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.
He told me looked at it for a long time before speaking. You are corn rock? Yes, sit down. I sat down. My heart was beating so so loud that I was afraid he would hear it. I remember the Adler family, he said slowly. They were at privileged, close to the regime. They have received several children during the war, children of programs special.
I tightened the stitches to keep myself from tremble. Where are they now? They went to Austria after the war, Salzburg, I think, but I don’t know if they are still there. He gave me a name street, a neighborhood. It was more than that that I had in 29 years. I have it thanked. He looked away, unable to meet my gaze.
I left for Salzburg the month next. I was sixty years old. My hair was almost completely gray. My hands trembled constantly cause of artitis. My knees caused pain at every step. But I went there. The train journey has lasted for hours. I watched it parade the landscapes out the window, the mountains, forests, villages.
I thought of all those wasted years, all this time when my son was growing up without me somewhere, maybe a few hundred kilometers only. Did he look like me? Had he inherited my eyes, from my mouth? Did he know that he was adopted? Did we have him talk about me? I found an Adler in Salzburg telephone directory.
Hans Adler. I wrote down the address in my worn notebook, the one where I had written hundreds of names over the years. Then I walked to this house as we walk towards a precipice knowing we’re going to jump anyway. It was a good bourgeois house maintained with a flower garden. Of roses climbed along the facade.
A children’s swing was installed under a large chain. Everything exuded normality. Peaceful life. quiet happiness. I rang the bell. The seconds that followed were the most long of my life. Then the door open. A man in his thirties of years stood there. Brown hair, dark eyes, marked features. My heart stopped. It was him. I knew it.
Every cell in my body knew it. I recognized something in his face. A resemblance to my mother, with Séverine, with myself perhaps. “Yes,” he said in German with a hint of impatience. I couldn’t manage speak. The words got stuck in my throat. I looked at him, unable to look away. I was looking for traces of me in him, of my sisters, of my family gone.
Are you doing well ? he asked his tone changing, becoming restless. I I looking for someone, I finally managed to say in my German hesitant. A man born in June 1943, adopted by the Adler family. His face changed instantly. Any color left him. A shadow passed into his eyes. He took a step back. For what ? I took a deep breath.
I have gathered all my courage because I am his mother. The silence that followed was unsustainable. He looked at me as if I was a ghost from his past to haunt him. His hands were tense on the door frame. Its breathing accelerated. Then slowly, without a word, he stepped back and closed the door. I stood there on the porch.
legs trembling, the heart in pieces. I heard voices inside. A woman who asked what was happening passed by, he who answered something that I couldn’t understand. I have waited maybe 10x minutes, maybe an hour. Time no longer had sense, but the door did not open. Finally, I left a letter in the mailbox. A letter where I explained everything, which I was, what happened, why I had come.
I left him the address from my hotel. Then I came home and I cried for three days. He doesn’t didn’t want me. He didn’t want know. I had been traveling for almost 30 years old, crossing borders, saved every penny, pursued every track and now that I finally had it found, he rejected me. But I don’t couldn’t give up. Not now, not after all this way.
I am came back the next day, I rang the bell, no one responded. I came back on two days later, same result. I left other letters, photos of me young people, a photo of Séverine and d’Aurore, camp documents, everything that I had kept during all these years. The 5th time it opened. He looked exhausted, deep dark circles under the eyes, the hollow face.
“What do you want from me?” he asked, his voice almost breaking pleading. “Nothing,” I replied. gently. I don’t want to take anything you. I just want you to know that you you were wanted, that I didn’t have you abandoned, that I was torn from you, that not a single day of my life have I stopped to think of you. He closed his eyes.
A tear rolled down her cheek. They got me said my mother died during the war, that I was an orphan, that my biological parents had indope in a bombing. I know, I whispered. I know this what they told you. They lied to me. Its voice trembled with anger and pain melee. Yes, he opened his eyes and told me looked, really looked for the first time.
What is your name ? Corn! He nodded slowly as if he were recording every syllable. I’m Mathias. And for the first time, in 29 years, I heard my son’s name. Mathias and I never became close ones. Not really. How could we have? I was a stranger who wore his face. He was a man built on a lie that I had just destroyed.
We saw each other sometimes after this first meeting. Polite coffees, careful conversations. He asked me questions about Aurore and Séverine, on the camp, on Von Steiner. I answered honestly, even when hurt. One day he asked me “Did you love me?” Even a little? I looked at this 30 year old man, this stranger who was my son, and I tells the truth.
I loved you from the first second I felt you move inside me and when they tore you from my arms, part of me is dead. I spent my life try to find you. So yes, Mathias, I loved you. I still love you. He cried. Me too. But love does not is not always enough to cure what has been broken. Mathias had his own family, a wife, two children, a life built far from me.
I don’t couldn’t demand a place in this life. I didn’t want to. I just wanted let him know. We wrote to each other for a few years, then letters are spaced out, then they are stopped. In 2005, I learned through one says that he died of a cancer. He was sixty years old. I don’t have not invited to the funeral.
Still, I stood at the back of the church, discreet, invisible. I looked at his children crying, his wife collapsed and I realized something. My son had a life, a real life despite everything. Despite Funsteiner, despite the camp. In spite of myself and maybe it was sufficient. In 2010, when I gave this interview for the dissertation project history, I was years old.
My body was worn out, my voice fragile, but my mind remained clear. I was asked if I regretted something. I replied no. Not for looking for Mathias, not to have knocked on his door, not to have tells the truth, because silence also kills and because some stories can’t die buried. Von Steiner was never judged.
The children born in this camp have no never been officially recorded. The women like me have never received recognition, apology, repair. We were simply erased. But as long as there’s someone left to tell the story, we still exist. I died 5 years after this interview, in 2015. I was 91 years old. I was alone as I had experienced most of my life. But my words remained.
And today, decades later, thousands of people hear my history. Perhaps among them there are to a woman who recognizes something, a familiar pain, a silence that she wears. If so, I want let her know this. Your story account. Your pain is real and you you are not alone. The world tried to fade away, but we are still there in every testimony, in every memory preserved, in each person who refuses to forget.
It was my history, the story of Maée du rock, the story of three sisters who survived the unthinkable. And now, it’s yours too. Because you you will remember, we will still live.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
