“But our investigators were not ready to give up. As you can imagine, the name was still on everyone’s lips. Gerhardt. Anton Gerhardt, tried and hanged. An important Nazi figure, a vicious experimentalist . . .”
“Willem was nothing like his father. You should know that when you file your report.”
“He has done some wrongs, Frau Winthur . . .”
“He gave many children a chance, Fraulein Janz. He did not know that her parents were alive when we adopted her. He would not have made her suffer . . . not Matilda. By the time the truth was known, it was too late—”
“It is never too late. You should have brought her forward. You should have found out for certain if her parents had been killed. Her father, unfortunately, never returned from war.”
Elsi is trembling now.
“Something Willem said to me toward the end, about a mistake, made me suspicious. But we loved her . . . she was ours. And she loved us. You have to believe that Willem died for her.”
I look away. It is always difficult to watch someone begging for forgiveness, especially when it is not my place to grant it.
“We looked into other properties held under the name Gerhardt—and there were many that he and his father owned and leased, the documentation most likely restricted while Anton was alive—until we found a transfer of a property in Oldenburg to someone by the name of Elsi Winthur. And that, of course, brings me here.”
“You need to know everything if you are going to judge me.”
“It will be for others, not me, to judge you. My job is simply to find the child and return her to her mother.”
“Will you at least hear what I have to say?”
Her eyes glisten like melting ice, and her hand shakes as she reaches for a glass of water. She is breaking. She is no longer looking at me, but through the window and out into the street.
“I will tell you everything, if you let me,” she says.
“Where is she?” I ask.
“School finishes in an hour. She will be home shortly after that.”
I nod.
She begins her story from the same age as Matilda is now: fifteen. She tells me everything: the ghetto, her mother, her sister sent to the camps, and the rescue by her lover, Willem Gerhardt. She talks simply, plainly, without exaggeration or drama. She was a young girl, with big dreams, before being stripped of everything she held dear. It is like so many other stories of horror, of being reduced to nothing. Though to hear her tell it, to hear what happened to her whole family, and then to Matilda at the hands of Frau Haus, causes an ache deep in my belly. And finally the witnessing of Willem’s suicide. He died attempting to save the other children. And he died for her and Matilda.
By the time she is finished, I am slightly exhausted. I have trained myself to listen, to not become involved, but it is always a challenge. Always after I hear these stories, it is many nights before I can sleep again. Elsi tells me of Willem’s quest to save as many children as he could, something that should not go unrecorded. His name is currently associated with misdeeds only.
But there is no doubt in my mind that Willem Gerhardt, like his father, would have been executed by the new government had he lived. He assisted with murders at Auschwitz. That much has been proven.
Elsi is suddenly distracted and turns her head. I have time to study the tiny lines in her young face, etched too early by years of torment, before I follow her gaze outside the window. A girl strides across the street toward the house. She wears a dress of green, and her golden hair is twisted into a tail that hangs over the front of her shoulder. Her head is held high. She is someone with confidence; I can tell immediately. She is less breakable than the woman in front of me.
I turn to look at Elsi and find her eyes then fixed on me.
“Please don’t tell her that I knew . . . please . . .”
The words wrench at me, they tear part of my heart from where it was embedded. She knew all along. And part of me says, What have I done? Should this woman endure any more?
Matilda opens the door, and her smile, already half-formed, disappears quickly when she sees me.
“Who are you?” asks the girl accusingly. She has sensed that I am unwanted here.
“Matilda,” Elsi jumps in quickly, “please . . . sit down.”
“Mutti, what is wrong? What has happened?” The girl looks at me with narrow, accusing eyes.
The concern she shows for her mother is so genuine, I have to remind myself why I am here, that I don’t enter into any feelings of sympathy toward this woman. Yet I do.
“Your family is alive, Matilda. Your mother . . .” Elsi’s voice trails off.
“My brothers?”
“They are with your mother.”
“And my father?’
“Unfortunately, he did not survive the battlefield.”
The smile that had nearly formed at the mention of her brothers fades at the news of her father. She sits down and stares at the table in front of her.
“I remember that he did not want to fight.”
I allow her a moment to remember him, to take in the news, to grieve. But there are no tears for him. Instead she looks up to examine her mother’s troubled expression, and I see then that Matilda’s sorrow extends elsewhere; she had already grieved for her father years earlier. She had already dealt with the loss.
“Perhaps they can come to visit?” she says.
Elsi shakes her head, and tears trickle from the corners of her eyes.
She knows immediately the implication.
“Oh God!” she says, as she reaches across to Elsi.
I cannot share this moment. It is too intense, too personal.
“I will give you a moment,” I say. “But I have been asked to take Matilda back as soon as possible.”
“I am fifteen,” she says. “No one takes me anywhere I don’t want to go. Mutti, how do you know that I can trust her? That she won’t take me somewhere far away . . . to still another house?”
Matilda’s look is fierce, and she is breathing rapidly.
“Matilda,” I say, “the war is over. The only thing you need to fear is the boredom of my company on the journey to your home. I can also tell you that your brother Theo, who looks just like you, had to hide your books during the war to keep your mother from burning them for fuel, and that your handsome brother Dragos wishes to see his little sun again.”
Matilda lowers her gaze to her lap, where she pinches the tips of her thumb nervously.
The silence lasts for several seconds until Elsi leans forward to hold Matilda’s hand.
“You can trust her,” says Elsi, her voice low and soothing. “I believe she is who she says she is. I believe that she is here in your best interests only.”
Her words have an instant effect on Matilda, who seems to transform into someone softer before my eyes. The fierce look of a lioness is replaced by the gentleness of a doe. She trusts this woman’s every word. Whatever wounds have befallen the girl, this woman has been the instrument of her healing.
I stand to leave, to give them some space.
“I’ll wait outside,” I say.
I wonder how it will be with Matilda and her mother when we get to Romania. I have seen this before. I have seen children balk at the prospect of any other parent than the new mothers they have bonded with. And I can see Matilda’s protective streak toward Elsi.
“And what about Nathanial? How are you going to tell him?”
And then from the corner of my eye, I see movement. A child has awakened. His fists in his eyes, he walks into the room and climbs onto Elsi’s lap.
This child has large eyes like his mother’s and a thick top of light-brown hair. He leans forward to take hold of his sister, and she lifts him onto her lap the same way she has probably done a hundred times before. And then I see that Matilda, too, has a breaking point. She hides her face in the boy’s thick hair, her shoulders shaking uncontrollably.
I close the front door behind me and light
a cigarette. The house sits on a quiet street. It is one of the better ones I have been to. It is modest, comfortable, a house bought to fit in with the rest, to hide and blend in, but perhaps also to normalize what began as an extraordinary situation.
I wonder if I should not walk to my car now and drive away, if I should file my report: case closed, child still missing. It crosses my mind. That is why we are taught to leave our emotions at home.
It is perhaps forty minutes gone when Elsi comes out. “Can I have one?” she says, looking at my cigarette. It is my third.
“Sure.”
She lights the cigarette, breathes it in, savors it—her eyes closed. I know how she’s feeling at that very moment. Some relief, too brief. We stand there quietly.
“Nathanial . . . is he yours and Willem’s?”
“Yes,” she says.
“He has your eyes,” I say.
Some children walk past us. They wave, and Elsi waves back.
“What happened after Willem died?”
“We helped some children escape and then came straight here. I didn’t have time to grieve. I had done enough. It was time to look forward. Willem taught me that, in the brief time we were together. He left money and instructions, and this house, and I did everything he wanted. He was meticulous in his planning. I trusted him, and Matilda and I are alive because of it. We were lucky to escape the Allied bombs, and we have carved out a life here. Matilda has been wonderful . . .”
She clears her throat and swallows.
“I suspected that her parents weren’t dead, though selfishly I wanted to believe they were. Matilda told me, even before Willem died, how she was taken. It did not match the story told by Miriam Haus, but I wasn’t sure of anything at that time. I trusted Willem, and I believe that it was only after Matilda was ours and settled that he learnt the truth. And then I convinced myself that her parents were probably dead anyway, perhaps killed in a bomb blast later in the war. Matilda also believed this in the end. She believed everything Willem said.”
Nothing from those years surprises me anymore.
“Look after her,” Elsi says before she goes inside. “She has gone through enough. She is very bright and can be anything she wants. She wants to study medicine. She wants to be a pediatrician. Tell her mother to encourage this. Matilda would be brilliant at caring for others.”
She smiles at this thought, though the expression slips away quickly.
“I can see that.”
“What is her mother like? What is the place like where she comes from?”
“Her mother is . . . concerned,” I say. I cannot think of another word for it. The woman I met, Catarina, was clearly missing her daughter, but it was her brothers who had placed an application to find her. I visited her to be certain and was shown through Catarina’s house. She showed me the fields where a timber yard sits, where lavender used to grow. Now it is a factory where both her sons work. That is her only source of income now. The boys give her money, though the oldest has a wife and son to take care of, also. They all live in the small house. Catarina desperately wants her daughter back. She wants to start a poultry farm.
“A daughter should be with her mother,” is all I say, because it is a line I am told to say. I am not to tell them anything about the family, in case they attempt to make contact, or worse, attempt to take the child back.
“I need you to tell me at least that she will be loved, that she will be happy.”
“Of course,” I say.
She turns and enters the house.
I light another cigarette. My fourth. I finish half of it quickly, then reenter the house.
I drove Matilda across the first border, and we stayed in a hotel. She did not talk the whole way, ignoring my questions. That night in the hotel room, she did not sleep, and neither did I. I cannot allow myself to sleep, in case the children try to escape.
We have breakfast early and then set out once more. We will be there late afternoon tomorrow, I predict, if I can find the place again; it is so remote.
“Do you remember your family?”
She doesn’t answer.
Always there is this danger: that she will not recognize them and will then scream, not wanting them to touch her, and feeling that she has been forcibly taken by people who are strangers. But usually only with the younger ones. Matilda does not strike me as someone who will run. She might tell her family she doesn’t want to be there, but she won’t run. She is strong, intelligent, and above all—I can tell—quite stubborn.
“I met your brother Dragos and his new baby. They seem like a nice family.”
I don’t tell her that the little house is crowded and in some kind of chaos, the older brother building more rooms to fit them all.
“What did they call the baby?”
I can’t tell her. I didn’t think to ask.
“But I can tell you that your brothers, Dragos and Theo, are tall and lean, and they work long hours in the factory. They are very much looking forward to seeing you.”
She makes a scoffing laugh.
“Theo wanted to go to university,” she says. “I do remember that. I remember we had lots of books.”
This is good. She is thinking, remembering.
They are poor, this family. I do not think that the brothers have time for study; they barely make do for money.
It is like this the whole way: brief conversations only. Elsi has packed everything Matilda owned and more. There are two large suitcases in the boot of the car, another on the backseat, and several bags filled with books and writing paper.
Many things to remind her of her life with Elsi.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
MATILDA
There was a point early in the journey that I thought of opening the door and jumping from the car and not returning to anyone. To determine for myself where I will live, not where others want me to be.
When Gilda spoke my brothers’ names, they seemed like people I didn’t know, foreigners, someone else’s brothers. Yet there is a yearning to see Dragos and Theo again, a tenderness I feel toward them when memories of them enter my mind unannounced—triggered by a smell or the sight of other siblings sharing affections.
But any feelings that come to me as I sit in the car are overshadowed by the reality that I am no longer with Elsi. I am some sort of prize to be snatched from others.
“It is my job to try and locate other children from the Center, now that I have their files,” says Gilda, interrupting my thoughts.
“You won’t find them,” I say.
“Why is that?”
“Because you won’t. Trust me. They are far away now.”
“Where? Who took them?”
“People.” I have said enough.
“If you know things that will help—”
“I can tell you that for however long you search, you will not find a trace of them. Those children came from villages, and many of these were destroyed. I know that there are no names in the files, no places—the children too young to even know their own names.”
“I would be grateful if you could tell me anything you know about some of the children there,” says Gilda. “Where they might have been sent to.”
“I have nothing to tell you.”
She doesn’t say anything more straight away, but I know it isn’t over. Fraulein Janz spends her days searching for ghosts, tearing apart families in her endeavor to piece together others.
We stay at another hotel on the second night and order a meal in a restaurant. I eat across the table from her, but I do not want our eyes to meet.
“Matilda,” she says, “I know you have been through a lot. No one deserves that—to be taken away from their home and shaped into someone else. What was done to you was cruel. My agency is trying to right the harm that was done. It does not make sense to me either, this job. There is rarely a day that I feel like I’ve accomplished anything. Are there things you can tell me about the other children who were there? Perhaps where
they might have been sent?”
I am missing Elsi and Nathanial so much already, and suddenly missing everyone I ever lost. I try to remember the faces of the children at the Center, but there were too many. I want to burst into tears. I want to throw the food in Fraulein Janz’s face, but Elsi would be ashamed of me if I did. I stand up and walk away from the table, tears escaping.
Fraulein has said in the car that for the sake of my family I should not encourage future interaction: that Catarina has requested there be no contact with Elsi. Catarina wants her daughter back, and she doesn’t want to share.
“I don’t want to go back,” I say when Fraulein infiltrates the space beside me.
Before I left with Fraulein, Elsi put Nathanial to bed, and I kissed his forehead. When he wakes each morning, I will not be there. At school my friends will see an empty chair in the classroom.
Gilda stayed in the car while Elsi and I parted. Elsi was being strong, avoiding an emotional good-bye. She was doing what she had to. We made no promises to find each other, though she said that if she moved she would leave a forwarding address with the Agency. She asked that I not fight the return to my family. Said that if she was in my mother’s shoes, she would do anything to have me back.
“You are my mother,” I said. “You can have me if you want.”
She said nothing as she placed her arms around me. I held her so tightly, afraid to be apart from her. We could have run through the back door. I could have finally attempted the escape I once planned at the Center. I suggested this tearfully to Elsi.
“No more running,” she whispered, and I could feel her body trembling.
She cupped my face in her hands and told me that I could be anything I wanted, that she would never, ever forget me. She told me to love my mother and brothers, who must have suffered when they lost me. She said that we’d had good years, healing years.
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