Hitler's Forgotten Children (6 page)

Then, one morning in April 1954, towards the end of the spring term and with the long summer holidays approaching, I said goodbye to him as usual. I noticed that he seemed a little disorientated when I left, but I didn't say anything to the Hartes because I assumed it was just another symptom of his illness. When I came back from school he was in a very bad way: it was clear he had had a stroke. My father – or rather my foster father, as I now knew him to be – was taken to hospital and died two weeks later.

I have to admit that I was not sad. I felt happy to be free of him and his harsh, unforgiving ways. And I assumed that at long last I would be allowed to live with Gisela in Hamburg. What did hurt me was Emmi and Karl's reaction: they criticised me severely for not telling them about Hermann's condition that morning.

My high hopes for a new life with my mother – I still thought of her as ‘Mummy' then, even though I knew I wasn't her ‘real' child – were not to be: or not immediately, at least. Gisela was too busy with her thriving physiotherapy practice and her five-year-old son, Hubertus.

For six long months I carried on living in Hermann's home with the Hartes looking after me. It was not until nearly October 1954 that I was finally sent to Hamburg. And by then, the strange story of Erika Matko and my true identity seemed to have been forgotten.

‘The lost identity of individual children is the social problem of the day on the continent of Europe.'
I
NTERNATIONAL
R
EFUGEE
O
RGANISATION INTERNAL MEMORANDUM
, M
AY
1949

W
hen I was fifteen years old I saw my face on a poster in the street. A decade after the end of the war, and seven years after the formation of our new Federal Republic, Germany was still a nation of displaced and unclaimed children. United Nations agencies had spent those years searching across Europe for close to two million missing boys and girls, separated from their parents by bombings, military service, evacuation, deportation, forced labour, ethnic cleansing, or murder. By 1956, it had traced just 343,000 of them.

The Red Cross had decided that one way to discover the origins of children who may have been brought to Germany during the war was to post photos of the children as they were then in newspaper advertising columns. Underneath these lists of faces and names ran the headline:
‘Who knows our parents and our origins?'
They also pasted up large posters on columns and lamp posts on streets across West Germany. It was from
one of these, in the centre of Hamburg, that my younger face peered back at me.

It was, to say the least, a shock. I had no idea that anyone was looking for me, nor how they would have obtained my photograph. I had to presume that Gisela had given it to the authorities, but no one had said anything about it to me.

By that point I had been living in my mother's house on Blumenstrasse in Hamburg for two years. Two years during which my dreams of a happy family life had proved to be no more than an unrealistic and childish fantasy. I had spent half of my young life longing to be with my mother, aching to feel loved and looked after. By the time I saw my photograph on the poster, reality had set in – and set me in my ways.

I knew, of course, that Gisela was not my real mother, but I still had no idea when – much less how or why – she and Hermann had taken me in, and I had pushed the whole business to the back of my mind. I wanted so much to cling to the belief that I belonged to Gisela and her family.

What I couldn't hide from, though, was the way Gisela treated me. She was not cruel; I could never call her that. But she was noticeably cold – emotionally and physically – towards me. This was in stark contrast to her other relationships. Professionally, she was an extremely successful physiotherapist: her patients clearly loved her, and she returned their affection.

With her own relatives, too, she was warm: to her mother and her sister (Aunt Eka, to whom I increasingly turned for love and understanding), and to her son. Hubertus was eight years younger than me; a very handsome boy, who – unlike me at his age – could speak well and fluently. It might have been easy not to like him: he was, after all, Gisela's natural child, and had been living in the house in Hamburg before I was allowed to go there. But although I resented the fact that Gisela seemed able to show love to almost anyone but me, I had come to care very much for Hubertus and we had a strong bond between us.

But this was a rare glimpse of light. Teenage years are always difficult, especially, I think, for girls. Those crucial years between thirteen and fifteen are generally a time of uncertainty and insecurity, and a time when it is all too easy to be critical of adults. But in Germany in 1956, that biological confusion was exacerbated by national crisis.

The Nazis and the war had broken the previously close bonds of German family life just as surely as the bombs and tanks had destroyed the country's houses, bridges and railways. In addition to creating a huge population of orphans, Hitler's desperate last-ditch battles had blurred the lines between childhood and adult life by throwing young boys into the doomed fighting.

In the immediate post-war years, an army of international psychologists and social workers was drafted in to address the problems for Germany's next generation. The men and women of the United Nations Refugee Relief Organisation (UNRRA) and its successor, the International Refugee Organisation (IRO), recognised that many teenagers in the late 1940s and early 1950s were growing up without the emotional security they needed – both individually and as part of an emerging new nation. An internal IRO memorandum in May 1949 highlighted the crisis in stark terms:
‘
The lost identity of individual children is
the
social problem of the day …'

And so, while the American Secretary of State, George Marshall, put in place a vast economic aid plan to rebuild Germany's shattered infrastructure and economy (and the rest of Europe), UNRRA and IRO set to work on what they termed a ‘psychological Marshall Plan' for its children.

First they had to identify us. Along with the posters, radio announcements instructed those fostering children from other countries to report to their local youth administration office.

How did this affect us? I could not have told you then what Gisela did: it would be decades before I learned that she met with the investigators
without telling me. But when I came face to face with my photo on the poster, I had conflicting emotions.

Of course, I wondered who my real parents were. Perhaps my father had been – like Hermann – an officer in the Wehrmacht
,
who went away to war, leaving me with a mother who either didn't want me, or could not cope alone with a baby. Those were my rational thoughts. But behind them were the sharp pangs of fear and hope. Hope that my biological mother would see the posters and suddenly turn up to say that she now wanted me. Fear, because if she ever did I was worried what sort of person this woman would turn out to be. Perhaps she would be worse than Gisela; maybe she wouldn't even like me?

But these were only flickering emotions and in the end I found it was easier to snuff them out than to dwell on them. Even though I wasn't happy and I knew that the von Oelhafens and the Andersens were not my blood relatives, I clung to the belief that in some way I belonged to them.

Does it sound odd that the mystery of who I was and where I had come from was never discussed? Perhaps. At the time it was simple: I did not have enough of a relationship with Gisela to ask her difficult questions. It would be a long time before I understood that she might have had good reasons for wanting to leave the past alone.

Whatever the reason, the subject was never broached: to all intents and purposes I was Ingrid von Oelhafen, the name under which I was registered at school. I did not have one of the new identity cards, issued by the Federal government from 1951 onwards, but since I was a child no one thought I would need one until I reached the legal age of majority: twenty-one in those days.

As it turned out, the problem of my identity surfaced rather sooner. I wasn't doing well at school: academic work – particularly maths – was not my strong point. I had decided that I wanted a career as either a children's nurse or a vet, but Gisela had other ideas. Although she sent me for tests that showed that I had sufficient potential to take the
German equivalent of A Levels, Gisela wanted me to earn money as soon as possible. And so it was arranged that I would leave school at the age of sixteen.

I was unhappy about this decision and felt convinced that behind everything lay the fact that I was not Gisela's biological child. But I didn't ask her to change her mind. I made a point of never asking her for anything because I was afraid she would refuse. Looking back I think this was a form of self-protection stemming from the time when I had pleaded in vain with her to take me away from Hermann's house.

Gisela's plan was for me to train as a physiotherapist, with a view to at some point coming to work in her practice. But as it turned out, I couldn't begin the college course in physiotherapy for another two years. I still have no idea why I was pulled out of school so early but as a stop-gap, I was sent off to live with the son of a friend of Gisela's mother, who owned a farm near Lake Constance on the border between Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Here I was supposed to learn household management. The farm was in a village called Heiligenholz: it was remote and tiny, with only three or four houses nearby. For the first four weeks I cried every night because I was so homesick. Gradually, though, I settled in: the farmer had six daughters and the youngest two, aged twelve and fourteen, became good friends. The farmer's wife was kind and warm, just as I supposed a mother should be. I stayed with them for eleven months and though I didn't really learn any household or cooking skills – my duties were mostly washing up and helping in the fields – they were very good to me, and inadvertently forced Gisela to do something about my lack of official documentation.

At some point during my stay, the family wanted to go on holiday to Switzerland. But I had no papers – no ID card, no passport, not even so much as a birth certificate – which would be needed to cross the border. The only documentation that anyone seemed to have for me was my state health insurance certificate, and that was in the name of the mysterious Erika Matko.

In 1957, children could be included on their parents' documents. Faced with the prospect of leaving me behind (or abandoning his holiday plans altogether), the farmer passed me off as one of his own daughters. We crossed and re-crossed the border without incident. But it prompted him to write to Gisela, urging her to sort out my identity documents – if for no other reason than I was shortly to be dispatched to somewhere where border controls were likely to be less relaxed.

There was still almost a year before I was to begin my physiotherapy training. Rather than spending it back in Hamburg, it was arranged that I was to be sent to England to work as an au pair. I would need a passport.

To this day I have no idea how Gisela arranged it. I never saw a passport in my name, and given what was to follow I'm as sure as can be that I was never issued one. Some form of documentation must have been procured, however, as I was able to make the long journey – alone, again – to a small village in Hertfordshire, 30 miles north of London.

The family I was to live with were evidently wealthy. The father was a banker who travelled into London every day. His wife was much younger than him and spent most of her time with the family's horses. Of their four children, two were away at Gordonstoun – the famous boarding school where Prince Charles was a pupil. The third child, an eight-year-old boy, joined them not long after I arrived, leaving me with only the couple's five-year-old daughter to look after. I spent six months in their grand house and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The couple treated me very well; I had a lovely bedroom with a private bathroom, and they made me feel like part of their family.

Looking back, I doubt I recognised then the irony of finding in the land of my country's former enemy the emotional warmth I had longed for at home. I was only seventeen and not as aware of history as I have since become. I returned to Hamburg with happy memories.

Completely unknown to me, while I had been away the problem of my identity had once again surfaced. The start date for my physiotherapy course was approaching and the university needed my birth certificate to
register me as a student. I assume that Gisela was somehow involved in dealing with this. (It would be many years before I discovered the flurry of correspondence between various local government offices about me – and in those letters the first hints about my origins.) But whatever she told the officials was not, I think, wholly truthful.

My new birth certificate – dated 1959, the first time my existence was formally registered – was in the name of Erika Matko. It was issued by Standesamt 1 in Berlin, the Federal government registry which had been specifically created to issue papers for people who had come (or had been forcibly brought) into Germany mainly from the east and who had no other documentation. And yet, oddly, it recorded my birthplace as St Sauerbrunn in Austria. It was a record that would, many years later, hamper the search for my true identity.

At the time, regardless of my birth certificate, I continued to insist that I was Ingrid von Oelhafen. That was the name I answered to and the one by which my friends at university came to know me.

To the university authorities, however, I was someone else: they had registered me in the name of Erika Matko, and when I graduated three years later, aged twenty-one, that was the name on my degree certificate. When I asked the university to change this to Ingrid von Oelhafen, my request was refused: without any official paperwork to prove that I was Ingrid, the administration insisted that I was Erika.