‘It was hard for Gretchen bringing up the child without a father’s help in postwar Berlin, as you may imagine. She worked in a street market, helping on a fruit stall, and her health suffered each winter. Sometimes, when she was feeling at her lowest, she would take out the gold medal from its case and draw some kind of inner strength from it. Fortunately, Trudi was a robust child, and seemed, if anything, to thrive better without the sponsorship of the SS. Being so prone to bronchial troubles herself, Gretchen formed the idea of saving enough money to make a new life in California, where the milder climate would be kinder to her health. In 1953, she contracted pleurisy and permanently damaged one of her lungs. That made up her mind; she sold her apartment and left Germany for good. They came here and rented a place in Santa Barbara. For several years her health improved, but in the winter of 1959 the pleurisy returned. This time she was not strong enough to pull through. She was forty-one when she died.
‘So Trudi was left without family in Santa Barbara. By now, she was eighteen and a capable young woman, able to fend for herself. She got a job as a stewardess with TWA and took an apartment of her own near Los Angeles International Airport. She did not lack cash, clothes or boyfriends. During her childhood, her mother had often talked to her of the two cherished events of her life — the gold medal at the Olympics and the weekend in Bavaria with her SS captain. When Trudi saw that the Olympic Games were to be held in Rome in 1960, she decided to make the trip, to watch the gymnastics, almost in tribute to the mother whose gold medal had so unfailingly raised her spirits when she took it out to look at it in the dark years of the forties and fifties. As a TWA employee, Trudi got a free flight to Rome.
‘The gymnastic team event in 1960 was dominated by the Russians. There was no storybook victory for Germany, I’m afraid. But something else happened which in some ways had a certain logic to it, but in others was quite remarkable.
‘The gymnastics took place in the evenings in the historic Terme di Caracalla, a former Roman bath. One evening Trudi found herself sitting next to a group of young Americans watching the beam exercises. They were cheering a little Czech girl named Eva Bosakova, who was performing so brilliantly that she looked to be snatching the gold medal from the Russians, and so preventing a clean sweep in the women’s events. When the result was announced, and Bosakova was declared the winner, the young man sitting next to Trudi jumped up in excitement and tipped half a bag of popcorn into her lap. As so often happens in such incidents, it started a friendship between them. He told her that he and his companions were members of the U.S. track team, and he presented her with a ticket for the next day’s events in the stadium.
‘I have never discovered whether the young American became a medal winner in the event, because Trudi concealed his identity from the one person with whom she discussed these things. I do know that when his competition was over and the team manager no longer checked his movements around the Olympic Village from hour to hour, he met Trudi and they went out together, discovering the beauties of Rome. I am speculating now, but I imagine that to Trudi, who had so often heard her mother speak with pride about that short weekend in Bavaria with the handsome sportsman chosen by the Reich as her Liebhaber, the friendship with an Olympic athlete must have seemed intensely romantic. And it may be that when she gave herself to him in her hotel bedroom, she was exhilarated by the knowledge that she, too, was privileged to enjoy the embrace of a superman.
‘Whether she made a conscious decision to conceive his child, I do not know. I can only say with certainty that she was not ignorant about birth control. As a schoolgirl in Germany and in the States, she would have received a comprehensive sex education, and her mother would certainly have talked to her about the methods in use.’
‘But she had a child, I guess,’ said Armitage.
‘Goldengirl?’ said Valenti.
‘She was born in the Norwalk State Hospital, Los Angeles, on June 6, 1961,’ Serafin said in confirmation.
‘When did you first hear of her?’ Dryden asked. Determined still to have no part in promoting the girl, he had found himself becoming increasingly interested in Serafin’s narrative. A question or two didn’t commit him to anything.
The doctor leaned back in his chair, pausing, Dryden suspected, not to recollect the date — because the details of the story had come so readily to his lips — but to take the measure of the interest it had evoked. ‘In 1964,’ he answered. ‘I mentioned earlier that I studied in Vienna. I was engaged in a research project there during 1963, on the influence of heredity on human physique. I set myself the task of comparing the skeletal proportions of one generation of females with their offspring at maturity. To achieve this, I had to locate accurate data obtained about twenty-five years previously, trace the progeny of the women concerned and measure them. I decided to use the data obtained by the medical team at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Perhaps you recall the sequence in the official film of the Games when hundreds of women gymnasts were shown moving in perfect co-ordination in a display in the stadium. With their customary attention to detail, the Germans recorded the measurements of 200 of those women. I estimated that I might be successful in tracing about half this number, of whom perhaps a third might have given birth to daughters. I needed more to achieve a statistically valid sample, and to my great good fortune, I also found anthropometrical data for each of the forty-two women in the official German team. The fact that they had achieved distinction by representing their country was likely to prove helpful in the process of contacting them and their children. Actually, I found twenty-nine of them, which wasn’t bad after twenty-seven years, including World War II.
‘One of those I did not meet, of course, was Gretchen, who had died four years previously. However, I succeeded in tracing five of her teammates from that successful octet who won the gold medal for combined gymnastics. One of them had been a close friend of Gretchen’s, actually attending the same Napola in Lower Saxony. They had corresponded right through the war and for some years after. She it was who told me of Gretchen’s pride in being selected to participate in the Nazi eugenics program, and of the birth of Trudi. After Gretchen emigrated to the States she lost touch with her, except that she received a Christmas card one year bearing a Santa Barbara postmark, but no address. It amused me that one of the group I called “my 242 Frauen” had found her way to my own state, to a place, in fact, less than two hours’ drive from my home in Bakersfield. Unfortunately the research grant didn’t stretch to trans-atlantic trips, so I had to put a small cross beside Gretchen’s name on my list.
‘I didn’t forget her, however. The story intrigued me. After all, there can’t be many women about who will admit to having served the Third Reich in the way she did. After I had presented my thesis, I took a little time off to check the story. In the university library at Vienna, I found a sports almanac listing the names of all Germans who had competed internationally in scores of different sports in the pre-war years. I looked for the names of men who had competed in the modern pentathlon. There were twenty-three listed as full internationals between the years 1924 and 1936, which I considered the likeliest span that would include Gretchen’s SS captain. With a list of those names I traveled to Berlin, to the American sector, where the SS records captured at the end of the war were still held. In the document depository there, I explained the purpose of my mission — although I will admit that I gave the impression that the information was vital to my thesis.