She never did. And even the sporadic, terse entries in the little journal she had – apparently – kept for me ceased abruptly in the summer of 1949.
I was ten years old when I finally left Langeoog for good in 1952. I had passed the exams to go to Mittelschule, the intermediary level of education between elementary and senior schools, and had high hopes that at last I would be allowed to live with my mother in Hamburg. Instead my father sent for my brother and me: we were to share his new home in Bad Salzuflen.
By this point Hermann von Oelhafen was sixty-eight years old, bitter at the loss of his wife, suffering from poor health and utterly ill-equipped to look after young children he barely knew. Of the ten years of my life and nine years of Dietmar’s, he had lived with us for a matter of months at most. It was surely a little too late to start being a father.
I believe I know now why Hermann ordered us to Bad Salzuflen. I think my father still loved Gisela and he hoped our presence there might somehow draw her back to him; that despite her evident love affair with another man – and their child – Dietmar and I would be the glue that mended their broken marriage.
In this, as in much else, he was to be disappointed. My mother came occasionally to visit us (a spare bedroom in the smart, if far from grand, house on Akazienstrasse was maintained for her exclusive use), but there was never any question of reconciliation.
From the moment we arrived, life in Bad Salzuflen was horrible. Even as a young child, Dietmar was spirited and difficult, though not particularly naughty. Today I think he might have been diagnosed with ADHD: certainly he and Hermann fought a battle of wills. He was routinely late coming home from school – even though he never seemed to want to learn there – and Hermann, who was hot-tempered at the best of times, had no understanding or patience for this irritating little boy. Very soon he began to beat Dietmar.
It was frightening to watch: on one occasion he physically threw him across the room. And yet somehow Dietmar wasn’t frightened of him. I, by contrast, was terrified: even though my father never hit me, I lived in fear of his temper. I began to rely on Dietmar to ask for Hermann’s permission to do even the smallest things. One day we wanted to go swimming but I didn’t dare ask. Dietmar went straight away in my place, and permission was granted, but it didn’t change anything for me. I was still too scared to speak to my father. And then Dietmar was taken away.
Someone – presumably the children’s welfare department of the local government – decided that since Hermann did not live with his wife and that there was therefore no mother in our house, Dietmar could no longer live with us.
There were a number of odd aspects to this decision. For a start it only applied to Dietmar: although I was less than a year older than him, the authorities did not appear to believe I had to be removed from my father’s care. Officially the reason for this discrepancy was that I was to be looked after by the middle-aged couple who lived with us as Hermann’s cook-cum-housekeeper and general help (the Hartes). But no one explained why the paid-for care of Emmi and Karl Harte was good enough for me yet insufficient for Dietmar.
More puzzling still was the revelation that Dietmar had family – a completely different family from ours – living in Munich. Had I been older I would, of course, have realised that the nine months between his birthday and mine meant that we were unlikely to have had the same mother. But even if I’d understood that, I would never have anticipated the truth. It was a complete shock to discover – aged ten – that the boy I had always known as my brother had in fact been fostered by my parents.
And so it transpired that Dietmar had an uncle, an aunt and a sister – blood relatives all – who had, presumably, been looking for him. I don’t remember anyone explaining how he had originally come to live with us instead of them: one day he was simply taken away from Bad Salzuflen. As it turned out, he never rejoined his long-lost family: instead – for reasons I have never understood – they placed him in the care of another children’s home.
I missed Dietmar very badly. And I was now on my own (save for the Hartes) in my father’s house and, if my letters to Gisela are anything to go by, absolutely terrified.
22th June 1952
Dear Mummy!
Please send me some envelopes and stamps. Dear Mummy, please pick me up this week and bring me to Hamburg, I’m not able to stay longer with Daddy. I must tell you that my fear of him is greater than before. He told me off once because I’ve cried about you. Now I cry every day.
Dear Mummy, please pick me up immediately, I cannot stand it here with Daddy any longer. Or come and stay here for ever. But ‘Uncle Harte’ says you are afraid of Daddy too. Dear Mummy, perhaps you can send the stamps to ‘Uncle Harte’, but don’t tell Daddy that I’ve written to you.
Mummy, we can organise it this way: You come and pick me up forever and explain to Daddy you had written to Munich [to the child welfare department] to ask whether they would allow me to stay with you. You [explain that you] didn’t bring the letter with you, but promise to send it when we get back to Hamburg.
And in Hamburg we’ll write a letter on typewriter and send it to Daddy and pretend it has come from Munich. I’d like so much to come to you just this week, please pick me up quickly. Today I cried again because I have been thinking of you. I’m not in the mood to play because you are not here. Please pick me up at the 25th of June. Greetings and kisses from Ingrid. Please pick me up the 25th. Please, please dear Mummy.
These pleas went unheeded. Although my mother continued to come for short visits, she never took me home with her. Whether this was because my father forbade it or because she didn’t want me to live with her, the outcome was the same: I was effectively imprisoned in the house in Bad Salzuflen with an increasingly bitter and parsimonious old man.
Even as an eleven-year-old, I was aware that my father was less well off than my mother. He received a state pension from the new West German government; reward for his years serving both the Kaiser and the Reich as an officer in the army. But this did not, for example, seem to be sufficient to pay the price of a daily newspaper to be delivered. Instead he would make the journey into town where he would stand outside the newspaper offices and read the morning’s edition, which was always pasted up in the window. Occasionally I was permitted to go with him.
Hermann’s health was deteriorating. He had suffered from epilepsy for many years (a condition he had apparently concealed from Gisela when asking her to marry him). Now it became increasingly severe. Although I never saw him have a full-blown grand mal fit, when a seizure took him he became ‘absent’ – completely lost within himself. There was no way to communicate with him, and his behaviour was strange and frightening. Often he picked up a knife and waved it around wildly. Once he was hospitalised and while he was away, Frau Harte was more generous than he was with the marmalade for my breakfast. When Hermann came home again he saw how much had been used from the jar 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 day
s 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 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
‘The lost identity of individual children is the social problem of the day on the continent of Europe.’
INTERNATIONAL REFUGEE ORGANISATION INTERNAL MEMORANDUM, MAY 1949
When 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 from one 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 never call her that. But she was noticeably cold – emotionally and physically – towards me. This was in stark contrast to her other relationships. Professionally, she was an extremely successful physiotherapist: her patients clearly loved her, and she returned their affection.
With her own relatives, too, she was warm: to her mother and her sister (Aunt Eka, to whom I increasingly turned for love and understanding), and to her son. Hubertus was eight years younger than me; a very handsome boy, who – unlike me at his age – could speak well and fluently. It might have been easy not to like him: he was, after all, Gisela’s natural child, and had been living in the house in Hamburg before I was allowed to go there. But although I resented the fact that Gisela seemed able to show love to almost anyone but me, I had come to care very much for Hubertus and we had a strong bond between us.
But this was a rare glimpse of light. Teenage years are always difficult, especially, I think, for girls. Those crucial years between thirteen and fifteen are generally a time of uncertainty and insecurity, and a time when it is all too easy to be critical of adults. But in Germany in 1956, that biological confusion was exacerbated by national crisis.
The Nazis and the war had broken the previously close bonds of German family life just as surely as the bombs and tanks had destroyed the country’s houses, bridges and railways. In addition to creating a huge population of orphans, Hitler’s desperate last-ditch battles had blurred the lines between childhood and adult life by throwing young boys into the doomed fighting.
In the immediate post-war years, an army of international psychologists and social workers was drafted in to address the problems for Germany’s next generation. The men and women of the United Nation
s Refugee Relief Organisation (UNRRA) and its successor, the International Refugee Organisation (IRO), recognised that many teenagers in the late 1940s and early 1950s were growing up without the emotional security they needed – both individually and as part of an emerging new nation. An internal IRO memorandum in May 1949 highlighted the crisis in stark terms: ‘The lost identity of individual children is the social problem of the day …’
And so, while the American Secretary of State, George Marshall, put in place a vast economic aid plan to rebuild Germany’s shattered infrastructure and economy (and the rest of Europe), UNRRA and IRO set to work on what they termed a ‘psychological Marshall Plan’ for its children.
First they had to identify us. Along with the posters, radio announcements instructed those fostering children from other countries to report to their local youth administration office.
How did this affect us? I could not have told you then what Gisela did: it would be decades before I learned that she met with the investigators without telling me. But when I came face to face with my photo on the poster, I had conflicting emotions.
Of course, I wondered who my real parents were. Perhaps my father had been – like Hermann – an officer in the Wehrmacht, who went away to war, leaving me with a mother who either didn’t want me, or could not cope alone with a baby. Those were my rational thoughts. But behind them were the sharp pangs of fear and hope. Hope that my biological mother would see the posters and suddenly turn up to say that she now wanted me. Fear, because if she ever did I was worried what sort of person this woman would turn out to be. Perhaps she would be worse than Gisela; maybe she wouldn’t even like me?
But these were only flickering emotions and in the end I found it was easier to snuff them out than to dwell on them. Even though I wasn’t happy and I knew that the von Oelhafens and the Andersens were not my blood relatives, I clung to the belief that in some way I belonged to them.
Hitler's Forgotten Children Page 4
