Magda's Daughter (40 page)

Chapter Twenty-three

Ronnie Ronconi moved to the end of the receiving line at the wedding reception, shook hands with Ned and kissed Helena's cheek. ‘Congratulations. Ned, you look like the cat who's stolen all the cream from the dairy and the mice to garnish it. My commiserations, Helena; a cracker like you could have done better.'

‘It's too late to give Helena advice. I have the certificate, signed and safe.' Ned patted the breast pocket of his suit before wrapping his arm around Helena's shoulders.

The blue and silver ballroom in the New Inn was packed with friends and Ned's family, although Alma and Peter Raschenko had so enthusiastically embraced their roles as Helena's family that Ned had overheard their former student housemate, Alan, ask Peter if he and Helena were first or second cousins.

Ronnie glanced over his shoulder. ‘Looks like I'm the last guest.'

Peter left his place next to Helena in the receiving line and went to the door. He glanced outside, turned back and lifted both his thumbs. ‘All clear.'

‘I think we've earned ourselves a pre-lunch drink after all that handshaking, ladies.' Andrew hailed a waiter and escorted Alma and Bethan towards him.

Peter rejoined Ned and Helena. ‘This looks like one of the games of sardines you Ronconis play in your airing cupboards at Christmas,' he said to Ronnie.

‘We didn't want to leave anyone out.' Ned hadn't relinquished his hold on Helena since they had left the Catholic church an hour before. Careful to avoid snagging her lace veil, he pulled her even closer to him. ‘No one on the original guest list,' Helena clarified. ‘I just hope the guests don't mind that we didn't have the big church wedding as originally planned.'

‘People prefer wedding receptions to the ceremony. All they want is to see the bride so they can admire her dress, have a good gossip about the other guests' clothes and absent acquaintances, and enjoy free food and drink.' Ronnie Ronconi handed Ned an envelope. ‘After the way Helena has gone on – and on and on – about piglets since you returned from Poland, Catrina and Billy wanted to buy you a pair as a wedding present. I thought you might find this more useful. But should you want a piglet …'

‘No pigs yet, not in a bungalow. But maybe in a few years, when we buy a farm. Thank you.' Helena stood on tip-toe and kissed Ronnie's cheek.

‘Ronnie!' Alma waved to attract his attention. ‘We need your professional opinion on the relative merits of a Ford Anglia compared to a Morris 1000.'

‘Work, work, nothing but work.' Ronnie winked at Helena. ‘Save me a dance.'

‘Of course.'

‘But make it a slow one; none of your jiggery-pokery.'

‘As father of the bride for the day, I'll make sure she respects the limitations of a man of your advanced years, Ronnie.' Peter took two glasses of champagne from a waiter and handed them to Ned and Helena before taking another for himself.

‘Junior business partners aren't indispensable,' Ronnie teased Peter as he left them.

‘You were right about Poland, in every way, Peter.' Ned sipped his champagne. ‘But especially about appreciating Pontypridd when we came back. A hot bath never felt so good.'

‘No plumbed-in bathrooms in the village?' Peter guessed.

‘None,' Ned confirmed.

‘I bet there was a lake nearby.'

‘And a cold tap in a wash-house,' Ned added.

‘Positive luxury. I think you're wanted.' Peter nodded to the top table where the photographer was hovering behind the four-tier wedding cake Magda had chosen.

‘Do you mind posing and pretending to cut it now?' the photographer asked Ned and Helena. ‘If you do, I won't have to wait until you've finished the wedding breakfast for the real event. That way I can get back to the shop and develop the films this afternoon. Then they'll be ready and in the albums by the time you get back from honeymoon.'

‘That's an offer we can't refuse.' Ned led Helena to the table, picked up the long-bladed silver knife and held it over the bottom tier.

Alma saw him. ‘Don't cut it,' she warned. ‘It's bad luck to slice it before the toast to the bride and groom.'

‘Don't worry, we won't.'

Helena laid her hand over Ned's on the knife.

‘Look at one another and smile.' The photographer operated his flash gun and camera. ‘As soon as the flash has charged, smile at one another, please. Now we'll have the family standing behind.'

Bethan, Andrew, Peter and Alma obediently shuffled into place behind Ned and Helena.

The photographer looked through his lens. ‘All of you, this way and smile.'

The smile died on Helena's lips when she thought of Magda, and how much she would have loved playing the part of mother of the bride.

In contrast to their journey out, she and Ned had talked non-stop on their return from Poland. She had suggested that they should keep the secret Magda had been at such pains to conceal from the world, and Ned had agreed. Anna had been right. In every way that mattered, she was Magda's daughter. And now, on her wedding day, she missed the woman she had always called Mama more than she would have believed possible.

Ned, his parents, Peter and Alma had worked hard to make the day perfect. But it was Magda's day. She had planned the event down to the smallest detail, from the colour of the table linen to the guests' rose buttonholes and the rose and lily table decorations.

Helena had only agreed to go ahead with Magda's elaborate plans for the wedding reception after talking to Alma. But she had insisted the actual wedding ceremony be small and private, although she had given in to Father O'Brien's pleading that it be held in the church Magda had loved so much.

It had been Father O'Brien and Alma who had finally persuaded her that the best way to honour the woman everyone in Pontypridd still believed was her mother was to marry, just as Magda had planned: wearing the dress Magda had helped her pick out; hosting the reception Magda had organised; and cutting the cake, which had taken Magda two weeks to choose from the baker's catalogue.

The photographer took two more photographs. ‘As soon as the flash has re-charged we'll take another couple, just in case.'

‘In case of what?' Andrew asked.

‘In case of disaster. You never know how they are going to turn out. I had one bride whose eyes were closed in every shot I took.'

‘Perhaps she was avoiding looking at her bridegroom,' Peter suggested.

‘He couldn't have been as handsome as me,' Ned joked.

‘Last one, for luck. And while we're waiting, you did say you wanted five complete albums?' the photographer checked.

‘We did,' Ned confirmed.

‘Five?' Bethan looked at Ned in surprise. ‘One for us, one for you.'

‘One for Auntie Alma as a thank you for helping us organise everything.' Helena grasped Alma's hand.

‘Darling, I was going to buy one –'

‘Our present,' Ned interrupted.

‘That still leaves two,' Andrew reminded.

‘For my family in Poland,' Helena explained.

‘Two? They can't share?' Alma asked.

Helena thought of the angry words Anna had exchanged with Weronika, and how war, bitterness and greed had separated three young girls who had believed their friendship would last a lifetime.

If only Magda, Anna and Weronika could have shared this special day with her and Ned. As it was, all she could do was send Weronika and Anna photographs as mementoes. ‘My aunt doesn't live close to the rest of the family, and they don't get on that well.'

‘Poles and their tempers.' Peter shook his head. ‘Pander to them and you'll encourage them not to share. If you're not careful you'll be packing parcels for Poland for years and years, Helena, just like Magda did.'

Helena glanced at Ned. ‘I certainly hope so, Peter.'

Ned gripped her hand. ‘And so do I.'

Author's Note

The Nazi organisation of Lebensborn (fountain or spring of life) was created by Heinrich Himmler on 12 December 1935 with the aim of reversing the declining birth rate in Germany and also halting abortions, which had reached record levels in Germany after the deaths of so many young men during the First World War. Initially, Lebensborn was a welfare organisation that nurtured the wives and children of the SS, as well as racially and biologically ‘valuable' families (those the Nazis deemed of Germanic Aryan blood). Lebensborn accommodated mothers who could prove their Aryan pedigree and cared for this select group of mothers and children during pregnancy and infancy in luxury maternity homes.

In 1939, there were 8,000 members of Lebensborn, including 3,500 SS. Lebensborn remained part of the SS Office of Race and Settlement until 1938 when it was transferred to Himmler's Personal staff. Leaders of Lebensborn were SS-Standartenführer Max Sollmann and SS-Oberführer Dr Gregor Ebner.

Lebensborn's maternity homes not only accommodated the wives and mistresses of SS officers. Provided both the woman and the father of her child were ‘Aryan', pregnant unmarried women were accepted into Lebensborn and given support away from their families and conservative German society, which frowned upon illegitimacy. To place their women's illegitimate children, Lebensborn opened orphanages and an adoption service. Non-SS members, parents and children were only admitted to Lebensborn after passing a ‘medical' examination by an SS doctor to prove their racial superiority.

The first Lebensborn home (Heim Hochland) opened in 1936 in Steinhoring, a village near Munich. The first home outside Germany was opened in Norway in 1941 to assist and support children born to German soldiers and Norwegian women. Approximately 8,000 children were born in Lebensborn homes in Germany, and 8,000 in Norway. Subsequently, Lebensborn established homes in several occupied countries including north-eastern Europe.

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Lebensborn sanctioned the kidnap of ‘racially pure' children, a policy they adopted in all Eastern occupied countries, including Russia and the Ukraine. Thousands of children who matched the Nazis' ideal racial criteria (blond hair, blue or green eyes, long narrow frame and skulls, etc.) were snatched from their homes, schools, the streets and their families, and transferred to Lebensborn homes and boarding schools to be ‘Germanized'. Once the process was complete they were placed for adoption in German families. Older children were told their parents were either dead or had rejected them. Children who failed further ‘medical' tests to determine their racial purity, or fought against Germanization, were sent to concentration camps.

No one knows exactly how many children the Nazis kidnapped in Poland and other occupied countries. Historians estimate that between 200,000 and 300,000 children were forcibly seized and taken to Germany from Poland alone. Only 25,000 returned to their families after the war. The SS destroyed the children's original identity papers, and the few Lebensborn records that survived the war had been falsified, making it impossible to determine the children's original nationality or family name. If the children had been taken at an early age, they were unaware of their origins. Some German families became attached to their adopted Lebensborn children and refused to give them up at the end of the war; in many cases, the children themselves declined to return to their original family. Victims of Nazi propaganda, they believed they were German. Further problems were created by the Cold War. German and Allied Occupation authorities were often unwilling to take well-adjusted children from stable families and send them behind the Iron Curtain to Communist Poland.

The Nazis opened brothels for their troops and the SS, and staffed them with girls they enslaved from all the countries they invaded and occupied. But there is no evidence, beyond sensational and inaccurate journalism, that Himmler set up ‘Lebensborn breeding
centres' or SS ‘stud' brothels with the aim of supplying racially pure children. The Nazis were evil, their crimes heinous, numerous and beyond the belief of civilised men and women. Embellishing facts and fictionalising Nazi crimes only serves to hand ammunition to neo-Nazis and Holocaust-deniers, who argue, still, that the Nazis are victims of post-war Allied propaganda.

There are numerous internet websites dedicated to recording the post-war and current plight of Lebensborn children; the most heart­ breaking bear photographs of elderly men and women, who are still searching for clues to their identity and are hoping that someone, somewhere will recognise a family resemblance, even after sixty years.

Catrin Collier, May 2008

The
HEARTS OF GOLD
series
by
Catrin Collier

  
  

  
  

  
  

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