to their relatives to find them.14 The majority had fled from the rapidly advancing Soviet Army; but there were hundreds of thousands of others who had been unable to escape, either because they were too young or too sick to travel or because they had been wounded.15 Some remained in children’s homes in areas that no longer belonged to Germany; others, found by the roadside after their mothers had died on the treks from the east, had been rounded up by Soviet troops and sent to orphanages in Russia. Yet more were held by foster families reluctant to give them up.

  As Fey and Detalmo were all too aware, while Corrado and Roberto were technically both ‘Allied’ and ‘Germanized’ children in that they were of Italian nationality and had been kidnapped by the Nazis, the SS had given them false German identities. Inevitably, the Allies would categorize them as enemy children. UNRRA officials were scouring the very camps where the boys could be, looking for Jewish, ‘Germanized’ and ‘Allied’ children, but their brief was to leave German children in situ. And because UNRRA records were confidential, parents looking for missing ‘enemy’ children could not access them. There was an outside chance that Corrado, who had a grasp of English, might tell the officials his real name. But after the trauma of what had happened to him, would he remember his name or his few words of English? Fey clung to the hope that he would, yet in her heart she knew this was a fantasy. A four-year-old boy could hardly be expected to have the presence of mind to speak to UNRRA officials.

  Fey and Detalmo remained in Rome throughout that June. ‘The frustration of that period was unbearable,’ she wrote. ‘Helpless in the face of visions of the children uncared for, perhaps even starving, we kicked our heels, wasting time and effort in the continuous importuning of bureaucrats. They remained inflexible.’

  To help overcome her frustration, Fey spent most of that period sending out posters and pamphlets with details of the children. They went to any organization or individual she and Detalmo could think of: to every bishop and archbishop in Germany and Austria; to the Italian, German and International Red Cross; to the British, French and American secret services; to the Italian ambassadors in Washington and Warsaw; to Vatican Radio and to countless other addresses.

  The notices – the size of a sheet of A4 or an advertising poster which could be pinned to a wall – were printed in five different languages: German, English, French, Russian and Italian. Beside a large photograph of Corrado and Roberto was a huge caption: ‘We are searching for these children!’ Beneath it was a physical description of the boys, followed by other information that Fey and Detalmo thought would help to identify them:

  CORRADO PIRZIO-BIROLI, aged 4½

  Italian citizen, Roman Catholic, born in Udine (Italy), Nov 25 1940

  Colour of hair: light blond

  Colour of eyes: light blue

  Complexion: fair, pale

  Language spoken: German (o
wing to detention in Germany), Italian

  Nicknames used: Corradino, Corradinchen

  Words he should remember: Nonino (a butler), Mila (a cook), Mirko (a horse), Oberleutnant Kretschmann (a German officer)

  Clothes: small dark blue coat with cowl made of navy cloth

  ROBERTO PIRZIO-BIROLI, aged 3½

  Italian citizen, Roman Catholic, born in Udine (Italy), Jan 25 1942

  Colour of hair: light blond

  Colour of eyes: light blue

  Complexion: fair and rosy

  Language spoken: German (owing to detention in Germany)

  Nicknames used: Robertino, Robertinchen

  Words he should remember: None

  Clothes: small dark blue coat with cowl made of navy cloth

  It pained Fey to have to list Lieutenant Kretschmann, who had been responsible for the children’s arrest in the first place, among the names Corrado might recognize. But the bond formed between her son and the German officer while he was stationed at Brazzà meant she had no choice but to mention him.

  With every poster Fey sent out, she included a document entitled ‘Suggestions for the Search’. It pointed to her despair and to her exasperation with the Church and Allied authorities. Doubting their ability to think laterally – or to even focus on the search for Corrado and Roberto – by sheer force of will, she sought to attract their attention and to do their thinking for them:

  On 29 Sept 1944 at Innsbruck the children were seized by Gestapo agent Tiefenbrunner and handed over to two SS women working for the NSV (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt). This suggests that the children were interned in one of the NSV institutes, of which there are many in Germany.