Before I left on my trip, I got in touch with several acquaintances, I can call them friends and fellow sufferers, who have gone through or are still going through the hell I had been going through for eight years, people I met at various gatherings and workshops at which one practises breathing in the truth and at which there is a lot of weeping. Aloizy Twardecki (the Nazis kidnapped him too and changed his name to Alfred Hartmann, then gave him up for adoption to a German family) told me, Come on, perhaps this is the end, though I doubt it. After the war Aloizy was repatriated to Poland and today he teaches at the University of Warsaw. I got in touch with Don Alexander Michelowski, who was ten in 1942 when he was kidnapped from his home and his name changed to Alexander Peters. He knocked around orphanges for years because he was too old for adoption, and later, as a Catholic priest, served the Polish Diaspora in Newcastle. Alexander said, Even God didn’t help me. Helena was adopted by a German policeman and his wife, a seamstress, but after the war she was returned to Poland, and today she is a judge in Warsaw. Helena told me, Write a book, maybe it will heal you. It was hardest to talk with Ingrid von Oelhalfen. Ingrid was stolen as an eight-month-old baby from Slovenia. They kidnapped me in Celje, she said. She was taken to Germany and never returned, and she never found any of her family; she only found this small and useless fact stating that she is not Ingrid von Oelhafen.
My name is Ana Johnson. I was born on 3 March, 1946, in Reutlingen, Germany. Because of an illness of the joints and bones I took my first steps only at the age of two. When my mother Mary Božić tried to board a ship for Australia in 1946 they stopped her. You cannot leave Germany without your child, they said. So Mary waited for me to walk. We arrived in Australia in 1948 and Mary immediately left me at St Therese’s Orphanage in Essendon. On 16 December, 1984, I was found by the Federal Police. Mary Božić has less than a month to live, said the men from the Federal Police. Mary Božić has cancer of the large intenstine and she wants to see you, repeated the Federal Police. We will take you to Mary Božić, they said three times. Then I saw my mother after thirty-six years and I had no recollection of her, so I thought right away that maybe she wasn’t my mother. I nursed Mary Božić and she told me the story of her life as she was dying. On her left arm Mary Božić had a tattoo of a swastika and the number LB 0097. I was a Lebensborn slave, she told me. I worked at the munitions factory in Reutlingen. We produced rockets and rounds for the German Army, she said. There were many S.S. men there. I was beautiful. The S.S. men raped me whenever they felt like it. There were many S.S. men. They raped me often. I was beautiful, she said. Luckily you were born on 3 March, 1946, she said, because had you been born on 3 March, 1945 you would not be alive today. They would have killed you, because Hitler wanted as many male children as possible. I spent my whole life in fear, my mother Mary Božić said, as she lay there dying in Australia, and I told her that I had constantly felt guilty, but didn’t know why. They moved me from orphanage to orphanage, I told my newly discovered mother, Mary Božić, then they sent me to reform school. To this day I don’t know why, because I never had any reason to reform. I was quiet and obedient, I told her. My mother, Mary Božić, died on 2 February, 1985. We talked for a month, for a month we were together. This was a great joy for me. I got in touch with the Red Cross. I hoped the Red Cross would help me find out my grandparents’ names. I might have relatives. I might have nephews. My mother had six brothers. My grandmother was a Gypsy from Hungary and my grandfather was from Yugoslavia. I believe I have hundreds of brothers and sisters. Who knows how many women he slept with, the man who got my mother pregnant? Mother never told me my grandmother’s name. I am German property, because I was made in Germany at the behest of Heinrich Himmler. I was born in Germany, but when the war ended they forced Mary Božić to take me with her, because they wanted to forget I existed. They did not want to see me. They wanted to forget I had ever lived, but I’m not giving up. Germany owes me an apology. It owes me compensation. Me and my mother Mary Božić. I must find out who my family are and where my grandfather and grandmother are buried. Thank you for hearing me out.
At Nuremberg, for crimes against humanity, for the theft of children, for Lebensborn manipulations, the following people were brought before the court, and sentenced or released:
Ulrich Greifelt: life imprisonment
Rudolf Creutz: 15 years
Dr Konrad Meyer: released
Otto Schwarzenberger: released
Herbert Hübner: 15 years
Werner Lorenz: 15 years
Heinz Brückner: 15 years
Otto Hofmann: 25 years
Richard Hildebrandt: 25 years
Fritz Schwalm: 10 years
Gregor Ebner: two of the charges dismissed, convicted of the third charge, but released on account of time served
Max Sollmann: released
Gunther Tesch: released
Inge Viermetz: released
My situation is complicated many times over. I was stolen. I am a Lebensborn “child”. I was raised by former supporters of Nazism, Jürgen Traube (who never, thank God, sullied his hands) and housekeeper Martha Traube, who also, thank God, renounced her “support”. I still consider Jürgen and Martha Traube to be my parents. I would like to disown them, but I cannot, because they were good and tender parents, they were permissive parents, though they were Catholics, I mean they were not fanatic Catholics, because fanatic Catholics are the worst Catholics, just as all fanatics are horrible and dangerous people. As tolerant parents, Martha and Jürgen Traube took my pronounced anti-fascism in their stride, my anti-Nazi photographs and exhibitions, my often uncontrolled outpourings of fury and, for me, not the least bit benign ressentiment of Austria’s part in the war. They put up with my disgust at Austrian silence, at Austrian blindness bound to Austrian Nazi history. They listened to what I told them and when I married Rebecca they said, Rebecca, you are ours as much as Hans is. But then into my life crept that murderer, S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz and that Jewish woman who spread her legs for him, for the blonde angel of death, the admirer of music and nature, the bad amateur fanatic photographer, the baby-faced executioner, she spread her legs while trains rumbled past, right there in front of her nose, on their way to killing grounds all over the Reich. At first I was sorry that S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz was dead, I wanted to shake him up, though his story didn’t interest me, I didn’t want to hear it, because the story was clear to me and for me the story has no inside or outside, it is a monstrous story, full stop. Maybe I would have killed him, S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, believing that I was thereby destroying, expunging, exterminating all the dirty genes that are planted inside me. Today nothing matters. I wanted to hear out the woman who gave birth to me, I wanted to forgive her, because she might be able to bring to life the little man, the stunted midget, Antonio Tedeschi, who has been waiting inside me for sixty-two years to grow up, to obtain some kind of a biography, no matter how dull and defective. This Haya Tedeschi could inscribe a history onto my minuscule, half-dead double, this foetus inside me, after which he, Antonio Tedeschi, would open his glued-shut eyelids, straighten up and maybe go his way, leaving me in peace.