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.I I refused to let my son disappear into oblivion as if its existence had never counted. In 1972, I finally had a serious lead. An old administrator of Vertmart had agreed to meet me. He lived in a retirement home in Strasbourg, consumed by illness and guilt. When I entered his room, I saw an emaciated old man, his eyes pressed down, hands trembling.
