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The legacy of East Germany¡¦s forced
adoptions
German families torn apart by forced adoptions during the Cold War are still
looking for answers ¡X and their lost relatives
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By Marten Rolff
THE GUARDIAN, LONDON
Saturday, Sep 04, 2010, Page 9
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¡§You can¡¦t describe the pressure you feel when there are
five Kalashnikovs pointing at you.¡¨¡ÐAndreas Laake, ex-prisoner and attempted
refugee
It took exactly four minutes to steal Andreas Laake¡¦s baby son ¡X that was the
length of the court hearing that swept away his paternity rights.
Some 26 years later, Laake can still recall every detail of the trial ¡X his
aching wrists cuffed behind his back, the musty smell of the courtroom, the
steely voice of the young female judge.
Then there were the vague words of the social worker who said that after his
attempted escape from the German Democratic Republic (GDR): ¡§We do not believe
Mr Laake has the ability to bring up his son for the purpose of socialism.¡¨
Laake was not even allowed to defend himself. All he said in court were four
words: ¡§I do not agree.¡¨
Several weeks later, his son Marco was adopted by people who were considered, in
ideological terms, much more reliable parents.
¡§Since then, I¡¦ve spent half a lifetime searching for him,¡¨ Laake says.
It took a matter of minutes for Katrin Behr to be separated from her family too.
It was a cold winter morning in 1972 when three men in long, dark coats knocked
on the door to arrest her mother. Behr was four and a half years old at the
time, and can still remember the panic in her mother¡¦s voice as she urged her
daughter to get dressed quickly, but Katrin Behr was left behind.
The last words she heard were: ¡§Be brave. I¡¦ll be back tonight,¡¨ before her
mother was spirited off to a socialist boot camp.
It would be 19 years until they saw each other again.
After short stopovers in various foster homes, Behr was adopted by a strict
woman, a secretary of the Socialist party. She tried to adapt as best she could.
¡§I did what I was told,¡¨ Behr says. ¡§As a little girl, I really thought that
that was the best way to avoid trouble.¡¨
Stealing children was one way the GDR muzzled its people ¡X Behr and Laake belong
to an estimated 1,000 families torn apart by the socialist authorities.
Forced adoptions were a tool that the regime ¡§could impose on virtually anyone
who was considered suspicious,¡¨ Behr says.
All it took to be judged a bad parent was to infringe on vague ¡§socialist
guidelines.¡¨
In Behr¡¦s case, her mother, a single parent, was arrested after she had lost her
job and decided to stay at home to care for her children ¡X a major transgression
in the eyes of a state that believed in compulsory labor.
In her new family, Behr always felt ¡§like a second-class daughter,¡¨ she says.¡¨A
Cinderella who had to clean the house and care for my younger adoptive brother
while my adoptive mother was at work.¡¨
She was told repeatedly that she had been put up for adoption because her
natural mother did not love her.
¡§I desperately tried to cling to a positive image of her, but any abandoned
child would start to doubt that love after 19 years,¡¨ Behr says.
She was granted limited access to her adoption file following German unification
and learned that her mother had never had a chance to get her daughter back. She
also found out that her mother had spent several years in prison. Still, it took
Behr a whole year to get in touch with her.
¡§I hesitated because I was afraid that the negative comments about her would be
proved right,¡¨ she says.
When Behr finally met her natural mother, she says she was obsessed with the
idea that everyone in her extended family would get along. She therefore
arranged for her natural and adoptive mother to meet.
It was a disaster.
Behr had to separate the women when they literally went for each other¡¦s throat.
¡§You stole my child, you communist bitch,¡¨ Behr¡¦s natural mother shouted.
Today, Behr is only in touch very occasionally with both women.
Three years ago, Behr set up a support group for the victims of forced adoptions
and since then the 43-year-old has been contacted by hundreds of people still
searching for their children, parents or siblings. The 20th anniversary of
reunification next month has prompted a flood of interest ¡X a number of films on
the topic have come out in Germany and have been greeted with huge surprise by
the public and they have also prompted victims to talk about their cases
publicly for the first time.
Like Laake, most of them feel betrayed twice over. The GDR destroyed their
families and the unified German state did nothing to redress the injustice.
Walking through the dismal Leipzig suburbs feels like being transported back 20
years. There are potholes, weeds growing through the tarmac, dozens of uniform
gray apartment blocks.
Laake, a slim, frail man of 50, lives in a ground-floor flat in one of these
blocks. Over the years, he has tried everything to find his son. He has posted
notices on the Internet. He has sent letters to politicians. He has recruited
lawyers and private investigators, and he has continually been reminded that,
while times and political systems change, his situation has not.
He is eager to tell his story, he says, despite the intimidation he has
experienced. Laake and his family have been attacked by a man in the street, his
car has been damaged twice, someone broke into his cellar and the only photo of
his son as a baby has disappeared.
However, Laake says he is not afraid.
¡§I am certainly not going to be paranoid. Not after all these years,¡¨ he says.
Laake¡¦s career as an ¡§enemy of the socialist state¡¨ was never political. It
started as a harmless teenage rebellion. He refused to join the youth
organization of the Socialist party and at school in the 1970s he often wore a
faux stetson and a black denim suit he had made himself. This provocatively
¡§Western¡¨ outfit made him a target for his teachers¡¦ criticism.
¡§But my mother always supported me,¡¨ Laake says. ¡§Our family agreed on the
importance of personal freedom. As long as I can remember, I wanted to get out
of East Germany.¡¨
Early marriages were common in the GDR and so, at 19, Laake proposed to his
childhood friend, Ilona, who came to share his dream of a life on the other side
of the Iron Curtain.
Three years into their marriage, when she was expecting a baby, they decided to
flee. Their idea was to cross the Baltic Sea overnight in an inflatable rubber
boat. It was hazardous ¡X the beach became a prohibited zone after dusk, closely
monitored by military police.
¡§But when you are on the run, you stop thinking,¡¨ Laake says. ¡§You are in a sort
of survival mode. It¡¦s all about: ¡¥Get on the water. Cower down in the dinghy so
you¡¦re not shot. Then paddle for your life.¡¦¡¨
They did not even make it to the water.
¡§You can¡¦t describe the pressure you feel when there are five Kalashnikovs
pointing at you,¡¨ he says.
As an ex-prisoner and attempted refugee, Laake is officially acknowledged as a
victim of political injustice and he has even been granted a small monthly
pension by the German government. However, as a betrayed father, there are no
documents proving his case.
The GDR authorities effectively covered their tracks. Laake never received any
official papers about his trial, and because of data privacy laws, his son¡¦s
adoption file is closed to him for 50 years. The only person who has limited
access to the file ¡X other than the case officers ¡X is Marco himself and there¡¦s
no way of knowing if he¡¦s ever even been told that he¡¦s adopted.
With no access to the details of his case, Laake has had to commit everything he
can to memory. The words of the security agent who beat him during questioning.
The document he signed to spare his pregnant wife imprisonment, confessing that
he alone was responsible for the escape. The Hannibal Lecter-style cage they
built inside a cell, where, for several weeks ¡X as a special punishment ¡X he was
kept in solitary confinement. He was in prison for six and a half years
altogether.
Marco was born and put up for adoption while Laake was under arrest ¡X his wife
had buckled under the massive pressure to give up their child.
¡§She was only 21 years old, she was afraid, they threatened to make her life
hell, they mentally broke her,¡¨ he says.
Laake knows that she had no real chance to prevent the forced adoption, but the
couple nevertheless fell out over the loss and are now divorced.
¡§In the end, I simply couldn¡¦t forgive her,¡¨ he says.
While telling his story, Laake shows me a number of photographs of Marco ¡X in a
rowing boat, aged eight, and as a teenager at a party. They were given to him
just a few months ago, as a result of his persistent campaign, by a social
worker who is apparently in contact with Marco¡¦s adoptive family.
She also read out a short letter, supposedly from Marco, now 26, who said that
he has a good life and does not wish to get to know his natural father. Laake
was not allowed to see the letter himself, for reasons of data protection.
¡§His language sounded clumsy and strangely impersonal,¡¨ he says. ¡§As if someone
had desperately tried to put himself into Marco¡¦s position and then made the
whole thing up.¡¨
Laake knows that ¡§there is no law that could turn around my situation.¡¨
When the unification treaty was signed in 1990, the new German state had not
distinguished between legal and illegal adoptions, so every case today is dealt
with according to the old West German law, which prohibits natural parents from
finding out about children they voluntarily gave up.
The builders of the new German state 20 years ago either forgot to classify
¡§adoptions against the will of the parents¡¨ as a violation of human rights or,
as the historian and GDR expert Uwe Hillmer suggests, they simply were not
interested.
¡§Even members of the Kohl government admitted internally: Forget about the
past,¡¨ Hillmer says.
Many of the Socialist administration¡¦s files were destroyed during the last days
of the GDR and a former officer of the Stasi, the East German security service,
once told Hillmer: ¡§You haven¡¦t got the slightest idea about the real extent of
injustice and you will never find out what really happened.¡¨
That Stasi officer might well be right, but reading through Behr¡¦s victim
support Web site gives some sense of the scale of what went on.
Behr has collected more than 300 cases of alleged forced adoption so far and she
is trying to help more than 200 people to find family members. There are 93
unsettled cases regarding the deaths of newborn babies. Behr has documented the
stories of mothers who were still lying in the delivery room when they were told
that their babies had died ¡X but swear they heard their child crying. They were
not allowed to see their baby¡¦s corpse.
One mother visited the grave of her twin daughters for more than 25 years before
seeing two young women tell the story of their adoption on TV. They were her
daughters.
It¡¦s unclear why this cruel practice took place ¡X most of the people involved in
the forced adoptions have refused to talk.
Hillmer says there are suspicions that Socialist party officials who could not
have children ¡§ordered¡¨ newborns from cooperative gynecologists, although this
has only been proved in one case so far.
Behr¡¦s objective is to make the victims¡¦ voices heard. She gives lectures across
Germany about forced adoption.
¡§Many victims find themselves in the humiliating position that no one even
believes them and the strangeness of their cases doesn¡¦t make it any easier,¡¨
she says.
Most of them suffer from depression and some question their own memories, as
Behr has herself. The separation from her natural mother destroyed her
self-esteem and she suspects she will never fully recover.
Laake refuses to accept that the data protection law is the only reason he is
prevented from contacting Marco ¡X he suspects that Marco¡¦s adoptive parents
don¡¦t want their son to know the circumstances of his adoption.
¡§If they told him, it could destroy their family,¡¨ he says.
He keeps turning questions over in his mind: What if Marco¡¦s clumsy letter was
written by someone else? What if old Stasi networks are still operating in
Leipzig? What if Marco¡¦s adoptive parents are former party officials trying to
hide their past?
Behr is helping Laake with his investigation and worries about his safety.
Until recently, she didn¡¦t believe the rumors about Stasi networks being
operational, but ¡§looking at Laake¡¦s case, with all its dodgy incidents, made me
change my mind,¡¨ she says.
After Laake was attacked in the street, police advised him to search for a new
flat for his own safety.
There is another reason that Behr is concerned about Laake. She says that many
victims of forced adoption build up high hopes that things will change for the
better once they find their natural family.
¡§They focus on a happy ending that is never going to happen,¡¨ she says.
Behr has helped more than 100 people to find their lost family members so far,
but most cases end like her own: There is an initial sense of relief, followed
by disappointment that the parent or child in question has become a complete
stranger.
Laake knows that there may be no happy ending for him, that the problem of East
Germany¡¦s lost children ¡§is probably not solvable.¡¨
Nevertheless, he will carry on searching for Marco.
He has started to call the adoption office twice a week, and he is also planning
a sit-down strike outside the office, ¡§with a sign around my neck: give me back
my son.¡¨
He says he doesn¡¦t expect anything from contact with Marco.
¡§I could even understand if he didn¡¦t wish to meet me,¡¨ he says.
However, he wants to hear that for himself. Laake is tired of all the threats
and delays.
¡§All I want is certainty. That¡¦s the minimum a father can expect,¡¨ he says.
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