A Nazi Officer Saved My Mother's Life. Here's What Happened When I Tracked Down His Daughter.

“She did not remember his name, but she would never forget him.”

“I’m here to find an SS officer,” I told the uniformed guard outside the Berlin Archives. “He saved my mother,” I added in German.

The guard handed me a visitor pass and a white plastic bag emblazoned with the German coat of arms – a black eagle with red talons – and directed me to a red brick building across a parade ground where thousands of SS officers once lined up.

I registered inside. I explained to a librarian that I knew the officer was of Ukrainian background, but I did not know his name. I had already contacted archives in Poland, the U.S. and other parts of Germany in hopes of tracking down this man.

Most of what I knew about the SS officer came from my grandmother, who, for much of her life, kept what happened to her during World War II hidden.

I first asked about the blue-green numbers on her arm when I was five, while watching her chop beets and onions for a soup.

“It’s our phone number,” she said. “So I won’t forget it.”

My grandmother continued to deflect my questions until she was in her 80s, when she finally let me interview her. But the gaps in her story alarmed me almost as much as her graphic descriptions, and after she died, I set out to fill them. To unravel her history. To understand how her experiences shaped her and my mother. To learn how a history I didn’t live ended up shaping me.

My grandmother first encountered the SS officer in a prison in Radom in Nazi-occupied Poland. The Polish Blue Police had arrested my grandparents at a factory my grandfather managed after they’d spent four years ducking and hiding from the Nazis using false names that hid their Jewish identities.

One policeman ordered my grandmother to leave my mother behind. She picked up the screaming toddler, grabbed a white teddy bear, burrowed it into my mother’s cheek, and left her in her bed.

A policeman snapped cuffs on my grandparents’ wrists and led them outside.

“Shoot us! Please shoot us!” My grandmother pleaded. She knew the Germans could kill her slowly as they attempted to learn how she’d obtained her fake papers.

The policemen ignored her and bundled her and my grandfather into a car.

Weeks later, on a frigid January morning, her prison cell door swung open, and my grandmother saw the SS officer: eyes set low below a bulbous forehead, stubby fingers taut as cigars. He locked shackles around her ankles, snapped cuffs on her wrists, and led her from the cell to interrogate her at Gestapo headquarters a mile away.

“He was a terrible fellow who was beating everyone,” my grandmother told me decades later. “A very famous, very cruel man, this fellow ... Ach! How he beat women!”

But she said, “he was like an angel with us.”

This unsettled me. When she told me this, I knew nothing about the interrogation procedures at Gestapo headquarters or the torture tactics prisoners who survived later recounted, particularly those they suspected of having connections to the resistance, like my grandfather.

Because of the floggings, starvation, slave labour and dehumanising treatment my grandmother endured in that prison and in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, I doubt she was able to communicate the full picture of what they lived through. Maybe there was an even more horrific experience she needed to protect herself from reliving.........

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