By the time he finally arrived it was mid-evening and I was in something of a state. But I had no time to dwell on my feelings: there was to be a meeting of the stolen Slovenian children that evening in the primary school at Celje. This town, I gathered, had been called Cilli during the German occupation, and had been both a centre for partisan resistance and the site of Nazi reprisals.
As we drove through the countryside, I looked out of the window, trying to take in the landscape, the land of my birth. I had wondered beforehand if seeing it for the first time in almost seventy years would prompt some memories: it felt disappointing to find that it did not.
I knew very little about the people I was meeting that evening and was surprised to discover that the event in Celje was a very different gathering of stolen children from my first encounter. They had started searching for one another as far back as 1962, determined to tell their stories to the (then) Yugoslavian public.
The men and women I met that evening were all in their eighties – between ten and fifteen years older than me. They were the leaders of what had become an officially supported group of survivors, and their accounts filled in some of the gaps in my knowledge.
Throughout 1942 a total of 654 children, from babies to eighteen-year-olds, were snatched from their families by the Nazis and shipped off to a succession of camps across the Reich. Most of the older ones – at least those who survived the rigours of slave labour or attempted Germanisation – had been brought back home at the end of the war. By the time I arrived in Celje, only around 200 were still alive.
Despite their age, their memories were strong and they were determined that the world should not forget what had been done to them. Two speakers stood up in the primary school to give testimony. I sat silently: even if I had felt able to trust the translator to speak for me, I knew too little to make any worthwhile contribution. But my presence had been noted. After the meeting was over, three people came over to speak to me. Each had been stolen from Celje in August 1942 and, to my complete astonishment, each one said they recognised me.
The first woman was seventeen when she was caught in a round-up of children from the area and held for two days in the primary school by SS troops. The children ranged from small infants to eighteen-year-old teenagers: because they were separated from their mothers, the older ones were ordered to look after the babies. This warm and emotional elderly woman told me that the babies were constantly crying. Her task had been to clean the smallest ones, and she specifically remembered washing me.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I would have been less than a year old when the round-up happened; how on earth could someone recognise me more than sixty years later? But somehow this woman believed that she did. It was astonishing. I had come to Slovenia hoping only to find some evidence that tied me to the country. Instead I had come face to face with someone who claimed that she could place me in Celje on the day that I was stolen – and who said she had actually held and looked after me when I was a baby.
On reflection it seemed more probable that the woman had been told I was coming and this had prompted her to remember me. But either way it was a connection.
The next person I spoke to was a man around the same age. He had been fourteen on the day of the kidnapping, and he was able to tell me a bit more about what had happened to the stolen children on the day after the round-up. He told me that we were transported 150 kilometres north to the holding camp at Frohnleiten in Austria. He was adamant that he had seen me there, and that the name he knew me by was Erika Matko.
Another elderly lady chimed in then, confirming what the man said. She had been kidnapped from Celje and shipped to Frohnleiten: she too remembered me there and that my name was Erika Matko.
I suddenly felt intensely happy. After so long, after so many disappointments, I had first-hand evidence of who I had once been and where I had come from. It was an extraordinary sensation.
I did not have time that night to press my new contacts for further details of the kidnapping. I would have to wait to find out more about the events of August 1942 and how I had been caught up in them.
The next day, we moved on to the Maribor region. Ahead of my meeting with Maria, Josef Focks had arranged for me to meet two other people whose surname was Matko. He had also equipped me with sterile test tubes and cotton buds so that if these Matkos were willing, I could take samples of their saliva, which we would have analysed to see whether we shared any genetic similarities. In this way I could discover whether we were related.
Our first stop was a village near Rogaška Slatina. As we drove closer, I looked out of the window at the green and densely wooded landscape, hoping to see something familiar, but I didn’t recognise anything. The village was clearly very poor: the woman I was due to meet was eighty and lived with her forty-year-old son. Both seemed puzzled by my visit but the old lady agreed to give me a saliva sample. Her son was more hostile and refused. Neither of them were able to tell me much about their family background and I left thinking that if we were related it was probably only distantly.
The next Matko was a thirty-year-old hairdresser. She willingly gave me a sample for DNA analysis but, again, had little information to help me on my journey.
Finally it was time to meet Maria Matko. Herr Focks had arranged our rendezvous in a little cafe in Rogaška Slatina, and she had promised to bring the mysterious other Erika with her. But the moment I walked in, I could see that Maria was alone. I felt a sharp pang of disappointment.
Maria herself turned out to be warm and helpful, and a vital link in unlocking the chains of my past. She was seventy-three years old and not a Matko by birth; she had married into the family. Her husband was called Ludvig and he had two sisters: Tanja, who was older than him, and Erika, who was younger. Both Ludvig and Tanja were dead, but Erika was still alive, if rather infirm. Maria said that in the end she had been unwilling to meet me.
It was plain from our conversation that none of the extended Matko family thought I was related to them. Maria was the most open-minded, but even she was sceptical. At that point I was beginning to share their doubts.
But then Maria gave me the details that once again raised my hopes. The parents of Ludvig, Tanja and Erika had been called Johann and Helena – the very names I had been given three years before by the archivist in Maribor. What’s more, Johann had been imprisoned by the Nazis for resistance activity: that seemed to fit what Georg Lilienthal had told me about my background.
Over the preceding years there had been a pattern to all my attempts to discover the truth: one piece of new information would emerge to lift my spirits and make me believe that I could find the answers I sought. But it would always be followed by a letter or conversation that dashed those hopes and sent me back into despair. And so it proved that day in Rogaška Slatina: no sooner had my expectations been raised than they were lowered once again. Maria produced two photographs. One was of Helena, taken in 1964: she was looking directly at the camera, a solid-looking woman with dark hair and a strong but kindly face. The second picture was of Erika, and my immediate reaction was that she looked just like Helena. That suggested she was Helena’s daughter – and if so, then surely it meant that I could not have been.
When we parted, I felt a little depressed. The only thing buoying my spirits was that Maria agreed to meet me again, and promised to talk to the other members of the Matko family to see if they would cooperate with me.
The next day I went to her apartment. She was babysitting her granddaughter, and talked openly about the family history. She told me that Ludvig, Tanja and Erika had lived with their parents until Johann was arrested by the Nazis and imprisoned in a concentration camp. In the early summer of 1942 he had been released and returned to the family home, after which point her knowledge ended. Johann’s brother, Ignaz, had not been so lucky: he too was a partisan and arrested by the Germans, but he was shot by a firing squad.
During our conversation, Maria’s son Rafael joined us.
Rafael was in his forties, solidly built and balding. Although he was polite, he clearly did not believe I was related to them. It was obvious that the family was close-knit and protective of one another.
The one exception was, apparently, Erika. Maria told me that her sister-in-law had never married, though she did have a son, and had been so ill throughout her life that she had never worked. It was plain that for all the family bonds – Erika was usually invited to Sunday lunches – the two women weren’t particularly close.
By the time I took my leave, I had convinced myself that although this family seemed to share some remarkable similarities with the Matkos I was searching for, they were probably not my blood family. Nonetheless, before I set off I explained about my DNA testing plans. Rafael kindly agreed to give me a saliva sample and, after some hesitation, so did his cousin Marko.
My final appointment was in Maribor. I went to the museum, which maintained a special section dedicated to the remembrance of what the Nazis had done in Slovenia. In addition to rounding up and executing ‘bandits’ – partisan fighters like Ignaz and Johann Matko – all Slovenian books were burned, the language was banned and anyone caught speaking it was severely punished. Himmler’s plan to subjugate the local population was put into effect brutally and efficiently.
Perhaps once I would have been shocked by what I saw in the museum, but everything I had learned over the previous three years about Lebensborn and its operations had inured me to the routine cruelty of the Nazi occupation. Instead I was preoccupied by trying to process what I had discovered during my four days in Slovenia. I had arrived uncertain about how I fitted into the country’s history in general, and into the story of the Matko family in particular. With each contradictory new piece of information I had, by turns, been convinced that I was Erika Matko from Rogaška Slatina and then certain that I could not be her. By the time I got back on the plane in Ljubljana, I was completely confused.
I had been away from my physiotherapy practice in Osnabrück for too long. My patients needed me, and I needed them. It was time to go home: to be Ingrid von Oelhafen once again.
FOURTEEN | BLOOD
‘Scientific analysis is 93.3 per cent certain …’
DNA TEST RESULTS, OCTOBER 2003
How do we put together the jigsaw puzzle of our lives? It is not easy, even when none of the pieces are missing and we have the picture on the box to compare it with. How much harder when we lack the solid, clear-cut corners to build out from.
This was how the story of my childhood looked to me when I arrived home from Slovenia. I had dozens of individual pieces but they were oddly shaped, sometimes overlapping, sometimes contradictory. There seemed to be no way to fit them together to reveal the full picture.
I couldn’t decide whether or not to believe the survivors of the Celje kidnappings, so convinced that I was the Erika Matko they remembered. Surely it wasn’t possible that someone would recognise in the face of a seventy-two-year-old woman the features of a nine-month-old baby they had known only in the most traumatic of circumstances? Plus their accounts were at odds with the reaction of Maria Matko and her son: they plainly did not believe I was part of their family. And always in the background was the shadowy figure of the other Erika, who had still not replied to my letter and who had deliberately avoided meeting me in Rogaška Slatina.
The answer, I hoped, lay in the swabs and test tubes I had brought home with me. Saliva analysis would provide genetic fingerprints, which are as reliable as a blood test in determining family relationships. The irony of this was not lost on me: the Lebensborn experiment had been based on the Nazis’ belief in blood as the determining factor of human worth. Himmler’s obsession with blood and bloodlines was the reason I had been plucked from my family – whoever they were – in Yugoslavia and reborn as a German child. It had shaped the course of my life from that day onward. Now I was trying to use it to unravel the tangled web Lebensborn had spun.
The saliva swabs had not been given without a great deal of anxiety. There had been a dispute within the Matko family about me taking them: some of the younger members of the family had been adamantly opposed to the idea of scientific tests to establish whether I was one of them. They worried, I think, primarily about the stress this could cause to Erika, who was not in good health. Others, though, believed that it was important to find out one way or the other. After much discussion, I had been given the family’s blessing to have their samples analysed. I set about finding a laboratory to test them for me.
Only at this point did I discover that it was not going to be easy – or cheap. The science of DNA testing really began in 1985 and was then both rudimentary and the exclusive domain of law enforcement authorities. Although it had since been refined and made more commercially available, it was still expensive.
All of the cotton buds I had collected in Slovenia had to be processed so that the individual DNA of each person could be isolated; I also gave a sample for comparison. Although 99.9 per cent of human DNA sequences are the same for everyone, there are enough differences to make it possible to distinguish one individual from another. What the scientists would look for were places in these sequences called ‘loci’. Where two people are related by blood, these loci are very similar to each other; in samples from biologically unrelated donors, they look completely different.
I used my savings to pay for the tests. It meant tightening my belt and not taking holidays for the foreseeable future, but there was simply no alternative. I carefully parcelled up the swabs and sent them off to the laboratory in Munich. It took several months for the results to come back. What they revealed was both the answer to the big puzzle and a new mystery.
I looked first at the analysis of the samples provided by the hairdresser and the old lady. As I had suspected, neither had any genetic relationship to me. I allowed myself a guilty feeling of relief: it was clear that the old lady lived in some poverty, which was sad to see. All along I had hoped that my biological family had not suffered; it was painful to imagine that my real mother might have had such a hard life.
The next set of results were for Rafael Matko, the son of Ludvig and Maria. When I read them, my guilty feelings were transformed into pure happiness.
Scientific analysis shows that Ingrid von Oelhafen and Rafael Matko are relatives in the second degree … it is 93.3 per cent certain that Ingrid von Oelhafen is the aunt of Rafael Matko.
There it was – the evidence I had been seeking for so long. If I was Rafael’s aunt, that meant I was Ludvig’s sister, and therefore the daughter of Johann and Helena Matko. I had found the vital piece of the jigsaw puzzle: I was unquestionably Erika Matko from St Sauerbrunn/Rogaška Slatina.
It is hard to convey what this news meant to me. Unless you have lived your life as I had, haunted by never knowing who I was and where I came from, I don’t think it is possible to fully understand the overwhelming elation: it was like being liberated. I felt as though the weight of sixty years had been lifted from me.
Then, as always seemed to happen, the other test results dragged me back into uncertainty. Analysis of the saliva sample given by Marko Matko – Rafael’s cousin – had yielded what appeared to be a completely contradictory outcome: it showed that to a 98.8 per cent degree of certainty I was not related to Marko.
This simply didn’t make sense. I looked again at the Matko family tree to remind myself of what I already knew: Johann and Helena had three children, Tanja, Ludvig and Erika. Ludvig’s son was Rafael and the tests proved that I was his aunt: therefore I must be Erika. But the same set of results showed that Tanja’s son, Marko, was not my biological relative. No matter how I arranged these jigsaw pieces, I could not get them to fit. If I was Ludvig and Tanja’s sister, why wasn’t I Marko’s aunt? The Matko family seemed to be surrounded by secrets
The person most likely to have the answers was the mysterious other Erika. She was the last living first-degree blood relative – at least in theory. She had been raised by Helena and Johann
and had grown up with Tanja and Ludvig. But she was still ignoring me and I had to assume by this point that she was not prepared to help me. It was immensely frustrating; I could not understand why she was being so obstructive.
I tried to focus on the positives. I knew for certain that I was – or had once been – Erika Matko, daughter of Johann and Helena, and that Ludvig at least was my brother. Quite how Tanja and the other Erika fitted into the picture was still a mystery, but at least I could be certain who my biological parents were. That was a very real comfort. But I was still no closer to solving the puzzle of how I had been taken from them. It would be another four years before those pieces fell into place.
FIFTEEN | PURE
‘To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.’
SIMONE WEIL, THE NEED FOR ROOTS, 1949
Wernigerode lies on the eastern edge of the Harz mountains in the German heartland of Saxony. It is a quiet, picturesque town, in which half-timbered houses flank the Holtemme river and horse-drawn carts still rumble through cobbled streets. It looks and feels like the setting for a fairy tale: the sort of place where the Brothers Grimm might have based their stories.
But Wernigerode has another, altogether less cosy history. On the top of a steep hill just outside the town lie the ruins of Heim Harz, one of the network of Lebensborn homes.
In late summer 2005, I drove to Wernigerode to take part in the creation of a new organisation. Lebensspuren (‘Traces of Life’) was the first formal attempt by those of us who had been born or reared under Himmler’s Master Race programme to band together: our aim was both to provide much-needed support and to begin the process of bringing Lebensborn into the public gaze, free from the prejudice and shame that prevented others from understanding what had been done to us in its homes.
It was a long journey. The road stretched more than 260 kilometres through the woods and fields of central Germany: as I drove I had time to reflect on how I had got here. It was more than five years since I had begun the search for my roots. I had learned so much during that time, and yet I still knew relatively little.
Hitler's Forgotten Children Page 14
