Hitler's Forgotten Children Read Online Free PDF Page B

closely guarded by a new influx of NKVD troops; it was not long before orders were given to shoot would-be escapers on sight.
    What did freedom look like to Gisela von Oelhafen that summer’s evening? What did it mean to her to have reached safety after two years under Soviet occupation, and to have escaped with her children from Moscow’s iron rule? I wish I could ask her now.

    A day’s hard travelling later, we arrived in Wunstorf, a little town just west of Hanover and the penultimate stop on my mother’s journey to her family home in Hamburg. I say my mother’s journey quite deliberately because she would make the last leg of her trek alone. Her diary entry – terse as ever – recorded the very different fate allocated to Dietmar and me: ‘4 July: To Loccum, children’s home.’
    She had taken us out of the Soviet zone and into the less dangerous territory of the British sector. But that is as far as her maternal protection extended. No sooner had she spirited us away to safety, than she sent us away. My second night of freedom ended in the surroundings of a home for unwanted children.
    I would spend the next six years, lonely and isolated, in the care of the church. In fact, my new life began exactly as the old life had ended: cold and frightened.

FOUR | HOME
    â€˜Dear Mummy, please take me home for ever.
I’m longing for you and Granny and Aunt Eka.’

L ETTER TO MY MOTHER
FROM THE CHILDREN ’ S HOME
    M y first real memory is an orange. I have snatches of other, possibly earlier, recollections – lying, cold, under a blanket on the floor of a train; a line of camp beds in a long room and a rat running over my feet – but the first actual memory I know to be true is of the orange. I am at a long wooden dining table in a big room. There are a lot of people, grown-ups and children. I know that many of the adults are homeless men and women who have been invited here for the day; the children, though, live in this building. Each of us is given a plate with fruit on it, including a single orange as a special treat.
    I know where and when this memory comes from. The year was 1947 and I was almost six years old. The room with the long table was in the children’s home to which Dietmar and I were dispatched. It was Christmas Day.
    The home was run by the Protestant church and was called Nothelfer, which, literally translated, means ‘help us in affliction’. There were sixty-five boys and girls living there, all under the age of ten. Some were displaced persons – children who had lost their parents during the war or in the chaotic mass migrations of the immediate post-war months. Dietmar and I were different: we had two living parents who knew where we were but who, for reasons best known to themselves, had sent us to be cared for by others.
    We were physically as well as psychologically isolated. Nothelfer was on Langeoog, a small island in the North Sea ten kilometres from the coast of mainland Germany and 200 kilometres from Hamburg. To be fair to my parents, I don’t think they had intended to send us so far away: when we first arrived in July, it had been situated near Hanover. But at some point in the subsequent five months those premises were closed and we were moved up to Langeoog.
    Given its location, it was hardly surprising that Nothelfer was cold. I can still feel the wind whipping up sand from the island’s long beach, seemingly stripping the skin from my legs and arms.
    The home was staffed by sisters from the religious order and at times the regime could be harsh: physical punishment was part of our daily routine. If we were disobedient, if we wet the bed, if we broke the cardinal rule forbidding us to slide down the sand dunes, we were spanked. One by one we had to line up and pull our pants down and one of the sisters would beat our bare bottoms with a stick.
    We would stay here for four years. From time to time our parents