“Now, I’ve outfitted Tiny’s nursery from Harrods. It’s not pink; I hate pink. I did it all in yellow. I have your old Silver Cross pram for the baby, and today Norland College is sending over a prospective nanny. I’m getting you organized, Slim,” Lady Johnson said triumphantly.
“Good. I need a nanny. Remy’s been taking care of her,” Slim explained, “but I need someone more permanent.”
“You can’t have a Gypsy bring up a baby, Slim. How do you know if she even knows how to take care of children?” Lady Johnson asked as she led both to the drawing room for tea.
“She had two of them,” Slim said.
“Well, where are they?” Lady Johnson huffed.
“Gassed at Auschwitz,” Slim said.
Lady Johnson drew a sharp intake of breath and looked at Tiny, “Oh my God, how did she manage to survive?”
“She’s German. She married into the Romani Gypsies. There was a doctor there who promised her the children would be fine. The night they broke up the Gypsy family camp, he took the children and they were gassed.”
“Sometimes I say the stupidest things. I’m sorry. I had no idea. It must bring Remy great joy to have a baby around, or perhaps…” Gran trailed off.
“It does bring her great joy, but Françoise needs her help in the bar. A nanny would be great.”
“It’s not just a nanny, it’s a Norland College nanny. They have to take a two-year course in early childhood education before they’re certified and placed with a family. All the best families use them,” Lady Johnson said, sitting down on her chintz sofa. She picked up a small bell and rang it while still keeping a firm grip on Tiny.
An older woman in a black dress with a starched collar, with neatly pulled-back, gray hair, pushed a tea cart into the room.
“Slim, this is my new housekeeper and cook, Mrs. MacGregor.”
“Mrs. McGregor? Isn’t Barnaby’s last name MacGregor?” Slim asked. “Are you Barnaby’s wife?”
“Aye, lass, I am his blushing bride,” she said, winking at Slim.
“They met six months ago at church,” Lady Johnson said approvingly, “and this is my great-granddaughter, Tiny, who still doesn’t have a proper name.”
“Her Ladyship has been talking about this little lass nonstop, and I can see why. Look at how alert she is. Her Ladyship has been telling me that you’re a famous detective.” Mrs. MacGregor picked up Tiny. “Now if it’s all right with you, I’ll be taking Miss Tiny for a bit of a cuddle and rest.” She looked at Slim who smiled and then nodded.
After they both left, Slim turned to her grandmother and said, “Barnaby got married? And I’m a famous detective?”
“Yes, and yes. Now, what’s your latest case?” Lady Johnson smiled as she poured them both some tea.
From someone who had been of the opinion that a woman’s name should appear in the newspaper only three times; birth, marriage, and death, her evident pride in Slim’s career choice was another abrupt turnaround.
“How come you’re so accepting of me all of a sudden?” Slim asked suspiciously.
“I spent my whole life caring what other people thought. I can't tell you how mortified I was when your mother ran off to marry your father. I was devastated when your mother…” Lady Johnson paused. “The thing is Slim, your life may not be perfect, but you’re truly living.”
“Gran, my life is a train wreck, Daniel is missing, I almost died giving birth, and my latest case is one big dead end.” Slim was incredulous. How could her grandmother think that she was 'truly living'? What did that even mean?
“Yes but, darling, it’s exciting.”
“You’re positively mad.” Slim rolled her eyes.
“Enough of me, tell me about your new case.” Lady Johnson handed Slim a plate of sandwiches and sat back to listen.
Afterward, Lady Johnson said, “Your case doesn’t sound hopeless. Perhaps that tracing organization can help you find him.”
“There’s something the mother is not telling me. She said the boy was a product of rape from a farm hand, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. Also, the gold watch is strange, and while she was adamant she didn’t steal the watch, there’s something fishy with that story as well.”
“What are you going to do next?”
“I have the name of a woman who was a translator for the Nuremberg trial that dealt with the stolen children, and I’m hoping that she’ll be able to map out for me what exactly happened to the children who were kidnapped by the Germans.”
“How many children were taken?”
“A woman who worked for UNRRA told me it might be as high as two hundred thousand children.” Slim took another sip of tea and then yawned, “Do you mind if I go upstairs and take a nap?”
“Go ahead, if Tiny wakes up, I will have Mrs. MacGregor give her a bottle.”
Slim headed upstairs and fell into a dead sleep. She dreamt of Daniel. He was standing before her holding out his forearm, baring his Auschwitz tattoo. He stood there looking at her saying nothing, and then slowly, he faded away.
Slim slept through until the morning. When she awoke, she realized Tiny was not with her and then she remembered Mrs. MacGregor was with her. Slim climbed the stairs to the fourth-floor nursery and opened the heavy oak door. The room was painted a pale yellow, with buttercup wallpaper. An old crib with a canopy was in the center. Slim reached in and picked up the sleeping Tiny. Mrs. MacGregor, who was asleep in the rocker next to the crib woke up and smiled.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for you to have to stay up all night with her,” Slim said apologetically.
“Tiny only woke up once and when she did it was for a bottle and a nappy change.” Mrs. MacGregor stood up, stretched and then said, “She’s a stunner, our Tiny.”
She smiled and left. Slim looked at Tiny. Her eyes were still blue, and maybe they would remain that way. Tiny’s hair was also growing in jet black, the same color as Daniel’s. Other than that, she couldn’t tell who the baby resembled until Tiny opened her eyes and broke into a smile.
“Oh, Good Lord Tiny, you have your grandfather’s smile. You’re going to be trouble with a capital T.” She sighed as she realized Tiny was the spitting image of her father, Tyrone Moran.
Slim left Tiny in the care of Lady Johnson, Mrs. MacGregor and the trial nanny from Norland College — a somewhat shy young woman named Josie Phillips. Once the baby was in Josie’s arms, Slim set about getting organized for the day.
Slim took the underground to Swiss Cottage and then made her way to 20 Maresfield Gardens, in Hampstead Gardens. She walked up to the gate and saw a large red rambling brick house built in the Queen Anne style.
She was met at the door by a housemaid who showed her into a library framed by a bay window. In the room was an enormous chaise lounge covered in oriental rugs and on the tables appeared to be Greek and Roman antiquities of every size. Books were crammed into every available space on the shelves and spilled over onto the floor. Even the desk had a series of deities crowding it. Slim felt as though she was in an antique store on Portobello Road. Unsure where to sit, she stood trying to figure out where exactly she was. The books seemed to be mostly in German, but who owned this house? She was supposed to meet the translator who Gitta Sereny had fixed her up with, Selina Treichler, but she was pretty confident that this was not her office. Just then the door opened, and a woman in her fifties wearing a cardigan sweater and a plaid skirt walked in, followed by a dark haired woman in her twenties in flared slacks and a silk blouse. They both jumped when they saw Slim.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you both. I’m Slim Moran; I’m here to see Selina Treichler. Gitta Sereny sent me.” She held out her hand which the older one took into hers.
“I’m Anna Freud, this is my assistant Selina Treichler.” The older woman spoke in fluent English, but with a distinct German accent.
“You’re Anna Freud? Then this must be…” Slim wasn’t often speechless, but this information stopped her in her t
racks.
“Yes, this is my father, Sigmund Freud’s, office. I am using it now. So how can we help you?” she asked, not unkindly, but wishing to get straight to the point as it was clear that Slim had interrupted her work.
“I’m trying to find a boy who was stolen by Germans in Poland. Gitta Sereny said that you, Miss Treichler, were a translator for the RuSHA trial. I thought perhaps you could fill me in as to how this kidnapping might have taken place.” Slim directed her question towards Selina Treichler, but she couldn’t take her eyes off of Anna Freud, the founder of child psychoanalysis.
“Let’s go to the drawing room. We will get some coffee, I may be in England, but I still crave my kaffe; tea not so much. Come,” Anna Freud said.
Minutes later, Slim found herself sipping kaffe with Anna Freud in a tastefully appointed drawing room, many of the furnishings seemed from the last century rather than from the late thirties when the Freuds had been forced to flee Nazi-occupied Vienna.
“Princess Marie Bonaparte got us out of Vienna. Papa wouldn’t leave without his things. So, she got them out too. My aunts were not so lucky, as they perished in Auschwitz,” Anna Freud said as she handed Slim a cup of kaffe. “Miss Moran, I know you didn’t come to see me, so I’m going to leave you for a bit. Don’t keep Selina too long; we’re finishing a paper on an experiment in group upbringing.”
“That sounds intriguing. Who were the subjects?” Slim asked.
“In 1945, we were sent six three-year-olds from Theresienstadt. You know Theresienstadt?” Anna Freud asked.
“Yes. It was mostly a transport camp in Prague. Didn’t the Nazis also use it as their model concentration camp?” Slim replied.
“Yes. The famous German director Kurt Gerron filmed a propaganda movie about it for the Red Cross. The Nazis gassed him as soon as he handed in the final cut,” Selina said wryly with a decidedly British accent tinged with German, perhaps? Slim couldn’t tell.
“Leonard Montefiore, the Jewish philanthropist, arranged for hundreds of children who survived the camps to be flown over to England. Most came to Windermere in Cumbria; some were sent to a castle in Ireland. The goal was to get them healthy again and re-acclimatized to normal society. They were mostly teenage boys and some girls, but not many. It was survival of the fittest. By some miracle, six three-year-olds arrived, three boys and three girls. They were completely feral and interdependent with each other,” Selina Treichler said.
“What happened to them?” Slim asked intrigued.
“You have to read the paper, and to read the paper, we have to finish it. So don’t keep my assistant too long. Good day, Miss Moran,” Anna Freud said, smiling as she left, closing the door.
“So Miss Treichler...” Slim began.
“Just call me Selina, and I’ll call you Slim if that is okay with you. Let’s not be so formal and don’t worry about how much time this takes. I have been working for Anna nonstop; I’m due for a break. Now, you want to know how I became a translator for the RuSHA trial.”
“Yes, please,” Slim replied as she reached for a piece of stollen.
“I was brought up bilingually by my Polish parents in Berlin. We left for England right before the war broke out. That’s where I learned English. Then we went to Switzerland, where I picked up French. I got my degree in translation and conference interpretation from Geneva University.”
“Did you translate Polish, French, German and English?” Slim asked.
“No, no, each translator was responsible for one language. I only translated English into German. The Nuremberg trials were the first place where simultaneous translation was used. So if the defendant spoke German (and the defendants usually did), it was translated into Russian, English and French as soon as the first guttural sounds spilled from his mouth. But, by the time the RuSHA trial rolled around, we were mostly doing English and German.”
“Why only English and German?”
“We were in the American zone and, quite frankly, this was a lesser trial — still important, but not like the first one.”
“Did you work on the first Nuremberg trial?” Slim asked.
“No, I only worked on the RuSHA trial held from the 20th of October 1947, until the 10th of March 1948,” Selina said.
“And that trial dealt only with the kidnapping of the Polish children, is that correct?” Slim asked while taking out her notebook.
“Oh, no, no, it dealt with a lot more than that,” Selina said. “The trial was nearly six months long. The kidnapping of the Polish children was just a small part of the trial. In Hitler’s quest to get more living space, he invaded Poland, also known as Generalplan Ost, shot all the Jews and partisan fighters using Einsatzgruppen squads. Then they expelled the Poles from their farms and resettled ethnic Germans there. Because the Poles were considered Untermenschen, they were to be treated like slaves and not educated past fourth grade. The goal was to wipe the population of Poland out.”
“So, it was about much more than the children,” Slim said.
“Yes, it was about the attempted and almost successful annihilation of the Czechs and Poles.” Selina took out a cigarette and offered one to Slim, who declined. Never a big smoker, she had stopped during her pregnancy because cigarettes had made her nauseous.
“How did the kidnapping of children play into this?” Slim asked.
“The Nazis depleted the master race by war. As much as Hitler tried to encourage massive German families by outlawing birth control, women were not reproducing at the rate he needed. So his right-hand man, Heinrich Himmler, instituted the Lebensborn homes. After the Nazi stud farm could not produce enough children, it became a holding center for ‘racially valuable’ children stolen from their parents in the East.” Selina blew a puff of smoke into the air, “Come let’s walk in the garden. Anna hates when I smoke inside. Her father died of tongue cancer from smoking cigars.”
“Was the kidnapping of children an informal policy?” Slim asked.
“No, in Generalplan Ost, Heinrich Himmler, decided to kidnap children with Aryan traits and give them to childless German families with impeccable pedigrees to bring up. He outlined all of this in ‘Reflections on the Treatment of Peoples of Alien Races in the East.’ Everything the Germans did was calculated right down to the tattooing of the inmates' arms in Auschwitz. Not a detail spared,” Selina said.
“Was the trial held in the Palace of Justice like the other trials?”
“Yes,” Selina said.
“And who translated for the witnesses?” Slim asked.
“We had auxiliary translators for that. I had some fun with them.” Selina added with a smile and a wink.
“So it wasn’t completely depressing,” Slim noted.
“It was trying. We all had what we called the ‘Nuremberg Cough’ from all the dust we inhaled. Nuremberg was in ruins. We lived in the Grand Hotel and danced the nights away. It was all very gay. Then the next day we’d have to go back into the courtroom and listen to the horrors,” Treichler commented wryly.
“Did you know anything about RuSHA before the trial?” Slim asked.
“No, not a thing. I have to say; it was quite an eye-opening experience. I had to try to detach myself from what was said. Sometimes, it was nearly impossible.”
✽✽✽
1947 — Palace of Justice, Nuremberg, Germany
When Selina was first recruited for the job as a Nuremberg translator, she had been excited. After all, the ink was barely dry on her certificate from Geneva University and to land such a plum position with such high pay was beyond anything she could imagine. So was the system she was going to use. Never before had simultaneous translation been employed in a courtroom. It took a bit of getting used to, but she was lucky there was only German and English translated behind the aquarium, which is what they called the glass-enclosed booths where the accused sat. She couldn’t imagine all five languages spoken at once.
It had taken Selina time to get used to the five translation channels on the Filene
Finlay system, which had been developed by IBM. The first channel broadcast whoever was speaking. The other channels were the translations in English, Russian, French and German (depending on what languages were being used). There were six microphones stationed around the courtroom, one for each of the judges, one for the lawyer at the podium and one for the witness stand. There were three pairs of interpreters, one of whom took a turn, while the other listened outside the courtroom to monitor whoever was translating. The fourth group of auxiliary translators was on hand for other languages, such as Polish and Yiddish.
Even though they were usually only translating into German and English, the work of translation occurred at the slow pace of sixty words a minute. If someone spoke too fast, a monitor would flick a switch, and a yellow blinking light would flash, indicating the speaker should slow down. If the monitor flicked on a red light, the speaker would know to repeat what they had just said.
Even with the trial’s slow pace, Selina could barely keep up. She had a hangover of epic proportions. The aspirin tablets she had washed down with soda water at breakfast had unsettled her stomach. She interpreted thirty minutes at a time, rotating with a woman nicknamed 'Red' (on account of her flaming hair) who seemed almost oblivious to the endless recounting of massacres from the Einsatzgruppen squads.
“I did the first trial, you know the one with Hermann Göring and his cronies. And while that fat man was leering at me, all I could think was, you killed my whole family and you almost killed me, I should be angry. Why aren’t I angry? Then I’d think about the money I’m getting paid and the Lieutenant that I’m dating. Then I think about maybe getting the hell out of this apocalyptic post-war nightmare that is called Germany, and I just ignore it all. And that’s what you should do. Translate what they say, but don’t think about what it means,” Red said.
The Lost Boy Page 5
