Free Hitler's Forgotten Children by Ingrid Von Oelhafen Page A

my origins. Perhaps I was now finally ready to face the truth.
    I have thought about this a great deal and come to the conclusion that it was age that made the difference. I was fifty-eight when I received that phone call, and looking back now I can see that the older I became, the more I wondered about my personal history. I am not alone in this: it is part of the human condition to revisit the past as the years slip away. There were practical considerations, too. Whenever I had cause to go to the doctor – something that becomes more frequent with advancing years – I was asked about my family medical history, and of course I had to say that I had no idea.
    I didn’t ask how the Red Cross knew where to find me or how they knew that I had a family mystery to solve. I simply said yes, and hoped for the best. They couldn’t give me any concrete information about my past. Instead, the woman told me to contact an academic historian at the university in Mainz.
    I owe an immense debt to Georg Lilienthal. When I sat down to write to him, I had no idea who he was – much less how important his role would be in my story
.
I simply knew what the Red Cross had told me: he was the person who could set my feet on the path I would need to follow.
    I understood that Dr Lilienthal would be expecting my letter, so I wrote openly and honestly, explaining that I had always wanted to know where I came from but that I had never known how or where to start.
    When I posted the letter I was so excited I wanted to get in the car and drive to Mainz the next day. But something told me that I must wait: whatever information this man had, he would surely need time to pull it together. And so I resolved to be patient and use the time to search through the documents I had found in Gisela’s room. I felt tantalisingly close to discovering the story of how I came to be fostered byGisela and Hermann and it was frustrating to still be in the dark. But I had waited fifty years before embarking on this quest: a few more weeks wouldn’t kill me.
    I dug out the box of papers. In the years since I had found them I’d never even taken a look at anything other than the diary. Now I began to look closely at the sheaf of fading documents Gisela had kept with it.
    The first was a small and slightly dog-eared pink slip. It was a vaccination certificate, dated 19 January 1944 and signed at Kohren-Sahlis, near Leipzig: it showed that Erika Matko, born on 11 November 1941 in a place called St Sauerbrunn, had been inoculated against smallpox.
    The date was significant: January 1944 was several months before I had been fostered by Gisela and Hermann. But other than indicating that the signatory was a doctor, nothing else on the form showed where the vaccination had taken place, or at whose request. What organisation had been based at Kohren-Sahlis? And, for that matter, where exactly was St Sauerbrunn? A second certificate recorded further vaccinations. On the reverse side was an official stamp that read:
‘Lebensborn Heim Sonnenwiese Kohren-Sahlis’.
    Heim
meant a children’s home: that much I knew from my earliest days, and it certainly fitted with Herman and Gisela having fostered me. But what was Lebensborn? I had never heard the word before.
    The next document was even more puzzling. Dated 4 August 1944, it appeared to be a kind of contract-cum-receipt for my foster parents.
    The family Hermann von Oelhafen, of Gentz Strasse 5, Munich, has on 3 June 1944, taken into their home the ethnic German girl Erika Matkow [sic], born 11 November 1941. Because she is a child of German stock, on the orders of the Reichsführer she is to be brought up in a German family.
    There will be no provision for the maintenance of the child from either side: the child herself has no assets or revenue. The foster parents alone shall be responsible for her support.
    The certificate had apparently been issued in Steinhöring. This, I knew, was a