Hitler's Forgotten Children by Ingrid Von Oelhafen Read Free Book Online

and became angry. I was punished for my evident greed by being denied marmalade for a week.
    School became my refuge. I had made friends with other children and was fortunate that their parents, perhaps seeing how unhappy I was at home, were kind and loving towards me. I loved spending time with them, seeing in their lives the thing that I valued – and missed – most: a real family. And then, when I was eleven, I discovered that I was not who I thought I was.
    I woke up one morning and found that I couldn’t open my eyes. My father took me to the doctor’s surgery.
    We sat in the reception area, waiting for my turn. When the doctor called out the name ‘Erika Matko’, my father stood up and led me into the consulting room. He handed over my health insurance card and I saw that it too had the name ‘Erika Matko’ printed on it.
    I had no idea why I was being called by a different name. But I didn’t dare say anything to the doctor or my father; I was still too frightened of him to question anything. At the end of the consultation I was prescribed a course of sun lamps – a common enough treatment in those days for vitamin deficiency (most likely a problem dating back to my years in the children’s home at Langeoog) – and we went back home. Nothing was said about that different name, but I had not forgotten.
    Shortly after that I had a conversation with Frau Harte. Every Friday it was our routine to clean the house together, and I could talk freely to her about whatever I had on my mind. It was the closest thing I had to a normal relationship with an adult. As we were polishing, I asked her if she knew why my name was written down as Erika Matko.
    Emmi told me that Hermann and Gisela were not my biological parents. She said that when I was a baby they had fostered me, just like Dietmar, and that my original name was Erika Matko. Emmi wasn’t embarrassed to tell me that I had been fostered. The war had fractured so many families and left so many children without parents that our situation was far from unusual.
    I don’t recall being upset at discovering the truth about myself. I was not close to Hermann and I think that I processed the information by deciding that it explained his coldness towards me, and why I was not allowed to live with Gisela.
    But of course I wondered where I had come from. I assumed that my real parents were German – it never occurred to me to think otherwise – and I speculated about what had happened to them. Perhaps they had been in prison; maybe they had died in the war. Emmi said she had wondered whether I was originally Jewish because of my prominent nose. But although my father had told her that I was a foster child, she didn’t know any more than that. Everything else was just speculation.
    Of course I never said anything to Hermann. Nor, the next time Gisela came to visit, did I ask her about it. But Hermann must have told her about the visit to the doctor’s surgery and I assume she felt she had to say something. She started to tell me that I was fostered and how she had fetched me from a children’s home but I quickly cut her off, saying ‘I know.’ I don’t really know why I stopped her: perhaps it was my childish way of showing her that it was all too late, that I was hurt that she had kept the truth from me. The subject was never mentioned again.
    The one person I would have liked to talk to was Dietmar. We had been close in the children’s home and in the few months we had spent together in Hermann’s house. But by then he had been taken away and I had no way to contact him: I didn’t even have an address that I could write to.
    Life carried on as before. Every morning I went to school – where I was registered and known as Ingrid von Oelhafen – and returned in the afternoon to the house in Bad Salzuflen and the man I now knew was not my biological father, of whom I was still very