Hitler's Forgotten Children (18 page)

From what Maria told Josef, she was the matriarch of the extended Matko family, which had once been involved with the anti-Nazi partisan movement. She was slightly hazy on the details, remembering only that one member of the family had been executed by the Nazis and that she had heard a story, long ago, that three children might have been kidnapped in the early 1940s. It sounded close to the likely Matko family history that I was looking for, and even more promising was the news that she knew the mysterious Erika very well.

But it was the final piece of information that threw me. Herr Focks had persuaded Maria that she should meet me – and that she should bring Erika with her. I was instantly nervous: I wanted desperately to go, but the prospect terrified me. What if these were the ‘wrong' Matkos,
and the trip turned out to be a wild goose chase? I would, I knew, be devastated. And even if these people were my relatives, that didn't mean a meeting would go well; perhaps they would be hostile or somehow resent me, which would be even worse.

The Father Finder was having none of it. He pushed and pushed until I agreed to his plan. This involved flying first to Munich, then on to Ljubljana, the Slovenian national capital. From there I would find a taxi to take me the eighty kilometres to Celje, the main town in the region.

There was an additional reason for going: every autumn a handful of survivors of the Nazis' kidnapping and deportation programme met in Celje. Josef had arranged for me to join them before heading on the next day to Rogaška Slatina, where I was to meet Maria in a cafe. Nor was I to go alone: he had asked a friend of his who spoke Slovenian to accompany me as my translator.

I knew precious little about Slovenia or its history at that point. I didn't even know how the country had come into being after the breakup of Yugoslavia. As the date for my departure approached, I started reading up, hoping to gain some insight into what life might have held for me had I not been stolen for the Lebensborn programme
.

Yugoslavia had been one of the first countries to overthrow its German conquerors. Under the leadership of Josip Tito, the partisans were the most effective anti-Nazi resistance force in occupied Europe; by the middle of 1943 their activity had grown from running sporadic guerrilla raids to causing major military defeats and inflicting heavy casualties that Hitler's army could ill afford. By the start of 1944 they had managed to push the Wehrmacht out of the Serbian regions; a year later all German troops were expelled.

They achieved this with only limited support from the Soviet Union and although Tito's post-war regime was unashamedly communist – a single-party state with little tolerance of dissent or democracy – for the next twenty-five years the country was the most independent of all the Soviet Union's satellites behind the Iron Curtain. It began to distance
itself from Moscow in 1948, determined instead to forge its own brand of socialism. It felt free to criticise the Kremlin and the West in equal measure and was one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement – the group of states which defiantly refused to ally themselves with either side in the Cold War.

But there were always tensions beneath the surface. The new nation was welded together from six separate and frequently hostile republics: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Slovenia. Each of these had very different ethnic, religious and political histories. What held them together was the inspirational figure of Josip Tito. His death in 1980 precipitated an unravelling of the whole country.

Serbs had always been the largest ethnic group in Yugoslavia and prior to the Second World War had been the most dominant force in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. With Tito gone, Serbian communist leader Slobodan Milošević sought to restore this historic supremacy. The other republics, especially Slovenia and Croatia, denounced this power grab but were unable to stop it.

Industrial action by ethnic Albanian miners in Kosovo in 1989 was the spark that ignited the simmering tension. Slovenia and Croatia supported the Albanian miners and the strikes turned into widespread demonstrations demanding a Kosovan republic. This angered Serbia's leadership, which proceeded to use police force against the miners before sending in the Federal Army to restore order.

In January 1990, an extraordinary Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia was convened. Since the country was a one-party state, this was effectively the ruling body for all of the Federal Republic. The meeting degenerated into an argument between Slovenia and Serbia about the future of the nation: in the end the League dissolved itself. The writing was on the wall for the future of Yugoslavia.

The immediate outcome was a constitutional crisis. Fuelled by a toxic rise in ethnic-based nationalism and inspired by the fall of communism across the rest of Eastern Europe, five of the republics demanded
independence and an end to Serbian dominance. The stage was set for war.

What followed was Europe's worst conflict since the Second World War, and one that once again raised the spectre of crimes against humanity. Over the next decade, at least 140,000 people died in the fighting. Hundreds of thousands more – possibly millions – endured ethnic cleansing, rape as a weapon of war, concentration camps and mass bombing.

The first of these dirty wars broke out in Slovenia. In December 1990, 88 per cent of the population voted for full independence from the disintegrating federal republic, knowing that to do so would inevitably lead to an attempted invasion by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People's Army. The fledgling Slovenian government secretly reorganised its antiquated territorial defence force into a well-trained and equipped guerrilla army and the partisan resistance which had once driven Hitler's troops from the country was effectively reborn.

The Slovenes knew that they stood no chance in a conventional battle: the YPA was simply too big and too powerful. So the country prepared for a campaign of guerilla warfare – a return to the resistance tactics of blowing up bridges and small close-quarter attacks in the towns and villages of their nascent nation.

At the same time, Slovenia sought help from the European Community and the United States. Neither was prepared to recognise the country's independence since they found it more convenient to deal with a single federation rather than a series of small states. The rebuff emboldened the Serbs and made a full-blown civil war inevitable.

The first shot was fired by the YPA on 27 June 1990 in the small village of Divača, just seventy-five kilometres from Ljubljana. That same afternoon, Slovenian soldiers shot down two Yugoslavian army helicopters.

Over the next ten days, the fighting moved westward towards Ljubljana, then on past the capital and into the eastern heartland around Celje and Rogaška Slatina. A ceasefire was announced on 6 July: Slovenia
won its independence, though at the cost of at least sixty-two deaths and almost 330 wounded. By contrast with the ensuing conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, this was a small war, but it was the first time since the Nazis had been expelled that Slovenians had their freedom. In some rather inexplicable way, I felt proud.

At the end of September 2003, I flew to Munich. Josef Focks had arranged for me to meet his translator at the airport so we could fly on to Ljubljana together. But by the time our flight was called he had not arrived and I boarded the plane alone. I was already nervous about who or what I would find in Slovenia and, since I spoke only German, I felt vulnerable and exposed. Fortunately the translator managed to get a message to the plane and asked a stewardess to tell me that he had been held up in traffic and would catch a later flight and meet me at Ljubljana.

I waited all day in the airport. I had no signal on my mobile phone, no one seemed to speak German and I could not work out how to use the local payphones. All I could do was sit and hope that my contact would turn up.

By the time he finally arrived it was mid-evening and I was in something of a state. But I had no time to dwell on my feelings: there was to be a meeting of the stolen Slovenian children that evening in the primary school at Celje. This town, I gathered, had been called Cilli during the German occupation, and had been both a centre for partisan resistance and the site of Nazi reprisals.

As we drove through the countryside, I looked out of the window, trying to take in the landscape, the land of my birth. I had wondered beforehand if seeing it for the first time in almost seventy years would prompt some memories: it felt disappointing to find that it did not.

I knew very little about the people I was meeting that evening and was surprised to discover that the event in Celje was a very different
gathering of stolen children from my first encounter. They had started searching for one another as far back as 1962, determined to tell their stories to the (then) Yugoslavian public.

The men and women I met that evening were all in their eighties – between ten and fifteen years older than me. They were the leaders of what had become an officially supported group of survivors, and their accounts filled in some of the gaps in my knowledge.

Throughout 1942 a total of 654 children, from babies to eighteen-year-olds, were snatched from their families by the Nazis and shipped off to a succession of camps across the Reich. Most of the older ones – at least those who survived the rigours of slave labour or attempted Germanisation – had been brought back home at the end of the war. By the time I arrived in Celje, only around 200 were still alive.

Despite their age, their memories were strong and they were determined that the world should not forget what had been done to them. Two speakers stood up in the primary school to give testimony. I sat silently: even if I had felt able to trust the translator to speak for me, I knew too little to make any worthwhile contribution. But my presence had been noted. After the meeting was over, three people came over to speak to me. Each had been stolen from Celje in August 1942 and, to my complete astonishment, each one said they recognised me.

The first woman was seventeen when she was caught in a round-up of children from the area and held for two days in the primary school by SS troops. The children ranged from small infants to eighteen-year-old teenagers: because they were separated from their mothers, the older ones were ordered to look after the babies. This warm and emotional elderly woman told me that the babies were constantly crying. Her task had been to clean the smallest ones, and she specifically remembered washing me.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I would have been less than a year old when the round-up happened; how on earth could someone recognise me more than sixty years later? But somehow this woman
believed that she did. It was astonishing. I had come to Slovenia hoping only to find some evidence that tied me to the country. Instead I had come face to face with someone who claimed that she could place me in Celje on the day that I was stolen – and who said she had actually held and looked after me when I was a baby.

On reflection it seemed more probable that the woman had been told I was coming and this had prompted her to remember me. But either way it was a connection.

The next person I spoke to was a man around the same age. He had been fourteen on the day of the kidnapping, and he was able to tell me a bit more about what had happened to the stolen children on the day after the round-up. He told me that we were transported 150 kilometres north to the holding camp at Frohnleiten in Austria. He was adamant that he had seen me there, and that the name he knew me by was Erika Matko.

Another elderly lady chimed in then, confirming what the man said. She had been kidnapped from Celje and shipped to Frohnleiten: she too remembered me there and that my name was Erika Matko.

I suddenly felt intensely happy. After so long, after so many disappointments, I had first-hand evidence of who I had once been and where I had come from. It was an extraordinary sensation.

I did not have time that night to press my new contacts for further details of the kidnapping. I would have to wait to find out more about the events of August 1942 and how I had been caught up in them.