Ana Karin Tetzner

Name of Interviewee: Anna Tetschner

Name of Interviewer: Ronit Wilder

Cassette Number: VT-2244

Date: May 16, 1999

Name of Typist: Cheryl Balshayi

Names:

Dachau

Deggendorf

Auschwitz

Theresienstadt

Bergen

Q: The 16th of May, 1999. This is an interview with Mrs. Anna Tetschner. I let you tell your story without my acknowledgement. Interviewer Ronit Wilder. Where do you want to begin your unique life story?

A: I think with my name, because I don’t know exactly what my name is. Here in Israel I use Anna, both because it is easy to say and I feel comfortable with it. My family name, Tezschner, I use now as the right one. I got it almost as a gift a little while ago in connection with my “aliyah”. I don’t know the day I was born, I don’t know exactly where. I only know the season. And I was born maybe in Dachau or maybe on the train from Auschwitz to Dachau – one of the places, but we don’t know for sure. My birthday on my documents is the 16th of February in ’45, but that is very clearly not the right one. I grew up in Norway and when I needed some documents it was always confusing because it was sometimes the 7th of February, sometimes December, ’44 – I never really knew. I came to Norway when I was seven years old or around seven. The reason was something very difficult had happened in England. I lived in England before I came to Norway. But my first memory is from Deggendorf, from a refugee camp there, and it’s not nice things I remember. People I have met later said to me that, “Your memories are true” because these refugee camps were not much different from the camp itself, but my problem was, as I grew up, I was always told, when I tried to talk about what happened to me when I was little, I was only “eine kleinkind”. They told me, “That is fantasy, it’s dreams, it’s nightmares, something you have heard.” Or they plainly told me, “You are lying to get attention,” and “You stupid kid.” I grew up in a Norwegian family, a Christian family, and they had a boy themselves.

Q: After you?

A: No, before me. I don’t understand it all, I never did, why these people wanted to take me into their family because I was always told I was Jewish, but I knew anyhow, but they told me I was a Jew from the garbage cans and I don’t deserve to live.

Q: A Jew from?

A: The garbage. That I didn’t deserve to live. Then they talked to me about, “You crucified Jesus Christ.” In school they told me I started the Second World War because on my documents it was written that I was born in Germany. It was very difficult always to be told what you feel in your heart is true, is not true, and always knowing you don’t belong. I came to Norway, I couldn’t speak a single word of Norwegian and from the very first day, in my new home in Norway, was sexual abuse and things like that, all the time. And you see, we come from England and the reason we left London was that my older brother, nicknamed “PP”, and I, we did a terrible crime together. I have to explain that when I now talk about mother and father and brothers, they turned out not to be, but to make it easier to tell you, I prefer to say “mother” and “father” and “brothers”, because as I grew up I believed they were my parents. I know we moved from Germany in ’49, the end of ’49. I know that I spent some time in Dachau and when the camp was liberated at the end of April we moved to one of the camps in Deggendorf. In late ’46 a brother was born, and “PP” I mentioned, we know for sure, was born in Berlin in the beginning of ’43. So that was supposed to be my family, but what I couldn’t understand was all the violence, all the anger towards me, the way I was punished for things I couldn’t understand. It was a lot of men around my mother. Her name was Beatrice and I don’t know if she did it for money or whatever, but this man used PP and me as if we were toys and you can look at any kind of abuse, we went through it. But we didn’t know we had an unhappy childhood before I saw something else. This was the way it was to be a child. And we only knew camps and death and running for your life and starving – that was life, that was the way it was to be a child.

Q: But this was after the war was finished?

A: Yes, it was.

Q: Still hunger and running for your life?

A: Yes. Running for our lives in the sense that we were very good in stealing food and people were after us all the time, so we felt we were running for our lives, but we accepted this abuse because we felt we were the real parents of Stevie, our younger brother.

Q: That means that you were sent to steal or was it your own…?A: No, no. It was the only way to be sure we got something in our stomachs. I don’t think it was much different. At that time it was not mentioned, the Jewishness, at all, so we really starved. And I know the Germans themselves starved at that time, in many cases.

Q: I still don’t understand. You are talking now about the family that after that you went with them to England and to Norway?

A: Yes, but I want to tell you what happened.

Q: But these are the same people?

A: Yes, the same people. The discovery of my real parents came many, many years later. Anyhow, so we felt we protected Stevie. We were accepting this man did these things to us. But one day we realized now it was Stevie’s turn and PP and I, we talked what to do. PP, he never talked. He could talk and as an adult he became quite a famous writer, but he refused to talk. Stevie refused to walk and I did both. We found that the only way was to kill my mother and her boyfriend, who actually was Jewish and the father of Stevie – that we know for sure. And this man lives in America nowadays and will have nothing to do with anything of this. Stevie tried to find his father, but he didn’t want to talk to him.

Q: Why did you want to kill them?

A: Because in our world that was the only way to survive and to protect Stevie because we loved Stevie tremendously and we felt…think about it. A girl, five, six, seven years old, feeling the mother of this one. That was the way we felt, and don’t ask me how we did it because I was the one who killed two people, but it turned out to be wrong. It was somebody I don’t know the name even today. They have board and bedroom for having…maybe it was a prostitute or something, I don’t know, but it was quite dark, so I didn’t see. Don’t ask me how I managed to do it because I don’t know really. Even the weapon was a big hammer. I don’t know how. But the case never came to court and it was discovered that Beatrice had no legal papers and she was told to leave to England. What I didn’t know at that time was that she was Danish and at the University of Bergen they had a program for Polish-speaking people who wanted to update their education. That is what I was told was the reason she went to Norway with us. Of course, I know it was a lie, but I’ll explain that later. In this situation I also had my first meeting with Christianity. I don’t know who this man who spoke to me was - I only remember his purple shirt and his big cross – and he told me that I had committed a sin for which I had to be forgiven. So we came to Norway and as you might know, in Norway they had quite many so-called war children, whose fathers were German soldiers – around ten thousand, I think. So it was very common – I have to tell, I came to Norway in ’52.

Q: But before that I have a few questions. You and your brother killed two people and they found out because you…

A: Yes, we didn’t hide it.

Q: No doubt about it.

A: No, no. We admitted it. We had no plans. Even PP said to me, because we communicated perfectly non-verbally, he had memories from Dachau and he said, “Anna, they can only send us back to Dachau and you know, Dachau is a very fine place because we will have a meal a day and we will have a bed.” So you understand what kind of life we had, when we could think about a concentration camp as heaven, because that was the way he explained to me.

Q: And where was supposed to be your father at that time?

A: He was not into the picture at that time.

Q: Not at all?

A: No, not at all.

Q: Only the mother and her boyfriend.

A: And there were two boys.

Q: And why did they move from Germany to England?

A: Because Joseph – the first name – he was a British citizen and I think she hoped to marry him or something.

Q: What did you say was his name?

A: His first name was Joseph. He was Jewish. That we know for sure. And because this happened, the case never came to court, as I told you, but she was told to leave the country because she had no valid passport, so her choice was Bergen then. When we came to Bergen it was very common to advertise in the newspapers if you wanted a foster child or adopted child, and Beatrice answered such an advertisment and she left me with a Norwegian family.

Q: And the brothers?

A: No, only me. The life in that family was not especially easy. I’ll leave the story about this just here and I’ll go back. You see, Beatrice and Karl, her husband, the guy I thought was my father, lived in Berlin and Beatrice came to Berlin in ’39. I know she studied at the University of Berlin. Her education actually was…she became a doctor, yes. Karl, he was studying Lutheran theology and (?).

Q: What’s the other thing?

A: A famous gentile theologian. So they lived in Berlin and they met. This is the only picture existing of these people. That is Karl.

Q: He was Norwegian, she was Danish?

A: Yes, but I didn’t know that. This picture is taken in ’39 or ’40, I think. He worked for the Wehrmacht. He worked for “Fernsprachendienst” and “Nachrichtendienst”. “Nachrichtendienst” you know is Intelligence Service. “Fernsprachendienst” is to translate. I know about both of them were convinced Nazis.

Q: In the Nazi party?

A: Yes, yes.

Q: Although they weren’t German citizens.

A: No. And it has always been very difficult for me to understand this because I know they were responsible for several hundred lives.

Q: How come?

A: They gave information, they rounded up people. I know that for sure.

Q: Both of them?

A: Both of them. And the story that was told to me was Beatrice then was a prisoner in Dachau and they were Jewish and he was Jewish. I was told the background – he was supposed to be born in Königsbergen before (?).

So I grew up in Norway and as I got older I wanted to know where I really came from because I knew something was terribly wrong.

Q: But at that time, when you were a child, you thought that you are Jewish, you knew that you are Jewish, and you thought that your parents were also Jewish?

A: Yes. These two people were my real parents and my brothers were my brothers. I believed it. I had no reason to believe something else.

Q: No one told you something else.

A: Oh yes, they told something, but I became very clever by listening to things I shouldn’t listen to because I felt in my heart something was terribly wrong somewhere. Why was it so necessary to tell what I knew for sure had to be true, was a lie? Why was it necessary to tell me all the time, “At least you can shut up about where you come from. You have to grateful.” And I don’t know what I should be grateful for. I lived in hell. When I was seventeen years old and I finished school, I was told by my foster mother, “Now you have to take care of yourself.” And I was very happy to do that. My foster father died when I was twelve and a half. He was killed in Japan. He was a newspaperman in one of the biggest newspapers in Norway. And actually I was very happy when he died because it meant the end of the incest he was doing. So then I worked. I worked in an orphanage. When I was twenty I decided to visit Israel and I did in ’65. I worked in a kibbutz up in the Galilee, Matzuba, outside Nahariyya, and it was not easy. It was hard work, but for the first time in my life I met people I felt I belonged to. I felt these people are thinking in the same way as I am thinking. Some of my memories were similar with these people’s memories, and it was a delight.

Q: There were Holocaust survivors in that kibbutz?

A: Yes, many, many. And you know, in ’65 a lot were still alive.

Q: And young enough.

A: Young enough. And some of them….I don’t know. They were not pitying me, but I think they wanted me to know that things actually a child remembers can be true. So I went back to Norway and I married. My husband’s mother’s family comes from Schleswig-Holstein and they were Jewish. They came to Norway so-called “Schutzjuden”. That meant that their knowledge was needed in Norway, so they actually had a sort of government letter. The man we know about – he became wounded, he was a miner – and he bought a little farm on the coast of Norway where my mother-in-law was born. And I met my husband and we fell in love and we married. And my husband was always so proud of knowing he was married to a Jewish woman. And I have five children.

Q: Proud or not proud?

A: Proud, very proud. He always talked about it. And we had five children.

Q: He grew up as a Christian?

A: Yes, but in a way we weren’t any religion. And we had five children together – two boys first and then three girls. And he insisted, and I was very happy, that the two boys should be circumcised And we celebrated in our way the Jewish holidays, raised our kids to be proud of being Jewish, and even that was difficult because anti-semitism is quite strong in Norway, too. Not physical, but emotional. And the Norwegians are very nice when you need help, but when you show them you can stand on your own feet and do it well, you have problems. And all the Jews in Norway have done it extremely well. They are very high up in society. And it’s only Randhousen (?). So the nearest synagogue for us was two hundred and fifty miles, a little less in kilometers, so we tried to raise our kids Jewish in the Christian environment.

Q: Not in a big city.

A: No, on an island. The North Atlantic into the kitchen window and four thousand people and fifty cars. And my husband and I, we talked a lot about moving to Israel because he was actually a sailor and didn’t need to live in Norway. He always said, “It’s time, Anna, to find out the truth,” because he was also sure that something was terribly wrong.

Q: He knew your life story till…?

A: Yes, and he was one of the very few who really believed me. You know, when you love each other and you live so close as husband and wife, it’s not easy to hide anything or tell lies over years, and we were actually married for twenty-six years. The sad thing was, he suffered from brain cancer for twenty-years.

Q: Twenty years?

A: Yes. We didn’t know it was cancer in the beginning and when we discovered it, it was too late and he died ten years ago. So it was also difficult, but anyhow, I went into the archives in Norway and something very strange appeared. It was not reported anything about me, nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Q: But what did you think at first that you would find in the archives?

A: I hoped to find something. I really don’t know what I looked for because I knew as a truth that this man, at least, was a war criminal. He had four years in jail after the war in Norway.

Q: That’s why he wasn’t in the picture at that time.

A: Yes. I also knew he wrote at lot – he was also a writer – he wrote a lot in the newspapers against the Jews. He really was convinced about the truth and he never took it back. Under the trials in Norway, he meant he was right. It was a burden for me, knowing you had parents who were responsible for killing other Jews.

Q: And that during the time that you thought that they are also Jews?

A: Yes. I was told they were Jewish. So I think what I looked for was somehow an explanation for why they did these things. In ’92 I was in Oslo and by an accident – it was a secondhand bookshop in downtown Oslo. First I saw they had a lot of books from the war. I was talking with the people there and I understood these people are Nazis, but I kept my face and my thoughts by myself and they allowed me to look into the books and there I found his name.

Q: Under what title?

A: He was a pastor actually, and the Nazis in Norway had made him to the leader of a faculty of the University of Oslo, as a Nazi. He never had time to take over, but that is another thing. And these people, I asked them, “Do you know anything about Karl Malder,” because that is his name. “Oh yes.” And they told me he was convicted and he was in jail for four years and he was innocent. He was a martyr for the case. And it was not easy for me to swallow. Then they invited me to come to a centre the Nazis had in Norway, open for public, named Norwegian Institute for History from the Time of Occupation. And what they tried to do was to tell that most of the people who were trialed were innocent, to telling the truth. And it scared me, it scared me. And then I found my brothers. To say I found them is not actually correct because I had known about them all along, but we got a chance to meet.

Q: Just a minute. From the age of seventeen you had no family at all?

A: I married when I was twenty-one.

Q: Okay, but since you were seventeen and you were told to take care of yourself you had no connection to no one in your family. Not your foster family, not your former family.

A: No, nobody, I was completely alone.

Q: And you knew no one of both those families?

A: I heard about my brothers, but it was one thing happened when I was around fourteen years old. My foster mother said to me - and for me it was one of the very, very rare events where she was nice to me – and she said to me, “If you really want, you can seek for your family.” But she said it in a way where I felt I should say, “No. I don’t want to.” Even I lied, because I deeply wanted to.

Q: She meant the former family, Beatrice and Karl?

A: Yes. And then, you know, I loved this woman, even so evil she could be to me, I loved her.

Q: You mean Beatrice?

A: No. This is my foster mother. I loved her too. She was the only one I had in the world. And now my foster father was dead also. So I felt that I even should give her a promise of never seeking the family. As evidence for I was grateful for having a family, having food, having a bed, whatever. So that, in a way, kept me away from going into the issue, but when I started to have children by my own, and also my husband, he said I had a right to know. And then the first thing coming to my knowledge was what they did, what Beatrice and Karl did, and it was like a heavy burden. How could these people do these things? Betray their own people. Being Jewish and….It was a terrible burden and I was thinking what can I do for mending the damage of what they had done? That was my feeling. So in ’92, I think it was, I met my brothers.

Q: After you found what you found about them?

A: Yes. I knew this about the war crimes, but not much beside that.

Q: Only what you found in that book there?

A: No, no, no. Other things also, because the archives for war criminals are for public, so it was very clear. They had evidence for what they did.

Q: But only Karl was arrested?

A: Yes. And you will have the explanation for why Beatrice was not – a little later. So I carried this burden. And then I met my brothers and one was born after the war, after I left the family, and he is very high up in politics in Norway. We were meeting PP again – he is a writer in Norway. He confirmed some of the memories and I was thinking, “Well, when this is true, why they tell me this is not true?” So the whole confusion around the whole thing was so difficult. After meeting them and Michael, the youngest of them, he made me promise not to talk in public about our background, and I wondered why.

Q: And the other brothers, they still believed they are Jewish?

A: That was what it appeared to be. But Michael said to me, “You know the media, the newspapers, television and so, hound us, who are high up in public, in politics” and so on, and then he told me he actually had lied that his parents – supposed to be our parents – were dead in a car accident in Denmark and that he was Danish. And I said to him, “Why are you doing this?” And he couldn’t really explain. And every time I brought up the issue for these boys, it was always turned to me, “You are making up a story. You might need care. You might need a doctor.” So after two, three years, they actually silenced me, but I went on doing my research, I couldn’t give up. And I went also to Vienna, to the Wiesenthal Centre.

Q: Before that, how were the relationships between you and the two brothers that you knew before and didn’t meet for thirty, forty years?

A: It was very painful, it was very painful. And PP, he wanted me to go into the role of a mother and I refused. And with Stevie, he had so many ugly memories and he blamed me.

Q: As a child he had so many memories?

A: And he is even professor in psychology, so you know….So I felt, “What is this? Something is terribly, terribly, terribly wrong.”

Q: And you think they knew more than they told you?

A: And you will know that. Just wait a little bit. I also went to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Vienna and I met a man there named Dr. Hubbick and he confirmed something. One of my brothers, who was a high officer in NATO, told me that Karl should have rescued out of Berlin three hundred and forty-eight Jews, and that made the story even more confusing. A war criminal helping Jews out of Germany? What is this? And Doug – his name – he said always that Karl, until he died in ’81, always said, “I have done nothing to be ashamed of.” The whole thing was a disaster. And after I had talked with the people in Vienna – because I love also to travel, and in connection with my education and my field - and I have to tell, my husband died in ’90.

Q: Before you began to discover all this stuff?

A: Yes. And I don’t know, I’m sort of glad, with what came up. So I knew I was on track of something. Then ’94, I think, I was at that time studying at the University of Tronheim – religion, actually, and Judaism and Hebrew, classical Hebrew.

Q: What university?

A: Of Tronheim, the middle of Norway. The second biggest university of Norway. And one day I got a letter and it was from a group, the second generation of the Nazis, the children of the Nazis, and they invited me to a meeting. And there was not much information in that letter about what they did and so on, so actually I didn’t answer them. At that time, I had more and more information about the activities of Nazis in Norway. I met one guy who had an archive of all the Nazi children in Norway – sixty thousand names. I met some of the old Nazis still alive.

Q: And you are one of the sixty thousand?

A: Yes. And then, as I was digging deeper, people around me became a little suspicious and one of the guys said to me, “Anna, you know how they treat betrayers among us? We don’t kill them. We only make them wish we did.” And I wondered what am I touching?

Q: That was a Nazi who told you that?

A: Yes, yes. And then I was in Oslo again in connection with my Greek studies and then I was thinking, “Why not go up to the state archives and see if I might find something, something overlooked?” Also because a Jew named Oscar Mendelsohn – he is dead now – had made two very, very good books, together two thousand pages, about the history of the Jews in Norway and I knew his private archives were in the state archives. So I went up and it was not so far from where I had lived on the campus of Oslo University. And I met a man, very good. He was actually Danish. And as I told him my story, I felt confident in him. I had no reason to, but I still felt, and he told me both his parents belonged to the underground movement in Denmark and both of them had committed suicide after the war because they couldn’t stand the memories. So he wanted to help.

Q: But they were in the underground?

A: In Denmark. This man, and his first name is Pier. And Pier said to me, “I really want you to find the truth.” And the very first thing we did was, I signed a paper where it ment nobody else would have a chance to look into the papers of what I found, a so-called “red map”. It’s very, very safe. And he felt he could break some rules and he did. So the first thing we went into was a report from his trial and there he had received around twenty-thousand D-mark in Germany.

Q: Karl?

A: Karl. In ’39, ’40, ’41. And he couldn’t explain where the money came from. The man, Pier, he said, “Maybe this confirms the story that he helped Jews out of Germany for money,” he said. And I was sort of relieved. Here was a man who honestly would help me, because I was not used to people in Norwegian archives being helpful. They said most of the time, “Forget it. Be grateful you are a Norwegian. You have a Norwegian passport.” So the next thing we did was to look into – I don’t know the English word for it – the police who have foreign people to do. In Norwegian it is “Fremed Politier”. “Fremdlings” in German? When people come and are not…

Q: Strangers’ police, something like that.

A: Yes. And PP was recorded there, Beatrice was recorded there, but not me, and I came together with them. Why? Then my friend – I count him as a friend now – called the State Office for Adoptions. “No, this girl doesn’t exist.” In Bergen, where I grew up, nothing, nothing, except one paper from the health department and I got a copy of it and when I came back - even one of the people in the office said, “We have a file on you.” - when I came back, “There are no files. There is nothing on you.” Guess who was more and more confused.

Q: Nothing even about the process of fostering you?

A: Nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing. Then I really got strained to go on. Whatever I would discover, I would face it. And I had some unpleasant experiences. We were Nazis. It was clear that, because I mentioned to them only Karl Malder, but somebody, I guess, stumbled over the name Tetzschner and I think also my brothers helped to hide things. Now I know for sure they did. So in connection with my studies, my special field is sexual abuse and inside the Church. I published my first research and it raised so much anger and problems, I felt, “Let’s go to America” and continue there. My kids had grown up and they didn’t need me. I was on my own again. And I did. And all the time I travelled back and forth to Israel. I knew I belonged here. I knew. And I started to go to Yad Vashem. And then I remembered a word somebody had told me along the way - I really don’t remember who - but my grandfather’s name was Yoseph Tetzschner, so I had a little track. And I found his death certificate here and even in that one I should have been alert, but I didn’t know so much in the beginning because he was transported from Auschwitz to Dachau, and not the other way. And this was in October, ’44.

Q: That you heard in Yad Vashem about….?

A: No, no. Somebody I met told me that, “Oh, your grandfather. I know the name of your grandfather. His name is Yoseph.”

Q: When did you first hear the name Tetzschner?

A: No, Beatrice was divorced from Karl, who married a Norwegian woman and she took back her name, Tetzschner, and when my husband died I had problems with my husband’s family and I don’t want to identify with them, so I took back the name I really believed was mine. Because my husband’s family had problems with my Jewishness. You know, “The Jews, the have a dollar sign instead of heart.”

Q: Although they had a Jewish background.

A: Yes. “Oh no, that is a shame. Don’t mention that.” My children suffered also in school.

Q: Your children see themselves as Jews?

A: Yes, they do and they are proud of it. And their teachers in school, in this little country school, were all belonging to something named the “Palestinian Committee”, working for the Palestinians. My kids were not ashamed of being Jewish and unpleasant things happened to them, like Daniel was forced to write, “Down with the Jews,” in front of all the kids.

Q: What?

A: “Down with the Jews.” On the wall of the school. It was in the time of Sabra and Shatilla and that stuff up in Lebanon, and the teachers only laughed, and when I complained, they said, “What do you think you have to defend?” So my kids faced these problems, being Jewish too. Even it’s not physical, I think emotional abuse is worse. When everybody tells you that “You belong to the garbage like your Mom did.” They were told that their blood was bad. Every time something bad happened….I don’t want to take the words in my mouth, what my kids were named. So I was here and I decided to try to do “aliyah”.

Q: But you said that someone said your grandfather was Yoseph Tetzschner.

A: Yes. And I found this, actually a whole bunch. It could be because he was born in ’99, so he could easily be my grandfather. I was told he was Czech and that fit together with the Tetzschner family also.

Q: That means that he was the father of Beatrice?

A: No. I was told it was.

Q: You thought that he was the father of Beatrice.

A: Yes.

Q: And when you were a child, you didn’t know anyone of the family – uncles, grandparents?

A: No, nothing, nothing. Only some things I think I heard, but when I tried to talk about it, “It’s a lie, Anna. It’s fantasy. You are a bright child, you are too bright. You have read too much.” So I had something to work out from, and I started to write a book about growing up under anti-semitism and the burden of having Jewish parents who were war criminals. It was also a way of working on my own pain. So I lived here and I was in America, coming here, went back to America. And then I decided to go to eastern Europe and work with street kids. And again you face Jewish history, you see how the Jews suffered. I decided, “Well, I’ll leave Norway. Whatever happens, I will live in Israel. Even I cannot prove anything, even I have to go in and out every three months, I want to be here. It’s my people. Whatever papers were there. And I came. And last year, for one reason or another, I started to look into these papers again and I decided to write to Czechoslovakia.

Q: But you had a problem because you knew that Beatrice was Danish and you said that her father was Czech.

A: No, the problem I had was every time I asked questions, they didn’t want me.

Q: Who?

A: Whoever I met, in offices. I travelled a lot. The two people who really wanted to help me were the Norwegian in the state archives and the people in the Wiesenthal Centre in Vienna.

Q: And at that time Beatrice wasn’t alive anymore?

A: She committed suicide in ’63. She did.

Q: You don’t know why?

A: I think I know why now. But every time I asked my brothers about her, they told me a little bit and suddenly, “No, we don’t want to talk about it.” So it’s a lot of painful things. And then finally, last year, I decided to write to Czechoslovakia. I had visited Prague many time, but this time I wrote to the three Jewish communities mentioned on the papers from Yad Vashem. And the rabbi in Brno responded, Rabbi Peter Werdner. Not a Czech name at all. Like you say my name is not German, it sounds German. And I told him what I struggled with and he wrote back to me saying he was very happy to help. And then he sent papers about Yoseph and his wife, Martha, and their son, Jeri. They lived in Prague and they were rounded up by the Germans in ’42 in connection with the murder of Heidrich, transported to Theresienstadt. From Theresienstadt, transported to Auschwitz, I think the 1st of October, and Martha and Jeri…

Q: ’42?

A: ’44. They were actually two years in Theresienstadt it looked like. And Jeri was seven years old when he came to Theresienstadt. And for me it was amazing because I knew most of the children in Theresienstadt didn’t survive.

Q: In Theresienstadt itself, yes.

A: So they were deported, Jeri and Martha were deported to Auschwitz the 6th of October. And here ends the track of Martha and Jeri. Then there was information that Yoseph was transported to Dachau the 10th of October and he died the 7th of February in Dachau. That we know for sure. And then Rabbi Werdner said to me, “Anna, are you sure these people are not your parents and not your grandparents?” And I was thinking, “Wow!” And a few pieces fell into place. So what I did, I took a phonecall to Norway to Michael, the youngest one of my brothers, and said to him, “Listen, Michael. I’m tired of all this blaming on me, always telling me about lies. Now you better tell me the truth. I sit here with documents. You better tell me the truth.” And he could easily have hung up, you know? But I guess I took him by surprise and I also believe it was “HaShem”. So he blurted out the truth. Knowing the truth all these years and never told me the truth. When I hung up with him, I called the other one who is now very high also in the military of Norway and he is actually a two-star general in NATO, and I told him the same. “You better tell me the truth.” And he did. And here is the truth. The explanation of all the stupid things, and it’s also a history we don’t have too many of because…you will understand why. What actually happened, in the summer of ’44, Karl and Beatrice understood, as so many others, the war was going to be lost. It was only a question about time. Both of them knew they had more than enough to be investigated and convicted as war criminals, and as so many of these Nazis, who were so brave, they became chickens. They wanted, of course, to escape. So Beatrice was absolutely not a prisoner in Dachau. To use a nice word, she was one of the staff. She was involved from ’39 in developing the medical experiments later carried out by the nice Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz, so she travelled a lot back and forth. And Karl, he had not only helped Jews out of Germany, but he had also betrayed them.

Q: That means he took money, he promised them to do this and that and…?

A: They were rounded up. Other cases were the people he received money from actually got out, but they were replaced with other Jews, so I know he is responsible for some hundred lives. And then the truth also came about her identity. Beatrice was absolutely not a Jew. She belonged to the Tetzschner family in Denmark. Most of them very important Nazis during the war. The Tetzschner family comes from Boehmen in Czechoslovakia, so that is true. They have a Czech background, but they were gentiles.

Q: Boehmen in Czechia?

A: Yes, you know, on the border. I think it’s named Sudetenland or something in Czechia. It’s just on the border there. And they spell the name “Tetzschner”, the German way. And Karl was absolutely not a Jew with Russian background born in Germany. He was a Norwegian and a Nazi and jailed for four years for what he did during the war. (end of side)

They knew that the war was lost and they would be convicted as Nazis. And here they developed the following clever plan, and that was – you have to remember that Beatrice was a guard in Dachau and could travel freely up and down. So they looked for a family – three members, almost the same age, what was an identical family, and they were so lucky to stumble over the Tetzschner family.

Q: She found someone with the same name.

A: Yes. Yoseph and Martha and Jeri. And PP was born in ’43, so the age was not fitting, but anyhow. So there was only one problem. Martha was pregnant and that was me. They think that Beatrice and Karl were behind the transport of Yoseph to Dachau to get rid of him. Maybe it was because she had many connections in Dachau and could play the game nicely out, that she decided to go as a prisoner and chaos when the camp was liberated and so on.

Q: But you know, usually the prisoners didn’t let things like that happen.

A: Yes, but I can really not explain.

Q: Especially because Dachau was ruled, it had a prisoner-ruling…actually.

A: Yes, the kapos and so on, but I have some memories - I guess I wasn’t two years old - and that the person I named - I even used the Hebrew word “Ima” - was not the same person as Beatrice, but I have only a glimpse. You see, there are no tracks of Jeri and Martha after the 6th of October in ’44.

Q: In Auschwitz they were not registered?

A: No. Rabbi Werdner said to me, “Write to them, to the archives in Auschwitz, and ask,” and I just got an answer from them. It’s very interesting. Even in the other papers I have, from the transport, they have nothing about them, about Jeri and Martha.

Q: And you didn’t check in Kibbutz Givat Haim Ihud where they have the archive of Theresienstadt?

A: I have the papers from Theresienstadt.

Q: Because there it is written, where they were sent to, if they were in Theresiendstadt.

A: Yes, I have that. That is the reason it is so interesting that here they have nothing about Martha and Jeri when I actually have documents here from Theresienstadt about even the number they get in Auschwitz. So it might be, I don’t know for sure, that I actually had my mom in the beginning and somewhere something happened and Beatrice managed to, I don’t know….So many strange things happened and I know there were a lot of deaths around me, but I was a little child. So it’s very difficult.

Q: So maybe you were born even before ’45?

A: Oh yes, that they think. They think I was born between October ’44 and somehow….but likely I was born earlier than it is recorded, because we have done investigation. It is now papers from child survivors from Dachau. No one with these names. Not Jeri’s name, not PP’s name, not mine, nothing. There was nothing in the prison, you know, the Landsberger Prison. Nothing. Nothing at the hospital. Nothing. I had once a baptismal certificate where it was said I was baptised Catholic three weeks old. And you know the Catholic Church, they would never let a child baptised into their church go. Nothing. And the priests I asked said if I was really baptised Catholic, they would have it because it is a sin to death not to record it, even during a war. So it’s nothing about me. Even this we cannot be a hundred percent sure, but it is as close as I can come to the truth because my brothers confirmed, my so-called brothers confirmed that was what they did and they even mentioned the name Yoseph. Not my grandfather. It was my father. And I do remember things that Karl said because he came into my life when I was a kid. He said he wasn’t my father, he denied it. My foster parents also said.

Q: But when you were a child Karl was in jail?

A: No, he came out of jail in ’49 and I came to Norway in ’52 and he lived not in Oslo, but outside Oslo with his new wife and his children. But he continued to have children with Beatrice. That was the funny thing.

Q: After he was in Norway?

A: He was a Norwegian citizen.

Q: After Beatrice left England?

A: Yes, she lived in Norway till she died. They met, but he married a Norwegian girl, but he was still the father of Michael even though they were divorced at that time. It was a tie one way or another. And my foster mother, the few times she talked about Beatrice and Karl she was very angry and said they were full of lies. You couldn’t believe anything of what they said. And she made me the same. I don’t think – Ann is her

name – ever knew the truth because she said I was a liar like my mom was a liar and all bad things with me I had from her, so I really don’t think she knew the truth. I don’t. One thing happened was Beatrice told my new parents the reason she left England was that I, the girl, was a victim of sexual abuse and she wanted to protect me. My foster father didn’t look at it that way, so he went on with the same business, from the first day in Norway. And I was happy when he died, but I felt guilty for it also. When I was close to fourteen years old Karl came into my life again and he actually managed to make me pregnant. Him. Over a period of a week. He told me the most wonderful stories and you see, he was the only one who gave me some…I thought he loved me in a way.

Q: And that time, of course, you thought he was your father?

A: Yes, and I knew it was terribly wrong and everything, but you know, my values and everything were so confuse. And he left and I don’t know, I never saw him again. I was pregnant six months or so and I hadn’t told anybody and already then I knew some of his doings, so I felt something like the child I had was from a devil or something. I explained everything, how evil things happened to me, was something I deserved because my Jewish parents had been so evil.

Q: At the age of fourteen what did you know about your so-called parents’ activities.

A: A little bit because my foster parents told me a little bit. Not much, but enough.

Q: They were Nazis, your foster parents?

A: I think so, yes, I think so. But what they were very angry for was the Jewishness and that was the reason.

Q: That Karl and Beatrice were Jewish and Nazis?

A: Yes, so they were not good enough Nazis and that was the reason for telling me all the time I should have burned in one of the camps or I shouldn’t have lived. So who should I tell I was pregnant with a child I believed from a devil or something? And I provoked an abortion - alone one day I was hiking up in the mountains and the baby died. It was a little girl. I think all these happenings…. (led me to do) my education and try to help suffering children, broken children, children who do things like you see in America now. They kill and all that stuff. And then the relief to know, because I think it is the truth what my brothers confirmed, my so-called brothers, is that my parents were Jewish, yes, but it was not those people.

Q: How did they know that?

A: They were told the truth and two of them – they are five together – two of them really believe in this stuff. They really believe it. The Nazis, they are thinking, are right. And the Jews, it was okay to kill them. They were dogs and pigs and I don’t know what. And I asked Michael at the end of a telephone call, “Why?” and he said, “Well, it’s better to be blamed to be Jewish since the Jews in Norway are pretty good” and they are even in his party. He said, “You know, people look different at children of Nazis.” Something like that he said. And the whole thing is….but it explained a lot of things. It explains memories, it explains things that happened to me, it explains the things I heard only half. For me, I finally get the truth, as painful as it is. I think it is the truth, yes. And I have now got the question, “What are you going to do with the people in Norway” – and I have met some of them – “who actually helped to hide the truth?” And some of them were on the right side during the war, but they helped him, they helped Beatrice, they helped to hide the truth. Why? For a position in the society? For the way of thinking? Because some of these people are even retired church leaders, Lutherans, and you know Lutheran Church is anti-semitic in its foundation. I don’t know why, but it had taken away a tremendous burden on me and I know I don’t need to mend what I did. But what I can do is to mend the hurts my kids have. And I think I will use the rest of my life to bring them a message that the anti-semitic way of thinking is poison and it can happen everywhere. My oldest daughter is married to a refugee from Kosovo, from Pristina. He can confirm. Even Holocaust or Shoah – I don’t like the word “holocaust” because I know what it means – even in Kosovo it is not big, but it is the same kind of thinking. I will fight against it. And even I haven’t told you the daily life, how it has been to grow up being a “garbage Jew”. I’m not so sure, I want, if I had a chance, to get it changed.

Q: Why?

A: Because I can see what it did to me, my own personality, my own even identity, making me have compassion. I think the biggest miracle in my life is I still love people. I have no reason. I have reason to hate Christians, I have reason to never forgive and I’m not sure I have forgiven these people, but it has made the good sides of me to develop much stronger than my negative sides, I think. So of course we know it’s impossible to change and live your life over again, but….the whole thing is meaningless. It’s only a way I try to make the thing have a sense of meaning, but it has, at the bottom, no meaning. To be killed because you happen to be born of a certain people, that that should be a justification for murder? No. On the other hand, my faith in G-d is sort of strange. I do believe in Him and I cannot see why He let it happen, but it did happen. I don’t think it’s because the Jewish people needed to be purified or punished. It doesn’t exist words for any explanation and I think the day we are able to explain the Holocaust, the evil in Holocaust will disappear because it’s a sort of ultimate evil sometimes. No, I don’t know. I cannot explain. But finally I am here and I met other people who cannot speak and sometimes I think through my art and my books and what I’m doing, I am the voice for somebody. Maybe what you are doing here, they are really not dead because we still remember them. It’s a way of keeping people alive. I don’t know. I do wish I had a chance to meet my parents or maybe some of the family, but until now it looks like I am the only one left. We haven’t found anybody. We have tried, but as far as we know we cannot see.

Q: You didn’t find papers in Dachau about your birth?

A: No. No, there was nothing. And nothing in Auschwitz. So that has been the biggest problem - to prove I am born.

Q: Formally you weren’t born, you were never born.

A: Yes. Formally I don’t exist. So here in Israel the way of trying to find a way of having a homeland was to go through the Rabbinate. And people sometimes criticise when the Orthodox are so religious, but to me they have been only good, only good and very, very helpful.

Q: They consider you a Jew?

A: Yes they do.

Q: Although you don’t have any certificate?

A: Yes. They said, “Your story is so unique that you couldn’t make it up yourself. Nobody can be so clever to make this up.” So I have been for “Beit Din” twice and the second time a friend was with me for translating and she mentioned this word I always had, a “garbage Jew”, and I saw the three judges became so angry and I thought they were angry with me. And they explained after they were not, and they said they would do everything for me to make it, that I can be an Israeli citizen. I filed the papers and wrote letters of explanation and went to the Ministry of the Interior the day before Independence Day and they did recognize me and said, “You are a new immigrant.” And now my children will do “aliyah”, all of them, yes. Because this happening to me, that I finally became a Jew and was recognized as born and all that stuff, made them to believe the story my husband and I told them as they grew up, that Mom was not telling a fake story. It was the truth and nothing else, but the truth as so far as we know. And now the question has arisen, “What are we doing with this case of stealing identity and going on and the people in the government willing to cover up?” But you know, it’s fifty years since the war, more than that – is it any use? I don’t think it is. But to make the story known by coming here was the most meaningful I could do because it is recorded from the Nuremburg trials, but they have very few cases where they have evidence for stealing and misusing Jewish papers. There was talk about it, but not many…The other thing is, actually, Beatrice’s name is in the lists for the Nuremburg trials. That I discovered alone.

Q: So how come she wasn’t on trial?

A: No, under one of the names she used. She had several identities and we found her, under the name Beatrice von Malder, and that was one of his names. His was never a “von”, but he did.

Q: But he was a “Malder”.

A: Yes. So we have it, yes. She was only as a kapo in Dachau. It is not mentioned the rest of the things.

Q: Now I still have many questions to clarify this complicated story, but let’s first begin in summarizing the story and tell me if I am wrong.

A: I will.

Q: You were born maybe in Dachau, maybe around it, at the end of ’44 or the beginning of ’45. Your parents were Jewish prisoners from Czechia. And Karl Malder and Beatrice Tetzschner took their identity and we suppose that’s the reason they took you, to match the papers.

A: Yes, because Martha was pregnant.

Q: Now, you grew up in a family that, as a very little child, the father was in jail, the mother was, we don’t know exactly what she did.

A: She was on her own.

Q: Till ’49 it was in Germany, since then in England.

A: And ’52 to Norway.

Q: At first you thought that you are all Jews and your parents were prisoners in Dachau. Your parents, now I mean Beatrice and Karl.

A: But I also knew they were war criminals and this was difficult.

Q: But that you knew only much later.

A: Yes.

Q: As a child you had, now we see it as a very difficult life in England. That made you and your brother want to kill your mother and her boyfriend, but you made a mistake and you killed another couple.

A: Yes.

Q: That’s why you had to kind of run away to Norway. You knew that your mother was Danish and your father was Norwegian.

A: These people.

Q: Now I am talking about Beatrice and Karl as your parents because at that time you knew them as your parents.

A: At that time I didn’t know where my so-called father was. I didn’t know that.

Q: You only knew that they were Jews and they were prisoners in Dachau. And in Norway, immediately you went to a foster family that they were Nazis, they were not a kind family. And you lost any connection with Karl, Beatrice and the kids. During the years you discovered that your parents, although they were Jews, they also were war criminals, and you couldn’t understand how that comes together. At the age of seventeen you became independent and were alone.

A: Yes, I was alone, completely alone.

Q: You built your own life after that and during the years you discovered things that didn’t match one another and caused you to investigate, to see what really had happened and what was the real truth. You found that these were not your parents and these were not your brothers, but they were war criminals who took the identity of the dead Jews.

A: They were not dead at the time they took their identity.

Q: They were not dead?

A: Yoseph and Martha were not dead. They were still alive when they took the papers, because I was going to be born.

Q: So they kept them alive.

A: I think so.

Q: And your supposed-to-be brothers, they all were Beatrice’s children?

A: Yes, all of them.

Q: But not the same father. Karl was not the father of all of them.

A: Stevie. Of Stevie, not. His father was a Jew.

Q: Besides those three boys you said there are two more?

A: Born one in ’54 and one in ’57, but that was after I had left the family, but the same parents. Even he was married to a Norwegian woman, they still made….Strange.

Q: When you were a child, you thought that your family abandoned you because of the scene you made in England, that you killed two people?

A: Yes, and other things, yes.

Q: Because you were a bad girl. So it wasn’t so strange to you that you were left alone.

A: No.

Q: With no connection.

A: No. I deserved it, I felt. I was, yes, a garbage thing. I didn’t look at myself really as a human being at the end of my childhood. I think I looked at myself as a thing. I think.

Q: I want to go back with you to your very early years. First you were in Germany. It was a D.P. camp.

A: In Deggendorf, yes.

Q: What memories do you have from there?

A: Being hungry all the time. But I also have the memories of small pieces of songs, the sound of the prayers also.

Q: In Yiddish.

A: Yes. And as I told you, it is very funny, but when I had pleasant dreams as a kid, I was dreaming in Yiddish. My nightmares were in German.

Q: What language did you speak at home at that time?

A: Norwegian.

Q: From the beginning you spoke Norwegian?

A: I learned Norwegian very quickly.

Q: No, but…

A: From the beginning I spoke German, I spoke English….

Q: Beatrice spoke to you German?

A: And English and I think even, I think I knew quite a bit of Yiddish, yes.

Q: And you think now that in the D.P. camp no one knew that Beatrice was not Jewish, but a war criminal?

A: I have, from a very early age, a memory of a woman kind to me and I remember I named her “Ima” and I remember, only as a flashlight or so, that she hugged me and sort of said “goodbye” or something and I remember I screamed for days. That is what I remember. And her face, that woman’s face, is absolutely not the face of Beatrice.

Q: So you think that your biological mother lived after the war?

A: What I have been thinking about, that she lived, yes, and if she committed suicide or was terminally ill or something. It would not be a big surprise for me if I met some survivors and they showed me a picture and said, “This is your mother,” and it would be that woman, because it is something. And I know later, even I believed that Beatrice was my mother, I made fantasy stories around this woman I named “Ima”. And sometimes I could see her face in a crowd, in the tram or in a bus or something, and I would shout or scream to her and it was never her. I never screamed for Beatrice, even I waited for her too. So I don’t know. Everything is possible, everything is possible. In this case, my so-called brothers, I haven’t even asked whether they know. Of course, they refuse to talk to me and they don’t answer letters or anything.

Q: Why do you think that your parents told them the truth?

A: I think when it came to Karl, he was proud of his past. I think he was very proud of it.

Q: Also the fact that he took Jewish identity to survive?

A: I think he, in a way…what I have heard from one of the other brothers who actually lived closest to him, he said he was very ambivalent and he could make white to be black and the other way. He might have believed this himself, that he was a good guy, telling the most strange things, what we know is not true. When you read in the newspaper archives or articles, it is not to believed the hate coming out. On the other hand, I know for sure that in ’36, he was working for the Norwegian State Church Mission to the Jews in Hungary. A whole year. And these people worked in (?). And they had a celebration, hundred –year celebration of something, and they had a book with everybody who had worked for them, even only a few months. He was not. So I made a phonecall only because I was curious why and they said he did good things to the Jews, but because he became a war criminal and it is recorded, they don’t want to have him in this book.

Q: How come that if he had this Jewish identity, how could he be recognized as a war criminal? If he was undercover?

A: Yes, but you see, he went back to Norway after the war. No, actually not. The war ended in Norway the 8th of May. He was back in Norway in April, and he had his own name, Malder. It was Beatrice who carried on mostly with the story.

Q: They were already divorced at that time?

A: No, they were not. You see, it is so funny. In Norway they had a law – it’s named the “Bigamy Law”, that you were actually allowed to marry when you were working underground outside Norway - you know, (?) with sailors? - even they had a woman in Norway. And you could also marry without being divorced if you married and you could say you had a reason for it. In this case I know what he did. What he did was, he was still married to Beatrice and in April he came back. He was, by the Nazis, chosen to carry on one of the departments for the University of Oslo and he went…it was just before the “Reichcommissar Tabor” committed suicide. He went to him and said he was married to a Jewish woman without knowing it and that gave him permission to marry a Norwegian girl who actually had worked as a nanny for PP. That she became his wife. So the whole thing, when you look at it, here is one story, here is one story, here is one, and you cannot believe it’s the same person. Two, three years ago I think, maybe even more, I contacted a retired Norwegian bishop, very famous for working in the underground, and he had been his teacher, and I asked him, “What was it about this man?” At that time I still believed he was my father. And he said that he was not schizophrenic, but something similar where he could be more than one person.

Q: Some mental disorder.

A: Yes, yes. And I have been thinking about it. Well, it is an explanation I accepted it at that time because it makes things easier. Now I don’t feel it’s a justification for what he did. But nobody of these people could really explain why they were so eager to kill the Jews. Mostly they said it was an order. He never said that. I don’t know if he sort of had a love-hate with Jews. I don’t know.

Q: He talked to you about the Jews?

A: No. The little I met him when I was a teenager was he talked about something named the “Sonnenkinder”. He talked about, that was children of the Nazis and they should be taken care of, and when the time came, it would be a Fourth Reich, risen, coming up out of the ashes of the Third Reich.

Q: So he kept being a Nazi?

A: Yes, yes. And he told me the reason he wanted to have intercourse with me was because I was bright and his wonderful genes, together with mine, would have made an extraordinary “Sonnenkind”.

Q: Although you were a Jew?

A: Yes. And back to these people who sent me the letter and wanted me to come to their meetings, the second generation of the Nazis. I got another letter from them. At that time they still believed, were sure, I was a Nazi kid. They told that it had been in January, ’95 a big meeting in Berlin - more than four hundred and fifty Nazi kids met. And their fighting case was to convince the world they were innocent and that Hitler himself was a bad leader, but the Nazi ideology is the only right one. And that is what G-d wants to be and these kids, these people looked at themselves as the really chosen people. And that letter I have hidden somewhere. And at that time I got the names of who was the leadership.

Q: When you were a child, you grew up till the age of seven only with Beatrice and not only with her even, I understand, because she didn’t have so much time for the children. She was busy in other things.

A: Yes. We were on our own very much.

Q: You grew up by yourselves?

A: Yes, we had to take care of ourselves and we were stealing food and picked up food we found and it was a battling for life. And we felt also we were the parents of Stevie, the little one – in our eyes, the little one.

Q: And when you came to Norway, suddenly you had a family, but not a normal one.

A: No, no. It appeared to be normal.

Q: They had children of their own?

A: Yes, one. I really don’t know why they took me. One thing could be….

Q: Maybe for the money?

A: Yes, because it is still existing a little group in Norway named Christian Guarding. They started during the war and they collected money to support the Nazi pastors in the Lutheran Church in Norway. And I know they gave money for me for awhile, but I don’t know how long because when my foster mother died in ’82, my foster brother, he hated me so much, he said I stole his father from him, and we never really spoke to each other the time we grew up, even we grew up together for ten years.

Q: What he did he mean that you stole his father?

A: Now he meant that because he knew what the foster father did. My foster mother did also.

Q: They knew?

A: Oh, they knew, yes. It was my fault. So when she died he burned all the papers concerning me and I met him last year and for the first time in our lives we could really speak to each other and he had a lot of pain. And the way he talked made me believe that these two people were Nazis. And he was very, very sorry for having burned so much. It was a lot of letters and documents. And I said to him, “But why? Even my birth certificate you burned.” And he said, “I only wanted to clean out everything from the past.” And he actually gave away everything from his mother’s home. He didn’t want it. So he had his own suffering.

Q: Today are you in any connection with someone of those families?

A: No. Of the family where I grew up, I have sporadic, a few times in connection with my cousin, the daughter of my aunt, and my aunt, the sister of my foster mother and her kids, now of course grown up, they are the only ones who gave me good memories from my childhood. They really cared about me. But even then, I got a shock when I came to Bergen after being away from Bergen for thirty years. I felt I had to face memories and I met my cousin and then she actually knew a little bit about the truth, and I was very, very disappointed because I always was thinking if my aunt had really known, they would have protected me from all this (?). And then to hear they actually knew about it was a very disappointing thing, but still I had good memories from them. They were very good to me.

Q: The belief was that you tempted him or what, that you were to be blamed?

A: Yes. And you know that is common, that is common, and you know it is common for children to blame themselves for everything. So even as stupid as it sounds, I really believed I was responsible for crucifying Jesus Christ. I believed it. Even I’m not a Christian, but I believed it was true, that I had done it. And my aunt said a couple of times that Jesus was a nice guy and he was Jewish and that was the only positive thing I heard about the Jews in my early childhood years. I mean, in Norway.

Q: What exactly did you hear from your brothers about you? What did they know?

A: What they knew was, what they really had for facts was that in ’44 the war was going to be ended and they wanted to escape investigation. They knew they took the identity of a Jewish family by the name Tetzschner, but they continued to spell the name Tetschner as the Danish. They knew that for a fact. And they knew for a fact that the family in Denmark, the Tetschner family in Denmark was basically a Nazi family and they also told me – and I know it’s true – when Beatrice committed suicide in ’63, when Michael was only eleven years old, their real grandmother, of course not Martha, but their real grandmother from a Danish family, she had married one of the most important Nazis for her second marriage, so she didn’t use the name Tetzschner.

Q: You mean Beatrice’s mother?

A: Yes. And Beatrice had, there were seven siblings together, and I think nobody was alive after 1950. I know three of them died during the war. I think they joined the Wehrmacht or something. So in Denmark I don’t think there are many people alive who could make the true story to come to the surface because I even wrote to the state archives in Denmark, in Copenhagen, asking about information about Beatrice. And I know the day she was born and the year she was born and I know for sure, but she was not recorded. Somebody in the office said, “You know, this family lived partly in Germany, so she might be recorded in Germany,” but then I gave up.

Q: I still didn’t understand why she committed suicide.

A: We don’t know, we don’t know. I don’t know. The interesting thing was, making problems between PP and me, when we met again as adults, we, who had been so close, he said, “Beatrice talked about you a lot of times. Your bed was always ready. She used to put a plate for you on the dinner table. And she told so many fancy stories about you that we were jealous. You were more present in the family than you were when you really were.” I also know that she was a patient in the biggest mental hospital in Oslo in quite long periods at the end of her life. And she also got diabetes and the way she committed suicide was to swallow pills and when they smelled the acetone, you know, because she needed insulin, and Michael was alone at home and he called the hospital and they didn’t understand it was serious. They thought it was a kid making a joke. And then a friend of the family came in the evening when she was dying and then it was too late to rescue her.

Q: You didn’t know anything about…?

A: The suicide? No.

Q: You knew nothing at all about them?

A: No. That was what they told me.

Q: You didn’t exist for them at that time.

A: The only thing I know was that my father worked as a teacher in the high school in a city outside Oslo. I wrote even a letter to him. I never got an answer. Even a second letter no. Came back returned. The second letter coming returned had been opened, but was only returned with no explanation.

Q: And now you know that your brothers knew that you were not really their sister and that’s the reason they didn’t try to contact you all those years.

A: Yes, and the reason for putting so much blame on me and telling me I created problems for them and I might sell this story to the media and destroy their future – I don’t what. I know what they said, but it’s not so fun to repeat it. And you know, at least two of them had a lot to lose. One, when you have lied and you are classified in NATO as a high-ranking officer and somebody comes and tells, “This is not the truth,” you know, they will be made under investigation. And actually, if you have parents who were Nazis, especially when they were punished for it, you couldn’t be classified under high security level. So that was for him. And for the youngest one, Michael, his position in Norwegian politics – if this came up, when he actually had in public told the truth and it is recorded in the party programs and so on.

Q: But still he has no problem with the past of Karl because he is not his father.

A: No, but he has other problems because he tried to find his father, Yoseph, now living in America, still alive, with a new family, and he needed a father.

Q: Although he is Jewish.

A: Yes. So he became bitter and took out his hate for his mother on me.

Q: And Beatrice, with all her past and the fact that she was a Nazi and she hated Jews and all that, she had a Jewish boyfriend after the war.

A: Yes. Oh, she met him in the camp.

Q: In the D.P. camp?

A: Yes.

Q: At the time that Karl was in jail?

A: Yes. And Stevie said to me once that Beatrice tried to convince Yoseph that I was his daughter too, but that was impossible because of my blue eyes. And you see, I am the only one in the family – that was a lot of talk when I met my brothers – that I am the only one with blue eyes, for generations.

Q: You look more Aryan than they do.

A: Yes. Actually. That is interesting.

Q: Do you want to say something before we finish the interview?

A: Not really. I only look forward to my kids looking at the video and getting the whole thing in connection and can play it over again. You know, it is so much emotions stirred up and sometimes it makes me cry. It was actually quite difficult to come now also, even I look calm enough, still….

Q: You feel now that you have told the whole story?

A: As far as I know, yes. As far as I know, yes. And I haven’t finished investigating because there is the possibility that I have family members alive and I feel I have the responsibility of coming back if I get more information, yes. And the other good thing there is, is I know it is needed. Even this story is not about a kid remembering from the camps, the effect of it, what happened, could have destroyed my life completely, and my children’s lives. It could. But even it has made a lot of suffering for the entire family - I mean my children and myself and also my husband when he was alive – maybe not always big things, but still – and I feel a sort of…like it is to bring the case to court, that to tell you, who have heard so many stories, to tell also my story, maybe different from most, making it real, giving me my right to grieve over the past I never knew, and still knowing I am, in a way, keeping them alive through my children and grandkids. It is very difficult to explain what I feel. And it also has given a strength to my desire to make the movie – not so much about the Holocaust itself, but as I told you, I want, with all my strength and all the skills I have, to fight against this way of thinking, what anti-semitism is. And in a very special field, where not so many realize we have a very strong anti-semitism – the Church.

Q: Okay.