Aurora also, Séverine too, three sisters, three pregnancies, same father. The silence who fell on the camp when they found out was deafening. The other women looked at us with pity, with horror, with relief not be us. The soldiers looked away. Even the guards the most brutal seemed difficult to comfortable. Von Steiner, however, remained impassive.
He summoned us to his office one afternoon in February. We we stayed there standing the three sisters rock while he signed papers without looking at us. Finally, he looked up and said in a almost perfect French: “You give birth here. The children will be registered as war orphans and sent to German families appropriate.
You will return to work as soon as you are physically capable.” There was no room for the discussion. There was no call possible. Séverine gave birth premiered in April 1943. A girl. They tore him from his arms even before the umbilical cord is cut. Séverine screamed for three days in a row. Then she stopped. She simply stopped talking, eat, react.
She died 6 weeks later. Officially from tifus. Heartbroken indeed. Aurora had a boy in May. She managed to hold it for a few hours before that he doesn’t come and get him. I was at next to her when it happened. I saw his face would break into pieces if small than it could ever be reunited again. I gave birth in June another boy dark hair, eyes closed, tiny hands that clung to my finger with a inexplicable force.
I felt love and hate at the same time. From love because he was my son, hatred because it was his son him. They took him away the next day. The war ended etsteiner disappeared before the arrival of the allies. Some say he fled South America, others it was killed by his own men when they realized they were going to lose.
We don’t we’ll never know. I returned to Saint-Rémi sur Loire. My mother was died of grief. My father didn’t have me recognized when I knocked on the door. I I stood there, watching the old watchmaker, looking at me as if I was a ghost. Maybe I was. I survived another few years after the end of the war. I lived alone. I worked as a seamstress.
I never got married. I don’t have never had other children. During decades, I have not spoken about what happened in this camp. Not because that I wanted to forget, but because no one wanted to hear. until that in 2010, I agree to give an interview for a dissertation project history on the forgotten women of the Second World War.
It was the first and only time I told my complete story. What I have revealed in this interview is fine beyond what has already been said until present because what happened to us to my sisters and our children not finished in 1945. In fact, it did not was just getting started. In the next chapters in this series documentary, I will reveal secrets who remained buried for almost 70-0 years old.
Secrets about real destiny children born in this camp, on the queiner clandestine network coordinated, on the day I found something something I thought was lost forever. But before continuing, if my story affects you in one way or another other, if you believe that stories like mine deserve to be recalled, leave your support with a like and tell us in the comments where you look from because memory is built collectively and each voice counts.
I spent the two years which followed the end of the war in a kind of fog. I wasn’t sleeping not really. I wasn’t really living. I simply existed as a yellowed photograph that is kept in a drawer without ever looking at it. Aurora returned with me to Saint-Rémi, but she was no longer Aurore. She doesn’t hardly ever spoke.
She remained sitting by the window for hours, hands placed on knees, staring at something that I alone could not see. Sometimes she whispered a first name, always the same, the one she gave to her son during the few hours when she could have held it. She died in 1947. The doctor said it was tuberculosis. I knew it was the sorrow. I remained alone.
The people from the village looked at me differently, not with pity, with discomfort, as if I were a reminder living on something he wanted forget. France wanted to turn the page, rebuild, move forward. Women like me, those who wore the scars of war in their stomach and in their soul, do not fit with this new image.
So, I did what was expected of me. I got myself kill. I found work as seamstress in a workshop in Orléans. I rented a small room above of a bakery. I sewed dresses married to women who believed still in fairy tales. I was coming home at home in the evening. I ate alone. I fell asleep thinking about my son. To what did he look like now? Was he five years old? 6 years old can he read? Was he afraid of the dark like me age? Had we told him that he was an orphan? Did we have him lied about who I was? These questions were gnawing, but I didn’t know where
start. I didn’t even know the name given to him. I didn’t know not in which city, in which country he had been sent. Then in 1953, some thing has changed. I received a letter, a simple envelope without address return posted from Munique. Inside, a single sentence written by hand in German “If you want to know what happened to your child, come to t
he following address on March 12 at 2 p.m..” My heart stopped. My hands were shaking so much I had to put down the letter on the table to reread it. Who sent me this? How does this Did anyone know who I was? Was it a trap? But I knew that I would go. No matter the danger, no matter no matter what. On March 193, I took the train to Munich.
It was the first time that I left France since my return. Each kilometer traveled revived memories that I had tried to bury. The uniforms, the orders shouted in German, the smell of the camp. The address indicated was a gray building in a working-class district of Munich. I went up the stairs to the third floor, heart beating so hard I was afraid let it explode. I knocked on the door.
A woman opened in her fifties. Gray hair pulled into a bun, face severe but gentle eyes. She looked at me at length before saying “Hock corn !” I nodded, she made me enter. The apartment was modest but clean, photos of children covered of the walls. She invited me to sit down and served me some tea.
Then she started talking. My name is Greta Hoffman. During the war, I worked as a nurse for the GlassMarthe, not by choice, but because that I had no other options. I was assigned to the camp where you and your sisters were detained. My sense was frozen. I did not participate in what happened to you, she continued quickly.
But I saw and I hated every day for doing nothing. She got up and took out a box of a cupboard. Inside, documents, registers, lists of names. Funsteiner kept records meticulous. He recorded everything, mothers’ names, dates of birth children, German families to who they were entrusted with. After the war, these documents had to be destroyed, but I saved some a few.
She put down a sheet in front of me, my name was there and just below, another line. Child male, born June 18, 1943, transferred June 20, 1943, foster family, Adler family. I read and reread this line until the letters are blur. He’s alive,” I said. whispered. “I don’t know,” she said. replied softly. “But you have now a starting point.
I am returned to France with this sheet folded in my bag and I took a decision. I was going to find him. Little no matter how long it lasts would take no matter how many doors I should knock.” My son existed somewhere and I wouldn’t die without having tried. The search lasted almost twenty years of writing letters which remained unanswered for twenty years knocking on office doors administrator who looked at me as if I was crazy.
20 years to save every franc to be able to take the train to Germany once or twice per year. The Adler family had moved from Hamburg in 1950. Nobody knew where at least no one wanted me to say. The fifties were the more difficult. Europe rebuilt, forgot, buried his dead and its secrets with the same efficiency.
The archives had been destroyed, scattered, hidden. The witnesses refused to speak out of fear, out of shame, out of cowardice. I contacted organizations helping victims of war. I consulted lawyers who looked with pity before explain to me that my case was complicated, unprecedented, probably without outcome. I even wrote to the Red Cross international.
Their response was polite, professional and completely useless. The archives were incomplete, the witnesses were dead or refused to speak. Germany after the war wanted to forget her too. And I was just a voice among thousands, one mother among many others who were looking for children lost in the chaos of war. But I couldn’t forget.
Every night, I saw his face, eyes closed, the tiny hands, the way he had clung to my finger. I woke up with a start, my body soaked of sweat, convinced of having heard a baby cry, but there was only the silence of my empty room. I worked during the day as a seamstress, sewing hems and buttonholes with mechanical gestures.
In the evening, I wrote letters, requests, supplications. I have worn out dozens of pens filled with entire notebooks of names, addresses, tracks that do not lead nowhere. The 60s are arrivals, then the 70s. My body was growing old, my hair was turning gray, but my determination remained intact. I refused to die without knowing.
