The author was born in 1938 in Gdynia. Her mother died in the first days of the war. During the war the whole family was expelled to Łódź. When she was four, she was taken from her grandparents and assigned to Germanisation. Her name was changed and she was placed with a German family. She did not learn who she really was until 1948 when she was identified by the Polish Red cross as a Pole and returned to Poland.

My war lasted much longer than 1945. My nationality changed as they took away my identity and knowledge of where I came from.

According to the archives in Łódź, Barbara Gajzler was born on 1 or 2 February 1938 and was in the ophanage at ul. Przędzalniana 66 in Łódź from 21 February 1942 until 9 March 1942. Then she was taken to the orphanage at ul. Lokatorska 12, and on 27 May 1942 transferred to Bruczków. From there she was taken to the Third Reich and given to the Rossmann family in Germany. In October 1947 she was identified as a Pole and repatriated. What happened in the meantime?

My mother’s mother told me that I was born on 1 February 1938 in Gdynia in the home where my parents lived with my mother’s parents and her siblings.

My mother had a heart attack during the first days of the war. The whole family was expelled. The youngest were taken to labour camps in the Third Reich, my grandparents and I were taken to Łódź where we lived in an old building in ul. Lipowa in a room that was assigned to us. It was from there that the Germans took me in February 1942 to the orphanage in ul. Przędzalniana. After two weeks my grandmother lost contact with me. When the war ended she requested the assistance of the Polish Red Cross. I learned everything when I returned to Poland.

I am going to attempt to remember what happened to me. I can remember things from when I was four. I was in a house with a large living room with windows and a windowsill in a half round shape on which I often sat. There were many children there and we would look out onto a large meadow. I now know that that was a lawn and the house was the Lebensborn facility in Połczyń. The children were constantly examined and weighed and above all punished. If one wet him or herself then everyone was punished. I think we wet ourselves as we were frightened about our future. This therefore happened every day. They changed my identity. I was called Bärbel Geisler, I was born on 2 February 1939. I was one year and one day younger than I really was and this was a characteristic feature of the Lebensborn programme. I cannot forget the day when an elderly gentleman came to take me away. Like all the children I had no hair and stood in front of him in underwear and shirt. I was crying as they did not want to give me my white fur.

When I returned to Poland I learned that the Germans took me from my grandmother with the white rabbit fur. What happened was that the past always reminded me of fur.

The older gentleman put his jacket around me and we travelled to Lemgo. Two women met us there and they cried when they saw me. All three of us cried.

They washed and fed me and put me in a child’s bed. I cried a lot before falling asleep. When I woke up I had a mummy, daddy and grandma. I was the little wild Bärbel, the orphan of a dead German officer. In a room of my new home there was a portrait of a little girl. Her name was Ursel and she had died when she was nine. She was to be my model. I had to be her. I wore her clothes but I was never her equal no matter how often I was punished. I was someone else.

Today I think that this is why I have complexes and underestimate myself. I think that I am worse than others. However returning to that time, it never occurred to me that the Rossmanns were not my parents. Who was I?

I found out that I was Polish when I was ten. That was in 1948. There was this secret in the air at home. When they spoke, they did it out of my sight. They prepared to send me away. One day in January, a woman came for me in American uniform. I thought I was going on an excursion but they said goodbye to me in such a strange way, with tears in their eyes. Even though I was not Ursel, they still loved me and they never said that I was not their child.

From then on I was kept with a small group of children in a small town in southern Germany. They dressed us in nice clothes from UNRA and every day we had citrus fruits which I had never had before. We also got chocolate and sweets. I had to learn English, even whilst eating. Later I could not understand why I had to learn English as I no longer spoke Polish. Years later I found out that I was to be sent to America. After the war the Americans took the children from the Germans who had been taken from their parents in order to take them there. If that had happened to me, I would never have found out my real identity.

That May I was sent with two other children to Augustdorf. We were placed in a camp, there were barracks there in which were people from various countries. Everyone was waiting to go home. They told us that we would be going to Poland.

In the beginning of June we got on a very long train organised by the Polish Red Cross. We were in a sleeper car with bunks. I thought that the journey would never end. Sometimes we spent the entire day in a field. Eventually we got to Katowice. We were taken from the station to a Red Cross facility and we waited there until we were collected. Who would come for us? Parents arrived for their children and took them home. I cried and was jealous when others were taken.

Nuns who ran an orphanage collected me. I now knew that Barbara Gajzler was an orphan. That was what they called me but as far as I was concerned I was Bärbel Rossmann from Lemgo and I could not get used to my new name. My uncle eventually came. I did not know him and I did not want to know him. My uncle was shocked at my reaction and he offered me a sausage and a bread roll. For the first time in my life I ate a whole sausage in one hand and bread and butter in the other. I still remember the taste. However it was hard to talk to my uncle as he had picked up German in a labour camp. I thought his pronunciation was funny and I could not understand it. We went to Gdańsk, home as my uncle put it. The town was in ruins. The house was old, uncomfortable and without water, an unknown language and just unpleasant surprises. I now met my family, my aunt, two cousins aged three and five and one month later a little boy was born, so I then had three cousins. That was my new home.

The war was long over and it was as though I had left one aunt for another. I ended up in the orphanage. I thought that this was a mistake as I seemed to fit in nowhere. The other children thought I was a German. I went to school in Gdańsk and started to learn Polish. At breaks the other children danced in a ring around me and sang a song ‘Old Hitler sleeps soundly’. I did not think anything bad of this as I was a German and I had a family in Lemgo. I did not understand what was going on.

I was an unwanted child and the reason was the war. I asked myself many times where was I supposed to be? Who was I? That is the internal fight I have had since I was ten. When I was 18 or more I went back to Lemgo in order to find out. It is hard to explain what I went through. The hardest times were now behind me. It was hard in my homeland and I needed to decide what I was to do for the rest of my life.

The years spent in Lemgo are deep in my memory. I think today of the nice little town and the people I met there as a Pole who knew where she belonged. A Pole who would like to tell future generations the story of Polish children who were manipulated by those that believed themselves to be a superior race.

I was fortunate to find the family who I had missed in the hardest moments of my life. However I chose Poland.

Germanisation may not have worked because the children stayed Polish, however it destroyed their psyche.

I know children who stayed German and that has never given them peace. They are constantly seeking their identity and Polish roots.