Hitler's Forgotten Children (25 page)

W
hat is identity and how is it formed? Does identity shape the person – or is it the other way round?

This is not, as it might seem, merely an exercise in abstract philosophy. As my journey ended, it was the question I had to face up to. I knew now who I was – or had once been; I was less sure about what this meant.

Identity is much more than merely the answer to the question ‘who am I?'. It is also about personality. I was struggling to understand how I had become the person I was today. Was I simply the product of the first years of my life as a Lebensborn child? Was my past to blame for my shyness, my lack of confidence and my desire to put the needs of others – of children especially – above my own? In other words, was the course of my life set in stone by Himmler? That, after all, was what he intended: we Lebensborn babies were supposed to fulfil his vision of a new and uniform generation of the German Master Race.

Surely I was just as much the product of my own choices. Genetics may dictate hair and skin colour, but identity must involve an element of free will. I had chosen to devote my life to working with disabled children; chosen not to get married and have a family of my own. These were my decisions – not the ineluctable result of the Lebensborn programme.

Perhaps those who have never endured the uncertainty of not knowing who they really are, are rarely troubled by these existential questions. And yet which of us hasn't, in our darker moments, returned to a particular moment of our lives and wondered what would have happened had events played out differently?

In Shakespeare's
Hamlet
, Ophelia says, ‘We know what we are, but not what we may be.' I could not help but dwell on what might have been. What if I had failed the racial examination that day in Celje? What would my life have been, growing up as Erika Matko? Would I have had the opportunity of a rewarding career, or would my horizons have been limited – as seemed to have been the case with the other Erika – by my environment? If Gisela had been more honest and if the Cold War had not intervened, I would have been reunited with my biological parents: what would that have meant for the course of my life? I asked myself whether I would have been better off had the Nazis left me with my family or whether, in some twisted irony, they did me an eventual favour.

The annual meetings of Lebensborn children exacerbated this uncertainty. The tensions I had detected at our first gathering had grown steadily over the years until Lebensspuren was riven by arguments. All of us had been damaged by our involvement in the Master Race experiment; all of us struggled to come to terms with our personal histories. By 2014, many of those who had joined together to create a supportive environment had walked out or drifted away to form new and smaller groups: I was one of them.

But that year I made two trips which helped me to find some peace.
The first was a visit to a former Lebensborn employee, Anneliese Beck. Now ninety-two and almost blind, when I arrived at her home near Frankfurt she greeted me with tea and stollen.

Frau Beck had worked at the Sonnenwiese home in Kohren-Sahlis at the time when I was held within it. She did not remember me: there were 150 youngsters living there, and I had not been in the group for which she was responsible. But she was able to tell me a great deal about the daily routine at Sonnenwiese and to help me understand what my life would have been like. She showed me a photograph of her with some of the children. I was pleased to see that they were nicely dressed and clearly well fed. And she was adamant that despite the circumstances and the presence of the SS, for the most part our time in Kohren-Sahlis was happy and comfortable.

Sitting with Frau Beck helped me fill one of the last remaining gaps in my knowledge. I had no memories of Sonnenwiese
,
and though I often tried, I was unable to visualise the years I spent there: no matter how much I forced myself to think about it, all I could see was a dark hole. Now that hole was filled and the walls that protected me from my memories were beginning to crumble. I sensed that the final stage would be to travel to Kohren-Sahlis, to walk inside the buildings there: that would, I felt sure, unlock my mind. I was not yet strong enough to go, but I knew that in the coming years I would make that journey.

In October I returned to Slovenia. I went first to Rogaška Slatina where, in a pretty public park, I paid my respects at the memorial to the men and women who were shot between 1941 and 1945. More than one hundred names were carved into the stone: I looked for my Uncle Ignaz and when I found him I traced the letters with my fingertips.

Later, Maria showed me the house where I was born, before taking me to the cemetery, sitting on the top of a hill, where my parents, my grandmother, my brother and my sister are all buried. I laid flowers on the graves and lit candles for my sister and brother, while Maria and her niece cleaned the paths around the stones. I had expected to be
overwhelmed by a sense of loss and so I was surprised to discover that, aside from the normal sadness of visiting a graveyard, I felt very little.

It was a similar story later in the afternoon when Maria invited me back to her apartment for Slovenian coffee and homemade blueberry liqueur with other members of the family. The atmosphere was warm, and everyone was hospitable and open. The Matkos had come to accept me as one of their own, and they gave me photographs of my parents, siblings, nephews and nieces. But although I was grateful for the love and generosity of the family I had longed for, I felt like a child among them. My overriding emotion was anxiety, the sort I had always endured when faced with an exam.

The following day I went to the civil registry office to look for records relating to my parents' marriage. The official there dug out a large book in which every local birth was documented. Together we found the page that recorded my arrival; it also revealed that Johann and Helena were married in 1938, several years after my sister Tanja and brother Ludvig were born. It was a clue to the puzzle of the DNA tests: these had shown that while Ludvig's son, Raphael, was definitely my nephew, I was equally certainly not a blood relative of Tanja's son, Marko. Given that both Tanja and Ludvig had been born before my parents' wedding, the most likely explanation was that Tanja had a different father. The Matko family seemed to have more than its fair share of secrets.

The last remaining mystery was the other Erika. She had still not responded to my letters nor, according to Maria, was she willing to speak to me in person.

I thought long and hard about what I should do. In the end I decided that I would go to her apartment and confront her. I had her address, which turned out to be on the fourth floor of a run-down block in a poor area of Rogaška Slatina. I knew Erika would be at home: the Matkos had told me she was too ill to walk down the stairs and so stayed inside every day. I found her letterbox and the bell with her name on
it. I wanted to press it, to be invited upstairs and to see this enigmatic woman with my own eyes. I wanted to hug her, to speak with her and to demand answers. I wanted, above all, to find the peace of mind that would come with confronting my other self.

But I did none of these things. As I stood on the street outside the apartment block, I realised that my emotions were not merely unproductive but corrosive. I had no right to force my own needs on a sick and vulnerable woman who – just as much as me – had been a victim of the Nazis and of Lebensborn. I knew I had to learn not just to understand but to forgive. I walked quietly away.

Two days later, after a last meeting with my Slovenian family, I went home to Osnabrück. As I settled back into my life there, I reflected on what the previous fifteen years had taught me. I seemed to have travelled a great distance, yet my journey had really been a giant circle and I had arrived back at the very place where I began.

It had not been easy or painless, but I was glad – I
am
glad – to know the truth about Lebensborn and how I came to be caught up in it. I draw comfort from the extended ‘family' of those who were born or kidnapped into Himmler's experiment; in the years since that first meeting in Hadamar, hundreds of us have discovered what we were searching for.

I am certain that I was once a Yugoslavian child called Erika Matko. I am certain that I was stolen from my family and I am grateful to have had the chance to be reunited with them. I wish, of course, that I could have met my biological mother; I wish I could remember her love for me, and I will always regret not having had the chance to ask her about her life or about why she didn't search for me after the war.

I do not feel close to the Matkos in the way that families should feel close. Too much has happened; too great a separation of time and of place. There is a gulf between us that is more than simply language.
I realise that I can no more understand what it means to have grown up in Yugoslavia than I can understand Slovenian. In fact I feel much greater kinship with my late step-brother, Hubertus. We were not blood relations but in our relationship lies the ultimate defeat for the Nazis' ideology: blood is not all-important.

I can smile at that now. How did it take me so long to see something so obvious? I have spent a lifetime working with children burdened with physical or mental disabilities; I have seen how love and patience can overcome these challenges. Nurture can always find a way to beat nature; the hammer does not necessarily shape the hand.

For years I had allowed my life to be overshadowed by the search for something that could not be found. There is for all of us, I believe, a gap between what we want and what we can have, and regret flourishes in that space. I spent too long trapped in a disappointing No Man's Land between dreams and reality. I lost sight of the fundamental truth that we are not defined by the facts of our birth but rather by the choices we make throughout our life.

Mahatma Gandhi once said:
‘
The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.' It has taken me all my life to understand this. Yet although I am back exactly where I started, if I had not embarked on my journey I don't think I would ever have worked this out. I now know who I was and who I am. Erika Matko was a Lebensborn baby, stolen from Yugoslavia, who disappeared in the madness of the Lebensborn programme. Ingrid von Oelhafen is a German woman, a physical therapist who has brought comfort to generations of children.

My name was Ingrid von Oelhafen. It was also Erika Matko. Ingrid is German; Erika is from Yugoslavia. Both of them were me. But now? Now I am Ingrid Matko-von-Oelhafen. As I always have been.

‘That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.'
A
LDOUS
H
UXLEY

T
his is a story of what happened more than seventy years ago. It would be easy to think of it only as history: easy, but wrong.

Since 1945, the world has not known a global conflict. Nor has there been a criminal enterprise on the scale of the Third Reich, nor an ideology that so openly worships the mystic importance of pure blood. But the key words are ‘global' and ‘openly'. The twisted creed that one person is inherently superior to another by virtue of his race has not disappeared. Nor have the wars fought because of it.

From Southeast Asia to the Middle East, from Africa to the Balkans, there have been those convinced that neighbouring peoples, races or nations are inherently inferior, that these post-Nazi Untermenschen are ‘other' and therefore less deserving of respect, food, land or life. In the two generations since the Lebensborn experiment died in the rubble of a devastated Europe, the world has known a succession of smaller, more
localised conflicts. Most have had, at their root, a version of Himmler's belief in greater and lesser races.

This book is a personal memoir as well as an examination of history. It has been written at a time when the world is fracturing into ever greater hostility between nations, regions or religions. Some of this hostility blossoms into nasty little wars: one ethnic group hacking another to pieces, one branch of a belief system blowing up those it deems to be unworthy in the eyes of its God.

In Europe particularly, and at its borders with countries that were once behind the Iron Curtain, politicians toy with nationalism, stoking the fires of hatred based on racial or historical inferiority. Not since 1945 has the continent – and beyond it, the world – been so dangerously divided.

The lesson of history is that no one learns the lesson of history. It is time we began.