Ilse asked Keegan if he could at least try to find out whether the two SS officials were still in Innsbruck. ‘Though he was pessimistic, he rang up an American agent in the town. The answer was negative. The agent didn’t have “the foggiest idea” as Keegan put it. The agent said that all SS had escaped from the city. “Tell the lady that it is hopeless for her to think she can accomplish anything here. If she rushes around on a wild goose chase she’ll never find the children. A special committee will be set up for that sort of thing. It has to be done systematically.’
As Munich was in the US occupation zone, the French did not have an office in the city. At a loss as to how to obtain a permit, Ilse hurried to the Displaced Persons Bureau. The different occupation zones were only just being enforced and her one hope was that the officials at the bureau did not know that the French now controlled the area round Innsbruck: ‘I found a young, innocent-looking American sergeant running things. I was in luck! Immediately and without any fuss he wrote out an official permit for us to travel to Innsbruck. It was only valid for a day but it seemed like solid gold to me. Thanking him profoundly, at which he seemed rather amazed, I dashed down the stairs and out to the car, shouting to Almuth, “I’ve got it, I’ve got it!”’
Innsbruck was 75 miles from Ebenhausen and they left at dawn the next morning. Crossing into Austria over the Scharnitz Pass, they took the same route as the SS convoy that had transported Fey and the other Prominenten from Dachau to Reichenau two months before.
Arriving in the city, they went straight to the Archbishop’s Palace overlooking the Gestapo’s old headquarters. Ilse hoped someone there might know about missing children but, when they knocked at the main door, a servant came out and said, ‘Their Honours are still asleep and cannot be disturbed.’
Ilse was furious: ‘Can you imagine that! There was the whole of Europe on its knees and Their Honours were sleeping!’
Next, they went to the main police station, hoping to obtain information about the SS officials whose names Almuth remembered. Again, they met with indifference. The police commander simply shrugged his shoulders and said that most SS and Gestapo officials were in hiding under false names and with false papers.
By then it was almost twelve o’clock; over half the day granted by the precious travel permit had already gone. Despairing, and running out of time, they decided to split up. Ilse would try the prison where Fey had been detained and Almuth the Albergerhof; according to one of the two SS officials, Fey and the boys had stayed at the hotel on their first night in Innsbruck.
Ilse was able to see the prison governor straight away. Nazi-appointed personnel had not been purged and he had been in charge nine months earlier when Fey had been at Adamgasse 1. While he remembered her well, he had no information about the children: they had been the responsibility of the SS, over whom he had no jurisdiction. He was, however, sympathetic and urged Ilse to enquire at the Jugendamt – the Youth Assistance Office. It was possible one of the clerks would know the names of local SS women who had run the various orphanages in the area.
This office was located at the town hall, a gloomy baroque building. Inside, Ilse found a maze of offices and corridors: ‘I rushed from one office to the other, asking for the Jugendamt. I was told to go to Room 140, but the whole place was in such chaos that nobody could tell me where it was. It was already past two o’clock and the permit was due to expire in less than three hours. Finally, I found the room, only to be told, “Sorry, Madame, displaced children are not the responsibility of this office. There is a special office for this. You have to go … etc. etc.”’
At her wits’ end, Ilse told the clerk that she simply had no time to find yet another office and pleaded with him to make a few calls on her behalf. Seeing her distress, he picked up the phone and started calling people he thought might know where children seized by the Gestapo had been taken. The conversations, as Ilse described, were awkward. ‘Since no one would admit to being directly involved, he had to be extremely diplomatic. Finally, after about five calls, he got through to a certain Fräulein Schlieger, who, somebody said, had had something to do with the transport of children whose parents had been arrested by the Gestapo. At first, she disclaimed any knowledge. Then, little by little, the clerk managed to extract the names of four “institutes” where the Gestapo often sent children, all fairly close to Innsbruck.’
To passers-by, Ilse must have presented an extraordinary sight on leaving the town hall. Wearing a widow’s veil and clad in traditional mourning dress, she ran through the centre of the city back to the car.
Almuth was waiting for her; by a stroke of extraordinary luck, she had also found an important lead.
It had taken Almuth a while to locate the Albergerhof, which she had visited the previous October when she and her brother had tried to see Fey: ‘I remembered more or less where it was. But I had trouble finding it. Innsbruck had changed so much with all the bombing. You can imagine how shocked I was when I found nothing but a pile of rubble and a half-standing wall where the hotel had been.’
She was about to give up and go back to the car when she saw a shabbily dressed man poking about in the ruins, looking for something to salvage. On the off-chance that he might know something about the place, Almuth went up to him.
Incredibly, the man explained that he had been the chauffeur and handyman at the hotel. She had barely launched into a description of Fey and her two boys, then aged two and three, when the man interrupted her, his expression pained. ‘Of course. I remember the beautiful young lady and the two little boys very well. They were in Room 112,’ he said.
He went on to tell her that he had been polishing the banister rail on the stairs outside the room when two SS women took the children away: ‘One child was screaming wildly and had to be dragged down the stairs.’
Almuth asked him if there was anything else he could remember. He said that he had overheard the women arguing about where they were taking the boys. Struggling to recall the names of the orphanages, after a long pause, he remembered.
‘Wiesenhof and Allgäu,’ he said.
Both were on the list that Ilse had obtained from the Jugendamt.
Wiesenhof was the closest – just 7 miles from Innsbruck – and the clerk had said that the orphanage was for children aged between three and five.
Driving at speed, they went there first.
As they approached the orphanage, Ilse was too agitated to notice the forbidding surroundings – the dense pine forest that enclosed the four-storey building, with its sinister Gothic turret, and the sheer rock, rising from the plateau on which it stood: ‘All I took in was a large white house.’
Frau Buri, the head nurse at the orphanage, showed them inside and Ilse produced the photographs she had of the children. ‘A good-looking woman in her late thirties, she seemed very kind and examined each picture carefully. Then, as I was already thinking of the next place on the list, Frau Buri stopped at the third or fourth picture and exclaimed, “Why, these are the Vorhof brothers, Conrad and Robert. Yes of course they’re here!” With that, Almuth let out a shriek that must have resounded through the whole valley and I burst into a rare fit of tears.’
Frau Buri took them to a large dormitory at the back of the building. Just a few years before, when the Wiesenhof had been a sanatorium run by the Anthroposophy Society, it had been used as a dining room. Senior Nazis, including Rudolf Hess and General Ohlendorf – the murderer of more than 90,000 Jews – had dined here.
Thirty children lay on the rows of beds, taking their afternoon nap. Corrado and Roberto were sleeping side by side. Tiptoeing up to the bed, Ilse had her first glimpse of her lost grandchildren: ‘I could see their little blond heads sticking out from under the bedclothes. They looked like little angels. But we did not want to wake them, so we slipped out of the room to let them finish their sleep.’
While they were waiting in Frau Buri’s office, Ilse plied her with questions. Were the boys well? Did they seem distressed? Had the
y been at the home for long? Watching Buri’s face closely, looking for any indication that she was withholding information or lying, she was reassured by her reply. ‘Frau Buri confessed that she had often wondered who the boys could be, since the SS always changed the smaller children’s names and never gave any information about who they were or why they were being held. She showed me the register she had filled in the night the Gestapo brought the children in: “Vorhof brothers, Conrad and Robert. Mother arrested.” She told us the children had been at the orphanage for seven months. To begin with “Conrad” was very shy and always cried when he was put to bed. Robert, on the other hand, seemed to adjust to the home with much less difficulty and after a while began to play happily with the other children. She said that the brothers hated being separated and that she and the staff had been particularly touched by the way Conrad looked after Robert, helping him dress in the morning.’
Ilse felt a surge of pride when Frau Buri told her that she had tried to persuade ‘Conrad’ to tell her his real name, but he had refused. Her one concern was that both boys had apparently arrived at the Wiesenhof ‘just before or just after Christmas’. Ilse knew from the note Fey dropped from the train that the Gestapo had seized the boys at the end of September. The dates did not add up. Where had they been between October and December? Frau Buri did not know.
After they had been talking for an hour or so, they heard the children getting up. Frau Buri went to fetch the boys and within a few minutes the door opened and she pushed the two little figures through, tactfully closing the door behind her.
Ilse felt as if all the breath had left her: ‘They stood there gazing curiously at us, not saying a word. They looked so beautiful in their white shirts and dark blue shorts. They were obviously excited and their little faces looked so trusting. I knelt down and, grasping Corrado’s tiny shoulders, asked, “Don’t you remember your grandmother?” Without hesitating, he put his arm around my neck and said, “Can we go home now?”’
Yet, to Ilse’s dismay, she did not recognize Roberto. ‘When I had last seen him, he was a small baby, and I realised that I could not be sure he really was Robertino. I tried speaking Italian, but he did not seem to know a word; he only prattled on in an Austrian dialect that I could barely understand. My heart was torn between wanting to rescue this beautiful little boy and worry for my other grandson if this was the wrong child.’
Sitting the boy on her lap, she showed him photographs of Fey and Brazzà, hoping for some sign of recognition: ‘On seeing the photographs, Corrado’s eyes lit up, and he immediately said, “That’s Mama!”, “That’s Brazzà!”, and so on. But the little one just sat there, mute and looking vacant or, when I prompted him, repeating exactly what Corrado had said.
‘I asked Corrado if the boy was his brother, and he said yes and gave him a big hug. But could I be certain? Frau Buri could not explain what had happened to the children before they arrived at the home. What if the boys had initially been split up and Corrado was only later told that this was his brother?’
Then, suddenly, as Ilse was wondering what to do next, the boy pointed at a tiny white spot on one of the photographs and started bouncing up and down on her lap.
‘Mirko!’ he shouted. ‘Mirko!’
‘My God! My heart jumped!’ Ilse later told Fey. ‘He kept staring at that little white horse, a small fleck on the castle lawn, as if it were the only thing in the world. At last I was sure. The children had been found!’
With only an hour on the travel permit still to run, Ilse and Almuth left almost immediately, taking the boys with them. As they were leaving, Frau Buri told them they had been extremely lucky. All Nazi children’s homes, including Wiesenhof, were to be closed within the next ten days. After that, unclaimed children were to be given over for adoption to local farmers. She had already arranged a home for Corrado and Roberto and they were due to move there the following week. Had this happened, she said, the children would probably have been ‘lost forever’.
41.
The breakdown in communications between Germany and Italy meant that it was to be another two months before Fey and Detalmo heard that the boys had been found.
On the morning of Tuesday 11 September 1945, exactly one year after the SS first arrested her at Brazzà, Fey was working in the rose garden next to the chapel when Nonino appeared with a telegram. She assumed it was from Detalmo; he was in Rome and had already sent three or four cables. Absent-mindedly, Fey opened the envelope, still talking to Nonino: ‘At first I could not understand the message. Then I stopped talking and reread it word by word. I could not believe it. It was over! The children had been found!’
As soon as Ilse arrived back at Ebenhausen with the children, she had written to a friend in Switzerland asking him to send word to Detalmo. It had taken eight weeks for the letter to reach him in Rome. Detalmo’s telegram to Fey read:
CHILDREN FOUND THEY ARE WITH YOUR MOTHER STOP HAD CONFIRMATION CALLING COLONEL WILLE ZURICH STOP WILLE RECEIVED LETTER FROM YOUR MOTHER WITH THE NEWS STOP THEY ARE IN EXCELLENT HEALTH STOP TRIED TO TELEPHONE YOU BUT IN VAIN DUE TO BAD WEATHER HOPE TO HAVE PERMITS FOR GERMANY WITHIN A FEW DAYS LOVE DETALMO
The permits Detalmo hoped for did not materialize. He tried everything, but everywhere he met with the standard response: ‘Italian citizens are not yet allowed to travel to Germany.’
A long month passed. Then Prime Minister Ferruccio Parri, whose private secretary Detalmo was at the time, asked him to arrange a reception at the Grand Hotel to honour General Mark Clark. In June 1944 Clark’s 5th Army had liberated Rome and he was now commander-in-chief of US occupational forces in Austria.
Hundreds of officers and politicians attended the reception. At the end of his tether, having tried everything, Detalmo waited for a chance to speak to the general. The moment came when he saw Clark break away from a group of reporters. Rushing over to him, he offered him a whisky. Then he told him about his father-in-law and the missing boys, and asked for his help. In one stroke, the impenetrable wall of bureaucracy gave way. Visibly moved, Clark turned to an aide and instructed him to provide Detalmo with a jeep and a pass to ‘travel to Germany on special business’. He also asked the officer to contact Ilse at Ebenhausen to let her know that Detalmo would be coming to collect the children.
The jeep and the invaluable permit were delivered to Detalmo’s palazzo in Via Panama the next morning. Using the generous petrol coupons provided, he drove through the night to Brazzà. Unable to get through to Fey, when he suddenly appeared on the drive she was bowled over: ‘There he was with a US Army jeep, in US uniform and boots, and with his Italian cavalry officer’s cap on! Finally, we were really going to see the boys!’
Wing Commander Colin Falconer, Foster’s successor, immediately offered them three rooms on the ground floor of the villa and they spent the day putting them in order. They also called on the parish priest to ask him to arrange a special Mass in the tenth-century chapel at Brazzà to be held on their return. The chapel was dedicated to St Leonardo, the patron saint of prisoners, and it seemed fitting to hold a service of thanksgiving to celebrate the children’s safe homecoming.fn1 After the Mass, there was to be a big party, which Fey planned with Bovolenta: ‘We asked everyone to come – friends, neighbours and all the contadini. There was to be food and wine for all, and music and dancing. We wanted to bring everybody together on that day so that we could lay to rest our sufferings and private tragedies. Detalmo said it would mark the end of the past and the beginning of a better life for all of us.’
Promptly, at six o’clock the next morning, they left for Ebenhausen. The jeep was packed with supplies – sacks of flour and sugar, enormous hams, huge rounds of cheese, salamis, fruit and several hundred eggs – things Fey knew her mother would appreciate, given the shortage of food in Germany.
It was already autumn and the trees were turning, the gold and copper colours brilliant against the snow-capped mountains. Fey and Detalmo barely exchanged a word on the journey. ‘We w
ere so intent on getting to Ebenhausen, we just stared straight ahead, praying there would be no hold-ups. We had no difficulty at the frontier. The permit worked wonders, and soldiers waved us through the checkpoints as if we were very important people.’
After driving without pause for almost ten hours, at four o’clock in the afternoon, they dropped down over the brow of the hill behind Ebenhausen and Fey saw the familiar spire of the church ahead. ‘As we came closer and closer to the house, I felt sick with excitement.’
Ilse had heard their car coming up the gravel drive and was standing on the doorstep. Dressed in black, she looked much thinner than Fey remembered: ‘It had been so long and so much had happened that, for a moment, it did not seem real. I jumped down from the jeep and rushed up to hug her. Choking with emotion, I managed to say “Poor Mutti” and her eyes filled with tears. But that was all. Her grief over my father’s death was locked inside her. She could not or did not want to express it, even to me.’
Corrado and Roberto were out on a walk with Almuth and an agonizing wait followed, which to Fey, after all the months of waiting, seemed the longest wait of all. ‘We sat down to tea as if it were the most normal thing in the world. As we were talking, Detalmo and I could not stop staring at the door, wondering just what we would find after one year. We talked about how we should react when Corradino and Robertino walked in. Should we hug them or should we hold back and be more formal? In the end, we decided to do the latter to see how the boys themselves responded.
‘After a while we heard some footsteps and the door flew open. In walked Almuth with the children. They stood there in front of us and there was complete silence. I was trying terribly hard not to cry. Then, bending gently over Corrado, Almuth whispered, “Do you recognize that person?” He blushed and said immediately, “Yes, it’s Mama.” Pointing at Detalmo, Almuth asked him, “And do you know that man there?” Staring wide-eyed at Detalmo, Corrado hesitated for a moment. Then he said excitedly, “Yes, it’s Papa! From the photograph!”
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