My father was an Austrian Bishop in the early 1900s. He fell in love with my mother in the same year he was nominated to become a bishop. They would secretly meet outside of the city. I was born a year later.
To avoid humiliation, the Archbishop coordinated my mother’s death. I was placed in an orphanage in Nuremberg, Germany and forgotten. At my orphanage I excelled in my studies and cared for the ill.
In September 1936, my orphanage played host to several outsiders scheduled to attend a rally in our area. That’s when I saw my father for the first time. According to my father, he immediately recognized me because I was almost a facsimile of my mother. I was 17-years-old.
Three years later, I received a letter from my father. He refused to pledge allegiance to the Nazi Party and feared for his safety. He planned to seek asylum in Belgium and asked me to move with him. I subsequently left the orphanage and moved to Belgium with my father. Given the necessity for my identity to remain secret, my father prepared a little cottage for me in a small town. There, he would visit me and tell me about my mother. How she was a beautiful dancer and could support her entire body on one toe. How they first met and would come together outside of the city where he lived. How I came to be.
It was in that little cottage where my father and I were executed by the Schutzstaffel; May 28th, 1940.