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

afraid.

    Over the next two years, Hermann’s heath continued to deteriorate and he was often still in bed when I left for school. I would go into his room to wish him good morning, but in truth this was no more than living up to my duties as a good daughter.
    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.

FIVE | IDENTITY
    â€˜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 fromone 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