Goodbye, Mr Hitler

by Jackie French

  ‘No,’ said Frau Marks calmly, ‘you are not.’ She crossed to the fridge. For a moment Johannes thought she was going to make them cocoa. He wouldn’t be able to stand the memories if she made them cocoa now. But instead she brought out a squat bottle of lemonade, frost clouding the glass, then fetched two glasses from the sideboard, two special glasses with coloured bands around the base that were only used for special drinks like lemonade or sarsaparilla, and filled them and passed one to each of them. ‘You are not Hitler’s daughter.’

  ‘You think I am making up a sick fantasy?’ demanded Helga, suddenly fierce.

  ‘No. I think all you say happened is true. But no one ever told you that you were Hitler’s daughter, did they? The only time you called him “Father” he denied you?’

  ‘He said that so that I could escape,’ said Helga stiffly. ‘Because he loved me . . .’

  ‘How many times had you met him?’ The voice was still soft.

  Helga considered. ‘Twenty, perhaps. He brought me presents, when I was very young, before the war became so bad. A doll with yellow hair and blue eyes. Perfect, as I was not.’

  ‘And your papers? What name was on your papers?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know. I never saw my papers. Fräulein Gelber must have had them. Given them to the soldier who was killed.’

  ‘Helga, Heidi . . . which name do you prefer?’

  ‘Helga,’ said Helga.

  ‘Helga, Hitler had no children.’

  ‘I told you, he was ashamed of me . . .’

  ‘You have told me that you think he was ashamed of you, of your lack of perfection. Hitler was the most important man in Germany, in Europe. Do you think he could ever have had a child and no one knew? He wasn’t able to have children. But he did have foster children. A patient in the hospital I worked in, during the war, told me about it. Her husband worked in the propaganda office, with Herr Goebbels.’ Frau Marks met Helga’s eyes. ‘Children Hitler adopted only for propaganda purposes. He was the Father of Germany — Goebbels advised him that people must see him as a father of German children too.’

  Helga sat very still. At last she said, ‘He would have adopted children with blonde hair and blue eyes. Perfect children. Not one like me.’

  ‘Some of the children were the orphans of soldiers who had fought with him in the Great War, though your parents must have died much later, of influenza perhaps, or an accident. I don’t think there is any way we could ever know. Perhaps,’ said Frau Marks carefully, ‘your limp, your birthmark, was why no one took pictures of you with the Führer, as they did of him with the other foster children.’

  Helga sat as if words had been leached out of her, like colour from litmus paper when you left it soaking for too long.

  Johannes said to crack the silence, ‘What happened to the other foster children?’ Others, he thought. I believe what Frau Marks says is true. Helga is not Hitler’s daughter. She is . . .

  Helga. The person she had always been. Herself. No more nor less.

  ‘I think the other foster children must have been taken to safety, in secrecy, like you were supposed to be,’ said Frau Marks quietly. ‘I remember pages of people with the surname Hitler in the Berlin phone book before the war. Now, they say, there are none. The name has vanished. But those children, like you, like those other Hitlers who have changed their names, would be innocent.’ Frau Marks smiled at them sadly. ‘But even if you had been Hitler’s daughter, why should you be guilty for what Hitler did? If you found out that Johannes’s father had done something wrong — and I am sure he has not, but just suppose — would you think it was Johannes’s fault?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘So why should it be different for you?’

  ‘Because . . . because the evil was so big. The hate is so big.’

  ‘Ah, hate,’ said Frau Marks. ‘You said there was no one left to hate. But there are many, many who are still being tried for war crimes. It will go on, perhaps, till the last one is dead. There is hate for all the people who looked away, who saw but would not see, who did not want to see, but kept their lives nice. People like my sister, who blamed me for bringing a crumb of the unpleasantness into her tidy life. And I hated her for that too.’

  ‘You mean you don’t now?’ asked Johannes.

  ‘I saw my son,’ said Frau Marks quietly. ‘I thought, I am a mother again. And in that moment Sister Columba’s words came back to me. Will you be a woman of love or hate? So I pushed the hate aside, to make room for love.’

  ‘Just like that?’ whispered Helga.

  ‘No. Not just like that. It took work. And years. All my life, perhaps, I will have to wake up and decide: today I will not be filled with hate. Anger still keeps breaking through. But I keep trying to understand. Understand my sister’s small and frightened life, trying to be nice in a mad world. Trying even to understand Hitler, that small, angry man, changing the map of Europe, soaking in the cheers, but never happy. Never fulfilled, as I am happy and fulfilled, with my family, my house in the sunlight, my memories, my friends. I had to forgive, not for my sister’s sake, but for mine. For George’s sake, so he has a mother who is not made of bitterness. For his future children, if he has them. To stop the passing on of hate. Once you realise that hate is like bacteria infecting others, you know you have to stop it. I won’t pass hate onto my grandchildren. But if I can, I will pass on love.’

  Silence dripped in long slow seconds. Johannes was aware of Helga’s hand still in his, the tears drying now on her face. ‘Helga,’ he whispered. ‘Are you all right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Frau Marks? Should we tell Helga’s parents? My parents?’

  ‘I will tell them,’ said Frau Marks gently. ‘But no one else. Because Helga was also right when she kept her secret. When lives have been hacked away till all that is left is hate, there will be many who want to fling that hate at whoever they can find. Even a child who was Hitler’s foster daughter.’

  They drank the lemonade. They ate the almond biscuits, and phoned the Schmidts to explain Helga was visiting Frau Marks and not to worry if she was late home.

  And then they walked, not to go anywhere in particular, but just to walk together, still hand in hand as Frau Marks waved to them from her gate, the flowers bright behind her.

  The sky stretched like a blue balloon. The clouds bobbed like ducks upon a lake. The light poured into the world in a golden stream, even here in this street of shabby houses, and a magpie sang again. Johannes loved them all. He loved Frau Marks too. He loved music, his parents, Mr Mittelfeld, and he would love the old man’s violin. And mostly, he loved Helga.

  I am a man of love, he thought. This afternoon, probably, perhaps, hate might seep back in. Hate will nibble at my soul at four in the morning, with memories that wake me screaming. Hate will try to flood me when I see the newsreels at the movie theatres and they show Hitler once again. But I have defeated him at last.

  I am no longer in the belly of the ogre.

  Goodbye, Mr Hitler. You are no longer part of me.

  Chapter 45

  JOHANNES

  AUSTRALIA, 1972

  On the corner by the park lives a house of love and stories.

  A cat called Fuzzball lives there too. She twines about the legs of the children, but sometimes she sits by the window and watches the pigeons and sighs.

  The neighbours call it ‘the doctors’ house’ for on the ground floor of the house are the surgery and waiting rooms where the mother and father see their patients. The father, whose name is Johannes, is a doctor for people’s minds. The mother’s name is Helga and she heals the pain of children.

  Sometimes in the night a patient rings the bell to say a doctor is needed urgently. But mostly, at night, there are hugs and stories for Christine and for Gregory in the bedrooms that look out onto the trees.

  The night-time stories are adventures, of flying in a rainbow boat to the land of silver dragons, where houses sit in crags above sheer cliffs and the snow t
astes of ice cream and the trees are loaves of fruit bread.

  Sometimes, in the holidays, when they meet their friends for picnics, the adults and the children sit on blankets on the ground.

  They tell different stories now the children are old enough to understand them.

  George tells the story of the night he almost killed a helpless enemy, then realised in the darkness that hatred is contagious. Hatred has power. But love has power too, and that night he helped the man live.

  And Mud, who is his wife, laughs and says it was a good thing that he did, for the man was not an enemy but Charlie Lee, who is their son’s Godfather now.

  The other Mrs Marks, who is older, tells the story of Sister Columba, who gave her a talisman to keep her safe, not on her body but in her heart. Mrs Marks cups her hands, then opens them and, for a second, the children can almost see the word shining in the shadows. Love.

  Helga tells of Frau Leib, and the day her pig followed her into her bedroom and began to eat the quilt.

  Johannes tells of a man called Opa, who said that ‘Words kept in the heart cannot be burned’, and how a line of ragged children died in the snow, but how he lived because a nurse carried him, a nurse whose arms were warm, despite the cold.

  The stories make them cry, sometimes, but they are healing tears. They teach us to remember to see the beauty in the world, the glint of sunlight on the leaves, the taste of cherry strudel, to face the horror and the hatred but to hold them at arm’s length, so we can see the love and beauty all around. What we choose to see is what we are.

  When you know how to hold the bad things of the world, you do not need to look away. And Mrs Marks smiles and says, ‘Sister Columba told me that every day we must open our eyes to one wrong thing and say aloud, to ourselves and others, “This is not right.”’

  I am Johannes. I am a man of love, not hate. I love my wife, my children, my friends, my patients. I feel the love spread from my hands across the world, to join the hands of others.

  I tell the story of the ogre too, the one called Mr Hitler.

  There in the park, with my family and my friends, the ogre is dead at last, for me, for Frau Marks, and for Helga. But others have had to carry him in their hearts all their lives. When an ogre swallows you, it is not easy to be free.

  The world has many ogres. Some, like Mr Hitler, do not even know that they are ogres, but dream they are the hero of the story.

  But I have learned this in the years since I was ten years old: when you see injustice, stand beside each other and seize your spears. My spears are made of words. Yours may be different. But do not hesitate or look away. If too many look away, the ogres win. To be mostly deeply human we must risk our lives for others. Only when we stand together can we be truly free.

  It is not easy fighting ogres. No one who fights an ogre comes away unscarred, even if you cannot see the wounds. And so you owe the ogre hunters this.

  When the ogre has been vanquished, sit down upon the quiet earth and try to understand the ogre’s anguish and his twisted fear. Only by understanding can we stop them rising in our midst.

  When you understand, forgive.

  And then stand up, and live.

  Live well.

  Author’s Note

  This book, like Hitler’s Daughter and Pennies for Hitler, is based on real events and people. The stories behind the books can be found at jackiefrench.com. Goodbye, Mr Hitler, like the others, is fiction, but historical fiction should weave between the facts, and not contradict anything that actually happened.

  This history in Goodbye, Mr Hitler is as accurate as I am able to recreate, but the details of Johannes’s short time in Auschwitz may conflict with other accounts. The concentration camp’s procedures of even a few weeks before had changed greatly by December 1944, and seem to have been far more disorganised with the Russian army so close, and Germany so desperate, which is one of the reasons I had Johannes arrive at that time. But no two accounts I have been able to find accord exactly. The camp was enormous. Routines changed often over the years. The other reason, of course, for having the main characters arrive so close to the camp’s liberation was so that they had a chance to survive.

  The two refugee camps and the voyages bringing displaced persons to Australia in this book are also based on real ones, but I have not given names or locations as it is impossible to find enough detail to be sure no inaccuracy crept in.

  There will be inaccuracies in this book. The war, and its aftermath, are too large and complex to be entirely understood by one historian, or even hundreds or thousands trying to recreate those days. But the most important words in this book are those spoken to me by those who were there: who survived, who hated . . . but who had the strength and courage to give the world extraordinary gifts of love.

  Acknowledgements

  Of all the books I have written, this is the most important. It is also the one that belongs least to me.

  The book’s theme that forgiveness is necessary both personally and for the good of the world was inspired by the Holocaust survivor volunteers at the Sydney Jewish Museum.

  On my first visit to the museum I heard Holocaust survivor Olga Horak speak to a packed auditorium of teenagers, quietly detailing her own story that is not mine to tell. To quote one young man who heard her, ‘I knew about the Holocaust, but I didn’t understand. I just didn’t know.’

  Olga’s story of hatred and privation was harrowing, and yet she spoke gently and, to the young people there, with love. It was one of the greatest privileges of my life to listen to her and yet, back then, I could not have articulated why.

  Years later, as I continued to make an annual visit to the museum, I was told quietly by a staff member of the enormous personal tragedy Olga had just suffered. Yet she still arrived, as scheduled, to speak. Later, I tried clumsily to express my sympathy to her. She took my hand and said, ‘Without this place I could not keep going.’

  Olga showed me that doing good for others can save your life.

  I already knew I must write a sequel to Hitler’s Daughter. After thousands of letters and emails asking me if Heidi in the book really was Hitler’s daughter, I needed to explicitly explain that Heidi would have been one of the foster children adopted for propaganda purposes, even if she hoped desperately that she really was the daughter of Germany’s leader. The story of Georg’s mother, from Pennies for Hitler, was still to be told too.

  But this book also began far earlier, when as a teenager I asked my English teacher, ‘Why?’ Why did the world look away from the Holocaust? Why were Jewish people — or even those whose distant ancestors were Jewish — targeted?

  Gillian Pauli was an inspired teacher, of deep and profound compassion. (She is still a woman of deep and profound compassion, though no longer, formally, a teacher.) She brought me armfuls of books every Monday, at a time when I needed those books to survive the horror I had learned not to even try to talk about at school.

  I thought the books were from her recent stint at university. I found out years later that she had hunted them out for me, the books I needed to understand the world, to give me the hope and courage to keep going.

  Gillian Pauli lent me The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an 1890s book of vicious anti-Semitic propaganda, to show me how lies can be used to create fear and hatred. She told me, a long time later, how she had to convince the shop where she bought it that it was for research, not because she was a Nazi sympathiser or an anti-Semite.

  A friend of hers, who had survived Dachau, saw it on her kitchen table.

  ‘Why do you have this book?’ he demanded.

  ‘It is for a student who needs to understand the Holocaust.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘She is fifteen.’

  ‘Too young!’

  ‘But not too young for Auschwitz,’ said Mrs Pauli’s husband.

  Their friend considered. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘Not too young for Auschwitz. But tell her it is an evil book.’


  ‘I wouldn’t be lending it to her if I didn’t think she already knows that,’ said Gillian Pauli.

  Gillian also taught me that writing is for those you write for, not for yourself, and that a book has power for both good and evil, and that power lasts long after those who wrote it have gone.

  Years later, I would read psychiatric research showing that just one violent teenager may turn another fifteen violent or vicious, and they too will spread the disease. But by then I knew kindness can be contagious too.

  It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Too simple. Be kind, especially to those who are troubled and lash out, and that kindness will spread. Be compassionate, and that compassion will travel to others too. But while some of the underlying truths of the universe may be too complex to understand, this one is not: whatever you do that is evil or kind or compassionate will multiply, even if you never know how far it spreads.

  At last I began to plot out this book. But first I requested permission to speak to the Holocaust survivors who volunteered at the museum. I asked them the question I had already asked many of those who had returned from the Japanese prison camps of World War II: ‘How did you survive?’

  I expected they would give the same answer I had heard from prison camp survivors: ‘If you had a mate, you’d have a better chance to get back home. When you were ill or in despair, your mate would help you, and you would help them.’

  I expected the museum volunteers to tell me that those who had a gift for friendship were more likely to live.

  They said instead it was mostly a matter of luck. You might be allowed to live. You might be placed where everyone died, though in their stories there were times when their courage, intelligence and endurance might have meant they lived when others died.

  Nor did those extraordinary volunteers say they had a greater capacity for friendship. Instead each said that after the war they hated; and that each, slowly, had learned to love again.

  In the words of one man: ‘The day they put my son into my arms I saw that my heart was so filled with hate there was little room to love my son. I knew I must become a man of love, not a man of hate, for my son.’