Hans Oderman keeps talking without a pause, and I realize that the two polarities of the German Reich are coming to light simultaneously: On the one hand, a twisted enterprise of death is taking place, a burning urgency to shove more and more transports into the gas chambers, each transport making way for the next. On the other, an equally twisted enterprise of life, the chambers of female wombs being stuffed to capacity, one fetus making way for the next. This animalistic machine does not rest for a moment, so urgent are the needs of the Reich.
Within this wild, confused enterprise, born of the yearnings of Reichsführer Himmler, Hans Oderman’s father is created. Born, perhaps, or possibly kidnapped and reeducated. Hans Oderman has no idea. Hans’s father did not remember the Lebensborn years. The four-year-old’s memories go back only to the post-war years, after German defeat. He told Hans very little about those blurred years of hunger. Huge orphanages, endless hours of enforced sleep. Facing the broken window of an abandoned house. A large hole behind a tree. For some reason, the hole becomes his friend, he likes to look at it, in the dark too, when he must sleep, sleep, sleep.
The war left thousands of infants, a master race that no one wanted, and there was no one to keep the promises that had created them.
“I began a tireless investigation. Most of the Lebensborn files were destroyed by the officials before the Lebensborn houses were occupied. A few papers were left, some memos, but there was no way to find my father. He was born a Lebensborn, that much he knew. An elderly childless couple had taken him in after the war, but they died and my father went back to the orphanages. He still had an aunt from his adoptive parents, and she told him everything she knew, which was very little. I searched through all the remaining files and documents. My father’s father might have been an SS man, my father might have been a kidnapped child, perhaps Polish. Hundreds of thousands of children were kidnapped in the war years, and who knows? I asked my dad what he thought, and he told me that sometimes he felt as if the Polish language sounded familiar. I would like to think that my father was kidnapped, rather than the planned child of an SS man, but look at me…”
Six-foot-three-sapphire-blue-eyes-golden-locks looks at me and I find myself convicting him against my own will. Then I think, “So what? So what if his father’s father was in the SS?”
(All the wonders, all the treasures, all the miracles.)
“I would like to believe that my father was kidnapped. The children they kidnapped were usually a little older, but still. Or maybe my father was the offspring of a simple German army man. They usually only allowed party members to impregnate women in the Lebensborn houses, but sometimes, towards the end, regular soldiers were given the chance too.”
We sit quietly. Grandpa Yosef remembers that we haven’t eaten dessert yet. Something hovers over Hans and myself, the story of my documentation and the story of his research, the truth I did not want to reach and the truth Hans wished not to find. From that clashing of wings comes a deceitful sort of lesson that says loudly: Never enquire.
“When you asked me what my family did during the war, I told you what was convenient, I didn’t exactly lie.”
(Still making excuses, Hans Oderman the artiste of awkwardness.)
“My father built his life without complaints. He built a house. He built a family. He started from nothing and achieved everything. I respect him very much, admire him even. It’s a shame I never had a grandfather like everyone else did. There was the aunt, and I called her Grandma, but it wasn’t really….”
(All the wonders, all the treasures, all the miracles.)
As I look at Hans Oderman, I realize what his role is, what it has been from the first day I saw him. He is my reflection. That’s it. I can no longer say us and them. Every move I make, every line I draw, there will be a line on my reflection too. Every thought of mine will produce a thought on the other side too. There is no more us and them.
“I want to write a book about the Lebensborn, about the kidnapping operation and the breeding farms. Today in Germany there are hundreds of thousands of people who are assumed to be Lebensborn children. There were more. Some were returned to their parents, if there were any. But there are many left without fathers, without mothers, without memories. You know, no one ever punished the Lebensborn directors, Dr. Gregor Ebner and Dr. Max Sollmann. And they were the people who signed documents ordering that a disappointing baby be liquidated. They allowed transports of kidnapped children with unsatisfactory data to be left to die. No one even bothered to investigate them. Strange, isn’t it?”
A reflection. A transparency. An unwanted world of mirrors, all the lines between me and him are reflected, joined together, inseparable. Since the day I let him carry his own suitcases, it was clear — he was destined to finish my search. To show me that everything was more complicated than I could even conceive.
A gleaming cloud whose center hung over the brown wooden table in Grandpa Yosef’s house opens up. All the wonders shower down, all the treasures, all the miracles. All the secrets, all the riddles, all the questions.
I did not go straight home that evening. After what Hans had told me, after the Lebensborn, after what I had come to understand, the reflection that trapped me and the realization that there was no simple explanation, I just stayed there. I could not leave. In order to be capable of being at home with Anat and Yariv, in order to be capable of living my life, the world had to operate differently. Like turning a sock inside out, the world simply spun around us, leaving us in our place, in our time, but it came in closer, upside-down, joining in. Time would have to figure out how to make things settle down — with us everything continued as usual. Hans stayed at Grandpa Yosef’s, washing dishes I suppose, speaking German. Effi disappeared somewhere — probably home, or perhaps to another place in her life (she too had bridges), and I found myself walking down Katznelson in the direction of home. At the end of all days, I believe, I will be sitting on a couch opposite Hans Oderman in Grandpa Yosef’s house. That will be the revenge of time. But that night, I walked down Katznelson without a thought in my head, and looked up at one of the tall poplar trees. Some of its bark was starting to shed, hanging limply as if I had caught it in the middle of an escape attempt. I stood and thought of those neighborhood trees for a long time. Who had planted them? Who had chosen poplars and poincianas and pepper trees and pink bauhinias and purple jacarandas and divided them up among the yards by some secret code? Who had taken the time? The people who lived here had never planted a tree, and I could not imagine a single one of them dropping everything to dig a hole for a sapling. Someone, perhaps a municipal clerk, must have picked out the trees when this neighborhood was designed. It was designed, after all, wasn’t it? And the trees, to which I had never given much thought before, suddenly appeared before me: the poplar, the poinciana, Gershon Klima’s Indian bombax. Hirsch emerged from the hibiscus shrubs, as if summoned for a purpose. Hirsch.