POZNAN, Poland – On a sunny April morning in 1944, 6-year-old Alodia Witaszek was sitting in the children’s home that had primed her for membership in Hitler’s master race.
Over the past year she had been snatched from her family, gone hungry in a concentration camp and been beaten for speaking her native Polish. Now she had a German name, “Alice Wittke,” and a new – German – mother.
Only years later would she discover the full truth: that she was among about 250 children seized from their families as part of a Nazi pursuit of a mad dream of racial purity.
Her adoptive mother, Luise Dahl, would later say she too had no idea. In a letter written after World War II she said that she knew nothing about snatching children for racial purposes; all she had wanted was to adopt a war orphan.
More than 60 years later, the story emerges from a collection of documents held by a unit of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
In the files are orders from Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler’s SS chief, to find children with “eindeutschungsfaehigskeit” – the potential to be Germanized. Other documents tell part of the children’s stories. One of those children was Alodia Witaszek – Alice Wittke.
‘Gift for the Fuehrer’
Luise Dahl had written to more than a dozen orphanages before a response came from an association in Munich called Lebensborn, roughly meaning Fountain of Life. But this was no ordinary adoption agency.
Founded by Himmler in 1938, it started out running birthing homes where racially acceptable, mostly unwed mothers could bear their children for adoption by Nazi families.
After World War II broke out, Lebensborn took on an even more sinister role – it became an adoption agency for hundreds of “racially desirable” children seized from their families in Poland and other occupied territories and forcibly Germanized.
With their neatly bobbed blond hair and wide blue eyes, Alodia and her sister, Daria, qualified. “They told me that I have nice features – like German features,” Alodia Witaszek recalls today, at 69, sitting in her living room in the Polish city of Poznan, where she was born.
“I was a ‘gift for the Fuehrer’ – that’s what they called us.”
A family ripped apart
Alodia wasn’t the only child of Halina and Franciszek Witaszek. There were five. Their father was a prominent member of the Polish underground and was arrested in 1942. Halina eventually was arrested as well and sent to Auschwitz.
Alodia and Daria, two years her junior, stayed together.
After the Nazis grabbed them, both girls were taken to a children’s concentration camp in Lodz, then to a German-run convent in Kalisz, where the “Germanization” began.
“They beat German into our minds until we didn’t know what was what anymore. If we spoke Polish, they would beat us or lock us in dark rooms for hours,” Alodia Witaszek said.
After the girls were taken away, Alodia was told that her parents were now “stars in the sky.” Only after the war did she learn that the Nazis had sent her mother to Auschwitz, and hanged and beheaded her father for masterminding the killing of Nazi officers by poisoning their coffee.
“I took charge of the child understanding it was an orphaned ethnic German to be adopted, under the German name ‘Alice Wittke,’ ” Dahl wrote in 1948, answering a query from a lawyer involved in researching Lebensborn for the Nuremberg trials.
Daria, renamed Doris Wittke, was sent to a foster family outside Salzburg, Austria.
Alodia’s new home was in Stendal, north of Berlin. She started school in 1945. She learned to swim and ride a bike, and took ballet lessons. But back in Poland, Halina Witaszek had survived Auschwitz and was struggling to find her children.
Her two eldest daughters and baby son came back, but Alodia and Daria were missing. Neighbors told her the SS had kidnapped them.
Halina wrote to the Polish Red Cross in February 1946.
In May 1946, the Dahls petitioned to adopt Alice Wittke, and a year later she legally became Alice Dahl, a German citizen.
And then, in October 1947, a letter arrived from the Polish Red Cross asking for the child to be returned.
“It goes without saying that the birth mother has the first right and we will, with a heavy heart, part with this child who has become beloved and dear to us, as long as it is in the best interest of the child,” Dahl wrote back six weeks later.
On a dark November morning in 1947, the Dahls put the girl on a Red Cross train to Poland.
A rocky reunion
Two months later, Daria came back, too. The Red Cross had found her in Austria.
Unlike her elder sister, the family that took Daria into its care viewed her more as an extra pair of hands around the house than as a daughter. On the day Daria left, her foster mother refused to say goodbye.
Daria died a few years ago.
The return to Poland was harsh at first. Food was scarce. Their classmates called the girls, now 8 and nearly 10, “German pigs.”
“Even after we returned, the war wasn’t over for us,” Witaszek said. “It went on for many years.”
One night the sisters got so miserable that they sneaked out to the train station, determined to get back to Germany. Their mother talked them out of it.
Shortly afterward, the first letter arrived. “Mutti” and “Vati” – Mom and Dad – wanted to hear how their Alice was doing. She wrote back that she missed them and Germany, the food, her toys. The response was a package of goodies, the first of many.
In 1957, at age 18, Alodia Witaszek returned to Germany to visit the Dahls. It became an annual tradition. Luise Dahl died in 1971, Wilhelm in 1983. But the daughter they briefly adopted still travels to Germany regularly, to attend Holocaust memorial ceremonies and visit friends.
In Poland she is Alodia Witaszek, but in Germany she still feels she is Alice Dahl. She is glad of it.
“If I didn’t have it today,” she says, “I don’t think I would be happy.”
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