He lived in a nursing home in Strasbourg, tormented by illness and guilt. When I entered his room, I saw an emaciated old man with dark circles under his eyes and trembling hands. He stared at me for a long time before he spoke. “Are you the one from the camp?” “Yes.” “Sit down.” I sat down. My heart was pounding so hard I was afraid he would hear it.
“I remember the Adler family,” he said slowly. “They were privileged and close to the regime. During the war, they took in several children – children from special assistance programs.” I clenched my fists to steady my trembling. Where are they now? After the war, they went to Austria, probably Salzburg, but I cannot be certain.
He gave me the name of a street, a neighborhood. It was more than I had learned in twenty-nine years. I thanked him. He looked away, unable to meet my gaze. The next month, I traveled to Salzburg. My hair was almost entirely gray. My hands trembled constantly from arthritis. My knees ached with every step. But I went.
The train journey took hours. I watched the landscapes pass by: mountains, forests, villages. I thought of all those lost years, all the time my son had spent growing up without me, somewhere, perhaps hundreds of kilometers away. Did he look like me? Had he inherited my eyes, my lips? Did he know he was adopted? Had anyone told him about me? I found an Adler in the Salzburg telephone directory.
Hans Adler. I noted the address in my old notebook, where I had written hundreds of names over the years. Then I made my way there, feeling as though I were about to fall into a ravine, fully aware that I would do it anyway. It was a well-kept middle-class house with a flower garden. Roses climbed the facade. A child's swing hung from a thick chain.
Everything seemed normal. A calm life, a quiet happiness. I rang the bell. The next few seconds seemed endless. Then the door opened. A man in his thirties stood there. Brown hair, dark eyes, deep lines. My heart skipped a beat. It was him. I knew it. My whole being knew it. I recognized something in his face.
A resemblance to my mother, to Séverine, and perhaps even to myself. “Yes,” he said in German with a hint of impatience. The words caught in my throat. I stared at him, unable to look away. I searched for traces of myself, of my sisters, of my lost family. “Are you all right?” he asked, and his voice changed, revealing concern.
“I… I am looking for someone,” I finally managed to say in broken German to the man who was born in June 1943 and adopted by the Adler family. His expression changed at once. He turned pale. Darkness fell over his eyes. He took a step back. Why? I took a deep breath. I gathered all my courage, because I was his mother.
The silence that fell was unbearable. He looked at me as if I were a ghost from his past come to haunt him. He gripped the doorframe tightly. His breathing was uneven. Then, slowly and without a word, he stepped back and closed the door. I stood frozen on the threshold, my legs trembling, my heart shattered.
I heard voices inside. A woman asked what was happening, and he answered something I could not understand. I waited perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour. Time lost all meaning, but the door did not open. In the end, I dropped a letter into the mailbox. A letter that explained everything: who I was, what had happened, why I had come.
I gave him the address of my hotel. Then I went home and cried for three days. He did not want me. He wanted nothing to do with me. For nearly thirty years I had traveled, crossed borders, saved every penny, followed every clue – and now, when I had finally found him, he turned me away. But I could not give up. Not now, not after all of this.
I returned the next day. I rang the bell, but no one answered. I returned the following day. Same result. I left more letters, photographs from my youth, a photo of Séverine and Aurore, documents from the camp – everything I had gathered over the years. On the fifth attempt, he opened the door. He looked exhausted, with deep shadows under his eyes.
His face was impassive. “What do you want from me?” he asked. His voice was broken, almost pleading. “Nothing,” I answered quietly. “I want nothing from you. I only wanted to tell you that I wanted you, that I never left you, that we were separated, that I have not stopped thinking of you a single day of my life.”
He closed his eyes. A tear ran down his cheek. “They told me my mother died in the war, that I was an orphan, that my biological parents were killed in a bombing.” “I know,” I whispered. “I know what they told you. They lied to you.” His voice trembled with anger and pain. “Yes,” he said, opening his eyes and looking at me, truly looking at me for the first time.
“What is your name?” I asked. He nodded slowly, as if memorizing every syllable. “My name is Mathias,” and for the first time in twenty-nine years, I heard my son's name. Mathias and I were never close. How could we be? I was a stranger to him. He was a man whose life had been built on a lie – a lie I had shattered. We met several times after that first meeting.
Polite coffee breaks, shy conversations. He asked questions about Aurore and Séverine, about von Steiner. I answered honestly, even when it hurt. One day he asked: “Did you love me?” I looked at this man in his thirties, this stranger who was my son, and I told him the truth. “I loved you from the first moment I felt you inside me, and when they took you away, a part of me died.”
“I have searched for you my whole life. Yes, Mathias, I loved you. I love you still.” He wept. So did I. But love alone is not always enough to heal old wounds. Mathias had his own family – a wife, two children, a life entirely different from mine. I could not demand a place in his life. And I did not want to. I only wanted him to know.
We wrote to each other for several years. Then the letters grew rarer, and the silence returned. In 2005, I learned from his obituary that he had died of cancer. He was sixty years old. Even so, I was not invited to the funeral. I stayed at the back of the church, discreet and unnoticed. I watched his children weep, his wife break down, and in that moment I understood.
My son had lived a life, a real life, in spite of everything – in spite of von Steiner, in spite of the camp, in spite of me. And perhaps that was enough. When I gave this interview for the “Historical Memory” project in 2010, I was eighty-six years old. I was physically exhausted, my voice hoarse, but my mind was still clear. They asked me whether I had any regrets. I said no.
Not for searching for Mathias, not for knocking on his door, not for telling the truth, but because silence also kills, and some stories cannot be buried. Von Steiner was never brought to trial. The children born in that camp were never officially registered. Women like me never received recognition, an apology, or compensation.
We were simply erased. But as long as there is someone to tell our story, we will live on. I died five years after that interview, in 2015. I was ninety-one years old. I was alone, as I have been for nearly my whole life. But my words remain. And today, decades later, thousands of people hear my story.
Perhaps among them is a woman who recognizes something – a familiar pain, a silence she carries within her. If so, I want to tell her: your story matters. Your pain is real, and you are not alone. The world tried to erase us, but we are still here – in every testimony, in every cherished memory, in every person who refuses to forget.
This was my story, the story of three sisters who survived the unthinkable. And now it is yours too, for as long as you remember it, we will live. This story does not belong to me alone; it is the story of thousands of women whose names have been erased from history. Women who bear the scars of a war they did not choose.
Mothers whose children were taken from them before they could even come to know them. Survivors who had to learn to live with an unbearable emptiness. While I searched for my son for twenty years, the world spun on. War memorials were unveiled, official speeches were given, and heroes were honored – but she, like so many others, remained in the shadows, because her story was unsettling, because it reminded us that wars do not end when the guns fall silent.
They live on in bodies, in memories, in the silence that lasts from generation to generation. Today, years after the end of the Second World War, we have a duty to remember not only the battles and the treaties, but also women like Ariane, Aurore, and Séverine. Children like Mathias, robbed of their stories, truths suppressed because they disturbed the established order.
Today, in her honor, in honor of all these forgotten women, ask yourself: what story do you carry within you – a story that deserves to be heard, perhaps waiting for someone in your community to finally listen?
