Magda's Daughter (29 page)

‘You didn't have a garden?' Weronika asked.

‘No.'

‘We used to grow roses in pots on the veranda in front of the barn. Magda always kept one in a silver vase next to a photograph of my parents.'

‘The first piece of silver I remember my mother buying was a rose vase.' Helena watched Weronika lift Wiktor's wreath from the earth.

‘Allow me.' Ned took the wreath from her and moved it out of sight behind the headstone.

‘Magda had exquisite taste, unlike her thieving brother.' Weronika opened her handbag and took out a roll of cardboard. She upended it and shook out a single red rose. ‘If Wiktor knew we'd moved that monstrosity, Ned, he'd punch me first, then you. But he'll never find out. He wouldn't dream of coming here to pay his respects now the public show is over.' Weronika laid the rose in front of the memorial, stood in front of it for a few minutes then crossed herself. ‘Goodbye, Adam. Goodbye, Magda. Be at peace together.'

‘I hope they are,' Helena whispered.

‘Adam was a good brother to me and Magda a good sister.' Weronika ran her fingers over the letters carved into the stone. ‘It's heart-breaking to see their names here when I remember them in childish writing on their drawings and school exercise books. When they married, they were so in love and wrapped up in one another I thought I'd feel awkward living with them. But they never made me feel in the way. But it couldn't have lasted, even without the war.'

‘Why not?' Helena ventured.

‘Because I would have married, and moved out of the family house.'

‘You were planning to marry?'

‘To a doctor. But the leaders of our communities – the doctors, lawyers and teachers – were the first people the Gestapo rounded up and shot. They were buried in mass graves. I never found out where they took him. Only that he didn't return. I don't even have a place to pray for him.'

Weronika took one last look at the memorial with its single rosebud. ‘I am tempted to place that wreath in the bin. But then, trust Wiktor. After robbing Adam and Magda blind, he has the gall to spend their money upon a wreath both of them would have hated.' She led the way back around the side of the church.

‘My uncle robbed Magda and Adam?' Helena asked in amazement.

‘When I returned, I asked Anna for my clothes, personal things, and the photographs and mementoes that had belonged to my family. She told me that Wiktor ransacked the house the day after the massacre and moved all the valuables and furniture to the Niklas farm. He led the campaign to keep me out of the village. Perhaps he was afraid that if I stayed I would want the Janek family possessions. But we weren't the only people he stole from. There were many empty houses here after the war.'

‘That's what Josef told me.' Helena opened the gate.

‘You said there were other women who worked with Magda in the children's home. Were they also sent to the Displaced Persons' camp at the end of the war?' Always analytical, Ned had been mulling over everything that Weronika had told them.

‘Yes. The Americans brought them in by truck.'

‘Did you keep in touch with any of them?' Ned fastened the gate.

‘No.'

‘Why not?' Ned walked Weronika and Helena to the war memorial.

‘We got on well enough together, but we had seen so many horrible things that all we wanted to do was return to our homes, forget the horrors of war and pick up the threads of our lives. Or in my case, start living a new one.'

‘Is there anyone we can talk to who was in the home with Magda? Who might have known anything about Helena or her real parents?'

‘So that is why you're asking,' Weronika said slowly. ‘About six or seven women came into the camp from the children's home with Magda but only two were Polish. I think the others were Latvians.'

‘Can you remember the names of the Polish girls?' Ned pressed.

‘One was called Irena, another Marta, but if I ever knew their surnames I have forgotten them.'

‘Did they say what part of Poland they were from?' Ned urged.

‘Cracow and Lublin. Adam and I had often visited our cousin who lived in Cracow, it was where your mother bought the silk for her wedding gown,' Weronika informed Helena.

‘She told me.'

‘Irena – who was from Cracow – Magda and I used to reminisce about the city. We talked for hours about the shops and planned expeditions to buy clothes, useless clothes like silk, satin and organza evening gowns, gold jewellery, high-heeled slippers and furs – and food. Such wonderful food!' She laughed. ‘You can have all the caviar, champagne, fried chicken, asparagus and rich cream cakes you want when you're shopping with your imagination.'

‘Was a register made of Polish people who were sent into the Reich as slave labourers?' Ned asked.

‘I don't know. Girls who were taken and used like me would want as few people as possible to know what had happened to them so they would never sign any official papers. As I told you, all most of us wanted to do at the end of the war was forget about it – not that we could.'

‘What about the children?' Helena asked hopefully. ‘Perhaps one of the older ones would remember me? They might have seen Magda with me …'

‘If they did they would hardly have thought it surprising. Magda worked there, she would have always had children with her. I doubt anyone would have noticed that she had one with her any more often than another. And all the children in the home would have been blond and blue-eyed.'

Weronika looked up as a car drove into the square. ‘And here is my friend.'

Norbert's red Syrena drew up in front of them. A well-dressed elderly man was sitting in the back of the car. Norbert opened the door, climbed out and held out his hand to Weronika to help her into the back.

Weronika didn't introduce her friend. Turning back to Helena, she held out her hand, then dropped it and embraced her. ‘It was good to meet you, my almost-niece and the nearest person I have left to a relative. You have my address safe?'

‘I do.' Helena returned Weronika's hug and kissed her cheek. Ned shook her hand. ‘Perhaps you will come and visit us someday, Weronika. ‘

‘In England?'

‘Wales. It's part of Britain – like Ireland and Scotland.'

‘Thank you. I will,' Weronika answered. ‘When I am old and drawing my pension. The government won't allow me to leave before. But I don't have so long to wait. Another twenty years or so.'

Norbert settled Weronika in the back of the car before replacing the seat. ‘I heard that you managed to bury your mother's ashes,' he said to Helena.

‘Yes,' Helena said briefly, not wanting to elaborate.

‘You still have the telephone number I gave you?'

‘I do.' Ned patted his pocket.

Norbert glanced at his passengers. ‘I must go. But I'll see you soon?'

‘When we leave,' Helena assured him.

‘But only if your price is right,' Ned called after him.

Chapter Sixteen

Helena and Ned watched Norbert drive off. When the car rounded the corner of the square, Helena waved goodbye and Weronika blew back a kiss. Ned rested his hand around Helena's waist. For once she didn't shrug it off.

‘I'll talk to Josef again about the Polish children who were kidnapped by the Germans,' Helena turned towards the narrow street that led to the bar. ‘From what he said, he seems to have done a great deal of research while he's been looking for his brother.'

Ned watched as the dust stirred by the car began to settle. ‘By all means talk to him, but given the number of children who were kidnapped and the various countries they were taken from, I doubt you will find any answers as to who your birth parents were.'

‘I have to start looking for them. They could be looking for me.‘

‘And they could be anywhere.'

‘I have to try and find them.'

‘You were taken in wartime. They could have been killed. In fact, that might be why Magda looked after you. Because she knew that your parents were dead. The more I consider it, the more I think that's the most likely scenario.' He pulled her even closer to him. ‘If they had lived, she would have told you about them.'

‘Unless I was just one more child who came into the Lebensborn home with her birth identity erased. Magda may well have known nothing about my life before I was given into her care, in which case I'll never know who I am.'

‘But I know exactly who you are: Helena soon-to-be-John, the girl I love and want to marry. Can't you be content with knowing that much about yourself?'

‘It isn't enough.'

Much as Ned was reluctant, he felt he had to put the question to her. ‘And if you discover something you can't live with?'

‘It's not a question of not being able to live with whatever I find out about myself, because there's simply no alternative. I have to try to find out who I am. The truth can't possibly be any worse than what I'm imagining right now.'

‘Which is?'

‘That I'm the result of some bizarre breeding programme. Or that my mother was an innocent young Pole who was raped by an SS officer.'

‘Helena, you can't spend the rest of your life roaming around Europe searching for people who lost a child during the war. There are hundreds of thousands of families who lost children in one way or another.'

‘I can try,' she countered stubbornly.

‘Sunshine, please –'

‘I'm trying to look at this sensibly and logically.'

‘Then allow me to say something sensible and logical. For whatever reason, Magda decided to tell you that you were her and Adam Janek's daughter.'

‘Her motive was obvious,' Helena snapped. ‘She wanted to give me a respectable background.'

‘And also because she also wanted you to be happy and feel secure. We might never find out where she picked you up, or who your parents were, but you could waste a lifetime on a futile search.'

‘It's my lifetime to waste.'

‘It's my lifetime, too.'

Her face was serious when she looked up at him. ‘I'd rather know something dreadful about myself than not know anything at all.'

Anna was sitting at the table in the courtyard, a glass and a pitcher of home-made lemonade in front of her when Ned and Helena returned.

‘We went to the churchyard so Weronika could pay her final respects to her brother and Magda,' Helena explained.

‘Did she tell you any more lies after you left here?'

Helena struggled to keep her voice even. ‘None.'

‘You can't trust that one. Everyone knows what she is.'

‘A woman who was enslaved by the Germans, as was my mother.' Helena spoke quietly but firmly.

‘You've done what you came to do. You've buried Magdalena's ashes with Adam Janek. You can sleep here tonight, but tomorrow you go.'

‘And if we can't get to the town?' Helena asked.

‘That's your problem.' Anna staggered as she made her way into the house, and Helena realised she was drunk. She returned with two clean glasses, left them next to the pitcher, and stumbled into the bar without saying another word.

Josef emerged a few minutes later with a crate of empty bottles, and overheard Helena translating what Anna had said to Ned.

‘Anna is not very good with strangers,' he said awkwardly. He dumped the crate on the veranda in front of the barn, and glanced at the table. ‘That lemonade looks good. I'll get a glass and join you. I'm due a break.' He went into the house and returned with a glass. Helena and Ned sat opposite him at the table.

‘We'd like to talk to you –' Helena began.

‘I'll have a word with Anna about letting you stay longer, but I can't promise anything.' Josef filled his glass and passed the jug to Helena.

‘Thank you.' Helena poured lemonade for herself and Ned. ‘But I didn't want to talk to you about Anna. Do you know if there is a register of children who were kidnapped by the Nazis for the Lebensborn project?'

‘Register sounds very grand. There are lists of parents who are looking for their children. They have given their sons' and daughters' original names – which isn't much good when the children were taught to forget them; that's if they were old enough to remember who they were in the first place – their ages when they were taken, the places they were taken from, their ages now, and their dates of birth, which the Nazis frequently changed. There are photographs and descriptions of the children as they were when kidnapped. But I doubt anyone will recognise young men and women from their baby pictures. There is also a very much shorter list made by children who can remember being taken. They have given what information they can recall of their original family and left current photographs. But for every Lebensborn child who knows they are adopted, there are hundreds if not thousands who don't. And some that do are still in Germany with their adoptive parents simply because they had nowhere else to go after the war.'

‘East Germany?' Ned asked.

‘East and West. The register covers all the children that the Nazis kidnapped in the Reich and occupied territories.'

‘Would it be possible to track down the children who went with Magda to the Displaced Persons' camp from the children's home?' Ned persisted. ‘Weronika said there were eighty of them.'

‘Some as young as six months old,' Josef reminded.

‘And some as old as six. A six-year-old child might remember seeing my mother with a baby.'

‘As a wet nurse it was Magda's job to look after the babies, Helena,' Josef interrupted. ‘They probably wouldn't have noticed which baby she was looking after at any one time. And the children weren't kept in the homes for long. The purpose of Lebensborn was to Germanize them so they could be brought up by Nazi families. The older ones, who were more difficult to place, were sent to special boarding schools, but most of the babies and toddlers selected for Lebensborn were passed on after a few weeks in the homes, sometimes only days. Once given a new identity they disappeared into their new families. And most of those families weren't prepared to relinquish their adoptive children after the war. They simply kept quiet about their origins.'

‘But it's worth trying to find out if there is a child who can remember my mother and me,' she pleaded.

To Ned's extreme annoyance, Josef covered Helena's hand with his own. But the thoughts he voiced were the same as Ned's. ‘What if you find out something you don't want to know, Helena?'

‘Everyone has the right to know who they are,' she insisted.

‘Start down this road and you will probably end up as just one more bitter Lebensborn child who will never know her origins.'

‘I know what I'm letting myself in for. Ned and I talked about it.'

‘Talk in the early days is easy. But years and years of disappointment are very difficult. I know what that can do to a person.'

‘But my case is different from yours. You're looking for a baby who was taken.'

‘And you are probably one of the babies. Our cases are not so dissimilar.'

‘I could have been taken from a family here, in Poland –'

‘Or France, or Norway, or Holland, or even Germany – the illegitimate child of a married SS officer and some girl he picked up in a bar one night.'

‘And raped?' She raised her eyes and looked at him.

‘If that is the case, better you never find out. And you won't,' Josef predicted. ‘The people who ran the homes took care to burn the records of the illegitimate children before the Allies reached them.'

‘Have any records survived?' Ned moved along the bench until his thigh pressed against Helena's.

Josef removed his hand from Helena's. ‘A few. Mainly details of the new identities the children were given after they went into Lebensborn. That's what makes the kidnapped children –'

‘Like your brother?' Ned interrupted.

‘Like Leon,' Josef agreed, ‘so difficult to trace. It is almost impossible to match new identities to old when you have little knowledge of the old. All I have of Leon is a photograph taken shortly after he was born. But I have put it in the register together with my own photograph in the hope that if he is alive, one day he will find out about his origins, start looking for his real family, discover the entry I made and see a similarity between us.'

‘You looked alike?' Ned asked.

‘I don't know. All I remember of him is a bundle in a shawl.'

‘That is your only hope of finding him?' Helena's disappointment was evident in her voice.

‘Perhaps now you realise just how difficult it is to identify your roots when you have been separated from your family and your papers have been destroyed.'

‘It seems impossible.'

‘I am afraid it is, Helena.'

Anna opened the door to the bar and shouted to Josef. He left the stool. ‘I will ask her if you can stay until the weekly bus leaves.'

‘Thank you.'

Ned slipped his arm around Helena's shoulders. ‘You need to rest. Let's go up to our room while Anna is still prepared to rent it to us.'

At Ned's insistence, Helena sat in a chair on the landing, a cushion behind her head and one of the suitcases beneath her feet. But she couldn't rest or settle; her mind remained fixed on the ceremony and her conversation with Weronika. She watched Ned as he sat reading his James Bond novel in the chair opposite her. Gradually his head sank lower, and when the book fell from his hands she knew he was asleep.

She went into their room and picked up her duffle bag. It felt odd without the weight of the casket that had contained Magda's ashes. The plastic box Ned's father had given her was on her bed. She set it beside the wickerwork waste paper basket, never wanting to see it again.

She felt restless and confused. She had been given irrefutable evidence that she wasn't Magda and Adam Janek's daughter, but memory – and her heart – dictated otherwise.

She recalled her childhood, all the dark winter nights she had woken with minor ailments – a sore throat, a cough, a rare nightmare. How Magda had always been there within seconds, smelling of toothpaste and lavender water. How she had wrapped her strong, comforting arms around her, cuddling and comforting her before fetching her a soothing drink. And her last assurance before returning to her own bed: ‘Don't worry, Helena sweetheart. Everything will be fine in the morning.'

Only things would never be fine again. She felt crushed, alone and unequal to facing the world – and that was without taking Magda's legacy of lies into account. She sank down on the bed, opened her duffle bag and did what she had always done when faced with seemingly insurmountable problems. She reached for a notepad and pencil, opened the book, drew a line down the centre of a clean page and stared at it.

Would making a plan of action help her find out who she really was? What could she write that would help her trace her origins, when almost everything Magda had told her had been untrue? She was an adult. She had been about to marry. She had a degree and a teaching certificate. She had been given a responsible job by influential, well-educated people who had faith in her ability to teach literature at Pontypridd Girls' Grammar School. So why did she feel like throwing herself to the floor and screaming at her mother – who hadn't been her mother at all – for putting her in this awful situation when Magda couldn't even hear, let alone answer her?

Ned woke with a start. Looking in from the landing, he saw her sitting on the bed next to her open duffle bag. ‘Are you searching for painkillers? I have a couple of aspirins in my suitcase.'

‘I don't need them.'

‘Are you sure your head isn't hurting? That you don't feel nauseous or dizzy?'

‘Just for once, stop being a doctor.'

‘I tried, but my fiancée gave my secret away to the locals,' he sniped back.

‘And you'll never let me forget it, will you?'

‘I don't understand why you had to tell Josef what I do for a living.'

‘We were talking about teaching – the difference between the Polish and British curriculum. He asked what your subject was, and the truth slipped out. Anyway, what difference does it make? After the way you started barking orders when Wiktor Niklas pushed me into that wall, everyone realised that you were a doctor anyway.'

Ned knew Helena was upset and angry, but the last thing he wanted was for her to continue taking her anger out on him. ‘Please, let's not quarrel.'

‘You're only saying that because you're losing.' She thought about what she'd said then, and murmured, ‘I'm sorry, that was childish of me.'

‘What are you doing anyway?'

She lifted up the notepad. ‘Trying to think things through. Making a list of what little I do know about myself.'