Narratives of Child Abduction in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe

Abstract

Narratives of Child Abduction in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe comprises a novella of historical fiction and a separate exegesis. Schicksal is a literary representation of the plight of children who were abducted from Eastern Europe by the Nazi regime for the purpose of Eindeutschung, or Germanisation. Himmler determined that kidnapping foreign children of “good blood” would not only build up Germany’s population but remove the potential risk of them becoming insurgents against the Reich, once they reached adulthood. The creative work was inspired by earlier reading of the history of the abductions and the accompanying research question focusses principally on how to represent what these children experienced while enduring the trauma of separation from their known world. I also explored connecting the story to the contemporary world where many former victims are now able to relate their stories, often after a lifetime of silence. The story is consequently told in dual time using a narrative framework, in which a daughter discovers her mother’s traumatic childhood, which she has kept secret; furthermore, despite being highly educated, the daughter has never heard of the “Germanisation” of foreign children by the Nazis. Although the mother is now elderly and terminally ill, the daughter extracts what she can of the story and retells it: In 1943 Lotka, a young girl from Warsaw, is abducted due to her racially valuable appearance. After undergoing multiple tests to confirm her “racial worth”, she is sent to a children’s home (in Poland) to be “Germanised”. Subsequently, she is taken to a Lebensborn home in Germany where she is fostered out to a German family. In late 1945, Lotka is found by a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration worker but instead of being repatriated, she is sent to England and adopted by a cold-hearted couple. The story examines themes of loss and deception as well as intergenerational trauma. The accompanying exegesis, Narratives of Child Abduction in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, comprises three parts and offers a critical explanation of my creative work. Part A details the inspiration for the creative work, the background to the abductions, the lacuna in both histories and historical fiction and consequently my contribution to the field. I also discuss how the creative work took shape in terms of the research question and my choice in writing fiction. In Part B, I debate writing historical fiction versus history and whether this poses a conundrum. I look at the formal historical research I undertook and review the literature, examining the primary and secondary sources used in terms of bias and reliability. I also discuss the advantage of learning German to access sources and being awarded the Hans-Jürgen and Marianne Ohff Research Grant, which allowed me to travel to Germany to access archives and meet with German scholars. Finally, I give an example of process: how I used sources critically to determine my portrayal of characters, in this case the NSV “nurses” who were involved in the abductions and Germanisation of the children. In Part C, I discuss the literary techniques that I used and the way that these address the research question. I contextualise my novella in relation to other works of historical fiction and examine those that were helpful for me when writing my creative work. Lastly, I consider challenges I faced and discuss revisions I needed to make to the story.