The Bonfire of Berlin: A Lost Childhood in Wartime Germany

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We hurried up the stairs of the old Viennese building, my heart thumping so hard that I couldn’t ring the bell. Renzo, my son, rang it for me.

I had been looking for her for a long time. Now, thirty years after she had abandoned me in a Berlin already traumatised by war, I had found my mother again; she was back in Vienna, her home-town.

As for myself, I’d been born in Poland, I’d lived in Nazi Germany and been repatriated to Austria (also the country where my father had been born), and now I was settled in Italy; I had a husband and a son.

When the door opened, I saw a woman who looked strikingly like me. I gave her a tearful hug, overwhelmed by happiness and disbelief, and ready to understand, to forgive, to let bygones be bygones.

She immediately started talking, talking about herself. There was no attempt to justify her abandoning of me, no explanation of any kind.

She told me her story. Many years previously, she had been arrested in Birkenau concentration camp, where she had been a warder. She had been wearing an impeccable uniform ‘that suited her terribly well’. Before twenty minutes bad passed, she was opening a horrible wardrobe to show me, nostalgically, that very uniform. ‘Why don’t you try it on? I’d like to see it on you.’ I didn’t try it on; I was confused and upset. But what she then said was even worse, a denial of her role as a mother. ‘I was condemned by the Nuremberg Court to six years’ imprisonment as a war criminal, but none of that matters anymore. With Nazism I was somebody. Afterwards I was nothing.’

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