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212 D Chapter Sixty-Two d the neWs of my father Tom Atkinson went back to Berlin a few weeks later and told my horrified mother about my adventure. When he returned to Hamburg in the fall of 1946, he contacted John and insisted on talking to me personally,because the nature of the message that he brought from my mother could not be conveyed over the telephone. He decided to drive up to Haseldorf; there the visitor, overwhelmed by the abundance of “royalty”—princes, princesses, dukes, duchesses, counts, barons, the white-gloved old butler, and the gorgeous castle—probably thought he was dreaming. Noticing his awkwardness, I suggested we go out to the park, where we sat down on a bench. He did not know how to begin, so he just took my hand as he had done that fateful night on the train.But now,in full realization of my social status,my mother having turned out to be a “real baroness,” he insisted on addressing me with my title, intermittently using “madam.” On the train it had been a casual “girlie” or “ducky,” and that was somehow not fitting anymore. “I am sorry, baroness,” the car mechanic from Leeds said in a soft, halting voice,“but your father is dead.”Three times he had to repeat the words that somehow did not reach me. My head seemed to spin,as it had after my fall into the icy river; there was something unreal about this whole situation.“Are you alright,madam?”he inquired shyly,deep concern in his voice. Then he proceeded to tell me why he had come all the way to see me. After my father’s disappearance, attempts by my mother, by Louis P. Lochner, and by members of the Danish military mission to discover his fate had netted no results whatsoever .The Soviet authorities steadfastly maintained that they had never even heard his name. The police gave my mother the comforting advice to simply have her husband reported missing; after the mandatory seven years, he would be declared legally dead. If it had not been for a strange coincidence, his fate would forever have remained an unsolved mystery. After I had gone back to West Germany, my brother managed to return to Berlin. His application to be accepted as a law student at Humboldt University in East Berlin,now under Soviet control, was rejected. The reason for refusal was that he was not the son of a laborer or a farmer. This rejection infuriated him enough to become one of the initiators responsible for the creation of the Free University of West Berlin a few years later. A rumor had come to his attention, according to which a famous actor, after his release from a top-secret camp in the Soviet zone, had mentioned my father’s name.After his return to the West, the Destruction unlimiteD 213 man kept his mouth shut for quite a while,remembering the stern instructions never to tell a living soul about his experience. “They” would find him wherever he went, and then he would be sent to Siberia for the rest of his life.Once he moved to West Germany,he realized that, for the sake of humanity, it was his duty to lift the veil of silence imposed on him. My brother decided to visit the man who, nine months before, had been among the few who left the death camp in Jamlitz alive. Gustaf Gründgens, one of Germany’s most prominent actors and a friend of Walter Franck, had held the position of general manager of Berlin’s State Theater for almost ten years, during which time he had succeeded in saving a number of actors and their Jewish spouses from a terrible fate. This could never have been achieved, had not Hermann Goering , patron of the State Theater, at some point decided to really show his archrival Goebbels ,in charge of the movie industry,who was more powerful.Just to annoy him,and by no means for love of the Jews, the non-Aryan spouses of his star actors remained unmolested. What more superbly elating sensation could exist for the obese, morphine addict Goering, the self-styled God, to be master over life and death?35 During the course of their conversation,Gründgens revealed that he and my father had already been through half a dozen makeshift places of detention including cellars, pigsties, and dirt holes,before arriving at the notorious...

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