The Invisible History of the Human Race (11 page)

Few Lebensborn children were able to find their original families, and many were rejected when they did attempt to make contact. As an adult Sarkar was discovered by her mother’s sister, who found her only after her mother died. They had a loving relationship. She also found out where her father, a member of the SS, lived, and she learned that she had three half-brothers. She never got in touch for fear they would not want to know her.

In Norway one doctor declared that any child of the SS must be mentally defective, so he placed them in mental asylums, only to be released when they were in their twenties. Even when children were kept by their mothers, local communities often stigmatized them. Heidenreich was unusual for having found a father who wanted to claim her and an extended family who embraced her. Still, as a young woman she was almost six feet tall, with blonde hair and blue eyes, and she was deeply embarrassed to so obviously embody the ideal of the Reich. For a long time she dyed her hair dark brown.

Heidenreich became a special-education teacher who worked with disabled children. She believes now that unconsciously she wanted to help children who would have been exterminated by Hitler. Later she became a family therapist specializing in family-systems therapy, a method that explicitly encourages exploration of the past. Issues that are unresolved in previous generations, Heidenreich advised her clients, have a way of surfacing in the present one. It was fifty years after the terrible events that took place when she was thirteen before Heidenreich realized she should take her own advice.

In fact, documents relating to the program and containing the names of parents were released to the public only in the early twenty-first century. It was then that most Lebensborn children became aware of the circumstances of their conception and birth. A support group was started in 2006, and some individual Lebensborn children have begun to speak publicly about their experiences. Allegedly some are proud to be part of an elite group, but there is little evidence of special status. In 2006 Lebensborn child Ruthild Gorgass told the
New York Times
, “
My eyes aren’t perfect. We’ve got all the same illnesses and disabilities as other people have.”

Heidenreich went through SS records and found that her father ranked high in the organization, but he was posted in communications and never accused of a crime against humanity. She discovered that her mother was a Nazi and read transcripts from her testimony at the Nuremberg trials. “She always told me that she brought me back with a transport of other babies to Berlin,” said Heidenreich. “I never knew what it meant, but in the end of course I found out this was one of the transports of Norwegian children.” In fact, Heidenreich’s mother first told her own family that Gisela was a Norwegian orphan. Later she acknowledged that she was her own child.

“After all the shocks and shame, we also feel guilt, which is funny,” said Heidenreich. “But most of us feel guilty . . . [because we were] the product for the Aryan race, for this madness of this regime.” Still, Heidenreich said she has turned her guilt into responsibility. Now she gives talks to schools throughout Germany, and she marvels at how little even the teachers now know about this side of Nazi eugenics.

 • • • 

Joe Mauch has lived in Australia for more than four decades. Now a slim and fit septuagenarian, he spent most of his adult life working with books, apart from eleven years when he tended his own olive grove. He has visited Germany a few times, and it was on one of his trips that his mother gave him the
Einheitsfamilienstammbuch
. He told me the pendulum had finally swung back—all children in Germany are now educated about what happened during the war. Mauch’s brother, a professor who stayed, told Mauch there was even a school whose motto was “No more Auschwitz.” “It’s pretty brutal,” Mauch said. “I feel sorry for these poor little kids who walk through that gate.”

Genealogy doesn’t worry him anymore either. “I can understand that people are interested in their ancestors and where they come from,” he said. “Genealogy is just like doing history. It’s nothing to be sneered at.”

It’s hard to reconcile the criticism that family histories aren’t worthy of serious attention with the experiences of Joe Mauch and Gisela Heidenreich and their peers, for whom big history was very personal. This paradox will only increase. The more we digitize records and make them accessible, the more we learn how to read DNA, then the more we will see extraordinary, fine-grained intersections between world history and personal history in the lives of ordinary individuals—not just royalty, not just the bourgeoisie, and not just Cleopatra.

Yet for all the people who took the journey through time that Mauch and Heidenreich did, there is still a strong current against the notion that examining the history of the people who formed us may help us learn about ourselves. Even as Western society devises ever-new ways to think about itself and help us understand “who we really are,” and even despite the millions of people who subscribe to services like Ancestry .com and FindMyPast, curiosity about lineage outside the ranks of committed genealogists isn’t taken very seriously. But history—if we care to examine it—shows us that genealogy is potent. Simply asserting that it shouldn’t be is meaningless.

No doubt many people today have inherited the fear that genealogy is the first step down the path to eugenics, without ever quite knowing the basis of that fear. But awareness of one’s role in the great historical narrative does not necessarily lead to delusion or bigotry. Nor does curiosity about personal history mean someone wants to be a queen. Rather, it is delusion and bigotry that lead to the misuse of records and ideas. The misuse then creates a fear of those records and ideas.

In the 1950s Friedrich von Klocke, who was a genealogist during the Third Reich, came to rue the role he and his associates played in it. He thought it had happened because he and his colleagues tried to make a science out of a field that was not scientific. But Eric Ehrenreich argues that genealogists like Klocke were merely doing what everyone else at the time was doing: embracing a racist ideology.

Still, the dogma that people shouldn’t ask how their ancestors shaped them will not prevent a twenty-first-century eugenics movement. Indeed, the insistence that we shouldn’t know these facts or try to analyze them or have feelings about them doesn’t mean that the details of our personal history won’t be interesting to those who may yet choose to investigate them for the wrong reasons.

Most recently, during the financial crisis in Greece in 2012, as the fascist Golden Dawn political party became more and more powerful, the question of how long a person had been in Greece and whether he could prove it began to be raised. In a
New York Times
article, a local cracked a joke about needing to show that you were Greek for three generations back. While some people will remain personally indifferent to their forebears—and there’s no reason to argue that they shouldn’t—it would be wise to be vigilant about how information about families is kept or lost or found or shaped by powerful socioeconomic and cultural forces over time.

The bureaucratization of genealogy in Nazi Germany was a suffocating expression of totalitarianism. Yet as genealogy can be used by totalitarian forces to persecute people, so can antigenealogy. Some regimes, whether institutional or political, control people by targeting their personal histories, not by using them against them but by taking them away altogether.

History is important. If you don’t know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.

—Howard Zinn

I
n 1937, at the age of fourteen months, Geoff Meyer appeared before a magistrate, who made him a ward of the state and handed him over to a state-run orphanage. By the time he was four, Meyer lived in a “boys’ depot,” which housed thirty to fifty children until they were fostered, though many were fostered, returned, and fostered again. For all the years he lived there, Meyer never learned any of the other boys’ names. “
We weren’t allowed to talk to each other,” he said, “and the staff always said, ‘Hey you’ or used terrible words.”

Every day at the depot began with a reckoning for children who wet their beds. Staff draped the urine-soaked sheets around bed wetters’ heads and made them parade around the dormitory. The other boys laughed, Meyer said, until it happened to them. “I was too small to laugh at anyone,” he told me. “I was scared of being bashed up.” The food was often rotten, and when Meyer threw up after eating weevil-ridden porridge, he was forced to eat his own vomit. Punishments included floggings and scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush, but the most feared was the small cupboard under the stairs. Boys were locked in with no food or water, and they soiled themselves until they were released. They never spoke, Meyer said. “We held hands.”

When prospective foster parents visited, the boys were lined up along the front veranda to be inspected. Meyer was fostered out eight times, and in his final placement he was sent to an old woman at Wentworthville, New South Wales. Meyer didn’t know who his parents were, why he was a ward, or if he had any family members at all, and—like every other adult in his life—his new foster parent wouldn’t tell him anything. It was only when he overheard her enrolling him at the local school that he found out his birthday for the first time. Still, everyone at the school knew Meyer was a ward because the assistant principal made him and another boy stand up and announced to the class, “They are under child welfare because their mothers never loved them.”

On May 10, 1954, his eighteenth birthday, Meyer simply fled, never to return. He had twenty-four pounds and eighteen shillings, the clothes he was wearing, a tennis racket, a cricket bat, and no friends, acquaintances, or family that he knew of. He had no idea how to find a job or a place to stay.

In Australia, where Meyer grew up, at least half a million children were placed in institutional care in the last century. In the United States today there are more than thirty thousand children in such circumstances; and in Africa, Asia, and Latin America the official figures are in the tens of thousands, although it’s believed that there are many more unofficial cases. For a long time these children were ignored, but in the last twenty years many stories about their mistreatment in homes and its long, damaging aftermath have emerged. All over the Western world, adults who were once institutionalized children have recounted vividly similar experiences of floggings, forced labor, sexual abuse, and emotional torment. In some homes children were not allowed to look one another in the eye.

The long-term consequences of such treatment have been the same the world over too. When the children reached a certain age and were ejected from their “homes,” they entered their own country like refugees, knowing nothing about “councils or libraries or voting.” Many died from drug- and alcohol-related causes, and some built careers in institutions, like the navy, or in the religious orders that ran their homes. Some became successful, but many struggled. Figures suggest that one in three attempted suicide, many experienced homelessness, and they had a high incidence of mental illness and physical injuries. Most “ex-orphans” were noticeably short (a trait usually attributed to malnutrition), and while they lived in terror of being forced into old people’s homes, a number of their own children ended up in care. There is also a well-worn path from children’s homes to jail: The last three people to be hanged in Australia grew up in such places.

Despite the fact that most people today know that terrible things sometimes happened to children in group homes, few comprehend that these institutions operated like totalitarian states within a democracy. As well as being places of mental and physical torture, the institutions systematically controlled children’s access to information while they were institutionalized as well as once they left. In many homes the staff had authority over every connection children had with the outside world, not sharing news and even confiscating letters from family. Some children were even schooled at the institution and did not leave the grounds for years. Many were not taught to read or write or do basic mathematics. Their names were arbitrarily changed, and it was common for them to be addressed only by a number. Some children were told that their parents were dead when they weren’t or that they never wanted to see them again when they did.

Even though it has been decades since group homes closed, vital information about their residents is still being withheld. For the children it’s as if someone pushed them through the looking glass, and decades later they still can’t find their way back.

 • • • 

What gets passed down? Records, of course, by definition are one key source of personal data. It may be a banal observation, but sometimes you don’t notice what gets passed down until it doesn’t. Birth certificates, school records, the names of family members, and all the other bits of information that we take for granted only become disturbingly obvious in their absence. The ordinary records that chart the passage of a life matter a great deal—not just to governments and corporations and librarians but to ordinary people too.

One reason why it’s so hard to understand the sense of rootlessness experienced by the former residents of the group homes is that most people live their lives firmly embedded in a web of information. They know where they were born. They know whether their parents loved each other. They know what it looks like when an adult brushes her teeth. They belong to interconnected groups, whether a family, a neighborhood, or a religion, and they have experiences that constantly reinforce what they know. Together these bits and the threads that bind them add up to an incalculably crucial body of information, providing not only a history but also a sense of self. It’s almost impossible for most of us to imagine not knowing such facts about ourselves, and yet this information was effectively erased from the lives of the children of twentieth-century orphanages.

One “ex-orphan” told me that these former group-home children want, like any other citizen, to have information about themselves and their family—or its proxy—and all the power that such knowledge brings. Yet there are enormous obstacles to obtaining it. In Australia records are scattered throughout each state, held by government records offices and by the religious institutions that housed children. Government departments may take years to respond to a single request. Many records were destroyed, but there’s little clarity about what was lost and what was never kept in the first place. Many files are undated, sloppy, or incorrect, and there is no consistency in how files are searched for or delivered. There’s no central organizing body, and most people need professional-grade archivist skills to find and understand the documents. Generally the ex-orphans distrust bureaucracy, and while it is intimidating enough for them to enter a neutral institution like a public records office, many must return to the actual organization that mistreated them. The overzealous application of privacy laws also means that when many care leavers do manage to receive files, their missing siblings’ names are redacted.
One ex-ward received a photo of a children’s party with all the little faces at the table whited out except for his own.

In forty-eight of the United States most citizens are not only given automatic access to their original birth certificates but also protected by privacy laws so no one else can see them. But this doesn’t apply to children who are adopted. At adoption their birth records are sealed, and a new certificate is issued with the names of the adoptive parents. Unless the birth parents have explicitly signaled consent for the adoptee to contact them later, adoptees in many states cannot gain access to their records without paying hundreds of dollars and getting a court order. Even then, adult adoptees who petition for access may be denied, and if they are successful, many states differ in what information they will provide.

In Texas and South Carolina adoptees are legally required to have counseling to deal with the possible emotional consequences of learning who their birth parents are. In Connecticut it is against the law to release any information that might assist in the identification of birth parents if a third party (such as the agency that initially placed the child) feels it would be disruptive to the adoptee or to the birth parents. In many states it is possible for birth parents to block the eventual opening of the record. In Minnesota in 2008, twelve hundred adoptees were unable to gain access to their basic birth information because of an affidavit filed by their biological parents. After all the social change of the 1960s, after the gains of the civil-rights era, after laws were passed making it illegal to discriminate against women and people of color, adoptees are the last group of American-born citizens who are denied straightforward
access to this fundamental information.

Naturally, when information can be retrieved, even the most banal detail of a stolen life can be traumatic. “People get rotten drunk in order to read their files,” one activist told me. In a government report one woman described opening her files at home alone and being committed to a psychiatric ward a week later. Others put the files away and never look at them.

Ivy Getchell went searching for information about herself at state government offices in 2004. Getchell was taken from her family by social services as a young girl and spent years inside the Parramatta Girls’ Training School, an old convict prison, where leg irons and wristbands were still attached to the walls. While she was at Parramatta, Getchell’s “name” was “Fifty-five.” It wasn’t until she was seventy-one years old that she felt able to start searching for the records of her life. Her father was long dead, but she found a file of letters from him that she hadn’t known existed. He wrote:

Ivy, my little mate, for Christ’s sake answer my letters. Let me know where you are. I will come and bring you home. We miss you and love you. We have a nice house now up at old Kelly’s place near Mount Bathhurst. You will remember it. Ivy, I have a job. I can help you. Please let me know where you are.

 • • • 

I met Geoff Meyer in 2012. With his Fair Isle sweater and slicked-down hair, he looked like anyone’s seventy-six-year-old grandfather. He was courtly and jokey, and he called me “mate.” He said that not long after he had run away to Sydney, “I started to get it into my brain to find out if I had any family.” He guessed that the best place to look was the Department of Child Welfare. “I’m a state ward,” he told a young man at the local office. “I’m looking to see if I’ve got a mother and father.” The young man went into another room and after five minutes returned and said, “I think you might have a sister.” He disappeared again to check further, and then an older man came out and said to Meyer, “I think you had better leave.” Meyer thought he had misunderstood. “I think you had better leave,” the man repeated. “No,” said Meyer. They argued back and forth, the man continuing to try to dismiss Meyer with no explanation and Meyer refusing to budge. Then the man told him, “Get out, or I’ll call the fucking police.” Meyer was frightened of being sent back to his foster mother, so he left.

He got a job, married, and had four children and, as the years passed, eleven grandchildren. Meyer never told any of them that he had been a state ward. When his own children asked him about his childhood, he changed the subject. But when he retired, he started to go to the state records offices to see what he could find. Even then he didn’t tell his wife about his past. “It felt very, very private,” he explained. He eventually tracked down his birth certificate and discovered that his mother was Maisie Aileen Meyer, a Sydney local, and his father was Leo Joseph Meyer, an American sailor. There was no information about why he had been made a state ward and no record of contact from his parents. As he continued his search for records about his life and family, Meyer was told different things by different departments. Some officials were kind to him, while others were perfunctory. One said his information had been lost in a flood; another claimed it had been destroyed in a fire. At the records offices Meyer had to insist that he was legally entitled to a copy of his files. When he received them, they took months to reach him and were often missing documents from the original sets he had seen.

When he was sixty-eight, Meyer saw a newspaper notice seeking former state wards. He responded and shortly after found himself at the head office of the Care Leavers Australia Network in Sydney, speaking with one of its founders, Leonie Sheedy. “She started talking to me, and I talked, and then the more I talked the more she was getting out of me, and I had never talked like this before.” When Meyer left Sheedy that day, he said, “I felt like Superman walking in the air. I felt like Jesus Christ walking on the water.” That conversation reframed his life. “I thought I was the reason all that stuff happened,” he explained. “All that time, I thought it was only happening to me, but it was happening all over the place.” When he got home that day and told his wife about his experience, she asked, “What really went on in your life?” So he began to tell her too.

Over a cup of tea Meyer showed me the files he had recovered. The first item was his intermediate school certificate. He found other records about his education and his foster parents, but he could locate only one from before he was ten. He spends a lot of time now searching for the missing records of his first decade; they are proof of an otherwise invisible life, but he also wants them so he can sue the government for compensation.